Shafiullah Khan’s research while affiliated with Abdullah Al Salem University and other places

This paper utilizes the concepts of fog computing, machine-learning and generative-AI to build accurate and efficient intrusion detection system IDS for the Internet of Things. It proposes a hybrid approach in which the machine learning classifier for the IDS system is built using both real data and synthetic data. The utilized real data will be information evaluated at the edge of the network and deemed to be non-sensitive and hence can be shipped to the cloud to build the generative-AI model. This model will then be used to generate the synthetic data used to augment the partial data. By doing so the security and privacy of the IoT environment is protected while still build an IDS with accepted accuracy. The evaluation shows that by applying techniques such as the light-weight privacy classification and principal component analysis PCA we are able to achieve good intrusion detection accuracy while minimizing the privacy risks to IoT raw data.

The incorporation of human-like social concepts into the Internet of Things (IoT) has given rise to the paradigm of Social IoT (SIoT). In these networks, objects autonomously form social relationships to enhance network scalability in information and service discovery, focusing on their own benefits. However, social likeness or dislikeness among nodes can result in selfish behavior, adversely affecting network performance. Existing node stimulation mechanisms primarily focus on ad hoc and IoT networks, emphasizing topological structures and traffic patterns, while overlooking the social and behavioral factors crucial to the SIoT. This work proposes a novel node stimulation scheme for the SIoT that incorporates both social and behavioral characteristics and network topology. The mechanism employs a virtual currency-based game to incentivize cooperation by considering parameters such as proximity, energy levels, buffer size, correlated relays, and data quality. Additionally, social factors—including social preference, node importance, interaction history, and the probability of vital data transfer—are integrated into the decision-making process. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms existing approaches in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay, making it a robust solution for improving cooperation and performance in SIoT networks.

This paper provides the complete details of current challenges and solutions in the cybersecurity of cyber-physical systems (CPS) within the context of the IIoT and its integration with edge computing (IIoT–edge computing). We systematically collected and analyzed the relevant literature from the past five years, applying a rigorous methodology to identify key sources. Our study highlights the prevalent IIoT layer attacks, common intrusion methods, and critical threats facing IIoT–edge computing environments. Additionally, we examine various types of cyberattacks targeting CPS, outlining their significant impact on industrial operations. A detailed taxonomy of primary security mechanisms for CPS within IIoT–edge computing is developed, followed by a comparative analysis of our approach against existing research. The findings underscore the widespread vulnerabilities across the IIoT architecture, particularly in relation to DoS, ransomware, malware, and MITM attacks. The review emphasizes the integration of advanced security technologies, including machine learning (ML), federated learning (FL), blockchain, blockchain–ML, deep learning (DL), encryption, cryptography, IT/OT convergence, and digital twins, as essential for enhancing the security and real-time data protection of CPS in IIoT–edge computing. Finally, the paper outlines potential future research directions aimed at advancing cybersecurity in this rapidly evolving domain.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are essential in many areas, from healthcare to environmental monitoring. However, WSNs are vulnerable to routing attacks that might jeopardize network performance and data integrity due to their inherent vulnerabilities. This work suggests a unique method for enhancing WSN security through the detection of routing threats using feed-forward artificial neural networks (ANNs). The proposed solution makes use of ANNs’ learning capabilities to model the network’s dynamic behavior and recognize routing attacks like black-hole, gray-hole, and wormhole attacks. CICIDS2017 is a heterogeneous dataset that was used to train and test the proposed system in order to guarantee its robustness and adaptability. The system’s ability to recognize both known and novel attack patterns enhances its efficacy in real-world deployment. Experimental assessments using an NS2 simulator show how well the proposed method works to improve routing protocol security. The proposed system’s performance was assessed using a confusion matrix. The simulation and analysis demonstrated how much better the proposed system performs compared to the existing methods for routing attack detection. With an average detection rate of 99.21% and a high accuracy of 99.49%, the proposed system minimizes the rate of false positives. The study advances secure communication in WSNs and provides a reliable means of protecting sensitive data in resource-constrained settings.

The medical and healthcare domains require automatic diagnosis systems (ADS) for the identification of health problems with technological advancements. Biomedical imaging is one of the techniques used in computer-aided diagnosis systems. Ophthalmologists examine fundus images (FI) to detect and classify stages of diabetic retinopathy (DR). DR is a chronic disease that appears in patients with long-term diabetes. Unattained patients can lead to severe conditions of DR, such as retinal eye detachments. Therefore, early detection and classification of DR are crucial to ward off advanced stages of DR and preserve the vision. Data diversity in an ensemble model refers to the use of multiple models trained on different subsets of data to improve the ensemble’s overall performance. In the context of an ensemble model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for diabetic retinopathy, this could involve training multiple CNNs on various subsets of retinal images, including images from different patients or those captured using distinct imaging techniques. By combining the predictions of these multiple models, the ensemble model can potentially make more accurate predictions than a single prediction. In this paper, an ensemble model (EM) of three CNN models is proposed for limited and imbalanced DR data using data diversity. Detecting the Class 1 stage of DR is important to control this fatal disease in time. CNN-based EM is incorporated to classify the five classes of DR while giving attention to the early stage, i.e., Class 1. Furthermore, data diversity is created by applying various augmentation and generation techniques with affine transformation. Compared to the single model and other existing work, the proposed EM has achieved better multi-class classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity of 91.06%, 91.00%, 95.01%, and 98.38%, respectively.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) can be seen as integrating the social networking concept into the Internet of Things (IoT). Such networks enable different devices to form social relationships among themselves depending on pre-programmed rules and the preferences of their owners. When SIoT devices encounter one another on the spur of the moment, they seek out each other’s assistance. The connectivity of such smart objects reveals new horizons for innovative applications empowering objects with cognizance. This enables smart objects to socialize with each other based on mutual interests and social aspects. Trust building in social networks has provided a new perspective for providing services to providers based on relationships like human ones. However, the connected IoT nodes in the community may show a lack of interest in forwarding packets in the network communication to save their resources, such as battery, energy, bandwidth, and memory. This act of selfishness can highly degrade the performance of the network. To enhance the cooperation among nodes in the network a novel technique is needed to improve the performance of the network. In this article, we address the issue of the selfishness of the nodes through the formation of a credible community based on honesty. A social process is used to form communities and select heads in these communities. The selected community heads having social attributes prove effective in determining the social behavior of the nodes as honest or selfish. Unlike other schemes, the dishonest nodes are isolated in a separate domain, and they are given several chances to rejoin the community after increasing their honesty levels. The proposed social technique was simulated using MATLAB and compared with existing schemes to show its effectiveness. Our proposed technique outperforms the existing techniques in terms of throughput, overhead, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and packet-delivery latency.

The regular frequent pattern mining (RFPM) approaches are aimed to discover the itemsets with significant frequency and regular occurrence behavior in a dataset. However, these approaches mainly suffer from the following two issues: (1) setting the frequency threshold parameter for the discovery of regular frequent patterns technique is not an easy task because of its dependency on the characteristics of a dataset, and (2) RFPM approaches are designed to mine patterns from the static datasets and are not able to mine dynamic datasets. This paper aims to solve these two issues by proposing a novel top-K identical frequent regular patterns mining (TKIFRPM) approach to function on online datasets. The TKIFRPM maintains a novel synopsis data structure with item support index tables (ISI-tables) to keep summarized information about online committed transactions and dataset updates. The mining operation can discover top-K regular frequent patterns from online data stored in the ISI-tables. The TKIFRPM explores the search space in recursive depth-first order and applies a novel progressive node’s sub-tree pruning strategy to rapidly eliminate a complete infrequent sub-tree from the search space. The TKIFRPM is compared with the MTKPP approach, and it found that it outperforms its counterpart in terms of runtime and memory usage to produce designated topmost-K frequent regular pattern mining on the datasets following incremental updates.

Various routing protocols have been proposed for ad hoc networks such as the Internet of Things (IoT). Most of the routing protocols introduced for IoT are specific to applications and networks. In the current literature, it is essential to configure all the network nodes with a single proposed protocol. Moreover, it is also possible for a single IoT network to consist of different kinds of nodes. Two or more IoT networks can also be connected to create a bigger heterogeneous network. Such networks may need various routing protocols with some gateway nodes installed. The role of gateway nodes should not be limited to the interconnection of different nodes. In this paper, a multi-mode hybrid routing mechanism is proposed that can be installed on all or a limited number of nodes in a heterogenous IoT network. The nodes configured with the proposed protocols are termed smart nodes. These nodes can be used to connect multiple IoT networks into one. Furthermore, a game-theory-based model is proposed that is used for intercommunication among the smart nodes to gain optimal efficiency. Various performance matrices are assessed under different network scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism outperforms in broader heterogeneous IoT networks with diverse nodes.

Internet of Things (IoT)-backed smart shopping carts are generating an extensive amount of data in shopping markets around the world. This data can be cleaned and utilized for setting business goals and strategies. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are used to efficiently extract meaningful patterns or insights from such huge amounts of data or big data. One such technique is Association Rule Mining (ARM) which is used to extract strategic information from the data. The crucial step in ARM is Frequent Itemsets Mining (FIM) followed by association rule generation. The FIM process starts by tuning the support threshold parameter from the user to produce the number of required frequent patterns. To perform the FIM process, the user applies hit and trial methods to rerun the aforesaid routine in order to receive the required number of patterns. The research community has shifted its focus towards the development of top-K most frequent patterns not using the support threshold parameter tuned by the user. Top-K most frequent patterns mining is considered a harder task than user-tuned support-threshold-based FIM. One of the reasons why top-K most frequent patterns mining techniques are computationally intensive is the fact that they produce a large number of candidate itemsets. These methods also do not use any explicit pruning mechanism apart from the internally auto-maintained support threshold parameter. Therefore, we propose an efficient TKIFIs Miner algorithm that uses depth-first search strategy for top-K identical frequent patterns mining. The TKIFIs Miner uses specialized one- and two-itemsets-based pruning techniques for topmost patterns mining. Comparative analysis is performed on special benchmark datasets, for example, Retail with 16,469 items, T40I10D100K and T10I4D100K with 1000 items each, etc. The evaluation results have proven that the TKIFIs Miner is at the top of the line, compared to recently available topmost patterns mining methods not using the support threshold parameter.

The seamless operation of inter-connected smart devices in Internet of Things (IoT) wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires consistently available end-to-end routes. However, the sensor nodes that rely on a very limited power source tend to cause disconnection in multi-hop routes due to power shortages in the WSNs, which eventually results in the inefficiency of the overall IoT network. In addition, the density of the available sensor nodes affects the existence of feasible routes and the level of path multiplicity in the WSNs. Therefore, an efficient routing mechanism is expected to extend the lifetime of the WSNs by adaptively selecting the best routes for the data transfer between interconnected IoT devices. In this work, we propose a novel routing mechanism to balance the energy consumption among all the nodes and elongate the WSN lifetime, which introduces a score value assigned to each node along a path as the combination of evaluation metrics. Specifically, the scoring scheme considers the information of the node density at a certain area and the node energy levels in order to represent the importance of individual nodes in the routes. Furthermore, our routing mechanism allows for incorporating non-cooperative nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed work gives comparatively better results than some other experimented protocols.