Convergence of Blockchain and Edge Computing for Secure and Scalable IIoT Critical Infrastructures in Industry 4.0

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordCritical infrastructure systems are vital to underpin the functioning of a society and economy. Due to ever-increasing number of Internet-connected Internet-of-Things (IoTs) / Industrial IoT (IIoT), and high volume of data generated and collected, security and scalability are becoming burning concerns for critical infrastructures in industry 4.0. The blockchain technology is essentially a distributed and secure ledger that records all the transactions into a hierarchically expanding chain of blocks. Edge computing brings the cloud capabilities closer to the computation tasks. The convergence of blockchain and edge computing paradigms can overcome the existing security and scalability issues. In this paper, we first introduce the IoT/IIoT critical infrastructure in industry 4.0, and then we briefly present the blockchain and edge computing paradigms. After that, we show how the convergence of these two paradigms can enable secure and scalable critical infrastructures. Then, we provide a survey on state-of-the-art for security and privacy, and scalability of IoT/IIoT critical infrastructures. A list of potential research challenges and open issues in this area is also provided, which can be used as useful resources to guide future research.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Trustworthy Federated Learning: A Survey

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a significant advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling collaborative model training across distributed devices while maintaining data privacy. As the importance of FL increases, addressing trustworthiness issues in its various aspects becomes crucial. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of the current state of Trustworthy FL, exploring existing solutions and well-defined pillars relevant to Trustworthy . Despite the growth in literature on trustworthy centralized Machine Learning (ML)/Deep Learning (DL), further efforts are necessary to identify trustworthiness pillars and evaluation metrics specific to FL models, as well as to develop solutions for computing trustworthiness levels. We propose a taxonomy that encompasses three main pillars: Interpretability, Fairness, and Security & Privacy. Each pillar represents a dimension of trust, further broken down into different notions. Our survey covers trustworthiness challenges at every level in FL settings. We present a comprehensive architecture of Trustworthy FL, addressing the fundamental principles underlying the concept, and offer an in-depth analysis of trust assessment mechanisms. In conclusion, we identify key research challenges related to every aspect of Trustworthy FL and suggest future research directions. This comprehensive survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on the development and implementation of Trustworthy FL systems, contributing to a more secure and reliable AI landscape.Comment: 45 Pages, 8 Figures, 9 Table

Deep-IFS:Intrusion Detection Approach for Industrial Internet of Things Traffic in Fog Environment

The extensive propagation of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies has encouraged intruders to initiate a variety of attacks that need to be identified to maintain the security of end-user data and the safety of services offered by service providers. Deep learning (DL), especially recurrent approaches, has been applied successfully to the analysis of IIoT forensics but their key challenge of recurrent DL models is that they struggle with long traffic sequences and cannot be parallelized. Multihead attention (MHA) tried to address this shortfall but failed to capture the local representation of IIoT traffic sequences. In this article, we propose a forensics-based DL model (called Deep-IFS) to identify intrusions in IIoT traffic. The model learns local representations using local gated recurrent unit (LocalGRU), and introduces an MHA layer to capture and learn global representation (i.e., long-range dependencies). A residual connection between layers is designed to prevent information loss. Another challenge facing the current IIoT forensics frameworks is their limited scalability, limiting performance in handling Big IIoT traffic data produced by IIoT devices. This challenge is addressed by deploying and training the proposed Deep-IFS in a fog computing environment. The intrusion identification becomes scalable by distributing the computation and the IIoT traffic data across worker fog nodes for training the model. The master fog node is responsible for sharing training parameters and aggregating worker node output. The aggregated classification output is subsequently passed to the cloud platform for mitigating attacks. Empirical results on the Bot-IIoT dataset demonstrate that the developed distributed Deep-IFS can effectively handle Big IIoT traffic data compared with the present centralized DL-based forensics techniques. Further, the results validate the robustness of the proposed Deep-IFS across various evaluation measures

Decentralized Federated Learning: Fundamentals, State-of-the-art, Frameworks, Trends, and Challenges

In the last decade, Federated Learning (FL) has gained relevance in training collaborative models without sharing sensitive data. Since its birth, Centralized FL (CFL) has been the most common approach in the literature, where a central entity creates a global model. However, a centralized approach leads to increased latency due to bottlenecks, heightened vulnerability to system failures, and trustworthiness concerns affecting the entity responsible for the global model creation. Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) emerged to address these concerns by promoting decentralized model aggregation and minimizing reliance on centralized architectures. However, despite the work done in DFL, the literature has not (i) studied the main aspects differentiating DFL and CFL; (ii) analyzed DFL frameworks to create and evaluate new solutions; and (iii) reviewed application scenarios using DFL. Thus, this article identifies and analyzes the main fundamentals of DFL in terms of federation architectures, topologies, communication mechanisms, security approaches, and key performance indicators. Additionally, the paper at hand explores existing mechanisms to optimize critical DFL fundamentals. Then, the most relevant features of the current DFL frameworks are reviewed and compared. After that, it analyzes the most used DFL application scenarios, identifying solutions based on the fundamentals and frameworks previously defined. Finally, the evolution of existing DFL solutions is studied to provide a list of trends, lessons learned, and open challenges

A Novel Attack Detection Scheme for the Industrial Internet of Things Using a Lightweight Random Neural Network

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings together many sensors, machines, industrial applications, databases, services, and people at work. The IIoT is improving our lives in several ways including smarter cities, agriculture, and e-healthcare, etc. Although the IIoT shares several characteristics with the consumer IoT, different cybersecurity mechanisms are adopted for both networks. Unlike consumer IoT solutions that are used by an individual user for a single purpose, IIoT solutions tend to be integrated into larger operational systems. As a result, IIoT security solutions require additional planning and awareness to ensure the security and privacy of the system. In this paper, different cybersecurity attacks such as denial of service (DoS), malicious operation, malicious control, data type probing, spying, scan, and wrong setup are predicted by applying machine learning techniques. To predict the aforementioned attacks, a novel lightweight random neural network (RaNN)-based prediction model has been proposed in this article. To investigate the performance of the RaNN-based prediction model, several evaluation parameters such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score were calculated and compared with the traditional artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT). The evaluation results show that the proposed RaNN model achieves an accuracy of 99.20% for a learning rate of 0.01, with a prediction time of 34.51 milliseconds. Other performance parameters such as the precision, recall, and F1 score were 99.11%, 99.13%, and 99.20%, respectively. The proposed scheme improves the attack detection accuracy by an average of 5.65% compared to that of state-of-the-art machine learning schemes for IoT security

Next Generation Internet of Things – Distributed Intelligence at the Edge and Human-Machine Interactions

This book provides an overview of the next generation Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation, development priorities, to enabling technologies in a global context. It is intended as a standalone in a series covering the activities of the Internet of Things European Research Cluster (IERC), including research, technological innovation, validation, and deployment.The following chapters build on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster, the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT–EPI), the IoT European Large-Scale Pilots Programme and the IoT European Security and Privacy Projects, presenting global views and state-of-the-art results regarding the next generation of IoT research, innovation, development, and deployment.The IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are evolving towards the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT, bringing together hyperconnectivity (5G and beyond), edge computing, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), virtual/ andaugmented reality (VR/AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation.Following the wider adoption of consumer IoT, the next generation of IoT/IIoT innovation for business is driven by industries, addressing interoperability issues and providing new end-to-end security solutions to face continuous treats.The advances of AI technology in vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and dialog are enabling the development of end-to-end intelligent systems encapsulating multiple technologies, delivering services in real-time using limited resources. These developments are focusing on designing and delivering embedded and hierarchical AI solutions in IoT/IIoT, edge computing, using distributed architectures, DLTs platforms and distributed end-to-end security, which provide real-time decisions using less data and computational resources, while accessing each type of resource in a way that enhances the accuracy and performance of models in the various IoT/IIoT applications.The convergence and combination of IoT, AI and other related technologies to derive insights, decisions and revenue from sensor data provide new business models and sources of monetization. Meanwhile, scalable, IoT-enabled applications have become part of larger business objectives, enabling digital transformation with a focus on new services and applications.Serving the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT real-time use cases over 5G and Network Slicing technology is essential for consumer and industrial applications and support reducing operational costs, increasing efficiency and leveraging additional capabilities for real-time autonomous systems.New IoT distributed architectures, combined with system-level architectures for edge/fog computing, are evolving IoT platforms, including AI and DLTs, with embedded intelligence into the hyperconnectivity infrastructure.The next generation of IoT/IIoT technologies are highly transformational, enabling innovation at scale, and autonomous decision-making in various application domains such as healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, energy, agriculture, transportation and autonomous vehicles, the military, logistics and supply chain, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, mining and oil and gas

Next Generation Internet of Things – Distributed Intelligence at the Edge and Human-Machine Interactions

This book provides an overview of the next generation Internet of Things (IoT), ranging from research, innovation, development priorities, to enabling technologies in a global context. It is intended as a standalone in a series covering the activities of the Internet of Things European Research Cluster (IERC), including research, technological innovation, validation, and deployment.The following chapters build on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster, the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT–EPI), the IoT European Large-Scale Pilots Programme and the IoT European Security and Privacy Projects, presenting global views and state-of-the-art results regarding the next generation of IoT research, innovation, development, and deployment.The IoT and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are evolving towards the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT, bringing together hyperconnectivity (5G and beyond), edge computing, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), virtual/ andaugmented reality (VR/AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) transformation.Following the wider adoption of consumer IoT, the next generation of IoT/IIoT innovation for business is driven by industries, addressing interoperability issues and providing new end-to-end security solutions to face continuous treats.The advances of AI technology in vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and dialog are enabling the development of end-to-end intelligent systems encapsulating multiple technologies, delivering services in real-time using limited resources. These developments are focusing on designing and delivering embedded and hierarchical AI solutions in IoT/IIoT, edge computing, using distributed architectures, DLTs platforms and distributed end-to-end security, which provide real-time decisions using less data and computational resources, while accessing each type of resource in a way that enhances the accuracy and performance of models in the various IoT/IIoT applications.The convergence and combination of IoT, AI and other related technologies to derive insights, decisions and revenue from sensor data provide new business models and sources of monetization. Meanwhile, scalable, IoT-enabled applications have become part of larger business objectives, enabling digital transformation with a focus on new services and applications.Serving the next generation of Tactile IoT/IIoT real-time use cases over 5G and Network Slicing technology is essential for consumer and industrial applications and support reducing operational costs, increasing efficiency and leveraging additional capabilities for real-time autonomous systems.New IoT distributed architectures, combined with system-level architectures for edge/fog computing, are evolving IoT platforms, including AI and DLTs, with embedded intelligence into the hyperconnectivity infrastructure.The next generation of IoT/IIoT technologies are highly transformational, enabling innovation at scale, and autonomous decision-making in various application domains such as healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, energy, agriculture, transportation and autonomous vehicles, the military, logistics and supply chain, retail and wholesale, manufacturing, mining and oil and gas

Distributed Denial of Service Attack Detection in IoT Networks using Deep Learning and Feature Fusion: A Review

The explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to escalating threats from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Moreover, the scale and heterogeneity of IoT environments pose unique security challenges, and intelligent solutions tailored for the IoT are needed to defend critical infrastructure. The deep learning technique shows great promise because automatic feature learning capabilities are well suited for the complex and high-dimensional data of IoT systems. Additionally, feature fusion approaches have gained traction in enhancing the performance of deep learning models by combining complementary feature sets extracted from multiple data sources. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive literature review focused specifically on deep learning techniques and feature fusion for DDoS attack detection in IoT networks. Studies employing diverse deep learning models and feature fusion techniques are analysed, highlighting key trends and developments in this crucial domain. This review provides several significant contributions, including an overview of various types of DDoS attacks, a comparison of existing surveys, and a thorough examination of recent applications of deep learning and feature fusion for detecting DDoS attacks in IoT networks. Importantly, it highlights the current challenges and limitations of these deep learning techniques based on the literature surveyed. This review concludes by suggesting promising areas for further research to enhance deep learning security solutions, which are specifically tailored to safeguarding the fast-growing IoT infrastructure against DDoS attacks

The Cloud-to-Thing Continuum

The Internet of Things offers massive societal and economic opportunities while at the same time significant challenges, not least the delivery and management of the technical infrastructure underpinning it, the deluge of data generated from it, ensuring privacy and security, and capturing value from it. This Open Access Pivot explores these challenges, presenting the state of the art and future directions for research but also frameworks for making sense of this complex area. This book provides a variety of perspectives on how technology innovations such as fog, edge and dew computing, 5G networks, and distributed intelligence are making us rethink conventional cloud computing to support the Internet of Things. Much of this book focuses on technical aspects of the Internet of Things, however, clear methodologies for mapping the business value of the Internet of Things are still missing. We provide a value mapping framework for the Internet of Things to address this gap. While there is much hype about the Internet of Things, we have yet to reach the tipping point. As such, this book provides a timely entrée for higher education educators, researchers and students, industry and policy makers on the technologies that promise to reshape how society interacts and operates