Investigating IoT Middleware Platforms for Smart Application Development

With the growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the data generated through these devices is also increasing. By 2030, it is been predicted that the number of IoT devices will exceed the number of human beings on earth. This gives rise to the requirement of middleware platform that can manage IoT devices, intelligently store and process gigantic data generated for building smart applications such as Smart Cities, Smart Healthcare, Smart Industry, and others. At present, market is overwhelming with the number of IoT middleware platforms with specific features. This raises one of the most serious and least discussed challenge for application developer to choose suitable platform for their application development. Across the literature, very little attempt is done in classifying or comparing IoT middleware platforms for the applications. This paper categorizes IoT platforms into four categories namely-publicly traded, open source, developer friendly and end-to-end connectivity. Some of the popular middleware platforms in each category are investigated based on general IoT architecture. Comparison of IoT middleware platforms in each category, based on basic, sensing, communication and application development features is presented. This study can be useful for IoT application developers to select the most appropriate platform according to their application requirement

Internet of Things: Current Challenges in the Quality Assurance and Testing Methods

Contemporary development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology brings a number of challenges in the Quality Assurance area. Current issues related to security, user's privacy, the reliability of the service, interoperability, and integration are discussed. All these create a demand for specific Quality Assurance methodology for the IoT solutions. In the paper, we present the state of the art of this domain and we discuss particular areas of system testing discipline, which is not covered by related work sufficiently so far. This analysis is supported by results of a recent survey we performed among ten IoT solutions providers, covering various areas of IoT applications.Comment: 10 pages Internet of Things (IoT

Softwarization of Internet of Things Infrastructure for Secure and Smart Healthcare

We propose an agile softwarized infrastructure for flexible, cost effective, secure and privacy preserving deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart healthcare applications and services. It integrates state-of-the-art networking and virtualization techniques across IoT, fog and cloud domains, employing Blockchain, Tor and message brokers to provide security and privacy for patients and healthcare providers. We propose a novel platform using Machine-to-Machine (M2M) messaging and rule-based beacons for seamless data management and discuss the role of data and decision fusion in the cloud and the fog, respectively, for smart healthcare applications and services.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Securing Machine Learning in the Cloud: A Systematic Review of Cloud Machine Learning Security.

With the advances in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques, and the potency of cloud computing in offering services efficiently and cost-effectively, Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) cloud platforms have become popular. In addition, there is increasing adoption of third-party cloud services for outsourcing training of DL models, which requires substantial costly computational resources (e.g., high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs)). Such widespread usage of cloud-hosted ML/DL services opens a wide range of attack surfaces for adversaries to exploit the ML/DL system to achieve malicious goals. In this article, we conduct a systematic evaluation of literature of cloud-hosted ML/DL models along both the important dimensions-attacks and defenses-related to their security. Our systematic review identified a total of 31 related articles out of which 19 focused on attack, six focused on defense, and six focused on both attack and defense. Our evaluation reveals that there is an increasing interest from the research community on the perspective of attacking and defending different attacks on Machine Learning as a Service platforms. In addition, we identify the limitations and pitfalls of the analyzed articles and highlight open research issues that require further investigation

Fair Selection of Edge Nodes to Participate in Clustered Federated Multitask Learning

Clustered federated Multitask learning is introduced as an efficient technique when data is unbalanced and distributed amongst clients in a non-independent and identically distributed manner. While a similarity metric can provide client groups with specialized models according to their data distribution, this process can be time-consuming because the server needs to capture all data distribution first from all clients to perform the correct clustering. Due to resource and time constraints at the network edge, only a fraction of devices {is} selected every round, necessitating the need for an efficient scheduling technique to address these issues. Thus, this paper introduces a two-phased client selection and scheduling approach to improve the convergence speed while capturing all data distributions. This approach ensures correct clustering and fairness between clients by leveraging bandwidth reuse for participants spent a longer time training their models and exploiting the heterogeneity in the devices to schedule the participants according to their delay. The server then performs the clustering depending on predetermined thresholds and stopping criteria. When a specified cluster approximates a stopping point, the server employs a greedy selection for that cluster by picking the devices with lower delay and better resources. The convergence analysis is provided, showing the relationship between the proposed scheduling approach and the convergence rate of the specialized models to obtain convergence bounds under non-i.i.d. data distribution. We carry out extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms reduce training time and improve the convergence speed while equipping every user with a customized model tailored to its data distribution.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Special issue on Federated Learning for the Management of Networked System

Adversarial Machine Learning for Social Good: Reframing the Adversary as an Ally

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been the driving force behind many of the recent advances in machine learning. However, research has shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples - input samples that have been perturbed to force DNN-based models to make errors. As a result, adversarial machine learning (AdvML) has gained a lot of attention, and researchers have investigated these vulnerabilities in various settings and modalities. In addition, DNNs have also been found to incorporate embedded bias and often produce unexplainable predictions, which can result in antisocial AI applications. The emergence of new AI technologies that leverage large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, increases the risk of producing antisocial applications at scale. AdvML for social good (AdvML4G) is an emerging field that repurposes the AdvML bug to invent prosocial applications. Regulators, practitioners, and researchers should collaborate to encourage the development of prosocial applications and hinder the development of antisocial ones. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive review of the emerging field of AdvML4G. This paper encompasses a taxonomy that highlights the emergence of AdvML4G, a discussion of the differences and similarities between AdvML4G and AdvML, a taxonomy covering social good-related concepts and aspects, an exploration of the motivations behind the emergence of AdvML4G at the intersection of ML4G and AdvML, and an extensive summary of the works that utilize AdvML4G as an auxiliary tool for innovating prosocial applications. Finally, we elaborate upon various challenges and open research issues that require significant attention from the research community

Securing combined Fog-to-Cloud systems: challenges and directions

Nowadays, fog computing is emerged for providing computational power closer to the users. Fog computing brings real-time processing, lowlatency, geo-distributed and etc. Although, fog computing do not come to compete cloud computing, it comes to collaborate. Recently, Fog-To-Cloud (F2C) continuum system is introduced to provide hierarchical computing system and facilitates fog-cloud collaboration. This F2C continuum system might encounter security issues and challenges due to their hierarchical and distributed nature. In this paper, we analyze attacks in different layer of F2C system and identify most potential security requirements and challenges for the F2C continuum system. Finally, we introduce the most remarkable efforts and trends for bringing secure F2C system.This work is supported by the H2020 projects mF2C (730929). It is also supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund both under contract RTI2018-094532-B-100.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft