Abstract

The objective of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks is to exploit Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) in combination with the Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT) by using fast attack methods. Machine learning (ML) techniques have shown potential in identifying APT attacks in autonomous and malware detection systems. However, detecting hidden APT attacks in the I-IoT-enabled CPS domain and achieving real-time accuracy in detection present significant challenges for these techniques. To overcome these issues, a new approach is suggested that is based on the Graph Attention Network (GAN), a multi- dimensional algorithm that captures behavioral features along with the relevant information that other methods do not deliver. This approach utilizes masked self-attentional layers to address the limitations of prior Deep Learning (DL) methods that rely on convolutions. Two datasets, the DAPT2020 malware, and Edge I-IoT datasets are used to evaluate the approach, and it attains the highest detection accuracy of 96.97% and 95.97%, with prediction time of 20.56 seconds and 21.65 seconds, respectively. The GAN approach is compared to conventional ML algorithms, and simulation results demonstrate a significant performance improvement over these algorithms in the I-IoT-enabled CPS realm.

Abstract

Excessive nutrient loading into the inland water bodies and resulting algal blooms have been a major threat to the water quality of the inland water bodies such as lakes and reservoirs where the water is relatively stagnant for longer duration. To improve the conditions, it is essential to study and understand the role of the contributing factors in increasing the nutrient load coming into the water body from the watershed. In general, the excessive usage of inorganic (NPK) fertilizers are considered to be the spearhead behind the increasing nutrient output from the watershed, but their impact has not been well evaluated due to several constraints. So, this study tries to evaluate the role of the fertilizer application on the nutrient yield from the watershed into an inland water body. Nagarjuna Sagar reservoir and its contributing

Abstract

A persistent, targeted cyber attack is called an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack. The attack is mainly launched to gain sensitive information, take over the system, and for financial gain, which creates nowadays more hurdles and challenges for the organization in preventing, detecting, and recovering from such attacks. Due to the nature of APT attacks, it is difficult to detect them quickly. Therefore machine learning techniques come into these research areas. This study uses deep and machine learning models such as random forest, decision tree, convolutional neural network, multilayer perceptron and so forth to categorize and effectively detect APT attacks by utilizing publicly accessible datasets. The datasets used in this study are CSE-CIC-IDS2018, CIC-IDS2017, NSL-KDD, and UNSW-NB15. This study proposes the hybrid ensemble machine learning model, a mixed approach of random forest and XGBoost classifiers. It has obtained the maximum prediction accuracy of 98.92%, 99.91%, 99.24%, and 97.11% for datasets CSE-CIC-IDS2018, CIC-IDS2017, NSL-KDD, and UNSW-NB15, with a false positive rate of 0.52%, 0.12%, 0.62%, and 5.29% respectively. These results are compared to other closely related recent studies in the literature. Our experiment's findings show that our model has performed significantly better for all datasets.

Abstract

The most significant and critical infrastructures, such as the electricity utilities, clean water facilities, nuclear plants and manufacturing industries are controlled and supervised by the industrial control systems. These systems undergo through a metamorphosis as a result of the Industry 4.0 revolution, which emphasises enhanced connectivity and flexibility with the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies. As the data is transferred across the Internet, Industry 4.0 communication can be easily attacked by launching different potential attacks. As a consequence, we attempt to propose a novel certificate-based access control and key establishment scheme for securing Industry 4.0 communication, called ACKS-IA. It offers access control and key establishment between smart industrial devices, as well as between a smart device and its associated cloud server. A formal security analysis of ACKS-IA through the broadly-accepted Burrows–Abadi– Needham (BAN) logic is provided. It confirms that ACKS-IA is secured and provides secure mutual authentication among the communication entities. The detailed informal security analysis and comparative study with the existing related schemes reveal that the proposed ACKS-IA is secured and efficient in terms of communication cost, computation cost, and security and functionality features including anonymity and untraceability as compared to other competing schemes. Finally, a real testbed implementation of ACKS-IA is provided to measure its effect on important performance attributes.

Abstract

Biometric signal consisting of irrelevant or non-distinctive features can contain useful correlational properties that privacy-preserving verification schemes can exploit. While an efficient protocol for iris verification using noise has been presented, it is not applicable to other widely used modalities, i.e., face and fingerprint, since the methods of noise extraction and comparison are different. In this work, we design a verification protocol for secure dot product computation and also propose noise extraction mechanisms for face and fingerprint modalities. We evaluate the performance of the protocol on CFP, LFW, CelebA, FVC 2004 DB1A, DB2A, DB3A, and SOCOFing datasets. While the protocol exhibits a slight degradation in accuracy, it provides information-theoretic security with a practical computational complexity.

Abstract

This paper discusses the development of autopilot hardware for small fixed-wing air vehicles. Weight constraint is the critical factor in developing such hardware. The sensors and communication devices are selected based on the requirements and constraints of these air vehicles. The sensors used in the hardware are calibrated using a three-axis rotating platform. The software written in the autopilot hardware is flexible enough to incorporate complex estimation and control algorithms along with the hardware-in-loop simulations. Linear output feedback controllers are designed for fixed wing micro and nano air vehicles. Successful flight trials are conducted to demonstrate the utility of the autopilot hardware for small fixed-wing air vehicles

Abstract

The epidemic growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) objects have revolutionized Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS). Though, it becomes challenging for the centralized cloud-centric framework to fulfil the application requirements such as low latency and power utilization. The introduction of the distributed edge-centric framework has recently helped the IoT-enabled MTS to meet these requirements by manipulating the tasks at the edge of the networks. Despite the fact that MTS leverages mobile subscribers by overcoming inherent cloud computing limitations, data security and user privacy requirements in establishing the MTS setup are still non-trivial challenges. In this article, we develop a key agreement solution for mobile users to realize mutual authentication in a single round. Our protocol offers user anonymity to maintain user privacy, and it can prevent physical attacks by physically unclonable functions. Initially, the security analysis is conferred to substantiate our protocol’s security persistence or strength. Later, its performance correlation is observed under the assumption of diverse metrics in a predefined empirical setup. The meticulous performance correlation endorses the precedence of our protocol over specified related protocols.

Abstract

The crisis in shared literary cultures and language communities during the transfer of power has been an important theme in Partition Studies. But while Urdu has been researched in the northern context, its place in southern India at this critical time remains neglected. This is an especially glaring gap because it was in the Deccan that Dakhni/Urdu literature flourished and developed before it came to be properly patronized by the courts of northern India. This chapter examines Jeelani Bano’s Urdu novel Aiwan-e-Ghazal (The Palace of Ghazal; 1976), which contemplates the changing place of Urdu and Urdu literary culture against the events and aftermath of Partition in the context of Hyderabad. Operating on the generic tensions between literature and historiography, Bano’s novel challenges hegemonic narratives of a monolithic, communal Hyderabadi Muslim community and charts the stagnation, transformation, and decline of Urdu poetry in twentieth-century Hyderabad. Through its analysis of this novel, this essay argues that the upheavals of Partition laid the groundwork for the homogenisation and marginalisation of both Hyderabadi Muslims and Urdu—contrary to the historical reality and diversity of these categories—and shows how their fate became inextricably intertwined, leading to the minoritisation of this singularly defined community and language in post-Partition India.

Abstract

In recent years there has been rampant growth in the field of ML, AI, Big Data, IoT, cyber security, and cloud computing. These technologies have also integrated into the field of smart healthcare. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-driven e-health is one such domain, which utilizes these modern technologies to provide cost-effective and secure healthcare care services to the patients [1]. It contain sensors, devices, actuators, etc. All the raw data is collected from these devices, which is prepossessed and refined to give useful insights. The medical professional can analyze and visualize critical health parameters such as ‘‘blood pressure (BP), heart rate, temperature, etc Based on the current status of the patient, alerts can be generated to doctors or the nursing staff in case of any eventuality. The integration of IoMT with e-health can enhance live tracking, monitoring and health services of patients [2], [3]. This data is regularly shared by the integrated devices and stored over the cloud server, where the healthcare professional can get all the diagnostics of patients. With the benefits of the technology, there are some security challenges. It can be architectural design flaws, a software bug, or a hardware backdoor that can lead to the compromise of the security of the systems. The cyber threat actor can gain authorized access to the system and paralyze all the networks at once. Weak control access, authentication and authorization protocols in the network may compromise the systems to the cyber attackers [4]. Attacks such as ransomware, rootkit, malware, denial of service (DoS), etc., can cause harm to the devices and tamper the healthcare data. Attackers can remotely access the smart healthcare devices and can use them as the botnet devices. With remote access, the attackers can redirect the network somewhere else and can huge network flooding [5], [6]. There have been a lot of high-impact cyber attacks happening to the e-health infrastructure. For example, a patient with the smart pacemaker monitors heart rate, temperature, and blood flow rate that can be critical to a heart alignment patient. Imagine this device gets compromised by a threat actor, it can create panic even worse and can cause death to the patient [7]. For mitigation of the cyber-attacks on all the critical infrastructure (i.e., e-health), cyber security comes into action. With threat modeling and hunting, we can actively search for any threat in the network, its source, and the severity of the threats. Once threats are found in the network, all the mitigation techniques can be used to secure the network from any intrusion. Cyber security provides a strong mechanism (i.e., authentication and key agreement) with all the tools and techniques to safeguard the e-health system [5], [6], [8]. Therefore, proper registration, authentication, authorization and intrusion detection schemes can be used to mitigate the various cyber attacks, i.e., ‘‘replay attempts, man-in-themiddle (MiTM) attacks, replay attacks, illegal session key computation, stolen verifier, etc., [8]

Abstract

This paper proposes a 162nW resistance-to-digital converter (RDC) for miniature battery-powered sensing systems. The RDC first converts input resistance to a pulse by charging a capacitor to a threshold voltage with a current proportional to the resistance. It compensates temperature sensitivity of the charging current by generating the threshold voltage with the same temperature dependency. Then, the circuit digitizes the pulse using an up-down counter that cancels temperature-dependent delay and offset of the low-power comparator in a digital Correlated Double Sampling (CDS) style. Designed in a 180 nm CMOS process, the proposed circuit achieves a figure-of-merit (FoM) of 0.845pJ/c.s. in simulation, with a conversion time of 50 ms for input resistance from to , while consuming 162nW at a supply voltage of 900 mV. Also, it obtains a temperature sensitivity of 26.9ppm/°C from −40 to 100°C