Biblio

We have several issues in most current supply chain management systems. Consumers want to spend money on environmentally friendly products, but they are seldomly informed of the environmental contributions of the suppliers. Meanwhile, each supplier seeks to recover the costs for the environmental contributions to re-invest them into further contributions. Instead, in most current supply chains, the reward for each supplier is not clearly defined and fairly distributed. To address these issues, we propose a supply-chain contribution management platform for fair reward distribution called ‘Advanced Ledger.’ This platform records suppliers' environ-mental contribution trails, receives rewards from consumers in exchange for trail-backed fungible tokens, and fairly distributes the rewards to each supplier based on the contribution trails. In this paper, we overview the architecture of Advanced Ledger and 11 technical features, including decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) based contribution verification, contribution concealment, negative-valued tokens, fair reward distribution, atomic rewarding, and layer-2 rewarding. We then study the requirements and candidates of the smart contract platforms for implementing Advanced Ledger. Finally, we introduce a use case called ‘ESG token’ built on the Advanced Ledger architecture.

In the computer field, cybersecurity has always been the focus of attention. How to detect malware is one of the focuses and difficulties in network security research effectively. Traditional existing malware detection schemes can be mainly divided into two methods categories: database matching and the machine learning method. With the rise of deep learning, more and more deep learning methods are applied in the field of malware detection. Deeper semantic features can be extracted via deep neural network. The main tasks of this paper are as follows: (1) Using machine learning methods and one-dimensional convolutional neural networks to detect malware (2) Propose a machine The method of combining learning and deep learning is used for detection. Machine learning uses LGBM to obtain an accuracy rate of 67.16%, and one-dimensional CNN obtains an accuracy rate of 72.47%. In (2), LGBM is used to screen the importance of features and then use a one-dimensional convolutional neural network, which helps to further improve the detection result has an accuracy rate of 78.64%.

The current adversarial attacks against machine learning models can be divided into white-box attacks and black-box attacks. Further the black-box can be subdivided into soft label and hard label black-box, but the latter has the deficiency of only returning the class with the highest prediction probability, which leads to the difficulty in gradient estimation. However, due to its wide application, it is of great research significance and application value to explore hard label blackbox attacks. This paper proposes an Automatic Selection Attacks Framework (ASAF) for hard label black-box models, which can be explained in two aspects based on the existing attack methods. Firstly, ASAF applies model equivalence to select substitute models automatically so as to generate adversarial examples and then completes black-box attacks based on their transferability. Secondly, specified feature selection and parallel attack method are proposed to shorten the attack time and improve the attack success rate. The experimental results show that ASAF can achieve more than 90% success rate of nontargeted attack on the common models of traditional dataset ResNet-101 (CIFAR10) and InceptionV4 (ImageNet). Meanwhile, compared with FGSM and other attack algorithms, the attack time is reduced by at least 89.7% and 87.8% respectively in two traditional datasets. Besides, it can achieve 90% success rate of attack on the online model, BaiduAI digital recognition. In conclusion, ASAF is the first automatic selection attacks framework for hard label blackbox models, in which specified feature selection and parallel attack methods speed up automatic attacks.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things and the exploration of its application scenarios, embedded devices are deployed in various environments to collect information and data. In such environments, the security of embedded devices cannot be guaranteed and are vulnerable to various attacks, even device capture attacks. When embedded devices are attacked, the attacker can obtain the information transmitted by the channel during the encryption process and the internal operation of the encryption. In this paper, we analyze various existing white-box schemes and show whether they are suitable for application in IoT. We propose an application of WBEAs for distributed devices in IoT scenarios and conduct experiments on several devices in IoT scenarios.

In the world of information technology and the Internet, which has become a part of human life today and is constantly expanding, Attention to the users' requirements such as information security, fast processing, dynamic and instant access, and costs savings has become essential. The solution that is proposed for such problems today is a technology that is called cloud computing. Today, cloud computing is considered one of the most essential distributed tools for processing and storing data on the Internet. With the increasing using this tool, the need to schedule tasks to make the best use of resources and respond appropriately to requests has received much attention, and in this regard, many efforts have been made and are being made. To this purpose, various algorithms have been proposed to calculate resource allocation, each of which has tried to solve equitable distribution challenges while using maximum resources. One of these calculation methods is the DRF algorithm. Although it offers a better approach than previous algorithms, it faces challenges, especially with time-consuming resource allocation computing. These challenges make the use of DRF more complex than ever in the low number of requests with high resource capacity as well as the high number of simultaneous requests. This study tried to reduce the computations costs associated with the DRF algorithm for resource allocation by introducing a new approach to using this DRF algorithm to automate calculations by machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms (Autonomic Dominant Resource Fairness or A-DRF).

In control systems, the operation of the system after an incident occurs is important. This paper proposes to design a whitelist model that can detect anomalies and identify locations of anomalous actuators using finite automata during multiple actuators attack. By applying this model and comparing the whitelist model with the operation data, the monitoring system detects anomalies and identifies anomaly locations of actuator that deviate from normal operation. We propose to construct a whitelist model focusing on the order of the control system operation using binary search trees, which can grasp the state of the system when anomalies occur. We also apply combinatorial compression based on BDD (Binary Decision Diagram) to the model to speed up querying and identification of abnormalities. Based on the model designed in this study, we aim to construct a secured control system that selects and executes an appropriate fallback operation based on the state of the system when anomaly is detected.

This study addresses the coordination issue of multi-agent systems under complicated actuator faults and cyber attacks. Distributed fault-tolerant design is developed with the estimated and output neighboring information in decentralized estimation observer. Criteria of reaching the exponential coordination of multi-agent systems with cyber attacks is obtained with average dwelling time and chattering bound method. Simulations validate the efficiency of the anti-attack fault-tolerant design.

Several excellent devices can communicate without the need for human intervention. It is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the history of computing, with an estimated 50 billion devices sold by the end of 2020. On the one hand, IoT developments play a crucial role in upgrading a few simple, intelligent applications that can increase living quality. On the other hand, the security concerns have been noted to the cross-cutting idea of frameworks and the multidisciplinary components connected with their organization. As a result, encryption, validation, access control, network security, and application security initiatives for gadgets and their inherent flaws cannot be implemented. It should upgrade existing security measures to ensure that the ML environment is sufficiently protected. Machine learning (ML) has advanced tremendously in the last few years. Machine insight has evolved from a research center curiosity to a sensible instrument in a few critical applications.

Artificial intelligence is a subfield of computer science that refers to the intelligence displayed by machines or software. The research has influenced the rapid development of smart devices that have a significant impact on our daily lives. Science, engineering, business, and medicine have all improved their prediction powers in order to make our lives easier in our daily tasks. The quality and efficiency of regions that use artificial intelligence has improved, as shown in this study. It successfully handles data organisation and environment difficulties, allowing for the development of a more solid and rigorous model. The pace of life is quickening in the digital age, and the PC Internet falls well short of meeting people’s needs. Users want to be able to get convenient network information services at any time and from any location

Edge computing is a prospective notion for expanding the potential of cloud computing. It is vital to maintaining a decent atmosphere free of all forms of security and breaches in order to continue utilizing computer services. The security concerns surrounding the edge computing environment has been impeded as a result of the security issues that surround the area. Many researchers have looked into edge computing security issues, however, not all have thoroughly studied the needs. Security requirements are the goals that specify the capabilities and operations that a process that is carried out by a system in order to eliminate various security flaws. The purpose of this study is to give a complete overview of the many different artificial intelligence technologies that are now being utilized for edge computing security with the intention of aiding research in the future in locating research potential. This article analyzed the most recent research and shed light on the following topics: state-of-the-art techniques used to combat security threats, technological trends used by the method, metrics utilize to assess the techniques' ability, and opportunities of research for future researchers in the area of artificial intelligence for edge computing security.

Expanding techniques for chip-scale acoustic wave focusing would open doors for advancements in signal processing and quantum electromechanical microsystems. In this paper, we present a method for acoustic wave focusing and wavefront shaping at radio frequencies (RF), validated with thin-film lithium niobite on a low-loss and high coupling silicon carbide (LiNbO3-on-SiC) testbed. By depositing a metal layer, we can mitigate the piezoelectric stiffening effect, and reduce the acoustic wave speed in a patterned area. Employing a design analogous to geometric optical systems, efficient acoustic wave focusing is experimentally observed. With more development, this technique could be employed in emerging acoustic microsystems.

Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) run on resource-constrained devices and play a key role in many Industrial Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems based applications. But, achieving an energy-efficient routing in LLNs is a major challenge nowadays. This challenge is addressed by Routing Protocol for Low-power Lossy Networks (RPL), which is specified in RFC 6550 as a “Proposed Standard” at present. In RPL, a client node uses Destination Advertisement Object (DAO) control messages to pass on the destination information towards the root node. An attacker may exploit the DAO sending mechanism of RPL to perform a DAO Insider attack in LLNs. In this paper, it is shown that an aggressive attacker can drastically degrade the network performance. To address DAO Insider attack, a lightweight defense solution is proposed. The proposed solution uses an early blacklisting strategy to significantly mitigate the attack and restore RPL performance. The proposed solution is implemented and tested on Cooja Simulator.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel paradigm that enables the development of a slew of Services for the future of technology advancements. When it comes to IoT applications, the cyber and physical worlds can be seamlessly integrated, but they are essentially limitless. However, despite the great efforts of standardization bodies, coalitions, companies, researchers, and others, there are still a slew of issues to overcome in order to fully realize the IoT's promise. These concerns should be examined from a variety of perspectives, including enabling technology, applications, business models, and social and environmental consequences. The focus of this paper is on open concerns and challenges from a technological standpoint. We will study the differences in technical such Sigfox, NB-IoT, LoRa, and 6LowPAN, and discuss their advantages and disadvantage for each technology compared with other technologies. Demonstrate that each technology has a position in the internet of things market. Each technology has different advantages and disadvantages it depends on the quality of services, latency, and battery life as a mention. The first will be analysis IoT technologies. SigFox technology offers a long-range, low-power, low-throughput communications network that is remarkably resistant to environmental interference, enabling information to be used efficiently in a wide variety of applications. We analyze how NB-IoT technology will benefit higher-value-added services markets for IoT devices that are willing to pay for exceptionally low latency and high service quality. The LoRa technology will be used as a low-cost device, as it has a very long-range (high coverage).

The rapid shift towards smart cities, particularly in the era of pandemics, necessitates the employment of e-learning, remote learning systems, and hybrid models. Building adaptive and personalized education becomes a requirement to mitigate the downsides of distant learning while maintaining high levels of achievement. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), machine learning (ML), and the internet of behaviour (IoB) are just a few of the technologies that are helping to shape the future of smart education in the age of smart cities through Customization and personalization. This study presents a paradigm for smart education based on the integration of XAI and IoB technologies. The research uses data acquired on students' behaviours to determine whether or not the current education systems respond appropriately to learners' requirements. Despite the existence of sophisticated education systems, they have not yet reached the degree of development that allows them to be tailored to learners' cognitive needs and support them in the absence of face-to-face instruction. The study collected data on 41 learner's behaviours in response to academic activities and assessed whether the running systems were able to capture such behaviours and respond appropriately or not; the study used evaluation methods that demonstrated that there is a change in students' academic progression concerning monitoring using IoT/IoB to enable a relative response to support their progression.

In order to solve the problems that may arise from the negative impact of EV charging loads on the power distribution network, it is very important to predict the distribution network variability according to EV charging loads. If appropriate facility reinforcement or system operation is made through evaluation of the impact of EV charging load, it will be possible to prevent facility failure in advance and maintain the power quality at a certain level, enabling stable network operation. By analysing the degree of change in the predicted load according to the EV load characteristics through the load prediction model, it is possible to evaluate the influence of the distribution network according to the EV linkage. This paper aims to investigate the effect of EV charging load on voltage stability, power loss, reliability index and economic loss of distribution network. For this, we transformed univariate time series of EV charging data into a multivariate time series using feature engineering techniques. Then, time series forecast models are trained based on the multivariate dataset. Finally, XAI techniques such as LIME and SHAP are applied to the models to obtain the feature importance analysis results.

With the increasing number of catastrophic weather events and resulting disruption in the energy supply to essential loads, the distribution grid operators’ focus has shifted from reliability to resiliency against high impact, low-frequency events. Given the enhanced automation to enable the smarter grid, there are several assets/resources at the disposal of electric utilities to enhances resiliency. However, with a lack of comprehensive resilience tools for informed operational decisions and planning, utilities face a challenge in investing and prioritizing operational control actions for resiliency. The distribution system resilience is also highly dependent on system attributes, including network, control, generating resources, location of loads and resources, as well as the progression of an extreme event. In this work, we present a novel multi-stage resilience measure called the Anticipate-Withstand-Recover (AWR) metrics. The AWR metrics are based on integrating relevant ‘system characteristics based factors’, before, during, and after the extreme event. The developed methodology utilizes a pragmatic and flexible approach by adopting concepts from the national emergency preparedness paradigm, proactive and reactive controls of grid assets, graph theory with system and component constraints, and multi-criteria decision-making process. The proposed metrics are applied to provide decision support for a) the operational resilience and b) planning investments, and validated for a real system in Alaska during the entirety of the event progression.

Automatic Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) detect coding rule violations, including mistakes and bad practices that frequently occur during programming. While ASATs are widely used in both OSS and industry, the developers do not resolve more than 80% of the detected violations. As one of the reasons, most ASATs users do not customize their ASATs to their projects after installation; the ASATs with the default configuration report many rule violations that confuse developers. To reduce the ratio of such uninteresting warning messages, we propose a method to customize ASATs according to the product source code automatically. Our fundamental hypothesis is: A software project has interesting ASAT rules that are consistent over time. Our method takes source code as input and generates an ASAT configuration. In particular, the method enables optional (i.e., disabled by default) rules that detected no violations on the version because developers are likely to follow the rules in future development. Our method also disables violated rules because developers were unlikely to follow them. To evaluate the method, we applied our method to 643 versions of four JavaScript projects. The generated configurations for all four projects increased the ASAT precision. They also increased recall for two projects. The result shows that our method helps developers to focus on their attractive rule violations. Our implementation of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/devreplay/linter-maintainer

This article is devoted to the existing standards for assessing the state of information security, which provides a classification and comparative analysis of standards for assessing the state of information.

The technique of concealing a confidential information in a carrier information is known as steganography. When we use digital images as carriers, it is termed as image steganography. The advancements in digital technology and the need for information security have given great significance for image steganographic methods in the area of secured communication. An efficient steganographic system is characterized by a good trade-off between its features such as imperceptibility and capacity. The proposed scheme implements an edge-detection based adaptive steganography with transform domain embedding, offering high imperceptibility and capacity. The scheme employs an adaptive embedding technique to select optimal data-hiding regions in carrier image, using Canny edge detection and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then, the secret image is embedded in the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT) coefficients of the selected carrier image blocks, with the help of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The analysis of the scheme is performed using metrics such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC).

The recent focus of cyber security on automated detection of malware for Android apps has omitted the study of some apps used for “legitimate” purposes, such as steganography apps. Mobile steganography apps can be used for delivering harmful messages, and while current research on steganalysis targets the detection of stego images using academic algorithms and well-built benchmarking image data sets, the community has overlooked uncovering a mobile app itself for its ability to perform steganographic embedding. Developing automatic tools for identifying the code in a suspect app as a stego app can be very challenging: steganography algorithms can be represented in a variety of ways, and there exists many image editing algorithms which appear similar to steganography algorithms.This paper proposes the first automated approach to detect Android steganography apps. We use symbolic execution to summarize an app’s image operation behavior into expression trees, and match the extracted expression trees with reference trees that represents the expected behavior of a steganography embedding process. We use a structural feature based similarity measure to calculate the similarity between expression trees. Our experiments show that, the propose approach can detect real world Android stego apps that implement common spatial domain and frequency domain embedding algorithms with a high degree of accuracy. Furthermore, our procedure describes a general framework that has the potential to be applied to other similar questions when studying program behaviors.

Steganography is one of the techniques for secure transformation of data which aims at hiding information inside other media in such a way that no one will notice. The cover media that can accommodate secret information include text, audio, image, and video. Images are the most popular covering media in steganography, due to the fact that, they are heavily used in daily applications and have high redundancy in representation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive steganography algorithm for hiding information in RGB images. To minimize visual perceptible distortion, the proposed algorithm uses edge pixels for embedding data. It detects the edge pixels in the image using the Sobel filter. Then, the message is embedded into the LSBs of the blue channel of the edge pixels. To resist statistical attacks, the distribution of the blue channel of the edge pixels is used when embedding data in the cover image. The experimental results showed that the algorithm offers high capacity for hiding data in cover images; it does not distort the quality of the stego image; it is robust enough against statistical attacks; and its execution time is short enough for online data transfer. Also, the results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms similar approaches in all evaluation metrics.

Underwater Wireless Communication Network (UWCN) is highly emerging in recent times due to the broad variety of underwater applications ranging from disaster prediction, environmental resource monitoring, military security surveillance and assisted navigation. Since the kind of accuracy these applications demands from the dynamic underwater environment is really high, so there is a need for effective way of study underwater communication networks. Usually underwater networks can be studied with the help of actual underwater testbed or with the model of the underwater network. Studying the underwater system with the actual underwater testbed is costly. The effective way of analysis can be done by creating a mathematical model of underwater systems. Queuing theory is one of the most popular mathematical theories used for conventional circuit switched networks whereas it can’t be applied for modeling modern packet switched networks which has high variability compared to that of circuit switched networks. So this paper presents Stochastic Network Calculus (SNC) as the mathematical theory for modeling underwater communication networks. Underlying principles and basic models provided by SNC for analyzing the performance graduates of UWCN is discussed in detail for the benefit of researchers looking for the effective mathematical theory for modeling the system in the domain of underwater communication.

Lateral movement attack performs malicious activities by infecting part of a network system first and then moving laterally to the left system in order to compromise more computers. It is widely used in various sophisticated attacks and plays a critical role. This paper aims to quantitatively analyze the transient security and dependability of a critical network system under lateral movement attacks, whose intruding capability increases with the increasing number of attacked computers. We propose a survivability model for capturing the system and adversary behaviors from the time instant of the first intrusion launched from any attacked computer to the other vulnerable computers until defense solution is developed and deployed. Stochastic Reward Nets (SRN) is applied to automatically build and solve the model. The formulas are also derived for calculating the metrics of interest. Simulation is carried out to validate the approximate accuracy of our model and formulas. The quantitative analysis can help network administrators make a trade-off between damage loss and defense cost.

We propose a novel theoretical approach for solving a Stochastic Security Game using augmented Markov Decison Processes and an experimental evaluation. Most of the previous works mentioned in the literature focus on Linear Programming techniques seeking Strong Stackelberg Equilibria through the defender and attacker’s strategy spaces. Although effective, these techniques are computationally expensive and tend to not scale well to very large problems. By fixing the set of the possible defense strategies, our approach is able to use the well-known augmented MDP formalism to compute an optimal policy for an attacker facing a defender patrolling. Experimental results on fully observable cases validate our approach and show good performances in comparison with optimistic and pessimistic approaches. However, these results also highlight the need of scalability improvements and of handling the partial observability cases.

We present a scalable optimization algorithm and its parallel implementation for two-stage stochastic programming problems of large-scale, particularly the security constrained optimal power flow models routinely used in electrical power grid operations. Such problems can be prohibitively expensive to solve on industrial scale with the traditional methods or in serial. The algorithm decomposes the problem into first-stage and second-stage optimization subproblems which are then scheduled asynchronously for efficient evaluation in parallel. Asynchronous evaluations are crucial in achieving good balancing and parallel efficiency because the second-stage optimization subproblems have highly varying execution times. The algorithm employs simple local second-order approximations of the second-stage optimal value functions together with exact first- and second-order derivatives for the first-stage subproblems to accelerate convergence. To reduce the number of the evaluations of computationally expensive second-stage subproblems required by line search, we devised a flexible mechanism for controlling the step size that can be tuned to improve performance for individual class of problems. The algorithm is implemented in C++ using MPI non-blocking calls to overlap computations with communication and boost parallel efficiency. Numerical experiments of the algorithm are conducted on Summit and Lassen supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and scaling results show good parallel efficiency.