Faisal Hussain

This paper presents a cross-layer intrusion detection framework leveraging explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and interpretability methods to enhance transparency and robustness in attack detection within the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) domain. By addressing the dual challenges of compromised data integrity, which span both biosensor and network-layer data, this study combines advanced techniques to enhance interpretability, accuracy, and trust. Unlike conventional flow-based intrusion detection systems that primarily rely on transport-layer statistics, the proposed framework operates directly on raw packet-level features and application-layer semantics, including MQTT message types, payload entropy, and topic structures. The key contributions of this research include the application of K-Means clustering combined with the principal component analysis (PCA) algorthim for initial categorization of attack types, the use of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for feature prioritization to identify the most influential factors in model predictions, and the employment of Partial Dependence Plots (PDP) and Accumulated Local Effects (ALE) to elucidate feature interactions across layers. These methods enhance the system’s interpretability, making data-driven decisions more accessible to nontechnical stakeholders. Evaluation on a realistic healthcare IoMT testbed demonstrates significant improvements in detection accuracy and decision-making transparency. Furthermore, the proposed approach highlights the effectiveness of explainable and cross-layer intrusion detection for secure and trustworthy medical IoT environments that are tailored for cybersecurity analysts and healthcare stakeholders.

The botnet attack is a multi-stage and the most prevalent cyber-attack in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment that initiates with scanning activity and ends at the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The existing studies mostly focus on detecting botnet attacks after the IoT devices get compromised, and start performing the DDoS attack. Similarly, the performance of most of the existing machine learning based botnet detection models is limited to a specific dataset on which they are trained. As a consequence, these solutions do not perform well on other datasets due to the diversity of attack patterns. Therefore, in this work, we first produce a generic scanning and DDoS attack dataset by generating 33 types of scan and 60 types of DDoS attacks. In addition, we partially integrated the scan and DDoS attack samples from three publicly-available datasets for maximum attack coverage to better train the machine learning algorithms. Afterwards, we propose a two-fold machine learning approach to prevent and detect IoT botnet attacks. In the first fold, we trained a state-of-the-art deep learning model, i.e., ResNet-18 to detect the scanning activity in the premature attack stage to prevent IoT botnet attacks. While, in the second fold, we trained another ResNet-18 model for DDoS attack identification to detect IoT botnet attacks. Overall, the proposed two-fold approach manifests 98.89% accuracy, 99.01% precision, 98.74% recall, and 98.87% f1-score to prevent and detect IoT botnet attacks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-fold approach, we trained three other ResNet-18 models over three different datasets for detecting scan and DDoS attacks and compared their performance with the proposed two-fold approach. The experimental results prove that the proposed two-fold approach can efficiently prevent and detect botnet attacks as compared to other trained models.

Fitness and sport have drawn significant attention in wearable and persuasive computing. Physical activities are worthwhile for health, well-being, improved fitness levels, lower mental pressure and tension levels. Nonetheless, during high-power and commanding workouts, there is a high likelihood that physical fitness is seriously influenced. Jarring motions and improper posture during workouts can lead to temporary or permanent disability. With the advent of technological advances, activity acknowledgment dependent on wearable sensors has pulled in countless studies. Still, a fully portable smart fitness suite is not industrialized, which is the central need of today’s time, especially in the Covid-19 pandemic. Considering the effectiveness of this issue, we proposed a fully portable smart fitness suite for the household to carry on their routine exercises without any physical gym trainer and gym environment. The proposed system considers two exercises, i.e., T-bar and bicep curl with the assistance of the virtual real-time android application, acting as a gym trainer overall. The proposed fitness suite is embedded with a gyroscope and EMG sensory modules for performing the above two exercises. It provided alerts on unhealthy, wrong posture movements over an android app and is guided to the best possible posture based on sensor values. The KNN classification model is used for prediction and guidance for the user while performing a particular exercise with the help of an android application-based virtual gym trainer through a text-to-speech module. The proposed system attained 89% accuracy, which is quite effective with portability and a virtually assisted gym trainer feature.

Internet of things (IoT) is a technology that enables our daily life objects to connect on the Internet and to send and receive data for a meaningful purpose. In recent years, IoT has led to many revolutions in almost every sector of our society. Nevertheless, security threats to IoT devices and networks are relentlessly disruptive, because of the proliferation of Internet technologies. Phishing is one of the most prevalent threats to all Internet users, in which attackers aim to fraudulently extract sensitive information of a user or system, using fictitious emails, websites, etc. With the rapid increase in IoT devices, attackers are targeting IoT devices such as security cameras, smart cars, etc., and perpetrating phishing attacks to gain control over such vulnerable devices for malicious purposes. In recent decades, such scams have been spreading, and they have become increasingly advanced over time. By following this trend, in this paper, we propose a threat modelling approach to identify and mitigate the cyber-threats that can cause phishing attacks. We considered two significant IoT use cases, i.e., smart autonomous vehicular system and smart home. The proposed work is carried out by applying the STRIDE threat modelling approach to both use cases, to disclose all the potential threats that may cause a phishing attack. The proposed threat modelling approach can support the IoT researchers, engineers, and IoT cyber-security policymakers in securing and protecting the potential threats in IoT devices and systems in the early design stages, to ensure the secure deployment of IoT devices in critical infrastructures.

The thriving adoption of drones for delivering parcels, packages, medicines, etc., is surging with time. The application of drones for delivery services results in faster delivery, fuel-saving, and less energy consumption. Giant companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., are actively working on developing, testing, and improving drone-based delivery systems. So far, a lot of work has been done for improving the design, speed, operating range, security of the delivery drones, etc. However, very limited work has been done to ensure a complete and reliable last-mile delivery from the merchant’s store to the hands of the actual customer. To ensure a complete and reliable last-mile delivery, a drone must authenticate the consumer before dropping the package. Therefore, in this work, we propose a consumer authentication (Consumer-Auth) hybrid computing framework for drone delivery as a service to make sure that the parcel is perfectly delivered to the intended customer. The proposed Consumer-Auth framework enables a drone to reach the exact destination by using the GPS coordinates of the customer autonomously. After reaching the exact location, the drone waits for the customer to come to the specific pinned location then it starts a two-factor consumer authentication process, i.e., one-time password (OTP) verification and face Recognition. The experimental results manifest the effectiveness of the proposed Consumer-Auth framework to ensure a complete and reliable drone-based last-mile delivery.

The Internet of things (IoT) has emerged as a topic of intense interest among the research and industrial community as it has had a revolutionary impact on human life. The rapid growth of IoT technology has revolutionized human life by inaugurating the concept of smart devices, smart healthcare, smart industry, smart city, smart grid, among others. IoT devices’ security has become a serious concern nowadays, especially for the healthcare domain, where recent attacks exposed damaging IoT security vulnerabilities. Traditional network security solutions are well established. However, due to the resource constraint property of IoT devices and the distinct behavior of IoT protocols, the existing security mechanisms cannot be deployed directly for securing the IoT devices and network from the cyber-attacks. To enhance the level of security for IoT, researchers need IoT-specific tools, methods, and datasets. To address the mentioned problem, we provide a framework for developing IoT context-aware security solutions to detect malicious traffic in IoT use cases. The proposed framework consists of a newly created, open-source IoT data generator tool named IoT-Flock. The IoT-Flock tool allows researchers to develop an IoT use-case comprised of both normal and malicious IoT devices and generate traffic. Additionally, the proposed framework provides an open-source utility for converting the captured traffic generated by IoT-Flock into an IoT dataset. Using the proposed framework in this research, we first generated an IoT healthcare dataset which comprises both normal and IoT attack traffic. Afterwards, we applied different machine learning techniques to the generated dataset to detect the cyber-attacks and protect the healthcare system from cyber-attacks. The proposed framework will help in developing the context-aware IoT security solutions, especially for a sensitive use case like IoT healthcare environment.

Despite the surging development and utilization of IoT devices, the security of IoT devices is still in infancy. The security pitfalls of IoT devices have made it easy for hackers to take over IoT devices and use them for malicious activities like botnet attacks. With the rampant emergence of IoT devices, botnet attacks are surging. The botnet attacks are not only catastrophic for IoT device users but also for the rest of the world. Therefore, there is a crucial need to identify and mitigate the possible threats in IoT devices during the design phase. Threat modelling is a technique that is used to identify the threats in the earlier stages of the system design activity. In this paper, we propose a threat modelling approach to analyze and mitigate the botnet attacks in an IoT smart home use case. The proposed methodology identifies the development-level and application-level threats in smart home use case using STRIDE and VAST threat modelling methods. Moreover, we reticulate the identified threats with botnet attacks. Finally, we propose the mitigation techniques for all identified threats including the botnet threats.

The network attacks are increasing both in frequency and intensity with the rapid growth of internet of things (IoT) devices. Recently, denial of service (DoS) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are reported as the most frequent attacks in IoT networks. The traditional security solutions like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, etc., are unable to detect the complex DoS and DDoS attacks since most of them filter the normal and attack traffic based upon the static predefined rules. However, these solutions can become reliable and effective when integrated with artificial intelligence (AI) based techniques. During the last few years, deep learning models especially convolutional neural networks achieved high significance due to their outstanding performance in the image processing field. The potential of these convolutional neural network (CNN) models can be used to efficiently detect the complex DoS and DDoS by converting the network traffic dataset into images. Therefore, in this work, we proposed a methodology to convert the network traffic data into image form and trained a state-of-the-art CNN model, i.e., ResNet over the converted data. The proposed methodology accomplished 99.99\% accuracy for detecting the DoS and DDoS in case of binary classification. Furthermore, the proposed methodology achieved 87\% average precision for recognizing eleven types of DoS and DDoS attack patterns which is 9\% higher as compared to the state-of-the-art.