Iqra Mustafa

Time-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) deployments need fine-grained, auditable authorization without exposing payloads to intermediaries or embedding access policy in ciphertext. The secure IoT communication and policy enforcement (SCOPE) framework separates on-ledger authorization from end-to-end content protection while keeping intermediaries minimally trusted. The SCOPE framework comprises a broker smart contract (BSC) that records authorization decisions, a decentralized trusted authority (TA) that issues committee attestations and epoch-scoped revocation snapshots, and a stateless edge relay that verifies requests and forward ciphertext without decryption. Payload confidentiality and integrity are provided end-to-end by a pairing-free authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) channel with ephemeral key agreement and disciplined nonces, yielding replay resistance and forward secrecy with respect to the sender’s key. A prototype on a permissioned distributed ledger runtime, evaluated on an IoT edge testbed, demonstrates subsecond end-to-end operation, on-ledger authorization within 500 ms, and lower computational latency than pairing-based ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption and attribute-based signcryption (CP-ABE/ABSC) baselines, including BLUMA (multiauthority CP-ABE with hidden policy). The design is portable across ledgers and supports a drop-in postquantum key-encapsulation mechanism plus AEAD (KEM+AEAD) channel without changes to the policy or relay planes, enabling auditable authorization for multistakeholder settings such as smart ports, industrial automation, and e-health.

The concept of smart contracts (SCs) is becoming more prevalent, and their application is gaining traction across many diverse scenarios. However, producing poorly constructed contracts carries significant risks, including the potential for substantial financial loss, a lack of trust in the technology, and the risk of exposure to cyber-attacks. Several tools exist to assist in developing SCs, but their limited functionality increases development complexity. Expert knowledge is required to ensure contract reliability, resilience, and scalability. To overcome these risks and challenges, tools and services based on modeling and formal techniques are required that offer a robust methodology for SC verification and life-cycle management. This study proposes an engineering framework for the generation of a robust and verifiable smart contract (GRV-SC) framework that covers the entire SC life-cycle from design to deployment stages. It adopts SC modeling and automated formal verification methodologies to detect security vulnerabilities and improve resilience, extensibility, and code optimization to mitigate risks associated with SC development. Initially, the framework includes the implementation of a formal approach, using colored Petri nets (CPNs), to model cross-platform Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML) SCs. It also incorporates a specialized type safety dynamic verifier, which is designed to detect and address new vulnerabilities that can arise in DAML contracts, such as access control and insecure direct object reference (Idor) vulnerabilities. The proposed GRV-SC framework provides a holistic approach to SC life-cycle management and aims to enhance the security, reliability, and adoption of SCs.

Day-ahead electricity price forecasting plays a critical role in balancing energy consumption and generation, optimizing the decisions of electricity market participants, formulating energy trading strategies, and dispatching independent system operators. Despite the fact that much research on price forecasting has been published in recent years, it remains a difficult task because of the challenging nature of electricity prices that includes seasonality, sharp fluctuations in price, and high volatility. This study presents a three-stage short-term electricity price forecasting model by employing ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and extreme learning machine (ELM). In the proposed model, the EEMD is employed to decompose the actual price signals to overcome the non-linear and non-stationary components in the electricity price data. Then, a day-ahead forecasting is performed using the ELM model. We conduct several experiments on real-time data obtained from three different states of the electricity market in Australia, i.e., Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria. We also implement various deep learning approaches as benchmark methods, i.e., recurrent neural network, multi-layer perception, support vector machine, and ELM. In order to affirm the performance of our proposed and benchmark approaches, this study performs several performance evaluation metric, including the Diebold–Mariano (DM) test. The results from the experiments show the productiveness of our developed model (in terms of higher accuracy) over its counterparts.

Among several approaches to privacy-preserving cryptographic schemes, we have concentrated on noise-free homomorphic encryption. It is a symmetric key encryption that supports homomorphic operations on encrypted data. We present a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme based on sedenion algebra over finite Zn rings. The innovation of the scheme is the compression of a 16-dimensional vector for the application of Frobenius automorphism. For sedenion, we have p16 different possibilities that create a significant bijective mapping over the chosen 16-dimensional vector that adds permutation to our scheme. The security of this scheme is based on the assumption of the hardness of solving a multivariate quadratic equation system over finite Zn rings. The scheme results in 256n multivariate polynomial equations with 256 + 16n unknown variables for n messages. For this reason, the proposed scheme serves as a security basis for potentially post-quantum cryptosystems. Moreover, after sedenion, no newly constructed algebra loses its properties. This scheme would therefore apply as a whole to the following algebras, such as 32-dimensional trigintadunion.

Conventional RSA algorithm, being a basis for several proposed cryptosystems, has remarkable security laps with respect to confidentiality and integrity over the internet which can be compromised by state-of-the-art attacks, especially, for different types of data generation, transmission, and analysis by IoT applications. This security threat hindrance is considered to be a hard problem to solve on classical computers. However, bringing quantum mechanics into account, the concept no longer holds true. So, this calls out for the modification of the conventional pre-quantum RSA algorithm into a secure post-quantum cryptographic-based RSA technique. In this research, we propose a post-quantum lattice-based RSA (LBRSA) for IoT applications in order to secure the shared data and information. The proposed work is validated by implementing it in 60-dimensions. The key size is about 1.152 × 105-bits and generation time is 0.8 hours. Furthermore, it has been tested with AVISPA, which confirms security in the presence of an intruder. Moreover, the proposed LB-RSA technique is compared with the existing state-of-the-art techniques. The empirical results advocate that the proposed lattice-based variant is not only safe but beats counterparts in terms of secured data sharing.

As novel technologies continue to reshape the digital era, cyberattacks are also increasingly becoming more commonplace and sophisticated. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are, perhaps, the most prevalent and exponentially-growing attack, targeting the varied and emerging computational network infrastructures across the globe. This necessitates the design of an efficient and early detection of large-scale sophisticated DDoS attacks. Software defined networks (SDN) point to a promising solution, as a network paradigm which decouples the centralized control intelligence from the forwarding logic. In this work, a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) ensemble framework for efficient DDoS attack detection in SDNs is proposed. The proposed framework is evaluated on a current state-of-the-art Flowbased dataset under established benchmarks. Improved accuracy is demonstrated against existing related detection approaches.