Muhammad Waqar

Background and Objectives: Public health needs collaborative, privacy-preserving analytics, but centralized AI is constrained by data sharing and governance. Federated learning (FL) enables training without moving sensitive data. This review assessed how FL is used for disease prevention in population and public health, and mapped benefits, challenges, and policy implications. Methods: Following PRISMA 2020, we searched PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar for peer reviewed English-language studies from January 2020–30 June 2025, applying FL to surveillance, outbreak detection, risk prediction, or policy support. Two reviewers screened and extracted data with third-reviewer arbitration. Quality was appraised with a tool adapted from MMAT and AI reporting frameworks. No meta-analysis was performed. Results: Of 5230 records identified (4720 after deduplication), 200 full texts were assessed and 19 were included. Most used horizontal FL across multiple institutions for communicable diseases, COVID-19, tuberculosis and some chronic conditions. Reported gains included privacy preservation across sites, better generalizability from diverse data, near real-time intelligence, localized risk stratification, and support for resource planning. Common barriers were non-IID data, interoperability gaps, compute and network limits in low-resource settings, unclear legal pathways, and concerns about fairness and transparency. Few studies linked directly to formal public-health policy or low-resource deployments. Conclusions: FL is promising for equitable, secure, and scalable disease-prevention analytics that respect data sovereignty. Priorities include robust methods for heterogeneity, interoperable standards, secure aggregation, routine fairness auditing, clearer legal and regulatory guidance, and capacity building in underrepresented regions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has transformed multiple industries, providing significant potential for automation, efficiency, and enhanced decision-making. The incorporation of IoT and data analytics in smart grid represents a groundbreaking opportunity for the energy sector, delivering substantial advantages in efficiency, sustainability, and customer empowerment. This integration enables smart grids to autonomously monitor energy flows and adjust to fluctuations in energy demand and supply in a flexible and real-time fashion. Statistical analytics, as a fundamental component of data analytics, provides the necessary tools and techniques to uncover patterns, trends, and insights within datasets. Nevertheless, it is crucial to address privacy and security issues to fully maximize the potential of data analytics in smart grids. This paper makes several significant contributions to the literature on secure, privacy-aware aggregation schemes in smart grids. First, we introduce a Fog-enabled Secure Data Analytics Operations (FESDAO) scheme which offers a distributed architecture incorporating robust security features such as secure aggregation, authentication, fault tolerance and resilience against insider threats. The scheme achieves privacy during data aggregation through a modified Boneh-Goh-Nissim cryptographic scheme along with other mechanisms. Second, FESDAO also supports statistical analytics on metering data at the cloud control center and fog node levels. FESDAO ensures reliable aggregation and accurate data analytical results, even in scenarios where smart meters fail to report data, thereby preserving both analytical operation computation accuracy and latency. We further provide comprehensive security analyses to demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively supports data privacy, source authentication, fault tolerance, and resilience against false data injection and replay attacks. Lastly, we offer thorough performance evaluations to illustrate the efficiency of the suggested scheme in comparison to current state-of-the-art schemes, considering encryption, computation, aggregation, decryption, and communication costs. Moreover, a detailed security analysis has been conducted to verify the scheme’s resistance against insider collusion attacks, replay attack, and false data injection (FDI) attack.

Smart farming leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address modern agricultural sustainability challenges. This study investigates the application of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and time series analysis in agriculture through a systematic literature review following the PRISMA methodology. The review highlights the critical roles of ML and DL techniques in optimizing agricultural processes, such as crop selection, yield prediction, soil compatibility classification, and water management. ML algorithms facilitate tasks like crop selection and soil fertility classification, while DL techniques contribute to forecasting crop production and commodity prices. Additionally, time series analysis is employed for demand forecasting of crops, commodity price prediction, and forecasting crop yield production. The focus of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of ML and DL techniques within the farming industry. Utilizing crop datasets, ML algorithms are instrumental in classifying soil fertility, crop selection, and various other aspects. DL algorithms, when applied to farming data, enable effective time series analysis and crop selection. By synthesizing the integration of these technologies, this review underscores their potential to enhance decision-making in agriculture and mitigate food scarcity challenges in the future.

Quantum cryptography is anticipated to drive substantial advancements in the field of cybersecurity. The impending arrival of quantum cryptography has the potential to compromise current encryption methods, thereby possibly compromising the effectiveness of traditional key management-based security protocols. Quantum cryptography represents a burgeoning area that necessitates thorough examination and scrutiny to validate its efficacy in safeguarding data and securely distributing secret keys. One fundamental quantum key distribution protocol, BB84, encounters challenges when operating with fewer quantum bits (qubits) and bases that only support up to 8 qubits. This limitation weakens the system’s security, making brute force, intercept, and resend attacks less challenging. Consequently, this study proposes a method to enhance the security of the BB84 protocol, to reduce susceptibility to attacks and eavesdropping. The proposed improved BB84 protocol utilizes 9, 12, and 16 quantum bits along with two, and three bases to significantly bolster security, allowing authorized parties to prevent the key distribution process and eliminate the use of compromised keys. Additionally, this study has implemented the E91 quantum key distribution protocol utilizing the Entanglement Pair Generation method to produce secure keys. While the existing E91 protocol ensures security through Bell’s theorem and Bell’s inequality, it overlooks the impact of noise, leading to inaccuracies in eavesdropper detection. Hence, this study introduces an additional security measure. Whenever an eavesdropper attempts to measure the quantum state, the proposed E91 protocol collapses its state from |10⟩ to |11⟩, setting the first qubit to |1⟩ and the other qubit to |0⟩, thus providing the eavesdropper with incorrect information, accompanied by a phase angle of 15π/8. This leads to misconception and misconfiguration, preventing eavesdroppers from obtaining useful details about transferred quantum states and compromising the keys. Additionally, considering that the proposed E91 protocol relies on entangled particles and utilizes double qubit gates, which are inherently noisier than single qubit gates and susceptible to quantum decoherence, this study employs error mitigation techniques in the final measurement to predict outcomes more efficiently.

Traditional networks face challenges in delivering messages when no direct path exists between the nodes. Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) address this issue through specialised algorithms, many of which leverage social metrics to select optimal relay nodes. While these approaches improve message delivery, they often incur high overhead costs. This paper introduces the SR‐SAAD routing protocol for DTNs, which aims to balance efficiency and performance by using three social metrics: degree centrality, social activeness, and random walk encounter (RWE). The philosophy behind SR‐SAAD is to prioritise nodes that exhibit higher social connectivity and activity, ensuring that messages are forwarded through nodes with the best potential to enhance delivery performance while minimising the overhead associated with more traditional methods. According to the proposed routing strategy, each node in the network first calculates its degree centrality, social activeness, and RWE. These values are then aggregated to compute a social rank (SR) for each node, which is shared with neighbouring nodes. Nodes that meet specific criteria—having a higher SR and exceeding a threshold—are shortlisted as potential relay nodes. The message is forwarded to the node with the highest SR value, and this process continues until the message reaches its destination. The design philosophy behind this approach is to use social metrics that correlate with real‐world human behaviours, optimising the selection of relay nodes for efficient data forwarding. We run simulations for 12 h using different buffer sizes. Simulation results show that SR‐SAAD outperforms traditional approaches such as Epidemic, PRoPHET, PRoPHETv2, and first contact, improving the packet delivery ratio (PDR) by delivering 936 messages out of 1440 messages about 533 (936–403) more messages than epidemic with the same set of parameter values, with fewer hops and reduced overhead, albeit at the expense of increased average latency.

The rising awareness of cybersecurity among governments and the public underscores the importance of effectively managing security incidents, especially zero-day attacks that exploit previously unknown software vulnerabilities. These zero-day attacks are particularly challenging because they exploit flaws that neither the public nor developers are aware of. In our study, we focused on dynamic application security testing (DAST) to investigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. We closely examined 23 popular WordPress plugins, especially those requiring user or admin interactions, as these are frequent targets for XSS attacks. Our testing uncovered previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in three of these plugins. Through controlled environment testing, we accurately identified and thoroughly analyzed these XSS vulnerabilities, revealing their mechanisms, potential impacts, and the conditions under which they could be exploited. One of the most concerning findings was the potential for admin-side attacks, which could lead to multi-site insider threats. Specifically, we found vulnerabilities that allow for the insertion of malicious scripts, creating backdoors that unauthorized users can exploit. We demonstrated the severity of these vulnerabilities by employing a keylogger-based attack vector capable of silently capturing and extracting user data from the compromised plugins. Additionally, we tested a zero-click download strategy, allowing malware to be delivered without any user interaction, further highlighting the risks posed by these vulnerabilities. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recognized these vulnerabilities and assigned them CVE numbers: CVE-2023-5119 for the Forminator plugin, CVE-2023-5228 for user registration and contact form issues, and CVE-2023-5955 for another critical plugin flaw. Our study emphasizes the critical importance of proactive security measures, such as rigorous input validation, regular security testing, and timely updates, to mitigate the risks posed by zero-day vulnerabilities. It also highlights the need for developers and administrators to stay vigilant and adopt strong security practices to defend against evolving threats.

The rapid surge in internet-driven smart devices and bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications demands high-capacity internet services and low latencies during connectivity. Cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) are considered the prominent solution to meet the stringent requirements of fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks by deploying the fronthaul transport links between baseband units (BBUs) and remote radio heads (RRHs). High-capacity optical links could be conventional mainstream technology for deploying the fronthaul in C-RANs. But densification of optical links significantly increases the cost and imposes several design challenges on fronthaul architecture which makes them impractical. Contrary, Ethernet-based fronthaul links can be lucrative solutions for connecting the BBUs and RRHs but are inadequate to meet the rigorous end-to-end delays, jitter, and bandwidth requirements of fronthaul networks. This is because of the inefficient resource allocation and congestion control schemes for the capacity constraint Ethernet-based fronthaul links. In this research, a novel reinforcement learning-based optimal resource allocation scheme has been proposed which eradicates the congestion and improves the latencies to make the capacity-constraints low-cost Ethernet a suitable solution for the fronthaul networks. The experiment results verified a notable 50% improvement in reducing delay and jitter as compared to the existing schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme demonstrated an enhancement of up to 70% in addressing conflicting time slots and minimizing packet loss ratios. Hence, the proposed scheme outperforms the existing state-of-the-art resource allocation techniques to satisfy the stringent performance demands of fronthaul networks.