Progresses in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and medical imaging technologies have allowed the development of the medical image processing field with some astonishing results in the last two decades. These innovations enabled the clinicians to view the human body in high-resolution or three-dimensional cross-sectional slices, which resulted in an increase in the accuracy of the diagnosis and the examination of patients in a non-invasive manner. The fundamental step for MRI brain scans classifiers is their ability to extract meaningful features. As a result, many works have proposed different methods for features extraction to classify the abnormal growths in brain MRI scans. More recently, the application of deep learning algorithms to medical imaging lead to impressive performance enhancements in classifying and diagnosing complicated pathologies such as brain tumors. In this study, a deep learning feature extraction algorithm is proposed to extract the relevant features from MRI brain scans. In parallel, handcrafted features are extracted using the modified grey level co-occurrence matrix (MGLCM) method. Subsequently, the extracted relevant features are combined with handcrafted features to improve the classification process of MRI brain scans with SVM used as the classifier. The obtained results proved that the combination of the deep learning approach and the handcrafted features extracted by MGLCM improves the accuracy of classification of the SVM classifier up to 99.30%.

The Internet of things model enables a world in which all of our everyday devices can be integrated and communicate with each other and their surroundings to gather and share data and simplify task implementation. Such an Internet of things environment would require seamless authentication, data protection, stability, attack resistance, ease of deployment, and self-maintenance, among other things. Blockchain, a technology that was born with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, may fulfill Internet of things requirements. However, due to the characteristics of both Internet of things devices and Blockchain technology, integrating Blockchain and the Internet of things can cause several challenges. Despite a large number of papers that have been published in the field of Blockchain and the Internet of things, the problems of this combination remain unclear and scattered. Accordingly, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the challenges related to Blockchain–Internet of things integration by evaluating the related peer-reviewed literature. The paper also discusses some of the recommendations for reducing the effects of these challenges. Moreover, the paper discusses some of the unsolved concerns that must be addressed before the next generation of integrated Blockchain–Internet of things applications can be deployed. Lastly, future trends in the context of Blockchain–Internet of things integration are discussed.

Forgery in digital images is immensely affected by the improvement of image manipulation tools. Image forgery can be classified as image splicing or copy-move on the basis of the image manipulation type. Image splicing involves creating a new tampered image by merging the components of one or more images. Moreover, image splicing disrupts the content and causes abnormality in the features of a tampered image. Most of the proposed algorithms are incapable of accurately classifying high-dimension feature vectors. Thus, the current study focuses on improving the accuracy of image splicing detection with low-dimension feature vectors. This study also proposes an approximated Machado fractional entropy (AMFE) of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to effectively capture splicing artifacts inside an image. AMFE is used as a new fractional texture descriptor, while DWT is applied to decompose the input image into a number of sub-images with different frequency bands. The standard image dataset CASIA v2 was used to evaluate the proposed approach. Superior detection accuracy and positive and false positive rates were achieved compared with other state-of-the-art approaches with a low-dimension of feature vectors.

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) enables mobile devices to exploit seamless cloud services via offloading, and has numerous advantages and increased security and complexity. Penetration testing of mobile applications has become more complex and expensive due to several parameters, such as the platform, device heterogeneity, context event types, and offloading. Numerous studies have been published in the MCC domain, whereas few studies have addressed the common issues and challenges of MCC testing. However, current studies do not address MCC and penetration testing. Therefore, revisiting MCC and penetration testing domains is essential to overcoming the inherent complexity and reducing costs. Motivated by the importance of revisiting these domains, this paper pursues two objectives: to provide a comprehensive systematic literature review (SLR) of the MCC, security and penetration testing domains and to establish the requirements for penetration testing of MCC applications. This paper has systematically reviewed previous penetration testing models and techniques based on the requirements in Kitchenham’s SLR guidelines. The SLR outcome has indicated the following deficiencies: the offloading parameter is disregarded; studies that address mobile, cloud, and web vulnerabilities are lacking; and a MCC application penetration testing model has not been addressed by current studies. In particular, offloading and mobile state management are two new and vital requirements that have not been addressed to reveal hidden security vulnerabilities, facilitate mutual trust, and enable developers to build more secure MCC applications. Beneficial review results that can contribute to future research are presented.