The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has advanced digital technology and the fastest interconnection, which creates opportunities to substantially grow industrial businesses today. Although IIoT provides promising opportunities for growth, the massive sensor IoT data collected are easily attacked by cyber criminals. Hence, IIoT requires different high security levels to protect the network. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is one of the crucial security solutions, which aims to detect the network’s abnormal behavior and monitor safe network traffic to avoid attacks. In particular, the effectiveness of the Machine Learning (ML)-based IDS approach to building a secure IDS application is attracting the security research community in both the general cyber network and the specific IIoT network. However, most available IIoT datasets contain multiclass output data with imbalanced distributions. This is the main reason for the reduction in the detection accuracy of attacks of the ML-based IDS model. This research proposes an IDS for IIoT imbalanced datasets by applying the eXtremely Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model to overcome this issue. Two modern IIoT imbalanced datasets were used to assess our proposed method’s effectiveness and robustness, X-IIoTDS and TON_IoT. The XGBoost model achieved excellent attack detection with F1 scores of 99.9% and 99.87% on the two datasets. This result demonstrated that the proposed approach improved the detection attack performance in imbalanced multiclass IIoT datasets and was superior to existing IDS frameworks.

Many researchers challenge the possibility of using blockchain and smart contracts to disrupt the Internet of Things (IoT) architecture because of their security and decentralization guarantees. However, the state-of-the-art blockchain architecture is not scalable enough to satisfy the requirements of massive data traffics in the IoT environment. The main reason for this issue is one needs to choose the consensus trade-off between either coping with a high throughput or a high number of nodes. Consequently, this issue prevents the applicability of blockchain for IoT use cases. In this paper, we propose a scalable two-tiered hierarchical blockchain architecture for IoT. The first tier is a Core Engine, which is based on a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus to cope with a high throughput, that supervises the underlying subordinate engines (sub-engines) as its second tier. This second tier comprises of the Payment, Compute, and Storage Engine, respectively. We can deploy multiple instances of these sub-engines as many as we need and as local as possible near to the IoT domains, where IoT devices reside, to cope with a high number of nodes. Furthermore, to further extend the scalability of the proposed architecture, we also provide additional scalability features on the Core Engine such as request aggregation, request prioritization, as well as sub-engine parallelism. We implement all of our engines and expose them to IoT applications through the Engine APIs. With these APIs, developers can build and run IoT applications in our architecture. Our evaluation results show that our proposed features on the Core Engine can indeed enhance the overall performance of our architecture. Moreover, based on our proof-of-concept IoT car rental application, we also show that the interoperability between sub-engines through the Core Engine is possible, even when the particular sub-engine is under sub-engine parallelism.

In recent years, numerous explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) use cases have been developed, to solve numerous real problems in industrial applications while maintaining the explainability level of the used artificial intelligence (AI) models to judge their quality and potentially hold the models accountable if they become corrupted. Therefore, understanding the state-of-the-art methods, pointing out recent issues, and deriving future directions are important to drive XAI research efficiently. This paper presents a systematic literature review of local explanation techniques and their practical applications in various industrial sectors. We first establish the need for XAI in response to opaque AI models and survey different local explanation methods for industrial AI applications. The number of studies is then examined with several factors, including industry sectors, AI models, data types, and XAI-based usage and purpose. We also look at the advantages and disadvantages of local explanation methods and how well they work in practical settings. The difficulties of using local explanation techniques are also covered, including computing complexity and the trade-off between precision and interpretability. Our findings demonstrate that local explanation techniques can boost industrial AI models’ transparency and interpretability and give insightful information about them. The efficiency of these procedures must be improved, and ethical concerns about their application must be resolved. This paper contributes to the increasing knowledge of local explanation strategies and offers guidance to academics and industry professionals who want to use these methods in practical settings.

The Internet of Things (IoT) providers serve better IoT services each year while producing more IoT gateways and devices to expand their services. However, the security of the IoT ecosystem remains an afterthought for most IoT providers. This action results in many cybersecurity breaches in the field, most likely due to the lack of access control mechanisms. In this paper, we propose BorderChain, an access control framework based on blockchain for IoT endpoints. The security protocol guarantees two properties. First, our proposal assures IoT users and services that they communicate with approved IoT gateways as endpoints, holding verified IoT devices that they need. Second, BorderChain also generates access tokens that the IoT service and users can use to query IoT resources legitimately inside the IoT domains. As a result, the protocol can convince IoT domain owners that the system will only authorize IoT requests that they approve. We realize our protocol in the form of a smart contract to allow many IoT entities such as IoT domain owners, IoT devices, IoT gateways, IoT vendors, IoT services, IoT users, and Internet Service Provider (ISP) to collaborate in a unified environment. We then implement entities in BorderChain as Node JS applications connecting to the Ethereum blockchain as our peer-to-peer platform. Based on our performance evaluation using several Raspberry Pi hardware and our private server, we show that BorderChain can process entities’ authentication and authorization requests efficiently using all hardware resources. Finally, we release BorderChain for public use.

Since the inception of the Internet of Things (IoT), we have adopted centralized architecture for decades. With the vastly growing number of IoT devices and gateways, this architecture struggles to cope with the high demands of state-of-the-art IoT services, which require scalable and responsive infrastructure. In response, decentralization becomes a considerable interest among IoT adopters. Following a similar trajectory, this paper introduces an IoT architecture re-work that enables three spheres of IoT workflows (i.e., computing, storage, and networking) to be run in a distributed manner. In particular, we employ the blockchain and smart contract to provide a secure computing platform. The distributed storage network maintains the saving of IoT raw data and application data. The software-defined networking (SDN) controllers and SDN switches exist in the architecture to provide connectivity across multiple IoT domains. We envision all of those services in the form of separate yet integrated peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay networks, which IoT actors such as IoT domain owners, IoT users, Internet Service Provider (ISP), and government can cultivate. We also present several IoT workflow examples showing how IoT developers can adapt to this new proposed architecture. Based on the presented workflows, the IoT computing can be performed in a trusted and privacy-preserving manner, the IoT storage can be made robust and verifiable, and finally, we can react to the network events automatically and quickly. Our discussions in this paper can be beneficial for many people ranging from academia, industries, and investors that are interested in the future of IoT in general.