The world is resorting to the Internet of Things (IoT) for ease of control and monitoring of smart devices. The ubiquitous use of IoT ranges from industrial control systems (ICS) to e-Health, e-Commerce, smart cities, supply chain management, smart cars, cyber physical systems (CPS), and a lot more. Such reliance on IoT is resulting in a significant amount of data to be generated, collected, processed, and analyzed. The big data analytics is no doubt beneficial for business development. However, at the same time, numerous threats to the availability and privacy of the user data, message, and device integrity, the vulnerability of IoT devices to malware attacks and the risk of physical compromise of devices pose a significant danger to the sustenance of IoT. This paper thus endeavors to highlight most of the known threats at various layers of the IoT architecture with a focus on the anatomy of malware attacks. We present a detailed attack methodology adopted by some of the most successful malware attacks on IoT, including ICS and CPS. We also deduce an attack strategy of a distributed denial of service attack through IoT botnet followed by requisite security measures. In the end, we propose a composite guideline for the development of an IoT security framework based on industry best practices and also highlight lessons learned, pitfalls and some open research challenges.

Future 5th generation (5G) networks are expected to enable three key services -enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTC) and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC). As per the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) URLLC requirements, it is expected that the reliability of one transmission of a 32 byte packet will be at least 99.999% and the latency will be at most 1 ms. This unprecedented level of reliability and latency will yield various new applications such as smart grids, industrial automation and intelligent transport systems. In this survey we present potential future URLLC applications, and summarize the corresponding reliability and latency requirements. We provide a comprehensive discussion on physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer techniques that enable URLLC, addressing both licensed and unlicensed bands. The paper evaluates the relevant PHY and MAC techniques for their ability to improve the reliability and reduce the latency. We identify that enabling long-term evolution (LTE) to coexist in the unlicensed spectrum is also a potential enabler of URLLC in the unlicensed band, and provide numerical evaluations. Lastly, the paper discusses the potential future research directions and challenges in achieving the URLLC requirements.

The Blockchain technology, featured with its decentralized tamper-resistance based on a Peer-to-Peer network, has been widely applied in financial applications, and even further been extended to industrial applications. However, the weak scalability of traditional Blockchain technology severely affects the wide adoption due to the well-known trillema of decentralization-security-scalability in Blockchains. In regards to this issue, a number of solutions have been proposed, targeting to boost the scalability while preserving the decentralization and security. They range from modifying the on-chain data structure and consensus algorithms to adding the off-chain technologies. Therein, one of the most practical methods to achieve horizontal scalability along with the increasing network size is sharding, by partitioning network into multiple shards so that the overhead of duplicating communication, storage, and computation in each full node can be avoided. This paper presents a survey focusing on sharding in Blockchains in a systematic and comprehensive way. We provide detailed comparison and quantitative evaluation of major sharding mechanisms, along with our insights analyzing the features and restrictions of the existing solutions.We also provide theoretical upper-bound of the throughput for each considered sharding mechanism. The remaining challenges and future research directions are also reviewed.

Mobile edge computing is of particular interest to Internet of Things (IoT), where inexpensive simple devices can get complex tasks offloaded to and processed at powerful infrastructure. Scheduling is challenging due to stochastic task arrivals and wireless channels, congested air interface, and more prominently, prohibitive feedbacks from thousands of devices. In this paper, we generate asymptotically optimal schedules tolerant to out-of-date network knowledge, thereby relieving stringent requirements on feedbacks. A perturbed Lyapunov function is designed to stochastically maximize a network utility balancing throughput and fairness. A knapsack problem is solved per slot for the optimal schedule, provided up-to-date knowledge on the data and energy backlogs of all devices. The knapsack problem is relaxed to accommodate out-of-date network states. Encapsulating the optimal schedule under up-to-date network knowledge, the solution under partial out-of-date knowledge preserves asymptotic optimality, and allows devices to self-nominate for feedback. Corroborated by simulations, our approach is able to dramatically reduce feedbacks at no cost of optimality. The number of devices that need to feed back is reduced to less than 60 out of a total of 5000 IoT devices.

Interconnected systems, such as Web servers, database servers, cloud computing servers and so on, are now under threads from network attackers. As one of most common and aggressive means, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks cause serious impact on these computing systems. In this paper, we present a DoS attack detection system that uses multivariate correlation analysis (MCA) for accurate network traffic characterization by extracting the geometrical correlations between network traffic features. Our MCA-based DoS attack detection system employs the principle of anomaly based detection in attack recognition. This makes our solution capable of detecting known and unknown DoS attacks effectively by learning the patterns of legitimate network traffic only. Furthermore, a triangle-area-based technique is proposed to enhance and to speed up the process of MCA. The effectiveness of our proposed detection system is evaluated using KDD Cup 99 data set, and the influences of both non-normalized data and normalized data on the performance of the proposed detection system are examined. The results show that our system outperforms two other previously developed state-of-the-art approaches in terms of detection accuracy.