Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models have become essential tools used in many critical systems to make significant decisions; the decisions taken by these models need to be trusted and explained on many occasions. On the other hand, the performance of different ML and AI models varies with the same used dataset. Sometimes, developers have tried to use multiple models before deciding which model should be used without understanding the reasons behind this variance in performance. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) models have presented an explanation for the models’ performance based on highlighting the features that the model considered necessary while making the decision. This work presents an analytical approach to studying the density functions for intrusion detection dataset features. The study explains how and why these features are essential during the XAI process. We aim, in this study, to explain XAI behavior to add an extra layer of explainability. The density function analysis presented in this paper adds a deeper understanding of the importance of features in different AI models. Specifically, we present a method to explain the results of SHAP (Shapley additive explanations) for different machine learning models based on the feature data’s KDE (kernel density estimation) plots. We also survey the specifications of dataset features that can perform better for convolutional neural networks (CNN) based models.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has widely expanded due to its advantages in enhancing the business, industrial, and social ecosystems. Nevertheless, IoT infrastructure is susceptible to several cyber-attacks due to the endpoint devices’ restrictions in computation, storage, and communication capacity. As such, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of the IoT. Attackers can easily utilize IoT devices as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks by taking advantage of their flaws. This paper proposes an Ethereum blockchain model to detect and prevent DDoS attacks against IoT systems. Additionally, the proposed system can be used to resolve the single points of failure (dependencies on third parties) and privacy and security in IoT systems. First, we propose implementing a decentralized platform in place of current centralized system solutions to prevent DDoS attacks on IoT devices at the application layer by authenticating and verifying these devices. Second, we suggest tracing and recording the IP address of malicious devices inside the blockchain to prevent them from connecting and communicating with the IoT networks. The system performance has been evaluated by performing 100 experiments to evaluate the time taken by the authentication process. The proposed system highlights two messages with a time of 0.012 ms: the first is the request transmitted from the IoT follower device to join the blockchain, and the second is the blockchain response. The experimental evaluation demonstrated the superiority of our system because there are fewer I/O operations in the proposed system than in other related works, and thus it runs substantially faster.

Privacy-preserving of medical information (such as medical records and images) is an essential right for patients to ensure security against undesired access parties. This right is typically protected by law through firm regulations set by healthcare authorities. However, sensitive-private data usually requires the application of further security and privacy mechanisms such as encipherment (encryption) techniques. ’Medical images’ is one such example of highly demanding security and privacy standards. This is due to the quality and nature of the information carried among these images, which are usually sensitive-private information with few features and tonal variety. Hence, several state-of-the-art encryption mechanisms for medical images have been proposed and developed; however, only a few were efficient and promising. This paper presents a hybrid crypto-algorithm, MID-Crypt, to secure the medical image communicated between medical laboratories and doctors’ accounts. MID-Crypt is designed to efficiently hide medical image features and provide high-security standards. Specifically, MID-Crypt uses a mix of Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) for image masking and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with updatable keys for image encryption. Besides, a key management module is used to organize the public and private keys, the patient’s digital signature provides authenticity, and integrity is guaranteed by using the Merkle tree. Also, we evaluated our proposed algorithm in terms of several performance indicators including, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) analysis, correlation analysis, entropy analysis, histogram analysis, and timing analysis. Consequently, our empirical results revealed the superiority of MID-Crypt scoring the best performance values for PSNR, correlation, entropy, and encryption overhead. Finally, we compared the security measures for the MID-Crypt algorithm with other studies, the comparison revealed the distinguishable security against several common attacks such as side-channel attacks (SCA), differential attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM), and algebraic attacks.

Recently, medical image encryption has gained special attention due to the nature and sensitivity of medical data and the lack of effective image encryption using innovative encryption techniques. Several encryption schemes have been recommended and developed in an attempt to improve medical image encryption. The majority of these studies rely on conventional encryption techniques. However, such improvements have come with increased computational complexity and slower processing for encryption and decryption processes. Alternatively, the engagement of intelligent models such as deep learning along with encryption schemes exhibited more effective outcomes, especially when used with digital images. This paper aims to reduce and change the transferred data between interested parties and overcome the problem of building negative conclusions from encrypted medical images. In order to do so, the target was to transfer from the domain of encrypting an image to encrypting features of an image, which are extracted as float number values. Therefore, we propose a deep learning-based image encryption scheme using the autoencoder (AE) technique and the advanced encryption standard (AES). Specifically, the proposed encryption scheme is supposed to encrypt the digest of the medical image prepared by the encoder from the autoencoder model on the encryption side. On the decryption side, the analogous decoder from the auto-decoder is used after decrypting the carried data. The autoencoder was used to enhance the quality of corrupted medical images with different types of noise. In addition, we investigated the scores of structure similarity (SSIM) and mean square error (MSE) for the proposed model by applying four different types of noise: salt and pepper, speckle, Poisson, and Gaussian. It has been noticed that for all types of noise added, the decoder reduced this noise in the resulting images. Finally, the performance evaluation demonstrated that our proposed system improved the encryption/decryption overhead by 50–75% over other existing models.

Data security is critical, particularly in medical imaging, yet remains challenging. Many research efforts have focused on enhancing medical image security, particularly during network transmission. Ensuring confidentiality and authenticity is a key priority for researchers. However, traditional encryption methods are unsuitable for IoT environments due to data size limitations. Lightweight encryption algorithms that preserve confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity can address these limitations. This paper proposes an efficient, lightweight method to encrypt and authenticate medical images in healthcare systems. The approach splits images into diagonal and non-diagonal blocks, and then processes them in two phases: (1) non-diagonal blocks are permuted using inter-block differences and XORed with diagonal blocks for substitution; (2) diagonal blocks are encrypted via AES and enhanced CBC mode with a tag mechanism for integrity. Security tests (histograms, correlation, entropy, NPCR, UACI) verify the scheme’s robustness. The results show that the model outperforms existing techniques in efficacy and attack resistance, making it viable for medical IoT and smart surveillance.

Medical images are one of the most significant and sensitive data types in computer systems. Sending medical images over the internet necessitates using a robust encryption scheme that is resistant to cryptographic attacks. Confidentiality is the most critical part of the three security objectives for information systems security, namely confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality is the most critical aspect for the secure storage and transfer of medical images. In this study, we attempt to classify various encryption methods in order to assist researchers in selecting the optimal strategy for protecting sensitive patient information while transferring medical images without alteration and outline the measures that should be adopted to address challenges and concerns relevant to techniques of medical image encryption.