Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept adopted in nearly every aspect of human life, leading to an explosive utilization of intelligent devices. Notably, such solutions are especially integrated in the industrial sector, to allow the remote monitoring and control of critical infrastructure. Such global integration of IoT solutions has led to an expanded attack surface against IoT-enabled infrastructures. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have demonstrated their ability to resolve issues that would have been impossible or difficult to address otherwise; thus, such solutions are closely associated with securing IoT. Classical collaborative and distributed machine learning approaches are known to compromise sensitive information. In our paper, we demonstrate the creation of a network flow-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) aiming to protecting critical infrastructures, stemming from the pairing of two machine learning techniques, namely, federated learning and active learning. The former is utilized for privately training models in federation, while the latter is a semi-supervised approach applied for global model adaptation to each of the participant’s traffic. Experimental results indicate that global models perform significantly better for each participant, when locally personalized with just a few active learning queries. Specifically, we demonstrate how the accuracy increase can reach 7.07% in only 10 queries.

The centralization of data is a current practice in information systems that do not fit into the novel next-generation computing concept. Such a paradigm aims to support the distribution of information, processing, and computing power. Blockchain is a technology supporting the recording of information for distributed and decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, which has emerged in the last decade, with the initial focus being on the finance sector. A highly valuable feature of blockchain is its capability of enhancing the security of data due to the immutability of the information stored on the ledger. In this chapter, the definition, details, applications, and benefits of this technology will be explored. In addition, the ways in which blockchain increases security and privacy will be described. Finally, the pairing of blockchain with other next-generation, cutting-edge technologies will be investigated. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->