The evolution of Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) marks the paradigm shift from a single large drone to multiple small drones linked together in an ad-hoc fashion. To maintain the Quality of Service (QoS) in the multi-hop networking schema, FANETs utilize the available resources efficiently. However, due to the open wireless boundary and high mobility of the drones, FANETs are vulnerable to malicious nodes that can penetrate the network and, thus, pose serious security threats, particularly at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. This vulnerability could adversely affect the network security and privacy, resulting in colossal damages to the information exchange operations within the network. An attacker intending to damage the network has multiple options to carry on the malicious aims. For instance, the attacker can transmit plenty of reservation requests, eavesdrop the control messages and/or forge the information. The network, as a result, enervates and, for survival, calls for a mechanism that aggregates secure access control and key agreement. We contribute to the sum of knowledge by harnessing the technique of Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) to present a certificate-based access control and key agreement scheme. To assess the viability and performance of the proposed scheme, we analyze it using formal security analysis techniques, such as the Real-Or-Random (ROR) model and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool. The scheme is also evaluated using the informal security analysis technique, or the non-mathematical approach. The results obtained from both the analyses affirm the superiority of our proposed scheme.

Today, farmers are suffering from the low yield of crops. Though right crop selection is the main boosting key to maximize crop yield by doing soil analysis and considering metrological factors, the lack of knowledge about soil fertility and crop selection is the main reason for low crop production. In the changed current climate, the farmers having primitive knowledge about conventional farming are facing challenges about making sagacious decisions on crop selection. The selection of the same crop in every seasonal cycle makes the low soil fertility. This study is aimed at making an efficient and accurate system using IoT devices and machine learning (ML) algorithms that can correctly select a crop for maximal yield. Such a system is reliable as compared to the old laboratory testing manual systems, which bear the chances of human errors. Correct selection of a crop is predominantly a priority in agricultural arena. As a contribution, we propose an ML-based model, Smart Crop Selection (SCS), which is based on data of metrological and soil factors. These factors include nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, CO2, pH, EC, temperature, humidity of soil, and rainfall. Existing IoT-based systems are not efficient as compared to our proposed model due to limited consideration of these factors. In the proposed model, real-time sensory data is sent to Firebase cloud for analysis. Its results are also visualized on the Android app. SCS ensembles the following five ML algorithms to increase performance and accuracy: Decision tree, SVM, KNN, Random Forest, and Gaussian Naïve Bayes. For rainfall prediction, a dataset containing historical data of the last fifteen years is acquired from Bahawalpur Agricultural Department. This dataset and an ML algorithm, Multiple Linear Regression leverages prediction of the rainfall in future, a much-desired information for the health of any crop. The Root Mean Square Error of the rain fall prediction model is 0.3%, which is quite promising. The SCS model is trained for 11 crops’ prediction, while its accuracy is 97% to 98%.

The Internet of Health Things (IoHT) is an extended breed of the Internet of Things (IoT), which plays an important role in the remote sharing of data from various physical processes such as patient monitoring, treatment progress, observation, and consultation. The key benefit of the IoHT platform is the ease of time-independent interaction from geographically distant locations by offering preventive or proactive healthcare services at a lower cost. The communication, integration, computation, and interoperability in IoHT are provided by various low-power biomedical sensors equipped with limited computational capabilities. Therefore, conventional cryptographic solutions are not feasible for the majority of IoHT applications. In addition, executing computing-intensive tasks will lead to a slow response time that can deteriorate the performance of IoHT. We strive to resolve such a deficiency, and thus a new scheme has been proposed in this article, called an online-offline signature scheme in certificateless settings. The scheme divides the signing part into two phases, i.e., online and offline. In the absence of a message, the offline phase performs computationally intensive tasks, while lighter computations are executed in the online phase when there is a message. Security analyses and comparisons with the respective existing schemes are carried out to show the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The results obtained authenticate that the proposed scheme offers enhanced security with lower computational and communication costs.

Recently, the spectacular innovations in the fields of wireless body area networks (WBAN) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have made e-Care services rise as a promising application domain, which significantly advances the quality of the medical system, however, due to the openness of the wireless environment and privacy of people’s physiological data, WBAN and IoT are prone to various cyber-attacks. There is a significant need for an efficient and highly secured cryptographic scheme that can meet the requirements of resource-constrained devices. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a certificate-based signcryption (CB-SN) scheme for the IoT-enabled WBAN. The proposed scheme is based on the concept of hyper-elliptic curve cryptography (HECC) that offers the same level of security as the elliptic curve and bilinear pairing with lower-key size. The formal security verification using the Automated Validation of the Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool along with informal security analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme is not just reducing the complexity of resource-constrained IoT devices, but proves to be secure against several well-known cryptographic attacks. Moreover, performance comparison with relevant existing schemes authenticates that the proposed scheme is far more secure and energy efficient.