As a new area of technology, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a flagship and promising paradigm for innovating society. However, IoT-based critical infrastructures are an appealing target for cybercriminals. Such distinctive infrastructures are increasingly sensitive to cyber vulnerabilities and subject to many cyberattacks. Thus, protecting these infrastructures is a significant issue for organizations and nations. In this context, raising the cybersecurity posture of critical cyber infrastructures is an extremely urgent international issue. In addition, with the rapid development of adversarial techniques, current cyber threats have become more sophisticated, complicated, advanced and persistent. Thus, given these factors, prior to implementing efficient and resilient cybersecurity countermeasures, identification and in-depth mapping of cyber threats is an important step that is generally overlooked. Therefore, to solve cybersecurity challenges, this study presents a critical analysis of the most recent cybersecurity issues for IoT-based critical infrastructures. We then discuss potential cyber threats and cyber vulnerabilities and the main exploitation strategies adopted by cybercriminals. Further, we provide a taxonomy of cyberattacks that may affect critical cyber infrastructures. Finally, we present security requirements and some realistic recommendations to enhance cybersecurity solutions.

Peer-reviewed journal on social and business aspects of informatics that covers the theory and application of enterprise information systems, as well as interactions between ICT and people.

We propose a distributed approach to solve the multi-robot task allocation problem. This problem consists of two distinct sets: robots and tasks. The objective is to assign tasks to robots while optimizing a given criterion. This problem is known to be NP-hard even with small numbers of robots and tasks. The field of survivors’ search and rescue is adopted: i.e. some Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are used to rescue a number of survivors. We choose this problem, given its importance in everyday life: (a) survivors are the tasks; (b) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are the robots; and (c) the objective is to rescue the maximum number of survivors while minimizing the makespan (time elapsed between rescuing the first and last survivors) and traveled distances. The approach is composed of two phases: inclusion and consensus. During the inclusion phase, each Unmanned Aerial Vehicle builds a bundle of survivors using the Ant Colony System. During the consensus phase, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles resolve conflicts in their bundles of survivors (i.e. a survivor is being chosen by more than two Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), using an adequate coordination mechanism. The approach is implemented using Java programming language and JADE multi-agent Framework. The performance of our approach is compared to five state-of-the-art multi-robot task allocation solutions. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms these solutions, in terms of: (i) makespans; (ii) traveled distances; and (iii) exchanged messages.

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to transform everyday physical objects into an interconnected ecosystem with digital data accessible anywhere and anytime. “Things” in IoT are embedded with sensing, processing, and actuating capabilities and cooperate in providing smart and innovative services autonomously. The rapid spread of IoT services arises different security vulnerabilities that need to be carefully addressed. Several emerging and promising technologies and techniques are introduced to improve the security of IoT. This paper aims to provide an up-to-date vision of the current research topics related to IoT security. Initially, we introduce common elements and protocols of IoT to demystify the origins of threats in IoT. Then, we propose a taxonomy of IoT attacks and analyze the security vulnerabilities of IoT at different layers. Subsequently, we provide a comparison of recent security schemes based on emerging solutions including fog computing, edge computing, software-defined networking (SDN), blockchain, lightweight cryptography, homomorphic and searchable encryption, and machine learning. Finally, security challenges are discussed and future directions are highlighted for future interested researchers.

Today, artificial intelligence has proliferated to reach almost every wing of daily life, perhaps one of the most sensitive of these being education. While teaching, insofar as it involves training human minds, is still mostly a form of art rather than a regular science, the taking up of this elitist job by computers has triggered much debate and controversy, involving the teaching community as much as the select corporate AI giants who strive to create computers capable of teaching better than humans. This paper surveys the most relevant studies carried out in this field to date. First, it introduces AI and describes the different AI applications in field of education and course assessment. It then goes on to list the most common topics in the educational context that have been resolved through AI and machine learning techniques, and finally, some of the most promising future lines of research are discussed.