Android has become the leading mobile ecosystem because of its accessibility and adaptability. It has also become the primary target of widespread malicious apps. This situation needs the immediate implementation of an effective malware detection system. In this study, an explainable malware detection system was proposed using transfer learning and malware visual features. For effective malware detection, our technique leverages both textual and visual features. First, a pre-trained model called the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model was designed to extract the trained textual features. Second, the malware-to-image conversion algorithm was proposed to transform the network byte streams into a visual representation. In addition, the FAST (Features from Accelerated Segment Test) extractor and BRIEF (Binary Robust Independent Elementary Features) descriptor were used to efficiently extract and mark important features. Third, the trained and texture features were combined and balanced using the Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling (SMOTE) method; then, the CNN network was used to mine the deep features. The balanced features were then input into the ensemble model for efficient malware classification and detection. The proposed method was analyzed extensively using two public datasets, CICMalDroid 2020 and CIC-InvesAndMal2019. To explain and validate the proposed methodology, an interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) experiment was conducted.

The Internet of Drones (IoD) has recently gained popularity in several military, commercial, and civilian applications due to its unique characteristics, such as high mobility, three-dimensional (3D) movement, and ease of deployment. Drones, on the other hand, communicate over an unencrypted wireless link and have little computational capability in a typical IoD environment, making them exposed to a wide range of cyber-attacks. Security vulnerabilities in IoD systems include man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation, credential leaking, GPS spoofing, and drone hijacking. To avoid the occurrence of such attacks in IoD networks, we need an extremely powerful security protocol. To address these concerns, we propose a blockchain-based authentication scheme employing Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC). The concepts of a blockchain as a Certificate Authority (CA) and a transaction as a certificate discussed in this article are meant to facilitate the use of a blockchain without CAs or a Trusted Third Party (TTP). We offer a security analysis of the proposed scheme, which demonstrates its resistance to known and unknown attacks. The proposed scheme resists replay, man-in-the-middle, device impersonation, malicious device deployment, Denial-of-Service (DoS), and De-synchronization attacks, among others. The security and performance of the proposed scheme are compared to relevant existing schemes, and their performance is shown to be better in terms of security attributes as well as computation and communication costs than existing competitive schemes. The total computation cost of the proposed scheme is 40.479 ms, which is 37.49% and 49.79% of the two comparable schemes. This shows that the proposed scheme is better suited to the IoD environment than existing competitive schemes.

Mobile anchor path planning techniques have provided as an alternative option for node localization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In such context, path planning is a movement pattern where a mobile anchor node’s movement is designed in order to achieve a maximum localization ratio possible with a minimum error rate. Typically, the mobility path planning is designed in advance, which is applicable when the mobile anchor has sufficient sources of energy and time. However, when the mobility movement is restricted or limited, a dynamic path planning design is needed. This paper proposes a novel distributed range-free movement mechanism for mobility-assisted localization in WSNs when the mobile anchor’s movement is limited. The designed movement is formed in real-time pattern using a fuzzy-logic approach based on the information received from the network and the nodes’ deployment. Our proposed model, Fuzzy-Logic based Path Planning for mobile anchor-assisted Localization in WSNs (FLPPL), offers superior results in several metrics including both localization accuracy and localization ratio in comparison to other similar works.

In many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), node location is required to locate the monitored event once occurs. Mobility-assisted localization has emerged as an efficient technique for node localization. It works on optimizing a path planning of a location-aware mobile node, called mobile anchor (MA). The task of the MA is to traverse the area of interest (network) in a way that minimizes the localization error while maximizing the number of successful localized nodes. For simplicity, many path planning models assume that the MA has a sufficient source of energy and time, and the network area is obstacle-free. However, in many real-life applications such assumptions are rare. When the network area includes many obstacles, which need to be avoided, and the MA itself has a limited movement distance that cannot be exceeded, a dynamic movement approach is needed. In this paper, we propose two novel dynamic movement techniques that offer obstacle-avoidance path planning for mobility-assisted localization in WSNs. The movement planning is designed in a real-time using two swarm intelligence based algorithms, namely grey wolf optimizer and whale optimization algorithm. Both of our proposed models, grey wolf optimizer-based path planning and whale optimization algorithm-based path planning, provide superior outcomes in comparison to other existing works in several metrics including both localization ratio and localization error rate.

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.