The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is an emerging technology that can promote the development of industrial intelligence, improve production efficiency, and reduce manufacturing costs. However, anomalies of IIoT devices might expose sensitive data about users of high authenticity and validity, resulting in security and privacy threats to the IIoT applications. That suggests the significance of anomaly detection executed by proper authorities. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a reliable anomaly detection strategy for IIoT using federated learning. Specifically, we apply the federated learning technique to build a universal anomaly detection model with each local model trained by the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. Since local data sets are not required during the federated learning, the chance of privacy leakage is reduced. In addition, by introducing privacy leakage degree and action relation to anomaly detection design, we can greatly improve the detection accuracy. The validation experiments indicate that the proposed strategy achieves high throughput, low latency, and high anomaly detection accuracy for privacy preservation in various IIoT scenarios.

Nowadays, with the proliferation of communication devices, Internet of Things (IoT) has become an emerging technology which facilitates massive devices to be enabled with connectivity by heterogeneous networks. However, it is usually a technical challenge for traditional networks to handle such a huge number of devices in an efficient manner. Recently, software defined network (SDN) technique with its agility and elasticity, has been incorporated into IoT to meet the potential scale and flexibility requirements, and forms a novel IoT architecture aka SDN-IoT. As the size of SDN-IoT increases, efficient routing protocols with low latency and high security are required, while the default routing protocols of SDN are still vulnerable to dynamic change of flow control rules especially when the network is under attack. To address the above issues, a Deep reinforcement learning based QoS-aware Secure routing Protocol (DQSP) is proposed in this paper. While guaranteeing the quality-of-service (QoS), our method can extract knowledge from history traffic demands by interacting with the underlying network environment, and dynamically optimize the routing policy. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted with respect to several network performance metrics, demonstrating that our DQSP has good convergence and high effectiveness. Moreover, DQSP outperforms the traditional OSPF routing protocol, at least 10% relative performance gains in most cases.

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more data are generated by smart devices to support various edge services. Since these data may contain sensitive information, security and privacy of data aggregation has become a key challenge in IoT. To tackle this problem, a blockchain-based secure data aggregation strategy, namely (BSDA), is proposed for edge computing empowered IoT. Specifically, in order to restrict task receivers [i.e., mobile data collectors (MDCs)] to search and accept tasks, the block header is intergraded with a security label including task security level (SL) and task completion requirement. Accordingly, new block generation rules are developed to improve system performance in throughput and transaction latency. Furthermore, BSDA decomposes both sensitive tasks and task receivers into groups against privacy disclosure. On the other hand, a deep reinforcement learning method, the improved self-adaptive double bootstrapped deep deterministic policy gradient (IDDPG), is developed to design energy-efficient MDC routes under the constrains that the SLs of MDCs should be higher than the SLs of data aggregation tasks. Simulation results indicate that 1) as a privacy-preserving strategy, BSDA obtains high throughput and low transaction latency and 2) BSDA outperforms certain contemporary strategies in aggregation ratio and energy cost.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is ushering in huge development opportunities in the era of Industry 4.0. However, there are significant data security and privacy challenges during automatic and real-time data collection, monitoring for industrial applications in IIoT. Data security and privacy in IIoT applications are closely related to the reliability of users, which is determined by user authentication that have been widely used as an effective approach. However, the existing user authentication mechanisms in IIoT suffer from single factor authentication and poor adaptability with the rapid growth of the number of users and the diversity of user categories. To solve the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a novel Authentication mechanism based on Transfer Learning empowered Blockchain, coined ATLB. In ATLB, blockchains are applied to achieve the privacy preservation for industrial applications. In addition, by introducing the transfer learning based authentication mechanism, trustworthy blockchains are built such that the privacy preservation for industrial applications is further enhanced. Specifically, ATLB first employs a guiding deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm to train the user authentication model of a specific region, which is then transferred locally for foreign user authentication or cross-regionally for another region's user authentication such that the model training time is significantly reduced. Experimental results show that the proposed ATLB not only provides accurate authentications for IIoT applications but also achieves high throughput and low latency.

The development and maturity of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication technology provides the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with ultra-reliable and low-latency communications and massive machine-type communications, and forms a novel IIoT architecture, 5G-IIoT. However, massive data transfer between interconnecting industrial devices also brings new challenges for the 5G-IIoT routing process in terms of latency, load balancing, and data privacy, which affect the development of 5G-IIoT applications. Moreover, the existing research works on IIoT routing mostly focus on the latency and the reliability of the routing, disregarding the privacy security in the routing process. To solve these problems, in this article, we propose a quality of service (QoS) and data privacy-aware routing protocol, named QoSPR, for 5G-IIoT. Specifically, we improve the community detection algorithm info-map to divide the routing area into optimal subdomains, based on which the deep reinforcement learning algorithm is applied to build the gateway deployment model for latency reduction and load-balancing improvement. To eliminate areal differences, while considering the privacy preservation of the routing data, the federated reinforcement learning is applied to obtain the universal gateway deployment model. Then, based on the gateway deployment, the QoS and data privacy-aware routing is accomplished by establishing communications along the load-balancing routes of the minimum latencies. The validation experiment is conducted on real datasets. The experiment results show that as a data privacy-aware routing protocol, the QoSPR can significantly reduce both average latency and maximum latency, while maintaining excellent load balancing in 5G-IIoT.

With the worldwide large-scale outbreak of COVID-19, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), as a new type of Internet of Things (IoT)-based intelligent medical system, is being used for COVID-19 prevention and detection. However, since the widespread use of IoMT will generate a large amount of sensitive information related to patients, it is becoming more and more important yet challenging to ensure data security and privacy of COVID-19 applications in IoMT. The leakage of private information during IoMT data fusion process will cause serious problems and affect people’s willingness to contribute data in IoMT. To address these challenges, this article proposes a new privacy-enhanced data fusion strategy (PDFS). The proposed PDFS consists of four important components, i.e., sensitive task classification, task completion assessment, incentive mechanism-based task contract design, and homomorphic encryption-based data fusion. The extensive simulation experiments demonstrate that PDFS can achieve high task classification accuracy, task completion rate, task data reliability and task participation rate, and low average error rate, while improving the privacy protection for data fusion under COVID-19 application environments based on IoMT.