Since the emergence of digital and smart healthcare, the world has hastened to apply various technologies in this field to promote better health operation and patients’ well being, increase life expectancy, and reduce healthcare costs. One promising technology and game changer in this domain is digital twin (DT). DT is expected to change the concept of digital healthcare and take this field to another level that has never been seen before. DT is a virtual replica of a physical asset that reflects the current status through real-time transformed data. This article proposes and implements an intelligent context-aware healthcare system using the DT framework. This framework is a beneficial contribution to digital healthcare and to improve healthcare operations. Accordingly, an electrocardiogram (ECG) heart rhythms classifier model was built using machine learning to diagnose heart disease and detect heart problems. The implemented models successfully predicted a particular heart condition with high accuracy in different algorithms. The collected results have shown that integrating DT with the healthcare field would improve healthcare processes by bringing patients and healthcare professionals together in an intelligent, comprehensive, and scalable health ecosystem. Also, implementing an ECG classifier that detects heart conditions gives the inspiration for applying ML and artificial intelligence with different human body metrics for continuous monitoring and abnormalities detection. Finally, neural-network-based algorithms deal better with ECG data than traditional ML algorithms.

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) supports recent developments in data management and information services, as well as services for smart factories. Nowadays, many mature IIoT cloud platforms are available to serve smart factories. However, due to the semicredibility nature of the IIoT cloud platforms, how to achieve secure storage, access control, information update and deletion for smart factory data, as well as the tracking and revocation of malicious users has become an urgent problem. To solve these problems, in this article, a blockchain-enhanced security access control scheme that supports traceability and revocability has been proposed in IIoT for smart factories. The blockchain first performs unified identity authentication, and stores all public keys, user attribute sets, and revocation list. The system administrator then generates system parameters and issues private keys to users. The domain administrator is responsible for formulating domain security and privacy-protection policies, and performing encryption operations. If the attributes meet the access policies and the user's ID is not in the revocation list, they can obtain the intermediate decryption parameters from the edge/cloud servers. Malicious users can be tracked and revoked during all stages if needed, which ensures the system security under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption and can resist multiple attacks. The evaluation has shown that the size of the public/private keys is smaller compared to other schemes, and the overhead time is less for public key generation, data encryption, and data decryption stages.

The emerging advances in personal devices and privacy concerns have given the rise to the concept of Federated Learning. Federated Learning proves its effectiveness and privacy preservation through collaborative local training and updating a shared machine learning model while protecting the individual data-sets. This article investigates a new type of vehicular network concept, namely a Federated Vehicular Network (FVN), which can be viewed as a robust distributed vehicular network. Compared to traditional vehicular networks, an FVN has centralized components and utilizes both DSRC and mmWave communication to achieve more scalable and stable performance. As a result, FVN can be used to support data-/computation-intensive applications such as distributed machine learning and Federated Learning. The article first outlines the enabling technologies of FVN. Then, we briefly discuss the high-level architecture of FVN and explain why such an architecture is adequate for Federated Learning. In addition, we use auxiliary Blockchain-based systems to facilitate transactions and mitigate malicious behaviors. Next, we discuss in detail one key component of FVN, a federated vehicular cloud (FVC), that is used for sharing data and models in FVN. In particular, we focus on the routing inside FVCs and present our solutions and preliminary evaluation results. Finally, we point out open problems and future research directions of this disruptive technology.

Edge intelligence is an emerging concept that refers to the processes in which data is collected, analyzed, and insights delivered close to where it is captured in a network using a selection of advanced intelligent technologies. As a promising solution to solve the problems of insufficient computing capacity and transmission latency, edge intelligence empowered Internet of Vehicle (IoV) is being widely investigated in both academia and industry. However, data sharing security in edge intelligent IoV becomes a challenge that should be solved with priority. Although the attribute-based encryption (ABE) is capable of addressing this challenge, a lot of time-consuming modular exponential operations and bilinear pair operations, as well as the serial computing, leads to a slow decryption speed of the ABE. It cannot address the response time requirement of edge intelligent IoV. Given this problem, an ABE model with parallel outsourced decryption for edge intelligent IoV, called ABEM-POD, is proposed. It includes a generic parallel outsourced decryption method for ABE based on the Spark and the MapReduce. This method is applicable to all ABE schemes with tree access structure and can be applied to edge intelligent IoV. Any ABE scheme based on the proposed model not only supports parallel outsourced decryption but also has the same security as the original scheme. In this paper, ABEM-POD has been applied to three representative ABE schemes and the experiments show that the proposed ABEM-POD is efficient and easy to use. It can significantly improve the speed of outsourced decryption to address the response time requirement for edge intelligent IoV.

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized people’s daily lives, providing superior quality services in cognitive cities, healthcare, and smart buildings. However, smart buildings use heterogeneous networks. The massive number of interconnected IoT devices increases the possibility of IoT attacks, emphasizing the necessity of secure and privacy-preserving solutions. Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a promising machine learning (ML) paradigm for IoT networks to address these concerns. In FL, multiple devices collaborate to learn a global model without sharing their raw data. However, FL still faces privacy and security concerns due to the transmission of sensitive data (i.e., model parameters) over insecure communication channels. These concerns can be addressed using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a powerful cryptographic technique that enables computations on encrypted data without requiring them to be decrypted first. In this study, we propose a secure FL approach in IoT-enabled smart cities that combines FHE and FL to provide secure data and maintain privacy in distributed environments. We present four different FL-based FHE approaches in which data are encrypted and transmitted over a secure medium. The proposed approaches achieved high accuracy, recall, precision, and F-scores, in addition to providing strong privacy and security safeguards. Furthermore, the proposed approaches effectively reduced communication overhead and latency compared to the baseline approach. These approaches yielded improvements ranging from 80.15% to 89.98% in minimizing communication overhead. Additionally, one of the approaches achieved a remarkable latency reduction of 70.38%. The implementation of these security models is nontrivial, and the code is publicly available at https://github.com/Artifitialleap-MBZUAI/Secure-Federated-Learning-with-Fully-Homomorphic-Encryption-for-IoT-Communications .