Numerous sensitive applications, such as healthcare and medical services, need reliable transmission as a prerequisite for the success of the new age of communications technology. Unfortunately, these systems are highly vulnerable to attacks like Sybil, where many false nodes are created and spread with deceitful intentions. Therefore, these false nodes must be instantly identified and isolated from the network due to security concerns and the sensitivity of data utilized in healthcare applications. Especially for life-threatening diseases like COVID-19, it is crucial to have devices connected to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) that can be believed to respond with high reliability and accuracy. Thus, trust-based security offers a safe environment for IoMT applications. This study proposes a blockchain-based fuzzy trust management framework (BFT-IoMT) to detect and isolate Sybil nodes in IoMT networks. The results demonstrate that the proposed BFT-IoMT framework is 25.43% and 12.64%, 12.54% and 6.65%, 37.85% and 19.08%, 17.40% and 8.72%, and 13.04% and 5.05% more efficient and effective in terms of energy consumption, attack detection, trust computation reliability, packet delivery ratio, and throughput, respectively, as compared to the other state-of-the-art frameworks available in the literature.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the urgency of effective testing strategies had never been more apparent. The fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models, particularly within medical imaging (e.g., chest X-rays), holds promise in smart healthcare systems. Deep Learning (DL), a subset of AI, has exhibited prowess in enhancing classification accuracy, a crucial aspect in expediting COVID-19 diagnosis. However, the journey to harness DL’s potential is rife with challenges: notably, the intricate landscape of medical data privacy. Striking a balance between utilizing patient data for insights while upholding privacy is formidable. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a solution by enabling collaborative model training across decentralized data sources, thus bypassing data centralization and preserving data privacy. This study presents a tailored, collaborative FL architecture for COVID-19 screening via chest X-ray images. Designed to facilitate cooperation among medical institutions, the framework ensures patient data remain localized, eliminating the need for direct data sharing. Addressing imbalanced and non-identically distributed data, the architecture is a robust solution. Implementation entails localized and fog-computing-based FL models. Localized models utilize Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on institution-specific datasets, while the FL model, refined iteratively, takes precedence in the final classification. Intriguingly, the global FL model, fortified by fog computing, emerges as the frontrunner in classification after weight refinement, surpassing local models. Validation within the COLAB platform gauges the model’s performance through metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Remarkably, the proposed model excels across these metrics, solidifying its efficacy. This research navigates the confluence of AI, FL, and medical imaging, unveiling insights that could reshape healthcare delivery. The study enriches scientific discourse by addressing data privacy in collaborative learning and carries potential implications for enhanced patient care.

The increasing reliance on cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in critical domains such as healthcare, smart grids, and intelligent transportation systems necessitates robust security measures to protect against cyber threats. Among these threats, blackhole and greyhole attacks pose significant risks to the availability and integrity of CPSs. The current detection and mitigation approaches often struggle to accurately differentiate between legitimate and malicious behavior, leading to ineffective protection. This paper introduces Gini-index and blockchain-based Blackhole/Greyhole RPL (GBG-RPL), a novel technique designed for efficient detection and mitigation of blackhole and greyhole attacks in smart health monitoring CPSs. GBG-RPL leverages the analytical prowess of the Gini index and the security advantages of blockchain technology to protect these systems against sophisticated threats. This research not only focuses on identifying anomalous activities but also proposes a resilient framework that ensures the integrity and reliability of the monitored data. GBG-RPL achieves notable improvements as compared to another state-of-the-art technique referred to as BCPS-RPL, including a 7.18% reduction in packet loss ratio, an 11.97% enhancement in residual energy utilization, and a 19.27% decrease in energy consumption. Its security features are also very effective, boasting a 10.65% improvement in attack-detection rate and an 18.88% faster average attack-detection time. GBG-RPL optimizes network management by exhibiting a 21.65% reduction in message overhead and a 28.34% decrease in end-to-end delay, thus showing its potential for enhanced reliability, efficiency, and security.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a significant technological advancement that allows for seamless device integration and data flow. The development of the IoT has led to the emergence of several solutions in various sectors. However, rapid popularization also has its challenges, and one of the most serious challenges is the security of the IoT. Security is a major concern, particularly routing attacks in the core network, which may cause severe damage due to information loss. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), a routing protocol used for IoT devices, is faced with selective forwarding attacks. In this paper, we present a federated learning-based detection technique for detecting selective forwarding attacks, termed FL-DSFA. A lightweight model involving the IoT Routing Attack Dataset (IRAD), which comprises Hello Flood (HF), Decreased Rank (DR), and Version Number (VN), is used in this technique to increase the detection efficiency. The attacks on IoT threaten the security of the IoT system since they mainly focus on essential elements of RPL. The components include control messages, routing topologies, repair procedures, and resources within sensor networks. Binary classification approaches have been used to assess the training efficiency of the proposed model. The training step includes the implementation of machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression (LR), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), and naive Bayes (NB). The comparative analysis illustrates that this study, with SVM and KNN classifiers, exhibits the highest accuracy during training and achieves the most efficient runtime performance. The proposed system demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving a prediction precision of 97.50%, an accuracy of 95%, a recall rate of 98.33%, and an F1 score of 97.01%. It outperforms the current leading research in this field, with its classification results, scalability, and enhanced privacy.

In recent years, the Internet has facilitated the emergence of social media platforms as significant channels for individuals to express their thoughts and engage in instantaneous interactions. However, the reliance on online reviews has also given rise to deceptive practices, where anonymous spammers generate fake reviews to manipulate the perception of a product. Ensuring the integrity of the online review system requires identifying and mitigating fake reviews. While existing machine learning (ML)- and neural network (NN)-based sentiment analysis methods can detect deceptive reviews, they often suffer from long training times, high computational resource requirements, and memory constraints. This study aims to overcome these limitations by introducing a transformer-based “deceptive bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (DeceptiveBERT) model.” This model utilizes contextual representations to enhance the precision of deceptive review identification. Transfer learning is employed to leverage knowledge from a pre-existing BERT base-uncased word embedding model, enabling efficient feature extraction. The proposed model incorporates a combination of classification layers to categorize reviews into two distinct categories: deceptive and truthful. Additionally, the study addresses the challenge of imbalanced datasets by utilizing three separate datasets and implementing appropriate methodologies for dataset curation. The effectiveness of the DeceptiveBERT model was evaluated through experimentation. The results demonstrate its efficacy, with the model achieving accuracy rates of 75%, 84.79%, and 81.08% on the Ott, YelpNYC, and YelpZip datasets, respectively.

The field of wireless communication has undergone revolutionary changes driven by technological advancements in recent years. Central to this evolution is wireless ad hoc networks, which are characterized by their decentralized nature and have introduced numerous possibilities and challenges for researchers. Moreover, most of the existing Internet of Things (IoT) networks are based on ad hoc networks. This study focuses on the exploration of interference management and Medium Access Control (MAC) schemes. Through statistical derivations and systematic simulations, we evaluate the efficacy of guard zone-based MAC protocols under Rayleigh fading channel conditions. By establishing a link between network parameters, interference patterns, and MAC effectiveness, this work contributes to optimizing network performance. A key aspect of this study is the investigation of optimal guard zone parameters, which are crucial for interference mitigation. The adaptive guard zone scheme demonstrates superior performance compared to the widely recognized Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) and the system-wide fixed guard zone protocol under fading channel conditions that mimic real-world scenarios. Additionally, simulations reveal the interactions between network variables such as node density, path loss exponent, outage probability, and spreading gain, providing insights into their impact on aggregated interference and guard zone effectiveness.