Background: The use of traditional mobility datasets, such as travel surveys and census data, has significantly impacted various disciplines, including transportation, urban sensing, criminology, and healthcare. However, because these datasets represent only discrete instances of measurement, they miss continuous temporal shifts in human activities, failing to record the majority of human mobility patterns in real-time. Bolstered by the rapid expansion of telecommunication networks and the ubiquitous use of smartphones, mobile phone network data (MPND) played a pivotal role in fighting and controlling the spread of COVID-19. Methods: We conduct an extensive review of the state-of-the-art and recent advancements in the application of MPND for analyzing the early and post-stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Additionally, we evaluate and assess the included studies using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP). Furthermore, we apply bibliometric analysis to visualize publication structures, co-authorship networks, and keyword co-occurrence networks. Results: After the full-text screening process against the inclusion and exclusion criteria, our systematic literature review identified 55 studies that utilized MPND in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: 46 (83.6%) were quantitative, and 9 (16.4%) were qualitative. These quantitative studies can be classified into five main groups: monitoring and tracking of human mobility patterns (n = 11), investigating the correlation between mobility patterns and the spread of COVID-19 (n = 7), analyzing the recovery of economic activities and travel patterns (n = 5), assessing factors associated with NPI compliance (n = 5), and investigating the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) measures on human behaviors, urban dynamics, and economic activity (n = 18). In addition, our findings indicate that NPI measures had a significant impact on reducing human movement and dynamics. However, demographics, political party affiliation, socioeconomic inequality, and racial inequality had a significant impact on population adherence to NPI measures, which could increase disease spread and delay social and economic recovery. Conclusion: The usage of MPND for monitoring and tracking human activities and mobility patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic raises privacy implications and ethical concerns. Thus, striking a balance between meeting the ethical requirements and maintaining privacy risks should be further discovered and investigated in the future.

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has significantly increased the volume and diversity of network traffic, making accurate IoT traffic classification crucial for maintaining network security and efficiency. However, existing traffic classification methods, including traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches, often exhibit critical limitations, such as insufficient generalization across diverse IoT environments, dependency on extensive labelled datasets, and susceptibility to overfitting in dynamic scenarios. While recent transformer-based models show promise in capturing contextual information, they typically rely on standard tokenization, which is ill-suited for the irregular nature of IoT traffic and often remains confined to single-purpose tasks. To address these challenges, this study introduces MIND-IoT, a novel and scalable framework for classifying generalized IoT traffic. MIND-IoT employs a hybrid architecture that combines Transformer-based models for capturing long-range dependencies and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for efficient local feature extraction. A key innovation is IoT-Tokenize, a custom tokenization pipeline designed to preserve the structural semantics of network flows by converting statistical traffic features into semantically meaningful feature-value pairs. The framework operates in two phases: a pre-training phase utilizing masked language modeling (MLM) on large-scale IoT data (UNSW IoT Traces and MonIoTr) to learn robust representations and a fine-tuning phase that adapts the model to specific classification tasks, including binary IoT vs. non-IoT classification, IoT category classification, and device identification. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple diverse datasets (IoT Sentinel, YourThings, and IoT-FCSIT, in addition to the pre-training datasets) demonstrates MIND-IoT’s superior performance, robustness, and adaptability compared to traditional methods. The model achieves an accuracy of up to 98.14% and a 97.85% F1-score, demonstrating its ability to classify new datasets and adapt to emerging tasks with minimal fine-tuning and remarkable efficiency. This research positions MIND-IoT as a highly effective and scalable solution for real-world IoT traffic classification challenges.

Background: Federated learning (FL) enhances network traffic classification (NTC) with significant benefits in privacy, performance, and efficiency. However, the distributed nature of FL exposes NTC models to critical adversarial attacks from byzantine clients. These attacks, such as label flipping (LF) and model poisoning, can severely degrade overall model performance, while backdoor and generative adversarial network (GAN) based attacks can force the model to misclassify specific traffic classes. Securing FL-based NTC is paramount, as these vulnerabilities pose substantial threats to its vital role in network management, quality of service, and threat identification. Methods: While various defensive measures for FL exist, they are often ineffective against multiple types of adversarial attacks, and their effectiveness diminishes as the number of attackers increases. To address this gap, this study proposed SHeRAA-FL, a secure framework for FL-based NTC. The framework secures the training process by combining remote attestation scoring, hierarchical training, and adaptive aggregation mechanisms, reinforced with hardware-level security and encrypted communication. We developed and evaluated SHeRAA-FL on public datasets, such as ISCX-VPN 2016 and N-BaIoT, benchmarking it against existing approaches, including weighted averaging, median-mean, trim-mean, Krum, and Multi-Krum. Results: The evaluation results show that SHeRAA-FL effectively mitigates the impact of multiple types of adversarial attacks, even in scenarios with multiple attackers. For example, in the LF attack, other approaches recorded a 99.6% accuracy reduction, while SHeRAA-FL only recorded a 5.33% reduction. Moreover, in a normal scenario, the framework produces a model with the highest accuracy of 0.9130, indicating minimal disruption to the FL process.