Recent advancements in the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) have ushered in the wide adoption of IoT devices in our daily health management. For IoHT data to be acceptable by stakeholders, applications that incorporate the IoHT must have a provision for data provenance, in addition to the accuracy, security, integrity, and quality of data. To protect the privacy and security of IoHT data, federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) have been proposed, where private IoHT data can be trained at the owner’s premises. Recent advancements in hardware GPUs even allow the FL process within smartphone or edge devices having the IoHT attached to their edge nodes. Although some of the privacy concerns of IoHT data are addressed by FL, fully decentralized FL is still a challenge due to the lack of training capability at all federated nodes, the scarcity of high-quality training datasets, the provenance of training data, and the authentication required for each FL node. In this paper, we present a lightweight hybrid FL framework in which blockchain smart contracts manage the edge training plan, trust management, and authentication of participating federated nodes, the distribution of global or locally trained models, the reputation of edge nodes and their uploaded datasets or models. The framework also supports the full encryption of a dataset, the model training, and the inferencing process. Each federated edge node performs additive encryption, while the blockchain uses multiplicative encryption to aggregate the updated model parameters. To support the full privacy and anonymization of the IoHT data, the framework supports lightweight DP. This framework was tested with several deep learning applications designed for clinical trials with COVID-19 patients. We present here the detailed design, implementation, and test results, which demonstrate strong potential for wider adoption of IoHT-based health management in a secure way.

Medical IoT devices are rapidly becoming part of management ecosystems for pandemics such as COVID-19. Existing research shows that deep learning (DL) algorithms have been successfully used by researchers to identify COVID-19 phenomena from raw data obtained from medical IoT devices. Some examples of IoT technology are radiological media such as CT scanning and X-ray images, body temperature measurement using thermal cameras, safe social distancing identification using live face detection, and face mask detection from camera images. However, researchers have identified several security vulnerabilities in DL algorithms to adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we have tested a number of COVID-19 diagnostic methods that rely on DL algorithms with relevant adversarial examples. Our test results show that DL models that do not consider defensive models against adversarial perturbations remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Finally, we present in detail the adversarial example generation process, implementation of the attack model, and the perturbations of existing DL-based COVID-19 diagnostic applications. We hope that this work will raise awareness of adversarial attacks and encourages others to safeguard DL models from attacks on healthcare systems.

In this paper, we propose mathematical optimization models of household energy units to optimally control the major residential energy loads while preserving the user preferences. User comfort is modelled in a simple way, which considers appliance class, user preferences and weather conditions. The wind-driven optimization (WDO) algorithm with the objective function of comfort maximization along with minimum electricity cost is defined and implemented. On the other hand, for maximum electricity bill and peak reduction, min-max regret-based knapsack problem (K-WDO) algorithm is used. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, extensive simulations are conducted for several scenarios. The simulations show that the proposed algorithms provide with the best optimal results with a fast convergence rate, as compared to the existing techniques.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of sensor nodes deployed in a manner to collect information about surrounding environment. Their distributed nature, multihop data forwarding, and open wireless medium are the factors that make WSNs highly vulnerable to security attacks at various levels. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) can play an important role in detecting and preventing security attacks. This paper presents current Intrusion Detection Systems and some open research problems related to WSN security.

Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) have emerged as a significant physiological condition, being a primary contributor to mortality. Timely and precise diagnosis of heart disease is crucial to safeguard patients from additional harm. Recent studies show that the usage of data driven approaches, such as Deep Learning (DL) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, in the field of medical science is highly useful in accurately diagnosing heart disease in less time. However, statistical learning and traditional ML approaches require feature engineering to generate robust and effective features from data, which are then used in the prediction models. In the case of large complex data, both processes pose many challenges. Whereas, DL techniques are capable of learning features automatically from the data and are effective at handling large and intricate datasets while outperforming the ML models. This study focuses on the accurate prediction of CVDs, considering the patient’s health and socio-economic conditions while mitigating the challenges presented by imbalanced data. The Adaptive Synthetic Sampling Technique is used for data balancing, while the Point Biserial Correlation Coefficient is used as a feature selection technique. In this study, two DL models, Ensemble based Cardiovascular Disease Detection Network (EnsCVDD-Net) and Blending based Cardiovascular Disease Detection Network (BlCVDD-Net), are proposed for accurate prediction and classification of CVDs. EnsCVDD-Net is made by applying an ensemble technique to LeNet and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and BlCVDD-Net is made by blending LeNet, GRU and Multilayer Perceptron. SHapley Additive exPlanations is used to provide a clear understanding of the influence different factors have on CVD diagnosis. The network’s performance is evaluated on the basis of various performance metrics. The results indicate that the EnsCVDD-Net outperforms all base models with 88% accuracy, 88% F1-score, 91% precision, 85% recall, and 777s execution time. Similarly, with 91% accuracy, 91% F1-score, 96% precision, 86% recall, and 247s execution time, BlCVDD-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art DL models. To validate the model’s results, 10-Fold Cross Validation is employed. An eXplainable Artificial Intelligence technique, SHapley Additive exPlanation is employed to know the features contribution in model’s predictions.

In this paper, a blockchain-based secure data sharing mechanism is proposed for Vehicular Networks (VNs). Edge service providers are introduced along with ordinary nodes to efficiently manage service provisioning. The edge service providers are placed in the neighborhood of the ordinary nodes to ensure smooth communication between them. The huge amount of data generated by smart vehicles is stored in a distributed file storage system, known as Interplanetary File System (IPFS). It is used to tackle the issues related to data storage in centralized architectures, such as data tampering, lack of privacy, vulnerability to hackers, etc. Monetary incentives are given to edge vehicle nodes to motivate them for accurate and timely service provisioning to ordinary nodes. In response, ordinary nodes give reviews to the edge nodes against the services provided by them, which are further stored in a blockchain to ensure integrity, security and transparency. Smart contracts are used to automate the system processes without the inclusion of an intermediate party and to check the reviews given to the edge nodes. To optimize gas consumption and to enhance the system performance, a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism is used to validate the transactions. Moreover, a caching system is introduced at the edge nodes to store frequently used services. Furthermore, both security and privacy are enhanced in the proposed system by incorporating a symmetric key cryptographic mechanism. A trust management mechanism is also proposed in this work to calculate the nodes’ reputation values based upon their trust values. These values determine the authenticity of the nodes involved in the network. Eventually, it is concluded from the simulation results that the proposed system is efficient for VNs.