Mobile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) forming Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) offer promising applications, but dynamic network structures, limited resources, and potential single points of failure create security challenges. While cluster-based data aggregation, where data is collected and combined at Cluster Heads (CHs) before transmission, improves efficiency, traditional techniques can compromise data privacy. This paper introduces SSDBFAN, a scalable and secure cluster-based data aggregation framework for Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs). The proposed approach integrates the Frilled Lizard Optimization Algorithm (FLOA) for efficient cluster head selection with blockchain technology and post-quantum cryptographic techniques, including lattice-based homomorphic encryption and the Chinese Remainder Theorem, to ensure privacy-preserving data aggregation. Additionally, a hybrid online/offline signature mechanism is employed to achieve secure and efficient authentication with reduced computational overhead. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated using NS-3 simulations under varying network sizes. Experimental results demonstrate that SSDBFAN significantly improves communication efficiency, reduces computational cost, and enhances network stability compared to existing schemes. Furthermore, scalability analysis with up to 500 UAV nodes confirms that the proposed framework effectively controls blockchain overhead, including bandwidth consumption, consensus latency, and storage requirements. Comparative evaluation with existing optimization algorithms shows that FLOA achieves superior performance in terms of cluster stability, delay, and throughput. These results validate the effectiveness of SSDBFAN as a scalable and security-aware solution for large-scale FANET environments.

The growing dependence on third-party foundries for integrated circuit (IC) fabrication has created major security concerns because of hardware Trojan (HT) insertion risks. Traditional detection methods, including side-channel analysis and golden reference models, face limitations such as sensitivity to noise, high cost, and impracticality for large-scale deployment. This work introduces a machine learning framework for HT detection that eliminates the need for golden references. The framework automatically extracts statistical features from chip data, groups chips into clusters, and uses an internal filtering process to identify the most reliable patterns. These patterns are then used to guide a learning model that can accurately separate Trojan-infected chips from clean ones. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method achieves high detection accuracy with zero false negatives, while remaining resilient against adversarial perturbations. These findings indicate that cluster-filtered pseudo-labeling provides a practical and scalable solution for enhancing hardware security in modern IC supply chains.

Bilateral idiopathic carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is a neuromuscular condition involving the compression of the median nerve at both wrists, leading to pain, neurological symptoms, and loss of function. This paper proposes a robust machine-learning framework for a randomized crossover clinical trial comparing two physiotherapeutic treatment regimens: stretching followed by myofascial mobilization (S/M) and the reverse sequence (M/S). Instead of making inferences about the superiority of one treatment over another, the treatment regimen serves as a structured analytical label for investigating predictive separability, feature representation, and model stability within a controlled experimental setting. The clinical dataset of 73 patients underwent rigorous preprocessing, including strength feature aggregation and principal component analysis (PCA). Various classifiers were evaluated, with CatBoost achieving an ROC-AUC of 0.985 and a test accuracy of 96.5%, while Random Forest demonstrated strong adversarial robustness with an adversarial accuracy of 96.83%. To assess robustness, clinically constrained perturbations were introduced into the PCA feature space, simulating realistic input variability. The findings indicate that ensemble learning algorithms can capture structured patterns in crossover clinical datasets and remain stable under low-magnitude adversarial perturbations. The study underscores the importance of robustness evaluation and interpretability when applying machine learning models to biomedical data, particularly in small and well-structured clinical cohorts.

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) networks has introduced new security challenges, necessitating efficient and reliable methods for intrusion detection. In this study, a detection framework based on hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is proposed to identify and classify network intrusions using the NSL-KDD dataset, a standard benchmark for intrusion detection systems. By leveraging the capabilities of HDC, including high-dimensional representation and efficient computation, the proposed approach effectively distinguishes various attack categories such as DoS, probe, R2L, and U2R, while accurately identifying normal traffic patterns. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 99.54%, significantly outperforming conventional intrusion detection techniques, making it a promising solution for IoT network security. This work emphasizes the critical role of robust and precise intrusion detection in safeguarding IoT systems against evolving cyber threats.

Anomaly detection is a cornerstone of modern intelligent systems, with critical applications in healthcare, cybersecurity, smart grids, and IoT environments. While traditional machine learning and deep learning models have shown promise in identifying outliers, they often face challenges such as dependence on large labeled datasets, high computational costs, and limited scalability to edge devices or high-dimensional data streams. This study introduces D2H-AD, a novel anomaly detection framework built upon Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), a brain-inspired paradigm that encodes information using high-dimensional distributed vectors. Unlike prior HDC-based approaches, D2H-AD fuses distance-based similarity and density-aware encoding in a hybrid design, significantly improving anomaly characterization and detection accuracy. Ablation experiments confirm that hyperdimensional encoding alone contributes up to 5.4% higher ROC-AUC compared to applying the same density-distance scoring in the original Euclidean feature space, and D2H-AD consistently outperforms all five published baselines (HDAD, ODHD, One-Class SVM, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders) across every evaluated dataset. The method is designed to be lightweight, interpretable, and computationally efficient, suggesting strong suitability for deployment in resource-constrained and real-time environments. To validate its effectiveness, we evaluate D2H-AD on five diverse benchmark datasets, comparing its performance against five leading techniques: HDAD, ODHD, One-Class SVM, Isolation Forest, and Autoencoders. Our results show that D2H-AD consistently achieves superior F1 scores and ROC-AUC metrics, demonstrating robustness against class imbalance, noise, and data complexity. Beyond accuracy, D2H-AD offers practical advantages including scalability, minimal memory footprint, and an expected low-latency profile derived from its binary operations and lightweight design. These characteristics are crucial for TinyML and edge AI applications. This work highlights the untapped potential of HDC for high-performance anomaly detection and opens new avenues for secure, interpretable, and energy-efficient AI solutions in dynamic environments such as IoT, embedded systems, and beyond. Additionally, D2H-AD provides feature-level interpretability through hypervector decoding, enabling transparent explanations for safety-critical applications.

Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) composed of highly mobile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed in mission-critical applications. However, the open wireless medium, high mobility, and resource constraints of UAVs expose FANETs to severe security and privacy threats, particularly at the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Existing authentication and key agreement schemes often suffer from high computational overhead and insufficient protection against advanced attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Lightweight Key Agreement Scheme (LWKAS) based on signcryption using Hyper Elliptic Curve Cryptography (HECC) and one-way cryptographic hash functions. The proposed scheme integrates MAC-layer security while simultaneously ensuring secure authentication, confidentiality, and location privacy through the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT). The security analysis demonstrates that LWKAS resists multiple attacks, including Man-In-The-Middle (MITM), replay, impersonation, Ephemeral Secret Leakage (ESL), cloning, desynchronization, and DoS attacks. The proposed scheme is implemented in NS-3 and evaluated against existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of authentication delay, communication overhead, and computational cost. The results demonstrate that LWKAS achieves significantly lower computational complexity and communication overhead while providing stronger security guarantees suitable for resource-constrained FANET environments.