Blockchain technology has heralded a new era in digital innovation, revolutionizing our approach to designing and building distributed applications in the digital sphere. Blockchain technology operates as an immutable digital ledger, where each entry representing a digital transaction is indelible and cannot be altered once established. Initially designed as the fundamental framework for cryptocurrencies, blockchain has outgrown its original purpose, demonstrating significant potential in various industries and offering a variety of security and privacy features. Our study provides a thorough and current survey of blockchain applications, security, privacy concepts, primitives, and threat models. It stands out by concentrating on how blockchain technology intersects with emerging fields like IoT, EVs, FinTech, and healthcare systems in a single framework. To provide security and privacy features, blockchain systems employ different foundational notions and primitives while tackling diverse adversarial scenarios with various capabilities and goals. This study presents a fresh examination of the current state of applications, security and privacy notions and primitives, and threat models in blockchain systems. Additionally, this work highlights existing gaps in knowledge and outlines open questions, aiming to stimulate interest in further advancements in the field.

The development of metaverses and virtual worlds on various platforms, including mobile devices, has led to the growth of applications in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in recent years. This application growth is paralleled by a growth of interest in analyzing and understanding AR/VR applications from security and performance standpoints. Despite this growing interest, benchmark datasets are lacking to facilitate this research pursuit. In this paper, we collect a dataset that consists of 408 diverse AR/VR applications from the Google Play Store and acquire various data modalities associated with those applications standardized in the form of seven features: control flow graphs, strings, functions, permissions, API calls, hexdump, and metadata. We highlight various research endeavors (applications) that can benefit from our dataset for each data modality.

The proper use of Android app permissions is crucial to the success and security of these apps. Users must agree to permission requests when installing or running their apps. Despite official Android platform documentation on proper permission usage, there are still many cases of permission abuse. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the Android permission landscape, highlighting trends and patterns in permission requests across various applications from the Google Play Store. By distinguishing between benign and malicious applications, we uncover developers’ evolving strategies, with malicious apps increasingly requesting fewer permissions to evade detection, while benign apps request more to enhance functionality. In addition to examining permission trends across years and app features such as advertisements, in-app purchases, content ratings, and app sizes, we leverage association rule mining using the FP-Growth algorithm. This allows us to uncover frequent permission combinations across the entire dataset, specific years, and 16 app genres. The analysis reveals significant differences in permission usage patterns, providing a deeper understanding of co-occurring permissions and their implications for user privacy and app functionality. By categorizing permissions into high-level semantic groups and examining their application across distinct app categories, this study offers a structured approach to analyzing the dynamics within the Android ecosystem. The findings emphasize the importance of continuous monitoring, user education, and regulatory oversight to address permission misuse effectively.

Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly deployed to detect fraudulent activities in Ethereum, where phishing and scamming attacks pose serious security risks. Despite their promise, these models remain susceptible to adversarial manipulations. In this article, we present a comprehensive evaluation of ML-based Ethereum phishing detectors under a spectrum of adversarial perturbations. Our study examines multiple classifiers, including Random Forest, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbors, Graph Neural Networks, and XGBoost, against rule-based, gradient-based, and black-box adversarial attacks. We conduct detailed feature-level analyses to identify transaction attributes most vulnerable to manipulation, and we evaluate the comparative robustness of classifiers under both targeted and untargeted attack scenarios. To strengthen model resilience, we assess mitigation techniques such as adversarial training and randomized smoothing, demonstrating their effectiveness in improving robustness without significant performance degradation.

Phishing detection on Ethereum has increasingly leveraged advanced machine learning techniques to identify fraudulent transactions. However, limited attention has been given to understanding the effectiveness of feature selection strategies and the role of graph-based models in enhancing detection accuracy. In this paper, we systematically examine these issues by analyzing and contrasting explicit transactional features and implicit graph-based features, both experimentally and analytically. We explore how different feature sets impact the performance of phishing detection models, particularly in the context of Ethereum's transactional network. Additionally, we address key challenges such as class imbalance and dataset composition and their influence on the robustness and precision of detection methods. Our findings demonstrate the advantages and limitations of each feature type, while also providing a clearer understanding of how feature affect model resilience and generalization in adversarial environments.

Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is a leading contributor to global physical disability, where delayed diagnosis often results in irreversible joint damage and socio-economic cost. Early diagnosis remains challenging due to subtle radiographic biomarkers and limited access to specialized expertise, particularly in distributed healthcare settings. Within the evolving landscape of the Future Internet, characterized by Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), edge–cloud computing, and intelligent digital health infrastructures, there is an increasing demand for scalable, low-latency, and explainable AI-driven diagnostic solutions. In this work, we propose a Dual-Stream Wavelet Fusion Network (DS-WFN) alongside a distributed edge-cloud architectural roadmap tailored for deployment in distributed and edge-enabled healthcare ecosystems. The framework integrates a spatial morphological stream with a spectral wavelet stream, augmented by an Adaptive Wavelet Selection Mechanism (AWSM). The AWSM dynamically selects optimal frequency bases (Haar, Symlet, Daubechies) to preserve fine-grained diagnostic features typically lost in conventional CNN architectures. An Adaptive Spatial Alignment (ASA) module further ensures efficient fusion of heterogeneous representations, enabling robust feature integration across computational nodes. Experimental results across a five-fold patient-isolated cross-validation protocol demonstrate that the DS-WFN achieves a mean classification accuracy of 76.3% (95% CI: 71.6–80.8%) and a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.747 (95% CI: 0.697–0.795), consistently outperforming single-stream baselines while preventing patient-level data leakage. Furthermore, Grad-CAM visualizations provide interpretable outputs aligned with clinical diagnostic criteria, supporting trustworthy AI integration into digital healthcare workflows. Furthermore, we disclose a methodological framework for edge-based implementation, highlighting how localized inference ensures data sovereignty and real-time clinical support. By combining multiscale signal processing with deep learning under a Future Internet paradigm, this work contributes a scalable, explainable, and edge-ready diagnostic framework for early KOA detection, enabling intelligent, connected, and resource-efficient healthcare services.