This study proposes a convolutional neural network model trained from scratch to classify and detect the presence of pneumonia from a collection of chest X-ray image samples. Unlike other methods that rely solely on transfer learning approaches or traditional handcrafted techniques to achieve a remarkable classification performance, we constructed a convolutional neural network model from scratch to extract features from a given chest X-ray image and classify it to determine if a person is infected with pneumonia. This model could help mitigate the reliability and interpretability challenges often faced when dealing with medical imagery. Unlike other deep learning classification tasks with sufficient image repository, it is difficult to obtain a large amount of pneumonia dataset for this classification task; therefore, we deployed several data augmentation algorithms to improve the validation and classification accuracy of the CNN model and achieved remarkable validation accuracy.

The proliferation of current wireless communications and information technologies have been altering humans lifestyle and social interactions-the next frontier is the smart home environments or spaces. A smart home consists of low capacity devices (e.g., sensors) and wireless networks, and therefore, all working together as a secure system that needs an adequate level of security. This paper introduces lightweight and secure session key establishment scheme for smart home environments. To establish trust among the network, every sensor and control unit uses a short authentication token and establishes a secure session key. The proposed scheme provides important security attributes including prevention of various popular attacks, such as denial-of-service and eavesdropping attacks. The preliminary evaluation and feasibility tests are demonstrated by the proof-of-concept implementation. In addition, the proposed scheme attains both computation efficiency and communication efficiency as compared with other schemes from the literature.

Smart meters are considered as foundational part of the smart metering infrastructure (SMI) in smart energy networks. Smart meter is a digital device that makes use of two-way communication between consumer and utility to exchange, manage and control energy consumptions within a home. However, despite all the features, a smart meter raises several security-related concerns. For instance, how to exchange data between the legal entities (e.g., smart meter and utility server) while maintaining privacy of the consumer. To address these concerns, authentication and key agreement in SMI can provide important security properties that not only to maintain a trust between the legitimate entities but also to satisfy other security services. This work presents a lightweight authentication and key agreement (LAKA) that enables trust, anonymity, integrity and adequate security in the domain of smart energy network. The proposed scheme employs hybrid cryptography to facilitate mutual trust (authentication), dynamic session key, integrity, and anonymity. We justify the feasibility of the proposed scheme with a test-bed using 802.15.4 based device (i.e., smart meter). Moreover, through the security and performance analysis, we show that the proposed scheme is more effective and energy efficient compared to the previous schemes.

Cloud computing is combination of various computing entities, globally separated, but electronically connected. As the geography of computation is moving towards corporate server rooms, it bring more issues including security, such as virtualization security, distributed computing, application security, identity management, access control and authentication. However, strong user authentication is the paramount requirement for cloud computing that restrict illegal access of cloud server. In this regard, this paper proposes a strong user authentication framework for cloud computing, where user legitimacy is strongly verified before enter into the cloud. The proposed framework provides identity management, mutual authentication, session key establishment between the users and the cloud server. A user can change his/her password, whenever demanded. Furthermore, security analysis realizes the feasibility of the proposed framework for cloud computing and achieves efficiency.

An ad hoc network is a wireless mobile communication network composed of a group of mobile nodes with wireless transceivers. It does not rely on preset infrastructure and is established temporarily. The mobile nodes of the network use their own wireless transceivers to exchange information; when the information is not within the communication range, other intermediate nodes can be used to relay to achieve communication. They can be widely used in environments that cannot be supported by wired networks or which require communication temporarily, such as military applications, sensor networks, rescue and disaster relief, and emergency response. In MANET, each node acts as a host and as a router, and the nodes are linked through wireless channels in the network. One of the scenarios of MANET is VANET; VANET is supported by several types of fixed infrastructure. Due to its limitations, this infrastructure can support some VANET services and provide fixed network access. FANET is a subset of VANET. SANET is one of the common types of ad hoc networks. This paper could serve as a guide and reference so that readers have a comprehensive and general understanding of wireless ad hoc networks and their routing protocols at a macro level with a lot of good, related papers for reference. However, this is the first paper that discusses the popular types of ad hoc networks along with comparisons and simulation tools for Ad Hoc Networks.