Software-Defined Network (SDN) has become a promising network architecture in current days that provide network operators more control over the network infrastructure. The controller, also called as the operating system of the SDN, is responsible for running various network applications and maintaining several network services and functionalities. Despite all its capabilities, the introduction of various architectural entities of SDN poses many security threats and potential targets. Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) is a rapidly growing attack that poses a tremendous threat to the Internet. As the control layer is vulnerable to DDoS attacks, the goal of this paper is to detect the attack traffic, by taking the centralized control aspect of SDN. Nowadays, in the field of SDN, various machine learning (ML) techniques are being deployed for detecting malicious traffic. Despite these works, choosing the relevant features and accurate classifiers for attack detection is an open question. For better detection accuracy, in this work, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is assisted by kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) with genetic algorithm (GA). In the proposed SVM model, KPCA is used for reducing the dimension of feature vectors, and GA is used for optimizing different SVM parameters. In order to reduce the noise caused by feature differences, an improved kernel function (N-RBF) is proposed. The experimental results show that compared to single-SVM, the proposed model achieves more accurate classification with better generalization. Moreover, the proposed model can be embedded within the controller to define security rules to prevent possible attacks by the attackers.

The ever-growing demand for electricity in the residential sector results in creating a severe burden on electric grids. However, with the emergence of smart homes (SHs) and smart grids (SGs), this burden can be reduced to some extent. To address this issue, we propose an energy management system in this paper which manages the power requirements of SHs automatically according to the utility constraints and user priorities. The proposed system is based on a heuristic technique which considers the users priority and power available from the grid as well as distributed energy resources (DERs) for scheduling of appliances. It works by dividing the appliance scheduling problem in an SH into sub-problems for different time-slots. Results show that the proposed scheme efficiently manages the load demand of the SH with respect to power available from the utility, battery energy storage system, and user preferences.

Securing messages and protecting them from tampering during transmission in wireless sensor networks is a challenging task. Using message authentication schemes provides security and authentication, but with a high computational and communication cost. Sensors are highly constrained in terms of computational capabilities and power consumption. Therefore, computation is divided into two phases: online (at the sensor) and offline (at a more powerful central node). Moreover, public keys are generated based on the identities to reduce communication overhead. In this article, we propose a message authentication scheme based on identity that uses online/offline signature. We prove that the scheme provides and protects the integrity of messages during the transmission of data over an insecure network. Our scheme is existential unforgeable against chosen message attack.

In this paper, we design algorithms for indoor activity recognition and 3D thermal model generation using thermal images, RGB images, captured from external sensors, and the internet of things setup. Indoor activity recognition deals with two sub-problems: Human activity and household activity recognition. Household activity recognition includes the recognition of electrical appliances and their heat radiation with the help of thermal images. A FLIR ONE PRO camera is used to capture RGB-thermal image pairs for a scene. Duration and pattern of activities are also determined using an iterative algorithm, to explore kitchen safety situations. For more accurate monitoring of hazardous events such as stove gas leakage, a 3D reconstruction approach is proposed to determine the temperature of all points in the 3D space of a scene. The 3D thermal model is obtained using the stereo RGB and thermal images for a particular scene. Accurate results are observed for activity detection, and a significant improvement in the temperature estimation is recorded in the 3D thermal model compared to the 2D thermal image. Results from this research can find applications in home automation, heat automation in smart homes, and energy management in residential spaces.