In a computing context, cybersecurity is undergoing massive shifts in technology and its operations in recent days, and data science is driving the change. Extractingsecurity incident patternsor insights from cybersecurity data and building correspondingdata-driven model, is the key to make a security system automated and intelligent. To understand and analyze the actual phenomena with data, various scientific methods, machine learning techniques, processes, and systems are used, which is commonly known as data science. In this paper, we focus and briefly discuss oncybersecurity data science, where the data is being gathered from relevant cybersecurity sources, and the analytics complement thelatest data-driven patternsfor providing more effective security solutions. The concept of cybersecurity data science allows making the computing process more actionable and intelligent as compared to traditional ones in the domain of cybersecurity. We then discuss and summarize a number of associatedresearch issues and future directions. Furthermore, we provide amachine learningbasedmulti-layered frameworkfor the purpose of cybersecurity modeling. Overall, our goal is not only to discuss cybersecurity data science and relevant methods but also to focus the applicability towards data-driven intelligent decision making for protecting the systems from cyber-attacks.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly emerging field of technologies that delivers numerous cutting-edge solutions in various domains including the critical infrastructures. Thanks to the IoT, the conventional power system network can be transformed into an effective and smarter energy grid. In this article, we review the architecture and functionalities of IoT-enabled smart energy grid systems. Specifically, we focus on different IoT technologies including sensing, communication, computing technologies, and their standards in relation to smart energy grid. This article also presents a comprehensive overview of existing studies on IoT applications to the smart grid system. Based on recent surveys and literature, we observe that the security vulnerabilities related to IoT technologies have been attributed as one of the major concerns of IoT-enabled energy systems. Therefore, we review the existing threat and attack models for IoT-enabled energy systems and summarize mitigation techniques for those security vulnerabilities. Finally, we highlight how advanced technologies (e.g., blockchain, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) can complement IoT-enabled energy systems to be more resilient and secure and overcome the existing difficulties so that they become more effective, robust, and reliable in operation. Precisely, this article will help understand the framework for IoT-enabled smart energy system, associated security vulnerabilities, and prospects of advanced technologies to improve the effectiveness of smart energy systems.

Due to the increasing popularity of recent advanced features and context-awareness in smart mobile phones, the contextual data relevant to users’ diverse activities with their phones are recorded through the device logs. Modeling and predicting individual’s smartphone usage based on contexts, such as temporal, spatial, or social information, can be used to build various context-aware personalized systems. In order to intelligently assist them, a machine learning classifier based usage prediction model for individual users’ is the key. Thus, we aim to analyze the effectiveness of various machine learning classification models for predicting personalized usage utilizing individual’s phone log data. In our context-aware analysis, we first employ ten classic and well-known machine learning classification techniques, such as ZeroR, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, K-Nearest Neighbors, Adaptive Boosting, Repeated Incremental Pruning to Produce Error Reduction, Ripple Down Rule Learner, and Logistic Regression classifiers. We also present the empirical evaluations of Artificial Neural Network based classification model, which is frequently used in deep learning and make comparative analysis in our context-aware study. The effectiveness of these classifier based context-aware models is examined by conducting a range of experiments on the real mobile phone datasets collected from individual users. The overall experimental results and discussions can help both the researchers and applications developers to design and build intelligent context-aware systems for smartphone users.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has emerged as one of the most disruptive technologies in the last decade. It promises to change the way people do their business, track their products, and manage their personal data. Though the concept of DLT was first implemented in 2009 as Bitcoin, it has gained significant attention only in the past few years. During this time, different DLT enthusiasts and commercial companies have proposed and developed several DLT platforms. These platforms are usually categorized as public vs private, general purpose vs application specific and so on. As a growing number of people are interested to build DLT applications, it is important to understand their underlying architecture and capabilities in order to determine which DLT platform should be leveraged for a specific DLT application. In addition, the platforms need to be evaluated and critically analyzed to assess their applicability, resiliency and sustainability in the long run. In this paper, we have surveyed several leading DLT platforms and evaluated their capabilities based on a number of quantitative and qualitative criteria. The comparative analysis presented in this paper will help the DLT developers and architects to choose the best platform as per their requirement(s).

Although ransomware has been around since the early days of personal computers, its sophistication and aggression have increased substantially over the years. Ransomware, as a type of malware to extort ransom payments from victims, has evolved to deliver payloads in different attack vectors and on multiple platforms, and creating repeated disruptions and financial loss to many victims. Many studies have performed ransomware analysis and/or presented detection, defense, or prevention techniques for ransomware. However, because the ransomware landscape has evolved aggressively, many of those studies have become less relevant or even outdated. Previous surveys on anti-ransomware studies have compared the methods and results of the studies they surveyed, but none of those surveys has attempted to critique on the internal or external validity of those studies. In this survey, we first examined the up-to-date concept of ransomware, and listed the inadequacies in current ransomware research. We then proposed a set of unified metrics to evaluate published studies on ransomware mitigation, and applied the metrics to 118 such studies to comprehensively compare and contrast their pros and cons, with the attempt to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we forecast the future trends of ransomware evolution, and propose future research directions.

Over the last few decades, the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has produced an overwhelming flow of data and services, which has shifted the access control paradigm from a fixed desktop environment to dynamic cloud environments. Fog computing is associated with a new access control paradigm to reduce the overhead costs by moving the execution of application logic from the centre of the cloud data sources to the periphery of the IoT-oriented sensor networks. Indeed, accessing information and data resources from a variety of IoT sources has been plagued with inherent problems such as data heterogeneity, privacy, security and computational overheads. This paper presents an extensive survey of security, privacy and access control research, while highlighting several specific concerns in a wide range of contextual conditions (e.g., spatial, temporal and environmental contexts) which are gaining a lot of momentum in the area of industrial sensor and cloud networks. We present different taxonomies, such as contextual conditions and authorization models, based on the key issues in this area and discuss the existing context-sensitive access control approaches to tackle the aforementioned issues. With the aim of reducing administrative and computational overheads in the IoT sensor networks, we propose a new generation of Fog-Based Context-Aware Access Control (FB-CAAC) framework, combining the benefits of the cloud, IoT and context-aware computing; and ensuring proper access control and security at the edge of the end-devices. Our goal is not only to control context-sensitive access to data resources in the cloud, but also to move the execution of an application logic from the cloud-level to an intermediary-level where necessary, through adding computational nodes at the edge of the IoT sensor network. A discussion of some open research issues pertaining to context-sensitive access control to data resources is provided, including several real-world case studies. We conclude the paper with an in-depth analysis of the research challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the literature and highlight directions for future work that has not been well aligned with currently available research.