During the recent years, the issue of preserving the integrity of digital text has become a focus of interest in the transmission of online content on the Internet. Watermarking has a useful tool in the protection of digital text content as it solves the problem of tampering, duplicating, unauthorized access and security breaches. The rapid development currently observable in information transfer and access is the consequences of the widespread usage of the Internet. When it comes to the different types of digital data, text constitutes the most complex and challenging type to which the method of text watermarking can be applied. Text watermarking constitutes a highly complex task, most of all since only limited research has been done in this field. In order to ensure the successful evaluation, analysis and implementation, a comprehensive research needs to be performed. This article studies the theory, methods and applications of text watermarking, which includes the discussion on the definition, embedding and extracting processes, requirements, approaches, and language applications of the established text watermarking methods. The article reviews in detail the new classification of text watermarking, which is through embedding process and its related issues of attacks and language applicability. Open research challenges and future directions are also investigated, with focus on its information integrity, information availability, originality preservation, information confidentiality, protection of sensitive information, document transformation, cryptography application, and language flexibility.

Chatbots have become increasingly popular in recent years, but they also present security risks and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. This systematic literature review examines the existing research relating to information security in chatbots, identifying the potential threats, proposed solutions, and future directions for research. The review finds that chatbots face various security threats, including malicious input, user profiling, contextual attacks, and data breaches, and that solutions such as blockchain technology, end-to-end encryption, and organizational controls can be used to mitigate these concerns. The review also highlights the importance of maintaining user trust and addressing privacy concerns for the successful adoption and continued use of chatbots. A taxonomy developed in this review provides a useful framework for categorizing the articles and their findings. The review concludes by identifying future research directions that include developing more sophisticated authentication and authorization mechanisms, exploring the use of privacy-enhancing technologies, and improving the detection and prevention of security threats, among others. This review contributes to the growing body of literature on information security in chatbots and can guide future research and practice in this field.

ABSTRACT Background and Motivation: The ever-expanding Internet of Things (IoT) landscape presents a double-edged sword. While it fosters interconnectedness, the vast amount of data generated by IoT devices creates a larger attack surface for cybercriminals. Intrusions in these environments can have severe consequences. To combat this growing threat, robust intrusion detection systems (IDS) are crucial. The data comprised by this attack is multivariate, highly complex, non-stationary, and nonlinear. To extract the complex patterns from this complex data, we require the most robust, optimized tools. Methods: Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have emerged as powerful tools for IDSs, offering high accuracy in detecting and preventing security breaches. This research delves into anomaly detection, a technique that identifies deviations from normal system behavior, potentially indicating attacks. Given the complexity of anomaly data, we explore methods to improve detection performance. Proposed Approach: This research investigates the design and evaluation of a novel IDS. We leverage and optimize supervised ML methods like tree-based Support Vector Machines (SVM), ensemble methods, and neural networks (NN) alongside the cutting-edge DL approach of long short-term memory (LSTM) and vision transformers (ViT). We optimized the hyperparameters of these algorithms using a robust Bayesian optimization approach. Results: The implemented ML models achieved impressive training accuracy, with Random Forest and Ensemble Bagged Tree surpassing 99.90% of accuracy, an AUC of 1.00, an F1-score, and a balanced Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 99.78%. While the initial deep learning LSTM model yielded an accuracy of 99.97%, the proposed ViT architecture significantly boosted performance with 100% of all metrics, along with a validation accuracy of 78.70% and perfect training accuracy. Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed methods for enhanced attack and intrusion detection. This improved detection capability can be instrumental in safeguarding system integrity, identifying fraudulent activity, and optimizing system performance in IoT networks.

Automatic classification of colon and lung cancer images is crucial for early detection and accurate diagnostics. However, there is room for improvement to enhance accuracy, ensuring better diagnostic precision. This study introduces two novel dense architectures (D1 and D2) and emphasizes their effectiveness in classifying colon and lung cancer from diverse images. It also highlights their resilience, efficiency, and superior performance across multiple datasets. These architectures were tested on various types of datasets, including NCT-CRC-HE-100K (set of 100,000 non-overlapping image patches from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histological images of human colorectal cancer (CRC) and normal tissue), CRC-VAL-HE-7K (set of 7180 image patches from N = 50 patients with colorectal adenocarcinoma, no overlap with patients in NCT-CRC-HE-100K), LC25000 (Lung and Colon Cancer Histopathological Image), and IQ-OTHNCCD (Iraq-Oncology Teaching Hospital/National Center for Cancer Diseases), showcasing their effectiveness in classifying colon and lung cancers from histopathological and Computed Tomography (CT) scan images. This underscores the multi-modal image classification capability of the proposed models. Moreover, the study addresses imbalanced datasets, particularly in CRC-VAL-HE-7K and IQ-OTHNCCD, with a specific focus on model resilience and robustness. To assess overall performance, the study conducted experiments in different scenarios. The D1 model achieved an impressive 99.80 % accuracy on the NCT-CRC-HE-100K dataset, with a Jaccard Index (J) of 0.8371, a Matthew's Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.9073, a Cohen's Kappa (Kp) of 0.9057, and a Critical Success Index (CSI) of 0.8213. When subjected to 10-fold cross-validation on LC25000, the D1 model averaged (avg) 99.96 % accuracy (avg J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.9993, 0.9987, 0.9853, and 0.9990), surpassing recent reported performances. Furthermore, the ensemble of D1 and D2 reached 93 % accuracy (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.7556, 0.8839, 0.8796, and 0.7140) on the IQ-OTHNCCD dataset, exceeding recent benchmarks and aligning with other reported results. Efficiency evaluations were conducted in various scenarios. For instance, training on only 10 % of LC25000 resulted in high accuracy rates of 99.19 % (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.9840, 0.9898, 0.9898, and 0.9837) (D1) and 99.30 % (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.9863, 0.9913, 0.9913, and 0.9861) (D2). In NCT-CRC-HE-100K, D2 achieved an impressive 99.53 % accuracy (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.9906, 0.9946, 0.9946, and 0.9906) with training on only 30 % of the dataset and testing on the remaining 70 %. When tested on CRC-VAL-HE-7K, D1 and D2 achieved 95 % accuracy (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.8845, 0.9455, 0.9452, and 0.8745) and 96 % accuracy (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.8926, 0.9504, 0.9503, and 0.8798), respectively, outperforming previously reported results and aligning closely with others. Lastly, training D2 on just 10 % of NCT-CRC-HE-100K and testing on CRC-VAL-HE-7K resulted in significant outperformance of InceptionV3, Xception, and DenseNet201 benchmarks, achieving an accuracy rate of 82.98 % (J, MCC, Kp, and CSI of 0.7227, 0.8095, 0.8081, and 0.6671). Finally, using explainable AI algorithms such as Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, Score-CAM, and Faster Score-CAM, along with their emphasized versions, we visualized the features from the last layer of DenseNet201 for histopathological as well as CT-scan image samples. The proposed dense models, with their multi-modality, robustness, and efficiency in cancer image classification, hold the promise of significant advancements in medical diagnostics. They have the potential to revolutionize early cancer detection and improve healthcare accessibility worldwide.

With the explosion of the generation, transmission and sharing of image data over the Internet and other unsecured networks, the need for and significance of the development of novel image encryption algorithms are unprecedented. In this research work, we propose a novel framework for image encryption that is based on two hyperchaotic maps utilized in conjunction with the single neuron model (SNM). The framework entails three successive stages, where in every stage a substitution box (S-box) is applied, then XORing with an encryption key is carried out. The S-boxes and the encryption keys are generated from the numerical solutions of the hyperchaotic maps and the SNM. The performance of the proposed framework is gauged through a number of metrics, reflecting superior performance and complete asymmetry between the plain images and their encrypted versions. The main advantages of this work are (1) vast key space and (2) high encryption efficiency. The superior key space of 2²⁵⁵¹ is the result of employing the two hyperchaotic maps, while the improved efficiency, resulting in an average encryption rate of 8.54 Mbps, is the result of using the SNM as well as the employment of optimized parallel processing techniques. In addition, the proposed encryption framework is shown to output encrypted images that pass the NIST SP 800 suite. Average achieved values for the metrics include MSE of 9626, PSNR of 8.3 dB, MAE of 80.99, entropy of 7.999, NPCR of 99.6% and UACI of 31.49%.