Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. These are particularly useful in applications, where human lives would otherwise be endangered. Multi-UAV systems can collaboratively complete missions more efficiently and economically as compared to single UAV systems. However, there are many issues to be resolved before effective use of UAVs can be made to provide stable and reliable context-specific networks. Much of the work carried out in the areas of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) does not address the unique characteristics of the UAV networks. UAV networks may vary from slow dynamic to dynamic and have intermittent links and fluid topology. While it is believed that ad hoc mesh network would be most suitable for UAV networks yet the architecture of multi-UAV networks has been an understudied area. Software defined networking (SDN) could facilitate flexible deployment and management of new services and help reduce cost, increase security and availability in networks. Routing demands of UAV networks go beyond the needs of MANETS and VANETS. Protocols are required that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, power constraints, and changing link quality. UAVs may fail and the network may get partitioned making delay and disruption tolerance an important design consideration. Limited life of the node and dynamicity of the network lead to the requirement of seamless handovers, where researchers are looking at the work done in the areas of MANETs and VANETs, but the jury is still out. As energy supply on UAVs is limited, protocols in various layers should contribute toward greening of the network. This paper surveys the work done toward all of these outstanding issues, relating to this new class of networks, so as to spur further research in these areas.

It is critical to secure the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices because of potentially devastating consequences in case of an attack. Machine learning and big data analytics are the two powerful leverages for analyzing and securing the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. By extension, these techniques can help improve the security of the IIoT systems as well. In this paper, we first present common IIoT protocols and their associated vulnerabilities. Then, we run a cyber-vulnerability assessment and discuss the utilization of machine learning in countering these susceptibilities. Following that, a literature review of the available intrusion detection solutions using machine learning models is presented. Finally, we discuss our case study, which includes details of a real-world testbed that we have built to conduct cyber-attacks and to design an intrusion detection system (IDS). We deploy backdoor, command injection, and Structured Query Language (SQL) injection attacks against the system and demonstrate how a machine learning based anomaly detection system can perform well in detecting these attacks. We have evaluated the performance through representative metrics to have a fair point of view on the effectiveness of the methods.

Network virtualization is the key to the current and future success of cloud computing. In this article, we explain key reasons for virtualization and briefly explain several of the networking technologies that have been developed recently or are being developed in various standards bodies. In particular, we explain software defined networking, which is the key to network programmability. We also illustrate SDN¿s applicability with our own research on OpenADN - application delivery in a multi-cloud environment.

The rapid evolutions in microcomputing, mini-hardware manufacturing, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications have enabled novel Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions to reshape many networking applications. Healthcare systems are among these applications that have been revolutionized with IoT, introducing an IoT branch known as the Internet-of-Medical Things (IoMT) systems. IoMT systems allow remote monitoring of patients with chronic diseases. Thus, it can provide timely patients’ diagnostic that can save their life in case of emergencies. However, security in these critical systems is a major challenge facing their wide utilization. In this article, we present state-of-the-art techniques to secure IoMT systems’ data during collection, transmission, and storage. We comprehensively overview IoMT systems’ potential attacks, including physical and network attacks. Our findings reveal that most security techniques do not consider various types of attacks. Hence, we propose a security framework that combines several security techniques. The framework covers IoMT security requirements and can mitigate most of its known attacks.

This article surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy and access control list (ACL), data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources along with their ownership and utilization over the network. Integrity helps in verifying that the data has not been modified or altered. These services are currently managed by centralized controllers, for example, a certificate authority. Therefore, the services are prone to attacks on the centralized controller. On the other hand, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can help resolve many of the problems with centralization. The objectives of this paper are to give insights on the use of security services for current applications, to highlight the state of the art techniques that are currently used to provide these services, to describe their challenges, and to discuss how the blockchain technology can resolve these challenges. Further, several blockchain-based approaches providing such security services are compared thoroughly. Challenges associated with using blockchain-based security services are also discussed to spur further research in this area.