For the betterment of human life, smart Internet of Things (IoT)-based systems are needed for the new era. IoT is evolving swiftly for its applications in the smart environment, including smart airports, smart buildings, smart manufacturing, smart homes, etc. A smart home environment includes resource-constrained devices that are interlinked, monitored, controlled, and analyzed with the help of the Internet. In a distributed smart environment, devices with low and high computational power work together and require authenticity. Therefore, a computationally efficient and secure protocol is needed. The authentication protocol is employed to ensure that authorized smart devices communicate with the smart environment and are accessible by authorized personnel only. We have designed a novel, lightweight secure protocol for a smart home environment. The introduced novel protocol can withstand well-known attacks and is effective with respect to computation and communication complexities. Comparative, formal, and informal analyses were conducted to draw the comparison between the introduced protocol and previous state-of-the-art protocols.

With easy access to the Internet and the popularity of online review platforms, the volume of crowd-sourced reviews is continuously rising. Many studies have acknowledged the importance of reviews in making purchase decisions. The consumer’s feedback plays a vital role in the success or failure of a business. The number of studies on predicting helpfulness and ranking reviews is increasing due to the increasing importance of reviews. However, previous studies have mainly focused on predicting helpfulness of “reviews” and “reviewer”. This study aimed to profile cumulative helpfulness received by a business and then use it for business ranking. The reliability of proposed cumulative helpfulness for ranking was illustrated using a dataset of 1,92,606 businesses from Yelp.com. Seven business and four reviewer features were identified to predict cumulative helpfulness using Linear Regression (LNR), Gradient Boosting (GB), and Neural Network (NNet). The dataset was subdivided into 12 datasets based on business categories to predict the cumulative helpfulness. The results reported that business features, including star rating, review count and days since the last review are the most important features among all business categories. Moreover, using reviewer features along with business features improves the prediction performance for seven datasets. Lastly, the implications of this study are discussed for researchers, review platforms and businesses.