The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has brought about tremendous possibilities, but at the same time, it has opened up new vulnerabilities and attack vectors that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of connected systems. Developing a secure IoT ecosystem is a daunting challenge that requires a systematic and holistic approach to identify and mitigate potential security threats. Cybersecurity research considerations play a critical role in this regard, as they provide the foundation for designing and implementing security measures that can address emerging risks. To achieve a secure IoT ecosystem, scientists and engineers must first define rigorous security specifications that serve as the foundation for developing secure devices, chipsets, and networks. Developing such specifications requires an interdisciplinary approach that involves multiple stakeholders, including cybersecurity experts, network architects, system designers, and domain experts. The primary challenge in IoT security is ensuring the system can defend against both known and unknown attacks. To date, the IoT research community has identified several key security concerns related to the architecture of IoT systems. These concerns include issues related to connectivity, communication, and management protocols. This research paper provides an all-inclusive and lucid review of the current state of anomalies and security concepts related to the IoT. We classify and analyze prevalent security distresses regarding IoT’s layered architecture, including connectivity, communication, and management protocols. We establish the foundation of IoT security by examining the current attacks, threats, and cutting-edge solutions. Furthermore, we set security goals that will serve as the benchmark for assessing whether a solution satisfies the specific IoT use cases.

File fragment classification is an essential problem in digital forensics. Although several attempts had been made to solve this challenging problem, a general solution has not been found. In this work, we propose a hierarchical machine-learning-based approach with optimized support vector machines (SVM) as the base classifiers for file fragment classification. This approach consists of more general classifiers at the top level and more specialized fine-grain classifiers at the lower levels of the hierarchy. We also propose a primitive taxonomy for file types that can be used to perform hierarchical classification. We evaluate our model with a dataset of 14 file types, with 1000 fragments measuring 512 bytes from each file type derived from a subset of the publicly available Digital Corpora, the govdocs1 corpus. Our experiment shows comparable results to the present literature, with an average accuracy of 67.78% and an F1-measure of 65% using 10-fold cross-validation. We then improve on the hierarchy and find better results, with an increase in the F1-measure of 1%. Finally, we make our assessment and observations, then conclude the paper by discussing the scope of future research.

Concept mapping is a well-known pedagogical tool to help students organize, represent, and develop an understanding of a topic. The grading of concept maps is typically manual, time-consuming, and tedious, especially for a large class. Existing research mostly focuses on topological scoring based-on structural features of concept maps. However, the scoring does not achieve comparable accuracy to well-defined rubrics for manual analysis on the quality of content in a concept map. This paper presents Kastor , a new method to automate the Waterloo Rubric of scoring concept maps by quantifying the rubric’s quality assessment parameters. The evaluation is performed on a publicly-available dataset of 39 concept maps of two cybersecurity courses, i.e., digital forensics, and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system security. The evaluation results show that Kastor achieves the accuracy of around 84% and 95% (at accurate and close-to-accurate levels) for SCADA and forensics concept maps, respectively. Furthermore, Kastor ’s comparison with a topological scoring method shows improvement by around 32% and 79% on SCADA and forensics concept maps, respectively.