Deep learning (DL) has been widely proposed for botnet attack detection in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, the traditional centralized DL (CDL) method cannot be used to detect the previously unknown (zero-day) botnet attack without breaching the data privacy rights of the users. In this article, we propose the federated DL (FDL) method for zero-day botnet attack detection to avoid data privacy leakage in IoT-edge devices. In this method, an optimal deep neural network (DNN) architecture is employed for network traffic classification. A model parameter server remotely coordinates the independent training of the DNN models in multiple IoT-edge devices, while the federated averaging (FedAvg) algorithm is used to aggregate local model updates. A global DNN model is produced after a number of communication rounds between the model parameter server and the IoT-edge devices. The zero-day botnet attack scenarios in IoT-edge devices is simulated with the Bot-IoT and N-BaIoT data sets. Experiment results show that the FDL model: 1) detects zero-day botnet attacks with high classification performance; 2) guarantees data privacy and security; 3) has low communication overhead; 4) requires low-memory space for the storage of training data; and 5) has low network latency. Therefore, the FDL method outperformed CDL, localized DL, and distributed DL methods in this application scenario.

Managing the integrity of products and processes in a multi-stakeholder supply chain environment is a significant challenge. Many current solutions suffer from data fragmentation, lack of reliable provenance, and diverse protocol regulations across multiple distributions and processes. Amongst other solutions, Blockchain has emerged as a leading technology, since it provides secure traceability and control, immutability, and trust creation among stakeholders in a low cost IT solution. Although Blockchain is making a significant impact in many areas, there are many impediments to its widespread adoption in supply chains. This article is the first survey of its kind, with detailed analysis of the challenges and future directions in Blockchain-enabled supply chains. We review the existing digitalization of the supply chain including the role of GS1 standards and technologies. Current use cases and startups in the field of Blockchain-enabled supply chains are reviewed and presented in tabulated form. Technical and non-technical challenges in the adoption of Blockchain for supply chain applications are critically analyzed, along with the suitability of various consensus algorithms for applications in the supply chain. The tools and technologies in the Blockchain ecosystem are depicted and analyzed. Some key areas as future research directions are also identified which must be addressed to realize mass adoption of Blockchain-based in supply chain traceability. Finally, we propose MOHBSChain, a novel framework for Blockchain-enabled supply chains.

The proliferation of inter-connected devices in critical industries, such as healthcare and power grid, is changing the perception of what constitutes critical infrastructure. The rising interconnectedness of new critical industries is driven by the growing demand for seamless access to information as the world becomes more mobile and connected and as the Internet of Things (IoT) grows. Critical industries are essential to the foundation of today’s society, and interruption of service in any of these sectors can reverberate through other sectors and even around the globe. In today’s hyper-connected world, the critical infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever to cyber threats, whether state sponsored, criminal groups or individuals. As the number of interconnected devices increases, the number of potential access points for hackers to disrupt critical infrastructure grows. This new attack surface emerges from fundamental changes in the critical infrastructure of organizations technology systems. This paper aims to improve understanding the challenges to secure future digital infrastructure while it is still evolving. After introducing the infrastructure generating big data, the functionality-based fog architecture is defined. In addition, a comprehensive review of security requirements in fog-enabled IoT systems is presented. Then, an in-depth analysis of the fog computing security challenges and big data privacy and trust concerns in relation to fog-enabled IoT are given. We also discuss blockchain as a key enabler to address many security related issues in IoT and consider closely the complementary interrelationships between blockchain and fog computing. In this context, this work formalizes the task of securing big data and its scope, provides a taxonomy to categories threats to fog-based IoT systems, presents a comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art contributions in the field according to their security service and recommends promising research directions for future investigations.

Deep Learning (DL) is an efficient method for botnet attack detection. However, the volume of network traffic data and memory space required is usually large. It is, therefore, almost impossible to implement the DL method in memory-constrained IoT devices. In this paper, we reduce the feature dimensionality of large-scale IoT network traffic data using the encoding phase of Long Short-Term Memory Autoencoder (LAE). In order to classify network traffic samples correctly, we analyse the long-term inter-related changes in the low-dimensional feature set produced by LAE using deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM). Extensive experiments are performed with the BoT-IoT dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid DL method. Results show that LAE significantly reduced the memory space required for large-scale network traffic data storage by 91.89%, and it outperformed state-of-the-art feature dimensionality reduction methods by 18.92-27.03%. Despite the significant reduction in feature size, the deep BLSTM model demonstrates robustness against model under-fitting and over-fitting. It also achieves good generalisation ability in binary and multi-class classification scenarios.