Delay-aware distributed program caching for IoT-edge networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) has had a considerable influence on our daily lives by enabling enhanced connection of devices, systems, and services that extends beyond machine-to-machine interactions and encompasses a wide range of protocols, domains, and applications. However, despite privacy concerns shown by IoT users, little has been done to reduce and protect individual information exposure. It is extremely difficult to mitigate IoT devices from reidentification threats which is why it is still a major challenge for IoT users to securely protect their information. The trust controls how we regulate privacy in our IoT platforms in the same way that it governs personal relationships. As IoT devices become increasingly linked, more data is shared across individuals, businesses, governments, and ecosystems. Technologies, sensors, machines, data, and cloud connections all rely largely on trust relationships that have been formed. With the rapid growth of additional types of IoT devices that are being introduced, it, therefore, expands privacy concerns and is difficult to develop trust with an IoT system or device without the option to regulate information privacy settings. Privacy has always been a barrier for many devices as they race for the early adoption of IoT technologies. Several Internet of Things devices or systems will continue to pose privacy threats. As a result, the main objective of this study was to examine the individual understanding of privacy and to promote information privacy protection awareness not only to IoT users but also to organizations that use IoT devices or platforms to run their day-to-day business operations. Furthermore, the objective extends to compare user knowledge and concerns about IoT privacy, as well as to identify any common attitudes and variances. However, in terms of enhancing individuals’ knowledge, an artifact was developed to educate and enhance information privacy awareness among IoT users. A pre- and postquestionnaire was generated to test and validate user knowledge regarding information privacy protection in IoT. The study was conducted using a quantitative research method. Findings indicate that IoT users’ awareness of information privacy protection turned out to be average, suggesting a need for education and awareness. Several participants stated that information privacy protection awareness is required within the community to educate, raise awareness, eliminate human error, and enable individuals to be conscious of their privacy when surfing the Internet.

Mobile Internet of Things (IoT) users possess dynamic service requirements in a real IoT system and always try to get services from trusted entities, which we term as facility nodes. However, the trustworthiness of the facility nodes varies from location to location, depending upon the service quality and user feedback. Therefore, a service provider may have different trust scores for its deployed facility nodes in different locations. It is always crucial for an IoT user to ensure that service has been taken from trustworthy nodes. In this article, we consider an IoT service provisioning architecture, where an IoT user requests services from nearby trusted nodes that are deployed by service providers other than the user's own registered service provider. To serve the requests from these unregistered users, the facility nodes incur additional costs. Furthermore, due to heterogeneous service requirements, IoT users prefer composite microservices from a set of facility nodes. In such cases, it is difficult to design a pricing scheme to incentivize the facility nodes. Therefore, we propose a pricing mechanism based on a two-stage Stackelberg game and analyze the interactions between the IoT users and the facility nodes, while considering the trust scores and service charges. In the game model, the facility nodes act as the leaders, and the IoT users act as the followers. Using backward induction, we analyze the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium. Finally, the numerical results based on the mobility traces of a real map show that the proposed scheme incentivizes both the IoT users and the facility nodes, while ensuring trusted services.

Billions of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) collect sensitive data about people, creating data privacy risks and breach vulnerabilities. Accordingly, data privacy preservation is vital for sustaining the proliferation of IoT services. In particular, privacy-preserving IoT connects devices embedded with sensors and maintains the data privacy of people. However, common misconceptions exist among IoT researchers, service providers, and users about privacy-preserving IoT. This article refutes five common misconceptions about privacy-preserving IoT concerning data sensing and innovation, regulations, and privacy safeguards. For example, IoT users have a common misconception that no data collection is permitted in data privacy regulations. On the other hand, IoT service providers often think data privacy impedes IoT sensing and innovation. Addressing these misconceptions is essential for making progress in privacy-preserving IoT. This article refutes such common misconceptions using real-world experiments and online survey research. First, the experiments indicate that data privacy should not be perceived as an impediment in IoT but as an opportunity to increase customer retention and trust. Second, privacy-preserving IoT is not exclusively a regulatory problem but also a functional necessity that must be incorporated in the early stages of any IoT design. Third, people do not trust services that lack sufficient privacy measures. Fourth, conventional data security principles do not guarantee data privacy protection, and data privacy can be exposed even if data is securely stored. Fifth, IoT decentralization does not attain absolute privacy preservation.

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks enhances data communication. The demand for data communication rapidly increases, which calls the emerging edge computing paradigm. Edge computing plays a major role in IoT networks and provides computing resources close to the users. Moving the services from the cloud to users increases the communication, storage, and network features of the users. However, massive IoT networks require a large spectrum of resources for their computations. In order to attain this, resource scheduling algorithms are employed in edge computing. Statistical and machine learning-based resource scheduling algorithms have evolved in the past decade, but the performance can be improved if resource requirements are analyzed further. A deep learning-based resource scheduling in edge computing IoT networks is presented in this research work using deep bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) and convolutional neural network algorithms. Before scheduling, the IoT users are categorized into clusters using a spectral clustering algorithm. The proposed model simulation analysis verifies the performance in terms of delay, response time, execution time, and resource utilization. Existing resource scheduling algorithms like a genetic algorithm (GA), Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO), and LSTM-based models are compared with the proposed model to validate the superior performances.

A network of linked devices that can gather, process, and exchange data is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). It delivers several benefits such as convenience, efficiency and automation. However, IoT also poses significant security concerns that necessity to be describe like the heterogeneity and diversity of IoT devices with different hardware, software and communication protocols. Now a days the large scale and complexity of IoT systems, which may involve multiple stakeholders, domains and layers. The limited resources and capabilities of IoT devices, which may affect their ability to perform security functions such as encryption, authentication and update. The vital and evolving features of IoT environments, which may introduce new threats and vulnerabilities over time. These challenges require novel and holistic approaches to ensure that privacy and security of IoT systems and its users. With the develop of security standards and best practices for IoT devices and systems it should include Implementation of security by design and security by default principles for IoT development and deployment by adopting risk-based and adaptive security mechanisms for IoT management, operation and enhanced security awareness and education among IoT users and stakeholders.

Privacy leakage of Internet of Things (IoT) has become a great challenge with the popularity of IoT services through mobile networks, such as smart homes, wearables, and healthcare. While previous work summarized general structures to analyze IoT privacy and provide case studies of specific devices or scenarios, it is still challenging to conduct a comprehensive and systematic quantification study of large-scale IoT privacy leakage in real world. To combine systematic analyses with real-world measurements, we provide a method to quantify IoT privacy leakage on a large-scale mobile network traffic data set containing 47651 IoT devices. We generate privacy fingerprints and attribute them to a privacy quantification framework. The framework is constructed based on the semantics of multiple privacy sensitive markers selected from the traffic along with the involved network entity types in IoT (i.e., user, device, and platform), and the fingerprints are generated from sensitive information extracted in the traffic via their markers. Our quantification shows that IoT users, devices, and platforms have considerable risks, respectively. Moreover, IoT devices have a larger scale of privacy leakage than users and platforms, and they perform different daily patterns on privacy leakage following their working conditions. In addition, we present three case studies on the leakage of location information, application calling, and voice service, which illustrate that a third party can profile a network entity in both cyberspace and physical space.

Internet of Things (IoT) is flourished in recent years, and a large of IoT devices are in our life. In general, processing time is an important issue for real-time IoT devices. Due to the characteristic of edge computing, edge computing could process the tasks with real-time requirements, and reduce the burden of clouds. Because the computing resource is limited and heterogeneous in edge nodes, how to assign tasks to suitable edge nodes is an important issue. So, this work proposes a new scheduling approach, which is called Crucial-Resource Scheduling Strategy (CRSS), for task allocation. The proposed approach adopts the multi-dimensional packing algorithm to increase the resource utilization in heterogeneous edge nodes. Experimental results show that CRSS effectively increases resource utilization in edge nodes, resulting in placing more tasks on heterogeneous nodes.

The computational power of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is usually low, which makes it necessary to process data and extract relevant information on devices with higher processing capacity. Edge Computing emerged as a complementary solution to cloud computing, providing devices at the network edge with computational resources to handle the data processing and analysis that constrained IoT devices eventually cannot perform. This solution allows data processing closer to the IoT devices, reducing latency for IoT applications. However, the resource constraints of edge nodes, which have lower computational power than the cloud nodes, make resource allocation and processing massive requests challenging. This study proposes an edge resource allocation mechanism based on task priority and machine learning. The proposed approach efficiently allocates resources for IoT requests based on their task priorities while monitoring the resource consumption of edge nodes. This study evaluates the performance of different classification algorithms by using well-known metrics for classifying models. The most efficient classifier achieved an accuracy of 92% and a precision of 90%. The results indicate good performance when using this classifier in the evaluated approach. The proposed mechanism demonstrated that resource management can be done more efficiently with significantly lower resource utilization when compared to an allocation method based only on distance. The study tested different scenarios regarding the number of requests, edge nodes, and a proposed failure mechanism to schedule failed node tasks to functional nodes. This failure control mechanism is a significant contribution of the proposal. Therefore, the proposed method in this study can become a valuable tool for efficient resource management with reduced computational cost and efficient resource allocation.

Edge computing is a type of distributed computing that was designed especially for Internet of Things (IoT) users to provide computational resources and data management nearby to users' devices. Introducing edge computing for IoT networks has reduced the bandwidth and latency issue while handling real-time applications. The major benefit of edge computing is that it reduces the communication overhead between IoT user and server. Integrating IoT in our daily life has attracted researchers towards its performance management such as complexity minimization, latency minimization, memory management, energy consumption minimization, etc. The paper focuses on deep reinforcement learning to minimize the computational complexity at IoT user end. The task offloading decision process is designed using Q-Learning that minimizes the system cost and curse of high dimensional data.

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the classic centralized cloud computing paradigm faces several challenges such as high latency, low capacity and network failure. To address these challenges, fog computing brings the cloud closer to IoT devices. The fog provides IoT data processing and storage locally at IoT devices instead of sending them to the cloud. In contrast to the cloud, the fog provides services with faster response and greater quality. Therefore, fog computing may be considered the best choice to enable the IoT to provide efficient and secure services for many IoT users. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of fog computing and its integration with the IoT by highlighting the benefits and implementation challenges. This review will also focus on the architecture of the fog and emerging IoT applications that will be improved by using the fog model. Finally, open issues and future research directions regarding fog computing and the IoT are discussed.

Federated learning (FL) is emerging as a powerful paradigm for distributed data mining in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) big data. It addresses privacy concerns associated with data outsourcing by enabling local data training and knowledge (i.e., model) sharing. However, simplistic local knowledge sharing can inadvertently expose user privacy to advanced attacks, such as model inversion or gradient leakage. Furthermore, achieving fine-grained and personalized privacy protection for IoT users remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel solution called hierarchical blockchain-empowered cloud-edge orchestrated federated learning (HBCE-FL) to address these challenges. HBCE-FL is designed to provide secure, intelligent, and distributed data analysis for IoT users. To tackle FL’s privacy issues, we develop a multi-level access control encryption and blockchain-based approach for sharing IoT knowledge within the HBCE-FL framework. Our approach classifies IoT users into different levels based on their individual privacy requirements, enabling fine-grained privacy protection. The blockchain is employed for identity authentication, key management, and message sanitization. For scenarios involving IoT users with non-IID data, we integrate federated multi-task learning into HBCE-FL to ensure fairness, robustness, and privacy. Finally, we conduct experiments using classic MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets to validate our approach. The experimental results illustrate that HBCE-FL effectively achieves personalized privacy-preserving FL without losing IoT data availability. Regardless of whether IoT data are homogeneous or heterogeneous, our approach enhances model accuracy and convergence rates by enabling secure IoT knowledge access and sharing for IoT users.

Cloud-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) has become the core infrastructure of smart society since it solves the computational power, storage, and collaboration bottlenecks of traditional IoT through resource decoupling and capability complementarity. The development of a graph database and cloud-assisted IoT promotes the research of privacy preserving graph computation. We propose a secure graph intersection scheme that supports multi-user intersection queries in cloud-assisted IoT in this article. The existing work on graph encryption for intersection queries is designed for a single user, which will bring high computational and communication costs for data owners, or cause the risk of secret key leaking if directly applied to multi-user scenarios. To solve these problems, we employ the proxy re-encryption (PRE) that transforms the encrypted graph data with a re-encryption key to enable the graph intersection results to be decrypted by an authorized IoT user using their own private key, while data owners only encrypt their graph data on IoT devices once. In our scheme, different IoT users can query for the intersection of graphs flexibly, while data owners do not need to perform encryption operations every time an IoT user makes a query. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the graph intersection scheme in this paper is secure and practical.

The growth of IoT technology is rapidly progressing and has changed people’s lives in society through escalating automation, connectivity, and decision-making in several areas. This technological change has brought about various security threats and risk factors due to the elusive nature of IoT devices and the general absence of a set standard of security features to adopt. This paper focuses on threats to IoT environments and provides realistic approaches to enriching device protection. The theoretical framework for the study is constructed on the grounds of reviewing the current literature and analyzing the quantitative questionnaire results among IoT users and cybersecurity specialists. Some risks include poor authentication, outdated firmware, and low awareness. Regression and ANOVA confirm that factors such as professional experience, knowledge of threats, and updated firmware are also significant to users’ decisions to spend on IoT security solutions for their gadgets. On the other hand, manufacturers’ trust and data breach concerns do not display much prognostic significance. It, therefore, advocates for multiple levels of security measures, awareness, and legal requirements that set a minimum bar of compliance. The study's recommendations include a mixture of IT or technical controls, organizational deployments or behavioral modifications, and policy approaches toward creating a competent and secure IoT network.

Edge computing provides cloud services at the edge of the network for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It aims to address low latency of the network and alleviates data processing of the cloud. This “cloud-edge-device” paradigm brings convenience as well as challenges for location-privacy protection of the IoT. In the edge computing environment, the fixed edge equipment supplies computing services for adjacent IoT devices. Therefore, edge computing suffers location leakage as the connection and authentication records imply the location of IoT devices. This article focuses on the location awareness in the edge computing environment. We adopt the “deniability” of authentication to prevent location leakage when IoT devices connect to the edge nodes. In our solution, an efficient deniable authentication based on a two-user ring signature is constructed. The robustness of authentication makes the fixed edge equipment accept the legal end devices. Besides, the deniability of authentication cannot convince any third party that the fact of this authentication occurred as communication transcript is no longer an evidence for this connection. Therefore, it handles the inherent location risk in edge computing. Compared to efficient deniable authentications, our protocol saves 10.728% and 14.696% computational cost, respectively.

The combination of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting-reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) and nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) brings the necessary full-space degrees of freedom and spatial multiplexing gains for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. The inherent network heterogeneity and sharing of wireless channels may however increase the exposure of the information interactions to the third party. To address this issue, we propose a covert communication scheme in STAR-RIS assisted NOMA networks over Nakagami-m fading channels, where both downlink and uplink IoT scenarios are considered. Under the NOMA protocol with imperfect successive interference cancelation (SIC), an IoT access point interacts with two IoT users aided by a STAR-RIS without being detected by two wardens. In this scenario, the two IoT users are located on both sides of the STAR-RIS which adopts coherent phase shifting and operates according to the mode switching protocol. To evaluate the wardens’ detection performance, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is used. Furthermore, the cascaded channel gains of IoT users and wardens are, respectively, characterized as Gamma and complex Gaussian random variables. The closed-form expressions of the expectations of KL divergence and the interruption probabilities for downlink and uplink are derived. To further improve the performance, we formulate the effective covert rate maximization as the joint optimization problems of the transmit power and power allocation coefficient for downlink and uplink, subject to the constraints for covertness, reliability and power budget, which are, respectively, resolved analytically. Extensive simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme improves covertness compared with the benchmarks.