Recent Advances in the Internet of Things (IoT): Architecture, Protocols and Security

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Computing and Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 July 2023) | Viewed by 9128

Special Issue Editor


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Tianjin Key Laboratory of Advanced Networking (TANK), College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China
Interests: network security; wireless network; networking protocol; Internet of things (IoT); blockchain; cryptography protocol
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As an emerging technology, the Internet of things (IoT) has become popular. The Internet of things (IoT) is aimed at enabling the interconnection and integration of the physical world and cyber space. It represents the trend of future networking and leads the third wave of the IT industry revolution.

This Special Issue aims at publishing a collection of research contributions illustrating the recent achievements in all aspects of the development, studying, and understanding of the Internet of things. We hope to establish a collection of papers that will be of interest to scholars in the field. Contributions in the form of full papers, reviews, and communications about related topics are very welcome.

Prof. Dr. Guangquan Xu
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Internet of things (IoT)
  • privacy and security
  • blockchain
  • cryptography protocol

Published Papers (5 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

17 pages, 1333 KiB  
Article
Blockchain-Based Licensed Spectrum Fair Distribution Method towards 6G-Envisioned Communications
by Mengjiang Liu, Qianhong Wu, Yiming Hei and Dawei Li
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(16), 9231; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13169231 - 14 Aug 2023
Viewed by 774
Abstract
Spectrum distribution is a classical licensed spectrum accessing method in mobile communication networks. The licensed idle spectrum resources are authorized and distributed from spectrum owners to mobile users. However, the exponential growth of user capacity brings excessive load pressure on the traditional centralized [...] Read more.
Spectrum distribution is a classical licensed spectrum accessing method in mobile communication networks. The licensed idle spectrum resources are authorized and distributed from spectrum owners to mobile users. However, the exponential growth of user capacity brings excessive load pressure on the traditional centralized network architecture. With a lack of sufficient supervision and penalty measures, dishonest behaviors of spectrum owners and spectrum users will lead to an unfair status in the distribution process. As a result, the honest participants’ interest will be harmed. As an important supporting infrastructure of Internet of Things technology, 6G cannot completely follow the existing spectrum distribution method. Towards 6G network spectrum distribution, a blockchain-based licensed spectrum fair distribution method is proposed. A lightweight consensus mechanism named proof of trust (PoT) is applied to reduce computational power consumption and consensus time overhead. We deploy the method on the Ethereum test chain; a theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate the fairness, effectiveness and security of the method. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

15 pages, 3237 KiB  
Article
Reference Broadcast-Based Secure Time Synchronization for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
by Zhaowei Wang, Dehua Sun and Chen Yu
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(16), 9223; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13169223 - 14 Aug 2023
Viewed by 660
Abstract
Security is an important factor that cannot be neglected in the design of time synchronization algorithms since industrial wireless sensor networks are prone to attacks against physical nodes and communication links. The Sybil attack is an intelligent attack with a high destructive capacity [...] Read more.
Security is an important factor that cannot be neglected in the design of time synchronization algorithms since industrial wireless sensor networks are prone to attacks against physical nodes and communication links. The Sybil attack is an intelligent attack with a high destructive capacity in pretending multiple identities and broadcasting illegitimate messages to destroy the network operation. Existing secure time synchronization algorithms mostly focus on distributed protocols; however, they pay less attention to Sybil attacks and centralized network time synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel reference broadcast-based secure time synchronization (RSTS) for industrial wireless sensor networks with a time source against Sybil attacks. Different from previous protocols, in converging the network structure and the clock status, RSTS employs a public neighbor forwarding mechanism based on reference broadcast to filter the illegal time information automatically. Instead of establishing a table with timestamps of packet transmission and receipt, the least square linear regression is utilized to estimate the compensation relative to the source node with the recorded time and calculated time difference in receiving packets. The simulation results demonstrate that RSTS is resilient to Sybil attacks as well as message manipulation attacks in comparison with existing algorithms. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

21 pages, 1394 KiB  
Article
TMVDPatch: A Trusted Multi-View Decision System for Security Patch Identification
by Xin Zhou, Jianmin Pang, Zheng Shan, Feng Yue, Fudong Liu, Jinlong Xu, Junchao Wang, Wenfu Liu and Guangming Liu
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(6), 3938; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13063938 - 20 Mar 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1327
Abstract
Nowadays, the time lag between vulnerability discovery and the timely remediation of the vulnerability is extremely important to the current state of cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the silent security patch presents a significant challenge. Despite related work having been conducted in this area, the patch [...] Read more.
Nowadays, the time lag between vulnerability discovery and the timely remediation of the vulnerability is extremely important to the current state of cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the silent security patch presents a significant challenge. Despite related work having been conducted in this area, the patch identification lacks interpretability. To solve this problem, this paper first proposes a trusted multi-view security patch identification system called TMVDPatch. The system obtains evidence from message commit and code diff views respectively, and models the uncertainty of each view based on the D-S evidence theory, thereby providing credible and interpretable security patch identification results. On this basis, this paper performs weighted training on the original evidence based on the grey relational analysis method to improve the ability to make credible decisions based on multi-views. Experimental results show that the multi-view learning method exhibits excellent capabilities in terms of the complementary information provided by control dependency and data dependency, and the model shows strong robustness across different hyperparameter settings. TMVDPatch outperforms other models in all evaluation metrics, achieving an accuracy of 85.29% and a F1 score of 0.9001, clearly verifying the superiority of TMVDPatch in terms of accuracy, scientificity, and reliability. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

13 pages, 3008 KiB  
Article
A DDoS Detection and Prevention System for IoT Devices and Its Application to Smart Home Environment
by Khalid Al-Begain, Murad Khan, Basil Alothman, Chibli Joumaa and Ebrahim Alrashed
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12(22), 11853; https://doi.org/10.3390/app122211853 - 21 Nov 2022
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1941
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an integral part of our daily life as it is growing in many fields, such as engineering, e-health, smart homes, smart buildings, agriculture, weather forecasting, etc. However, the growing number of IoT devices and their weak [...] Read more.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an integral part of our daily life as it is growing in many fields, such as engineering, e-health, smart homes, smart buildings, agriculture, weather forecasting, etc. However, the growing number of IoT devices and their weak configuration raise many security challenges such as designing protocols to protect these devices from various types of attacks such as using them as bots for DDoS attacks on target servers. In order to protect IoT devices from enslavement as bots in a home environment, we develop a lightweight security model consisting of various security countermeasures. The working mechanism of the proposed security model is presented in a two-part experimental scenario. Firstly, we describe the working mechanism of how an attacker infects an IoT device and then spreads the infection to the entire network. Secondly, we propose a set of mechanisms consisting of filtration, detection of abnormal traffic generated from IoT devices, screening, and publishing the abnormal traffic patterns to the rest of the home routers on the network. We tested the proposed scheme by infecting an IoT device with malicious code. The infected device then infects the rest of the IoT devices in its network and launches a DDoS attack by receiving attack-triggering commands from the botmaster. Finally, the proposed detection mechanism is used to detect the abnormal traffic and block the connection of infected devices in the network. The results reveal that the proposed system blocks abnormal traffic if the packets from an IoT device exceeded a threshold of 50 packets. Similarly, the network packet statistics show that, in the event of an unwanted situation, the detection mechanism runs smoothly and avoids any possible delays in the network. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

19 pages, 596 KiB  
Article
Blockchain-Based Multiple Authorities Attribute-Based Encryption for EHR Access Control Scheme
by Xiaohui Yang and Chenshuo Zhang
Appl. Sci. 2022, 12(21), 10812; https://doi.org/10.3390/app122110812 - 25 Oct 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2186
Abstract
The Internet of Medical Things (IOMT) is critical in improving electronic device precision, dependability, and productivity. Researchers are driving the development of digital healthcare systems by connecting available medical resources and healthcare services. However, there are concerns about the security of sharing patients’ [...] Read more.
The Internet of Medical Things (IOMT) is critical in improving electronic device precision, dependability, and productivity. Researchers are driving the development of digital healthcare systems by connecting available medical resources and healthcare services. However, there are concerns about the security of sharing patients’ electronic health records. In response to the prevailing problems such as difficulties in sharing medical records between different hospitals and patients’ inability to grasp the usage of their medical records, we propose a patient-controlled and cloud-chain collaborative multi-authority attribute-based encryption for EHR sharing with verifiable outsourcing decryption and hiding access policies (VO-PH-MAABE). This scheme uses blockchain to store the validation parameters by utilizing its immutable, which data users use to verify the correctness of third-party outsourcing decryption results. In addition, we use policy-hiding technology to protect data privacy so that data security is guaranteed. Moreover, we use blockchain technology to establish trust among multiple authorities and utilize Shamir secret sharing and smart contracts to compute keys or tokens for attributes managed across multiple administrative domains, which avoids a single point of failure and reduces communication and computation overhead on the data user side. Finally, the ciphertext indistinguishability security under the chosen plaintext attack is demonstrated under the stochastic prediction model and compared with other schemes in terms of functionality, communication overhead, and computation overhead. The experimental results show the effectiveness of this scheme. Full article
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop