We have several issues in most current supply chain management systems. Consumers want to spend money on environmentally friendly products, but they are seldomly informed of the environmental contributions of the suppliers. Meanwhile, each supplier seeks to recover the costs for the environmental contributions to re-invest them into further contributions. Instead, in most current supply chains, the reward for each supplier is not clearly defined and fairly distributed. To address these issues, we propose a supply-chain contribution management platform for fair reward distribution called ‘Advanced Ledger.’ This platform records suppliers' environ-mental contribution trails, receives rewards from consumers in exchange for trail-backed fungible tokens, and fairly distributes the rewards to each supplier based on the contribution trails. In this paper, we overview the architecture of Advanced Ledger and 11 technical features, including decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) based contribution verification, contribution concealment, negative-valued tokens, fair reward distribution, atomic rewarding, and layer-2 rewarding. We then study the requirements and candidates of the smart contract platforms for implementing Advanced Ledger. Finally, we introduce a use case called ‘ESG token’ built on the Advanced Ledger architecture.

Ensuring sustainable sourcing of crude materials and production of goods is a pressing problem in consideration of the growing world population and rapid climate change. Supply-chain traceability systems based on distributed ledgers can help to enforce sustainability policies like production limits. We propose two mutually independent distributed-ledger-based protocols that enable public verifiability of policy compliance. They are designed for different supply-chain scenarios and use different privacy-enhancing technologies in order to protect confidential supply-chain data: secret sharing and homomorphic encryption. The protocols can be added to existing supply-chain traceability solutions with minor effort. They ensure confidentiality of transaction details and offer public verifiability of producers' compliance, enabling institutions and even end consumers to evaluate sustainability of supply chains. Through extensive theoretical and empirical evaluation, we show that both protocols perform verification for lifelike supply-chain scenarios in perfectly practical time.

Blockchain has emerged as a leading technological innovation because of its indisputable safety and services in a distributed setup. Applications of blockchain are rising covering varied fields such as financial transactions, supply chains, maintenance of land records, etc. Supply chain management is a potential area that can immensely benefit from blockchain technology (BCT) along with smart contracts, making supply chain operations more reliable, safer, and trustworthy for all its stakeholders. However, there are numerous challenges such as scalability, coordination, and safety-related issues which are yet to be resolved. Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a completely new dimension for scalability, cooperation, and coordination in distributed culture. MAS consists of a collection of automated agents who can perform a specific task intelligently in a distributed environment. In this work, an attempt has been made to develop a framework for implementing a multi-agent system for a large-scale product manufacturing supply chain with blockchain technology wherein the agents communicate with each other to monitor and organize supply chain operations. This framework eliminates many of the weaknesses of supply chain management systems. The overall goal is to enhance the performance of SCM in terms of transparency, traceability, trustworthiness, and resilience by using MAS and BCT.

Blockchain has the potential to enhance supply chain management systems by providing stronger assurance in transparency and traceability of traded commodities. However, blockchain does not overcome the inherent issues of data trust in IoT enabled supply chains. Recent proposals attempt to tackle these issues by incorporating generic trust and reputation management methods, which do not entirely address the complex challenges of supply chain operations and suffers from significant drawbacks. In this paper, we propose DeTRM, a decentralised trust and reputation management solution for supply chains, which considers complex supply chain operations, such as splitting or merging of product lots, to provide a coherent trust management solution. We resolve data trust by correlating empirical data from adjacent sensor nodes, using which the authenticity of data can be assessed. We design a consortium blockchain, where smart contracts play a significant role in quantifying trustworthiness as a numerical score from different perspectives. A proof-of-concept implementation in Hyperledger Fabric shows that DeTRM is feasible and only incurs relatively small overheads compared to the baseline.

Food supply chain is a complex but necessary food production arrangement needed by the global community to maintain sustainability and food security. For the past few years, entities being a part of the food processing system have usually taken food supply chain for granted, they forget that just one disturbance in the chain can lead to poisoning, scarcity, or increased prices. This continually affects the vulnerable among society, including impoverished individuals and small restaurants/grocers. The food supply chain has been expanded across the globe involving many more entities, making the supply chain longer and more problematic making the traditional logistics pattern unable to match the expectations of customers. Food supply chains involve many challenges like lack of traceability and communication, supply of fraudulent food products and failure in monitoring warehouses. Therefore there is a need for a system that ensures authentic information about the product, a reliable trading mechanism. In this paper, we have proposed a comprehensive solution to make the supply chain consumer centric by using Blockchain. Blockchain technology in the food industry applies in a mindful and holistic manner to verify and certify the quality of food products by presenting authentic information about the products from the initial stages. The problem formulation, simulation and performance analysis are also discussed in this research work.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) (a non-profit foundation that works to improve computer security) considered, in 2021, injection as one of the biggest risks in web applications. SQL injection despite being a vulnerability easily avoided has a great insurgency in web applications, and its impact is quite nefarious. To identify and exploit vulnerabilities in a system, algorithms based on Swarm Intelligence (SI) can be used. This article proposes and describes a new approach that uses SI and attack vectors to identify Structured Query Language (SQL) Injection vulnerabilities. The results obtained show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

The development of new types of technology actualizes the issues of ensuring their information security. The aim of the work is to increase the security of the collective decision-making process in swarm robotic systems from negative impacts by identifying malicious robots. It is proposed to use confidence in choosing an alternative when reaching a consensus as a criterion for identifying malicious robots - a malicious robot, having a special behavior strategy, does not fully take into account the signs of the external environment and information from other robots, which means that such a robot will change its mind with characteristic features for each malicious strategy, and its degree of confidence will be different from the usual voting robot. The modeling performed and the obtained experimental data on three types of malicious behavioral strategies demonstrate the possibility of using the degree of confidence to identify malicious robots. The advantages of the approach are taking into account a large number of alternatives and universality, which lies in the fact that the method is based on the mechanisms of collective decision-making, which proceed in the same way on various hardware platforms of swarm robotic systems. The proposed method can serve as a basis for the development of more complex security mechanisms in swarm robotic systems.

The rapid growth of number of devices that are connected to internet of things (IoT) networks, increases the severity of security problems that need to be solved in order to provide safe environment for network data exchange. The discovery of new vulnerabilities is everyday challenge for security experts and many novel methods for detection and prevention of intrusions are being developed for dealing with this issue. To overcome these shortcomings, artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in development of advanced intrusion detection systems (IDS). This allows such system to adapt to emerging threats, react in real-time and adjust its behavior based on previous experiences. On the other hand, the traffic classification task becomes more difficult because of the large amount of data generated by network systems and high processing demands. For this reason, feature selection (FS) process is applied to reduce data complexity by removing less relevant data for the active classification task and therefore improving algorithm's accuracy. In this work, hybrid version of recently proposed sand cat swarm optimizer algorithm is proposed for feature selection with the goal of increasing performance of extreme learning machine classifier. The performance improvements are demonstrated by validating the proposed method on two well-known datasets - UNSW-NB15 and CICIDS-2017, and comparing the results with those reported for other cutting-edge algorithms that are dealing with the same problems and work in a similar configuration.

Advanced metamorphic malware and ransomware use techniques like obfuscation to alter their internal structure with every attack. Therefore, any signature extracted from such attack, and used to bolster endpoint defense, cannot avert subsequent attacks. Therefore, if even a single such malware intrudes even a single device of an IoT network, it will continue to infect the entire network. Scenarios where an entire network is targeted by a coordinated swarm of such malware is not beyond imagination. Therefore, the IoT era also requires Industry-4.0 grade AI-based solutions against such advanced attacks. But AI-based solutions need a large repository of data extracted from similar attacks to learn robust representations. Whereas, developing a metamorphic malware is a very complex task and requires extreme human ingenuity. Hence, there does not exist abundant metamorphic malware to train AI-based defensive solutions. Also, there is currently no system that could generate enough functionality preserving metamorphic variants of multiple malware to train AI-based defensive systems. Therefore, to this end, we design and develop a novel system, named X-Swarm. X-Swarm uses deep policy-based adversarial reinforcement learning to generate swarm of metamorphic instances of any malware by obfuscating them at the opcode level and ensuring that they could evade even capable, adversarial-attack immune endpoint defense systems.

Physical layer security is an emerging security area to tackle wireless security communications issues and complement conventional encryption-based techniques. Thus, we propose a novel scheme based on swarm intelligence optimization technique and a deep neural network (DNN) for maximizing the secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) in a cooperative relaying underlay cognitive radio- and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system with a non-linear energy harvesting user which is exposed to multiple eavesdroppers. Satisfactorily, simulation results show that the proposed particle swarm optimization (PSO)-DNN framework achieves close performance to that of the optimal solutions, with a meaningful reduction in computation complexity.

Swarm robotics is a network based multi-device system designed to achieve shared objectives in a synchronized way. This system is widely used in industries like farming, manufacturing, and defense applications. In recent implementations, swarm robotics is integrated with Blockchain based networks to enhance communication, security, and decentralized decision-making capabilities. As most of the current blockchain applications are based on complex consensus algorithms, every individual robot in the swarm network requires high computing power to run these complex algorithms. Thus, it is a challenging task to achieve consensus between the robots in the network. This paper will discuss the details of designing an effective consensus algorithm that meets the requirements of swarm robotics network.

As a core problem of multi-agent systems, multiagent pathfinding has an important impact on the efficiency of multi-agent systems. Because of this, many novel multi-agent pathfinding methods have been proposed over the years. However, these methods have focused on different agents with different goals for research, and less research has been done on scenarios where different agents have the same goal. We propose a multiagent pathfinding method incorporating a multi-objective gray wolf optimization algorithm to solve the multi-agent pathfinding problem with the same objective. First, constrained optimization modeling is performed to obtain objective functions about agent wholeness and security. Then, the multi-objective gray wolf optimization algorithm is improved for solving the constrained optimization problem and further optimized for scenarios with insufficient computational resources. To verify the effectiveness of the multi-objective gray wolf optimization algorithm, we conduct experiments in a series of simulation environments and compare the improved multi-objective grey wolf optimization algorithm with some classical swarm intelligence optimization algorithms. The results show that the multi-agent pathfinding method incorporating the multi-objective gray wolf optimization algorithm is more efficient in handling multi-agent pathfinding problems with the same objective.

Classification problems have been part of numerous real-life applications in fields of security, medicine, agriculture, and more. Due to the wide range of applications, there is a constant need for more accurate and efficient methods. Besides more efficient and better classification algorithms, the optimal feature set is a significant factor for better classification accuracy. In general, more features can better describe instances, but besides showing differences between instances of different classes, it can also capture many similarities that lead to wrong classification. Determining the optimal feature set can be considered a hard optimization problem for which different metaheuristics, like swarm intelligence algorithms can be used. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of hybridized swarm intelligence (SI) algorithm for feature selection problem. To test the quality of the proposed method, classification was done by k-means algorithm and it was tested on 17 benchmark datasets from the UCI repository. The results are compared to similar approaches from the literature where SI algorithms were used for feature selection, which proves the quality of the proposed hybridized SI method. The proposed method achieved better classification accuracy for 16 datasets. Higher classification accuracy was achieved while simultaneously reducing the number of used features.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has been advocated to provide diverse data-centric services including data relay, content caching and computing task offloading in vehicular networks due to their flexibility and conveniences. Since only offloading computing tasks to edge computing devices (ECDs) can not meet the real-time demand of vehicles in peak traffic flow, this paper proposes to combine edge computing and UAV swarm for cooperative task offloading in vehicular networks. Specifically, we first design a cooperative task offloading framework that vehicles' computing tasks can be executed locally, offloaded to UAV swarm, or offloaded to ECDs. Then, the selection of offloading strategy is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming problem, the object of which is to maximize the utility of the vehicle. To solve the problem, we further decompose the original problem into two subproblems: minimizing the completion time when offloading to UAV swarm and optimizing the computing resources when offloading to ECD. For offloading to UAV swarm, the computing task will be split into multiple subtasks that are offloaded to different UAVs simultaneously for parallel computing. A Q-learning based iterative algorithm is proposed to minimize the computing task's completion time by equalizing the completion time of its subtasks assigned to each UAV. For offloading to ECDs, a gradient descent algorithm is used to optimally allocate computing resources for offloaded tasks. Extensive simulations are lastly conducted to demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the utility of vehicles compared with conventional schemes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is advancing technology by creating smart surroundings that make it easier for humans to do their work. This technological advancement not only improves human life and expands economic opportunities, but also allows intruders or attackers to discover and exploit numerous methods in order to circumvent the security of IoT networks. Hence, security and privacy are the key concerns to the IoT networks. It is vital to protect computer and IoT networks from many sorts of anomalies and attacks. Traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) collect and employ large amounts of data with irrelevant and inappropriate attributes to train machine learning models, resulting in long detection times and a high rate of misclassification. This research presents an advance approach for the design of IDS for IoT networks based on the Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (PSO) for feature selection and the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) model for PSO fitness function. The classifier utilized in the intrusion detection process is Random Forest (RF). The IoTID20 is being utilized to evaluate the efficacy and robustness of our suggested strategy. The proposed system attains the following level of accuracy on the IoTID20 dataset for different levels of classification: Binary classification 98 %, multiclass classification 83 %. The results indicate that the proposed framework effectively detects cyber threats and improves the security of IoT networks.

Metaverse technologies depend on various advanced human-computer interaction (HCI) devices to be supported by extended reality (XR) technology. Many new HCI devices are supported by wireless Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where a reliable routing scheme is essential for seamless data trans-mission. Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL) is a key routing technology used in IPv6-based low power and lossy networks (LLNs). However, in the networks that are configured, such as small wireless devices applying the IEEE 802.15.4 standards, due to the lack of a system that manages the identity (ID) at the center, the maliciously compromised nodes can make fabricated IDs and pretend to be a legitimate node. This behavior is called Sybil attack, which is very difficult to respond to since attackers use multiple fabricated IDs which are legally disguised. In this paper, Sybil attack countermeasures on RPL-based networks published in recent studies are compared and limitations are analyzed through simulation performance analysis.

Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) has been proposed to address the security and response time issues of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) in latency-sensitive vehicular network environments, due to the frequent interactions that VANETs need to have with cloud servers. However, the anonymity protection mechanism in VFC may cause the attacker to launch Sybil attacks by fabricating or creating multiple pseudonyms to spread false information in the network, which poses a severe security threat to the vehicle driving. Therefore, in this paper, we summarize different types of Sybil attack detection mechanisms in VFC for the first time, and provide a comprehensive comparison of these schemes. In addition, we also summarize the possible impacts of different types of Sybil attacks on VFC. Finally, we summarize challenges and prospects of future research on Sybil attack detection mechanisms in VFC.

While vehicle-to-everything communication technology enables information sharing and cooperative control for vehicles, it also poses a significant threat to the vehicles' driving security owing to cyber-attacks. In particular, Sybil malicious attacks hidden in the vehicle broadcast information flow are challenging to detect, thereby becoming an urgent issue requiring attention. Several researchers have considered this problem and proposed different detection schemes. However, the detection performance of existing schemes based on plausibility checks and neighboring observers is affected by the traffic and attacker densities. In this study, we propose a malicious attack detection scheme based on traffic-flow information fusion, which enables the detection of Sybil attacks without neighboring observer nodes. Our solution is based on the basic safety message, which is broadcast by vehicles periodically. It first constructs the basic features of traffic flow to reflect the traffic state, subsequently fuses it with the road detector information to add the road fusion features, and then classifies them using machine learning algorithms to identify malicious attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that our scheme achieves the detection of Sybil attacks with an accuracy greater than 90 % at different traffic and attacker densities. Our solutions provide security for achieving a usable vehicle communication network.

Sybil attack is one of the most dangerous internal attacks in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). It affects the function of the VANET network by maliciously claiming or stealing multiple identity propagation error messages. In order to prevent VANET from Sybil attacks, many solutions have been proposed. However, the existing solutions are specific to the physical or application layer's single-level data and lack research on cross-layer information fusion detection. Moreover, these schemes involve a large number of sensitive data access and transmission, do not consider users' privacy, and can also bring a severe communication burden, which will make these schemes unable to be actually implemented. In this context, this paper introduces FedMix, the first federated Sybil attack detection system that considers cross-layer information fusion and provides privacy protection. The system can integrate VANET physical layer data and application layer data for joint analyses simultaneously. The data resides locally in the vehicle for local training. Then, the central agency only aggregates the generated model and finally distributes it to the vehicles for attack detection. This process does not involve transmitting and accessing any vehicle's original data. Meanwhile, we also designed a new model aggregation algorithm called SFedAvg to solve the problems of unbalanced vehicle data quality and low aggregation efficiency. Experiments show that FedMix can provide an intelligent model with equivalent performance under the premise of privacy protection and significantly reduce communication overhead, compared with the traditional centralized training attack detection model. In addition, the SFedAvg algorithm and cross-layer information fusion bring better aggregation efficiency and detection performance, respectively.

Any decentralized, biased distributed network is susceptible to the Sybil malicious attack, in which a malicious node masquerades as numerous different nodes, collectively referred to as Sybil nodes, causing the network to become unresponsive. Cloud computing environments are characterized by their loosely linked nature, which means that no node has comprehensive information of the entire system. In order to prevent Sybil attacks in cloud computing systems, it is necessary to detect them as soon as they occur. The network’s ability to function properly A Sybil attacker has the ability to construct. It is necessary to have multiple identities on a single physical device in order to execute a concerted attack on the network or switch between networks identities in order to make the detection process more difficult, and thereby lack of accountability is being promoted throughout the network. The purpose of this study is to Various varieties of Sybil assaults have been documented, including those that occur in Peer-to-peer reputation systems, self-organizing networks, and other similar technologies. The topic of social network systems is discussed. In addition, there are other approaches in which it has been urged over time that they be reduced or eliminated Their potential risks are also thoroughly investigated.

The intrusion detection systems are vital for the sustainability of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) and the detection of sybil attacks are particularly challenging. In this work, we propose a novel approach for the detection of sybil attacks in C-ITS environments. We provide an evaluation of our approach using extensive simulations that rely on real traces, showing our detection approach's effectiveness.

Smart cities are a wide range of projects made to facilitate the problems of everyday life and ensure security. Our interest focuses only on the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) that takes care of the transportation issues using the Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) paradigm as its base. VANETs are a promising technology for autonomous driving that provides many benefits to the user conveniences to improve road safety and driving comfort. VANET is a promising technology for autonomous driving that provides many benefits to the user's conveniences by improving road safety and driving comfort. The problem with such rapid development is the continuously increasing digital threats. Among all these threats, we will target the Sybil attack since it has been proved to be one of the most dangerous attacks in VANETs. It allows the attacker to generate multiple forged identities to disseminate numerous false messages, disrupt safety-related services, or misuse the systems. In addition, Machine Learning (ML) is showing a significant influence on classification problems, thus we propose a behavior-based classification algorithm that is tested on the provided VeReMi dataset coupled with various machine learning techniques for comparison. The simulation results prove the ability of our proposed mechanism to detect the Sybil attack in VANETs.

As a result of the inherent weaknesses of the wireless medium, ad hoc networks are susceptible to a broad variety of threats and assaults. As a direct consequence of this, intrusion detection, as well as security, privacy, and authentication in ad-hoc networks, have developed into a primary focus of current study. This body of research aims to identify the dangers posed by a variety of assaults that are often seen in wireless ad-hoc networks and provide strategies to counteract those dangers. The Black hole assault, Wormhole attack, Selective Forwarding attack, Sybil attack, and Denial-of-Service attack are the specific topics covered in this thesis. In this paper, we describe a trust-based safe routing protocol with the goal of mitigating the interference of black hole nodes in the course of routing in mobile ad-hoc networks. The overall performance of the network is negatively impacted when there are black hole nodes in the route that routing takes. As a result, we have developed a routing protocol that reduces the likelihood that packets would be lost as a result of black hole nodes. This routing system has been subjected to experimental testing in order to guarantee that the most secure path will be selected for the delivery of packets between a source and a destination. The invasion of wormholes into a wireless network results in the segmentation of the network as well as a disorder in the routing. As a result, we provide an effective approach for locating wormholes by using ordinal multi-dimensional scaling and round trip duration in wireless ad hoc networks with either sparse or dense topologies. Wormholes that are linked by both short route and long path wormhole linkages may be found using the approach that was given. In order to guarantee that this ad hoc network does not include any wormholes that go unnoticed, this method is subjected to experimental testing. In order to fight against selective forwarding attacks in wireless ad-hoc networks, we have developed three different techniques. The first method is an incentive-based algorithm that makes use of a reward-punishment system to drive cooperation among three nodes for the purpose of vi forwarding messages in crowded ad-hoc networks. A unique adversarial model has been developed by our team, and inside it, three distinct types of nodes and the activities they participate in are specified. We have shown that the suggested strategy that is based on incentives prohibits nodes from adopting an individualistic behaviour, which ensures collaboration in the process of packet forwarding. To guarantee that intermediate nodes in resource-constrained ad-hoc networks accurately convey packets, the second approach proposes a game theoretic model that uses non-cooperative game theory. This model is based on the idea that game theory may be used. This game reaches a condition of desired equilibrium, which assures that cooperation in multi-hop communication is physically possible, and it is this state that is discovered. In the third algorithm, we present a detection approach that locates malicious nodes in multihop hierarchical ad-hoc networks by employing binary search and control packets. We have shown that the cluster head is capable of accurately identifying the malicious node by analysing the sequences of packets that are dropped along the path leading from a source node to the cluster head. A lightweight symmetric encryption technique that uses Binary Playfair is presented here as a means of safeguarding the transport of data. We demonstrate via experimentation that the suggested encryption method is efficient with regard to the amount of energy used, the amount of time required for encryption, and the memory overhead. This lightweight encryption technique is used in clustered wireless ad-hoc networks to reduce the likelihood of a sybil attack occurring in such networks

Vehicular crowdsensing (VCS) is a subset of crowd-sensing where data collection is outsourced to group vehicles. Here, an entity interested in collecting data from a set of Places of Sensing Interest (PsI), advertises a set of sensing tasks, and the associated rewards. Vehicles attracted by the offered rewards deviate from their ongoing trajectories to visit and collect from one or more PsI. In this win-to-win scenario, vehicles reach their final destination with the extra reward, and the entity obtains the desired samples. Unfortunately, the efficiency of VCS can be undermined by the Sybil attack, in which an attacker can benefit from the injection of false vehicle identities. In this paper, we present a case study and analyze the effects of such an attack. We also propose a defense mechanism based on generative adversarial neural networks (GANs). We discuss GANs' advantages, and drawbacks in the context of VCS, and new trends in GANs' training that make them suitable for VCS.

In most PUF-based authentication schemes, a central server is usually engaged to verify the response of the device’s PUF to challenge bit-streams. However, the server availability may be intermittent in practice. To tackle such an issue, this paper proposes a new protocol for supporting distributed authentication while avoiding vulnerability to information leakage where CRPs could be retrieved from hacked devices and collectively used to model the PUF. The main idea is to provision for scrambling the challenge bit-stream in a way that is dependent on the verifier. The scrambling pattern varies per authentication round for each device and independently across devices. In essence, the scrambling function becomes node- and packetspecific and the response received by two verifiers of one device for the same challenge bit-stream could vary. Thus, neither the scrambling function can be reverted, nor the PUF can be modeled even by a collusive set of malicious nodes. The validation results using data of an FPGA-based implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in thwarting PUF modeling attacks by collusive actors. We also discuss the approach resiliency against impersonation, Sybil, and reverse engineering attacks.