Blockchain for the Metaverse: A Review

As technology has become pivotal a part of life, it has also become a part of criminal life. Criminals use new technology developments to commit crimes, and investigators must adapt to these changes. Many people have, and will become, victims of cybercrime, making it even more important for investigators to understand current methods used in cyber investigations. The two general categories of cyber investigations are digital forensics and open-source intelligence. Cyber investigations are affecting more than just the investigators. They must determine what tools they need to use based on the information that the tools provide and how effectively the tools and methods work. Tools are any application or device used by investigators, while methods are the process or technique of using a tool. This survey compares the most common methods available to investigators to determine what kind of evidence the methods provide, and which of them are the most effective. To accomplish this, the survey establishes criteria for comparison and conducts an analysis of the tools in both mobile digital forensic and open-source intelligence investigations. We found that there is no single tool or method that can gather all the evidence that investigators require. Many of the tools must be combined to be most effective. However, there are some tools that are more useful than others. Out of all the methods used in mobile digital forensics, logical extraction and hex dumps are the most effective and least likely to cause damage to the data. Among those tools used in open-source intelligence, natural language processing has more applications and uses than any of the other options.

Cyber Crime Investigation: Landscape, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan School of Information Technology, Illinois State University USA, Normal, IL 61761, USA School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia Department of EE, University of Engineering and Technology Peshawar, Bannu 28100, Pakistan Department of Computer Science, College of Computer, Qassim University, Buraydah 52571, Saudi Arabia Department of ECE, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan

Exploiting Machine Learning to Detect Malicious Nodes in Intelligent Sensor-Based Systems Using Blockchain

In this paper, a blockchain-based secure routing model is proposed for the Internet of Sensor Things (IoST). The blockchain is used to register the nodes and store the data packets’ transactions. Moreover, the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism is used in the model to avoid the extra overhead incurred due to the use of Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Furthermore, during routing of data packets, malicious nodes can exist in the IoST network, which eavesdrop the communication. Therefore, the Genetic Algorithm-based Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) and Genetic Algorithm-based Decision Tree (GA-DT) models are proposed for malicious node detection. After the malicious node detection, the Dijkstra algorithm is used to find the optimal routing path in the network. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed model. PoA is compared with PoW in terms of the transaction cost in which PoA has consumed 30% less cost than PoW. Furthermore, without Man In The Middle (MITM) attack, GA-SVM consumes 10% less energy than with MITM attack. Moreover, without any attack, GA-SVM consumes 30% less than grayhole attack and 60% less energy than mistreatment. The results of Decision Tree (DT), Support Vector Machine (SVM), GA-DT, and GA-SVM are compared in terms of accuracy and precision. The accuracy of DT, SVM, GA-DT, and GA-SVM is 88%, 93%, 96%, and 98%, respectively. The precision of DT, SVM, GA-DT, and GA-SVM is 100%, 92%, 94%, and 96%, respectively. In addition, the Dijkstra algorithm is compared with Bellman Ford algorithm. The shortest distances calculated by Dijkstra and Bellman are 8 and 11 hops long, respectively. Also, security analysis is performed to check the smart contract’s effectiveness against attacks. Moreover, we induced three attacks: grayhole attack, mistreatment attack, and MITM attack to check the resilience of our proposed system model. 

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Answer selection, as a crucial method for intelligent medical service robots, has become more and more important in natural language processing (NLP). However, there are still some critical issues in the answer selection model. On the one hand, the model lacks semantic understanding of long questions because of noise information in a question–answer (QA) pair. On the other hand, some researchers combine two or more neural network models to improve the quality of answer selection. However, these models focus on the similarity between questions and answers without considering background information. To this end, this paper proposes a novel refined answer selection method, which uses an attentive bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network and a self-attention mechanism to solve these issues. First of all, this paper constructs the required knowledge-based text as background information and converts the questions and answers from words to vectors, respectively. Furthermore, the self-attention mechanism is adopted to extract the global features from the vectors. Finally, an attentive Bi-LSTM network is designed to address long-distance dependent learning problems and calculate the similarity between the question and answer with consideration of the background knowledge information. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, this paper constructs a knowledge-based QA dataset including multiple medical QA pairs and conducts a series of experiments on it. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach could achieve impressive performance on the answer selection task and reach an accuracy of 71.4%, MAP of 68.8%, and decrease the BLUE indicator to 3.10.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/5/3016/pdf?version=1677634106

Refined Answer Selection Method with Attentive Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network and Self-Attention Mechanism for Intelligent Medical Service Robot

Due to the vigorous development of wireless communication technology, massive sensors have been gradually connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and generate a massive quantity of valuable IoT data from large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) controlled by different owners. Massive IoT data need to be collected and circulated among multiple data owners and data users. However, existing data collection frameworks may cause heavy computational overhead or rely on trusted third parties, since sensors have constrained resources. Consequently, massive IoT data are transformed among different parties, causing severe trust and security issues. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-assisted massive IoT data collection (MIDC) intelligent framework to support the security, trust and efficiency of massive data collection for large-scale heterogeneous WSNs. In particular, we propose a series of novel technologies for the framework. First, we design a Large-Scale Heterogeneous WSNs Collaborative Identity Verification protocol to ensure reliable data sources. Second, we build a Hierarchical Massive Data Aggregation scheme to collect massive IoT data efficiently and securely. Third, we depict a Blockchain-Based Massive IoT Data Management method to construct trust among different parties. Extensive simulation and prototype experimental results prove the effectiveness of our framework.

Rui Su

Papers

A Blockchain-Assisted Massive IoT Data Collection Intelligent Framework

Complex scene video frames alignment and multi-frame fusion deraining with deep neural network