The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

Today is the era of the Internet of Things (IoT). The recent advances in hardware and information technology have accelerated the deployment of billions of interconnected, smart and adaptive devices in critical infrastructures like health, transportation, environmental control, and home automation. Transferring data over a network without requiring any kind of human-to-computer or human-to-human interaction, brings reliability and convenience to consumers, but also opens a new world of opportunity for intruders, and introduces a whole set of unique and complicated questions to the field of Digital Forensics. Although IoT data could be a rich source of evidence, forensics professionals cope with diverse problems, starting from the huge variety of IoT devices and non-standard formats, to the multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and the resulting multi-jurisdictional litigations. A further challenge is the end-to-end encryption which represents a trade-off between users’ right to privacy and the success of the forensics investigation. Due to its volatile nature, digital evidence has to be acquired and analyzed using validated tools and techniques that ensure the maintenance of the Chain of Custody. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the main issues involved in the complex process of IoT-based investigations, particularly all legal, privacy and cloud security challenges. Furthermore, this work provides an overview of the past and current theoretical models in the digital forensics science. Special attention is paid to frameworks that aim to extract data in a privacy-preserving manner or secure the evidence integrity using decentralized blockchain-based solutions. In addition, the present paper addresses the ongoing Forensics-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm, as well as some promising cross-cutting data reduction and forensics intelligence techniques. Finally, several other research trends and open issues are presented, with emphasis on the need for proactive Forensics Readiness strategies and generally agreed-upon standards.

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A Survey on the Internet of Things (IoT) Forensics: Challenges, Approaches, and Open Issues

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Blockchain in the built environment and construction industry: A systematic review, conceptual models and practical use cases

Recently, the world witnessed a significant increase in the number of used drones, with a global and continuous rise in the demand for their multi-purpose applications. The pervasive aspect of these drones is due to their ability to answer people’s needs. Drones are providing users with a bird’s eye that can be activated and used almost anywhere and at any time. However, recently, the malicious use of drones began to emerge among criminals and cyber-criminals alike. The probability and frequency of these attacks are both high and their impact can be very dangerous with devastating effects. Therefore, the need for detective, protective and preventive counter-measures is highly required. The aim of this survey is to investigate the emerging threats of using drones in cyber-attacks, along the countermeasures to thwart these attacks. The different uses of drones for malicious purposes are also reviewed, along the possible detection methods. As such, this paper analyzes the exploitation of drones vulnerabilities within communication links, as well as smart devices and hardware, including smart-phones and tablets. Moreover, this paper presents a detailed review on the drone/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) usage in multiple domains (i.e civilian, military, terrorism, etc.) and for different purposes. A realistic attack scenario is also presented, which details how the authors performed a simulated attack on a given drone following the hacking cycle. This review would greatly help ethical hackers to understand the existing vulnerabilities of UAVs in both military and civilian domains. Moreover, it allows them to adopt and come up with new techniques and technologies for enhanced UAV attack detection and protection. As a result, various civilian and military anti-drones/UAVs (detective and preventive) countermeasures will be reviewed.

Security analysis of drones systems: Attacks, limitations, and recommendations

Smart cities contain intelligent things which can intelligently automatically and collaboratively enhance life quality, save people's lives, and act a sustainable resource ecosystem. To achieve these advanced collaborative technologies such as drones, robotics, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT) are required to increase the smartness of smart cities by improving the connectivity, energy efficiency, and quality of services (QoS). Therefore, collaborative drones and IoT play a vital role in supporting a lot of smart-city applications such as those involved in communication, transportation, agriculture,safety and security, disaster mitigation, environmental protection, service delivery, energy saving, e-waste reduction, weather monitoring, healthcare, etc. This paper presents a survey of the potential techniques and applications of collaborative drones and IoT which have recently been proposed in order to increase the smartness of smart cities. It provides a comprehensive overview highlighting the recent and ongoing research on collaborative drone and IoT in improving the real-time application of smart cities. This survey is different from previous ones in term of breadth, scope, and focus. In particular, we focus on the new concept of collaborative drones and IoT for improving smart-city applications. This survey attempts to show how collaborative drones and IoT improve the smartness of smart cities based on data collection, privacy and security, public safety, disaster management, energy consumption and quality of life in smart cities. It mainly focuses on the measurement of the smartness of smart cities, i.e., environmental aspects, life quality, public safety, and disaster management.

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Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities

Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them These developments help create smart and connected (eg, self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies, and maintenance service providers for various applications One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is forensic analysis of traffic accidents The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrumental in post-accident scenarios to discover the faulty party, particularly for self-driving vehicles With the opportunity of being able to access various information in cars, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework among the various elements involved to manage the collected vehicle-related data Specifically, we first integrate vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI) to the proposed blockchain to provide membership establishment and privacy Next, we design a fragmented ledger that will store detailed data related to vehicles such as maintenance information/ history, car diagnosis reports, and so on The proposed forensic framework enables trustless, traceable, and privacy-aware post-accident analysis with minimal storage and processing overhead

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Block4Forensic: An Integrated Lightweight Blockchain Framework for Forensics Applications of Connected Vehicles

It is expected that drones will take a major role in the connected smart cities of the future. They will be delivering goods and merchandise, serving as mobile hot spots for broadband wireless access, and maintaining surveillance and security of smart cities. However, pervasive use of drones for future smart cities also brings together several technical and societal concerns and challenges that needs to be addressed, including in the areas of cybersecurity, privacy, and public safety. Drones, while can be used for the betterment of the society, can also be used by malicious entities to conduct physical and cyber attacks, and threaten the society. The goal of this survey paper is to review various aspects of drones in future smart cities, relating to cybersecurity, privacy, and public safety. We will also provide representative results on cyber attacks using drones.

Drones for smart cities: Issues in cybersecurity, privacy, and public safety

The nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) utilize the radio frequency (RF) channel to communicate. Given that the RF channel is the primary communication channel, many researchers have developed techniques for securing that channel. However, the RF channel is not the only interface into a sensor. The sensing components, which are primarily designed to sense characteristics about the outside world, can also be used (or misused) as a communication (side) channel. In this paper, we characterize the side channels for various sensory components (i.e., light sensor, acoustic sensor, and accelerometer). While previous work has focused on the use of these side channels to improve the security and performance of a WSN, we seek to determine if the side channels have enough capacity to potentially be used for malicious activity. Specifically, we evaluate the feasibility and practicality of the side channels using today's sensor technology and illustrate that these channels have enough capacity to enable the transfer of common, well-known malware. The ultimate goal of this work is to illustrate the need for intrusion detection systems (IDSs) that not only monitor the RF channel, but also monitor the values returned by the sensory components.

Examining the characteristics and implications of sensor side channels

Internet of Things (IoT) adoption is a differentiating factor in the hospitality industry which facilitates the integration of the digital and real world. This paper aims to explore academic research and practical applications of IoT in the hospitality domain to help identify opportunities and challenges with implementing the technology for creating competitive advantages and service operations process improvements.,This paper uses previous works and exemplars to demonstrate the use of IoT in hospitality. Academic indexing websites such as Google Scholar and ScienceDirect are used to search for related terms. Whitepapers, IoT project websites of service providers and media coverage are accessed to collect information. Related work is investigated by classifying into major categories of hospitality.,Hospitality is one of the leading industries that has adopted IoT to create innovative services, but this topic has not been investigated deeply. A comprehensive study is needed to give guidance to decision-makers and helps to design better services by presenting practical and potential benefits.,The IoT will usher in great opportunities in hospitality by enabling novel applications for customization and personalization of the services. Operational processes will be redefined for efficiency and speed. It will alter the expectations and servicescape; thus, its integration will be vital in terms of competitiveness and success.,This study provides a comprehensive overview of IoT research and applications in the hospitality domain. It contributes to better understanding of recent trends and potentials. A holistic approach was used instead of focusing on a single sector which enables the consideration of all aspects of the topic. Theoretical support in addition to technical aspects, challenges and concerns are offered to the reader.

Improving the service industry with hyper-connectivity: IoT in hospitality

Mass penetration and market dominance of Electric Vehicles (EVs) are expected in the upcoming years. Due to their frequent charging needs, not only public and private charging stations are being built, but also V2V charging options are considered. This forms a charging network with various suppliers and EV customers which can communicate to schedule charging operations. While an app can be designed to develop matching algorithms for charging schedules, the system also needs a convenient payment method that will enable privacy-preserving transactions among the suppliers and EVs. In this paper, we adopt a Bitcoin-based payment system for the EV charging network payments. However, Bitcoin has a transaction fee which would be comparable to the price of the charging service most of the time and thus may not be attractive to users. High transaction fees can be eliminated by building a payment network in parallel to main ledger, with permission and signatures. In this paper, we design and implement such a network among charging stations and mobile EVs with flow, connectivity and fairness constraints, and demonstrate results for the feasibility of the scheme under different circumstances. More specifically, we propose a payment network optimization model for determining payment channels among charging stations. We present numerical results on the characteristics of the network model by using realistic use cases.

Selcuk Uluagac

Papers

Block4Forensic: An Integrated Lightweight Blockchain Framework for Forensics Applications of Connected Vehicles

Drones for smart cities: Issues in cybersecurity, privacy, and public safety

Examining the characteristics and implications of sensor side channels

Improving the service industry with hyper-connectivity: IoT in hospitality

Building a Private Bitcoin-Based Payment Network Among Electric Vehicles and Charging Stations