Kashif Sharif

Awais Bilal, Kashif Sharif, Liehuang Zhu et al.

The rapid development and integration of intelligent technologies in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) have revolutionized transportation systems by enhancing connectivity, automation, and safety. However, the complexity and connectivity of IoV networks also introduce security challenges, including data privacy concerns, cyber threats, and system vulnerabilities. This paper surveys the role of Edge Computing (EC), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) in strengthening IoV security frameworks. It examines the synergy between these technologies, highlighting their individual capabilities and their collective impact on enhancing threat detection, response times, and adaptive security. Through real world case studies and practical deployments, we demonstrate how EC, ML, and DL are currently improving security and operational efficiency in IoV systems. The paper also identifies key research gaps and future directions for further advancements in IoV security, including the need for scalable, privacy preserving solutions and robust defense mechanisms against emerging cyber threats. By integrating EC, ML, and DL, this work lays the groundwork for developing adaptive, efficient, and resilient IoV security infrastructures capable of addressing evolving challenges in the transportation ecosystem.

Abdulrahman Hamman Adama Chukkol, Senlin Luo, Kashif Sharif et al.

Binary program vulnerability detection is critical for software security, yet existing deep learning approaches often rely on source code analysis, limiting their ability to detect unknown vulnerabilities. To address this, we propose VulCatch, a binary-level vulnerability detection framework. VulCatch introduces a Synergy Decompilation Module (SDM) and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) to transform raw binary code into pseudocode using CodeT5, preserving high-level semantics for deep analysis with tools like Ghidra and IDA. KAN further enhances feature transformation, enabling the detection of complex vulnerabilities. VulCatch employs word2vec, Inception Blocks, BiLSTM Attention, and Residual connections to achieve high detection accuracy (98.88%) and precision (97.92%), while minimizing false positives (1.56%) and false negatives (2.71%) across seven CVE datasets.

Chuan Zhang, Liehuang Zhu, Chang Xu et al.

The recent proliferation of smart devices has given rise to ubiquitous computing, an emerging computing paradigm which allows anytime & anywhere computing possible. In such a ubiquitous computing environment, customers release different computing or sensing tasks, and people, also known as data processors, participate in these tasks and get paid for providing their idle computing and communication resources. Thus, how to select an appropriate and reliable customer while not disclosing processors' privacy has become an interesting problem. In this article, we present a trust-based and privacy-preserving customer selection scheme in ubiquitous computing, called TPCS, to enable potential processors select the customers with good reputation. The basic concept of TPCS is that each data processor holds a trust value, and the reputation score of the customer is calculated based on processors' trust values and feedbacks via a truth discovery process. To preserve processors' privacy, pseudonyms and Paillier cryptosystem are applied to conceal each processor's real identity. In addition, three authentication protocols are designed to ensure that only the valid data processors (i.e., the processors registering in the system, holding the truthful trust values, and joining the computing tasks) can pass the authentication. A comprehensive security analysis is conducted to prove that our proposed TPCS scheme is secure and can defend against several sophisticated attacks. Moreover, extensive simulations are conducted to demonstrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Liehuang Zhu, Chuan Zhang, Chang Xu et al.

Recent advances in Socially Aware Networks (SANs) have allowed its use in many domains, out of which social Internet of vehicles (SIOV) is of prime importance. SANs can provide a promising routing and forwarding paradigm for SIOV by using interest-based communication. Though able to improve the forwarding performance, existing interest-based schemes fail to consider the important issue of protecting users' interest information. In this paper, we propose a PRivacy-preserving Interest-based Forwarding scheme (PRIF) for SIOV, which not only protects the interest information, but also improves the forwarding performance. We propose a privacy-preserving authentication protocol to recognize communities among mobile nodes. During data routing and forwarding, a node can know others' interests only if they are affiliated with the same community. Moreover, to improve forwarding performance, a new metric {\em community energy} is introduced to indicate vehicular social proximity. Community energy is generated when two nodes encounter one another and information is shared among them. PRIF considers this energy metric to select forwarders towards the destination node or the destination community. Security analysis indicates PRIF can protect nodes' interest information. In addition, extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate that PRIF outperforms the existing algorithms including the BEEINFO, Epidemic, and PRoPHET.

Chang Xu, Xuan Xie, Liehuang Zhu et al.

Recent advances in Socially Aware Networks (SANs) have allowed its use in many domains, out of which social Internet of vehicles (SIOV) is of prime importance. SANs can provide a promising routing and forwarding paradigm for SIOV by using interest-based communication. Though able to improve the forwarding performance, existing interest-based schemes fail to consider the important issue of protecting users' interest information. In this paper, we propose a PRivacy-preserving Interest-based Forwarding scheme (PRIF) for SIOV, which not only protects the interest information, but also improves the forwarding performance. We propose a privacy-preserving authentication protocol to recognize communities among mobile nodes. During data routing and forwarding, a node can know others' interests only if they are affiliated with the same community. Moreover, to improve forwarding performance, a new metric {\em community energy} is introduced to indicate vehicular social proximity. Community energy is generated when two nodes encounter one another and information is shared among them. PRIF considers this energy metric to select forwarders towards the destination node or the destination community. Security analysis indicates PRIF can protect nodes' interest information. In addition, extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate that PRIF outperforms the existing algorithms including the BEEINFO, Epidemic, and PRoPHET.

Chuan Zhang, Liehuang Zhu, Chang Xu et al.

In recent years, cognitive Internet of Things (CIoT) has received considerable attention because it can extract valuable information from various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In CIoT, truth discovery plays an important role in identifying truthful values from large scale data to help CIoT provide deeper insights and value from collected information. However, the privacy concerns of IoT devices pose a major challenge in designing truth discovery approaches. Although existing schemes of truth discovery can be executed with strong privacy guarantees, they are not efficient or cannot be applied in real-life CIoT applications. This article proposes a novel framework for lightweight and privacy-preserving truth discovery called LPTD-I, which is implemented by incorporating fog and cloud platforms, and adopting the homomorphic Paillier encryption and one-way hash chain techniques. This scheme not only protects devices' privacy, but also achieves high efficiency. Moreover, we introduce a fault tolerant (LPTD-II) framework which can effectively overcome malfunctioning CIoT devices. Detailed security analysis indicates the proposed schemes are secure under a comprehensively designed threat model. Experimental simulations are also carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed schemes.