Abderrahim Benslimane

Aymen Bouferroum, Valeria Loscri, Abderrahim Benslimane

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) introduces significant security challenges as resource-constrained devices become increasingly integrated into critical industrial processes. Existing security approaches typically address threats at a single network layer, often relying on expensive hardware and remaining confined to simulation environments. In this paper, we present the research framework and contributions of our doctoral thesis, which aims to develop a lightweight, Machine Learning (ML)-based security framework for IIoT environments. We first describe our adoption of the Tm-IIoT trust model and the Hybrid IIoT (H-IIoT) architecture as foundational baselines, then introduce the Trust Convergence Acceleration (TCA) approach, our primary contribution that integrates ML to predict and mitigate the impact of degraded network conditions on trust convergence, achieving up to a 28.6% reduction in convergence time while maintaining robustness against adversarial behaviors. We then propose a real-world deployment architecture based on affordable, open-source hardware, designed to implement and extend the security framework. Finally, we outline our ongoing research toward multi-layer attack detection, including physical-layer threat identification and considerations for robustness against adversarial ML attacks.

Aymen Bouferroum, Ildi Alla, Valeria Loscri et al.

Radio frequency jamming poses a critical threat to the availability of wireless Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks. Existing detection and classification techniques are poorly suited to this setting: coarse signal-strength and cross-layer features lack information richness, while raw I/Q baseband approaches require hardware and throughput that is impractical at the scale of hundred-node IIoT deployments. This paper presents CITADEL, a lightweight two-stage hierarchical pipeline that uses only Channel State Information (CSI) measurements, which are natively available on commodity IIoT devices, to detect and classify jamming attacks including previously unseen ones. While prior work has shown that jamming leaves observable CSI signatures, CITADEL is the first system to translate this insight into an end-to-end pipeline that jointly achieves closed-set classification of known attacks, open-set detection of zero-day attacks, and resistance to adversarial evasion. Evaluated across 6 known attack types and 15 zero-day scenarios, CITADEL achieves 100% known-attack detection and 97.1% zero-day detection at a 0.4% end-to-end false positive rate. Under adversarial evaluation spanning white-box and black-box threat models, gradient-based evasion remains below 2% across all tested perturbation budgets and the strongest published CSI attack generator achieves less than 5% average evasion. A systematic comparison against eight baselines confirms that no existing method achieves comparable performance on CSI data across all three axes: detection, generalization, and robustness. The full pipeline completes inference in 14.2 ms at 95.9 mJ on an edge GPU, establishing CITADEL as a practical solution for large-scale IIoT network security.

Aymen Bouferroum, Valeria Loscri, Abderrahim Benslimane

In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, trust management plays a vital role in securing systems, especially when dealing with resource-constrained devices. Traditional trust models often overlook the impact of fluctuating network quality, leading to slower trust convergence and inaccurate assessments. In this paper, we propose a dynamic trust management solution, known as the Trust Convergence Acceleration (TCA) approach, which integrates Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate trust convergence under poor network conditions. Our model predicts the number of time units needed for trust convergence based on key network metrics and dynamically adapts transition probabilities in the trust model to enhance convergence speed. Using a simulation framework that incorporates realistic Wi-Fi channel conditions based on the IEEE 802.11 standard, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the TCA-based approach, achieving up to a 28.6% reduction in trust convergence time under challenging conditions. Furthermore, the proposed solution exhibits resilience in scenarios involving malicious nodes, improving trust evaluation accuracy. This work provides a scalable and adaptive trust framework for IIoT systems in dynamic industrial environments, ensuring robust performance under varying network conditions.

Peiying Zhang, Fanglin Liu, Chunxiao Jiang et al.

Virtual network embedding is one of the key problems of network virtualization. Since virtual network mapping is an NP-hard problem, a lot of research has focused on the evolutionary algorithm's masterpiece genetic algorithm. However, the parameter setting in the traditional method is too dependent on experience, and its low flexibility makes it unable to adapt to increasingly complex network environments. In addition, link-mapping strategies that do not consider load balancing can easily cause link blocking in high-traffic environments. In the IoT environment involving medical, disaster relief, life support and other equipment, network performance and stability are particularly important. Therefore, how to provide a more flexible virtual network mapping service in a heterogeneous network environment with large traffic is an urgent problem. Aiming at this problem, a virtual network mapping strategy based on hybrid genetic algorithm is proposed. This strategy uses a dynamically calculated cross-probability and pheromone-based mutation gene selection strategy to improve the flexibility of the algorithm. In addition, a weight update mechanism based on load balancing is introduced to reduce the probability of mapping failure while balancing the load. Simulation results show that the proposed method performs well in a number of performance metrics including mapping average quotation, link load balancing, mapping cost-benefit ratio, acceptance rate and running time.

Peiying Zhang, Chao Wang, Chunxiao Jiang et al.

Virtual network embedding (VNE) algorithm is always the key problem in network virtualization (NV) technology. At present, the research in this field still has the following problems. The traditional way to solve VNE problem is to use heuristic algorithm. However, this method relies on manual embedding rules, which does not accord with the actual situation of VNE. In addition, as the use of intelligent learning algorithm to solve the problem of VNE has become a trend, this method is gradually outdated. At the same time, there are some security problems in VNE. However, there is no intelligent algorithm to solve the security problem of VNE. For this reason, this paper proposes a security-aware VNE algorithm based on reinforcement learning (RL). In the training phase, we use a policy network as a learning agent and take the extracted attributes of the substrate nodes to form a feature matrix as input. The learning agent is trained in this environment to get the mapping probability of each substrate node. In the test phase, we map nodes according to the mapping probability and use the breadth-first strategy (BFS) to map links. For the security problem, we add security requirements level constraint for each virtual node and security level constraint for each substrate node. Virtual nodes can only be embedded on substrate nodes that are not lower than the level of security requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to other typical algorithms in terms of long-term average return, long-term revenue consumption ratio and virtual network request (VNR) acceptance rate.