Rasheed Hussain

Oscar Dilley, Juan Marcelo Parra-Ullauri, Rasheed Hussain et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-enhancing technology for distributed ML. By training models locally and aggregating updates - a federation learns together, while bypassing centralised data collection. FL is increasingly popular in healthcare, finance and personal computing. However, it inherits fairness challenges from classical ML and introduces new ones, resulting from differences in data quality, client participation, communication constraints, aggregation methods and underlying hardware. Fairness remains an unresolved issue in FL and the community has identified an absence of succinct definitions and metrics to quantify fairness; to address this, we propose Federated Fairness Analytics - a methodology for measuring fairness. Our definition of fairness comprises four notions with novel, corresponding metrics. They are symptomatically defined and leverage techniques originating from XAI, cooperative game-theory and networking engineering. We tested a range of experimental settings, varying the FL approach, ML task and data settings. The results show that statistical heterogeneity and client participation affect fairness and fairness conscious approaches such as Ditto and q-FedAvg marginally improve fairness-performance trade-offs. Using our techniques, FL practitioners can uncover previously unobtainable insights into their system's fairness, at differing levels of granularity in order to address fairness challenges in FL. We have open-sourced our work at: https://github.com/oscardilley/federated-fairness.

Yuelin Liu, Haiyuan Li, Xenofon Vasilakos et al.

Future networks (including 6G) are poised to accelerate the realisation of Internet of Everything. However, it will result in a high demand for computing resources to support new services. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising solution, enabling to offload computation-intensive tasks to nearby edge servers from the end-user devices, thereby reducing latency and energy consumption. However, relying solely on a single MEC server for task offloading can lead to uneven resource utilisation and suboptimal performance in complex scenarios. Additionally, traditional task offloading strategies specialise in centralised policy decisions, which unavoidably entail extreme transmission latency and reach computational bottleneck. To fill the gaps, we propose a latency and energy efficient Cooperative Task Offloading framework with Transformer-driven Prediction (CTO-TP), leveraging asynchronous multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to address these challenges. This approach fosters edge-edge cooperation and decreases the synchronous waiting time by performing asynchronous training, optimising task offloading, and resource allocation across distributed networks. The performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed CTO-TP algorithm reduces up to 80% overall system latency and 87% energy consumption compared to the baseline schemes.

Sabah Suhail, Raja Jurdak, Rasheed Hussain

Digital twins, being the virtual replicas of their physical counterparts, share valuable knowledge of the underlying system. Therefore, they might become a potential source of data breaches and a playground for attackers to launch covert attacks. It is imperative to investigate necessary countermeasures to mitigate such attacks.

Sabah Suhail, Saif Ur Rehman Malik, Raja Jurdak et al.

The complexity of cyberattacks in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) calls for a mechanism that can evaluate critical infrastructures' operational behaviour and security without affecting the operation of live systems. In this regard, Digital Twins (DTs) provide actionable insights through monitoring, simulating, predicting, and optimizing the state of CPSs. Through the use cases, including system testing and training, detecting system misconfigurations, and security testing, DTs strengthen the security of CPSs throughout the product lifecycle. However, such benefits of DTs depend on an assumption about data integrity and security. Data trustworthiness becomes more critical while integrating multiple components among different DTs owned by various stakeholders to provide an aggregated view of the complex physical system. This article envisions a blockchain-based DT framework as Trusted Twins for Securing Cyber-Physical Systems (TTS-CPS). With the automotive industry as a CPS use case, we demonstrate the viability of the TTS-CPS framework in a proof of concept. To utilize reliable system specification data for building the process knowledge of DTs, we ensure the trustworthiness of data-generating sources through integrity checking mechanisms. Additionally, the safety and security rules evaluated during simulation are stored and retrieved from the blockchain, thereby establishing more understanding and confidence in the decisions made by the underlying systems. Finally, we perform formal verification of the TTS-CPS.

Patrik Joslin Kenfack, Adil Mehmood Khan, Rasheed Hussain et al.

Training machine learning models with the only accuracy as a final goal may promote prejudices and discriminatory behaviors embedded in the data. One solution is to learn latent representations that fulfill specific fairness metrics. Different types of learning methods are employed to map data into the fair representational space. The main purpose is to learn a latent representation of data that scores well on a fairness metric while maintaining the usability for the downstream task. In this paper, we propose a new fair representation learning approach that leverages different levels of representation of data to tighten the fairness bounds of the learned representation. Our results show that stacking different auto-encoders and enforcing fairness at different latent spaces result in an improvement of fairness compared to other existing approaches.

Sabah Suhail, Rasheed Hussain, Raja Jurdak et al.

Industrial processes rely on sensory data for decision-making processes, risk assessment, and performance evaluation. Extracting actionable insights from the collected data calls for an infrastructure that can ensure the dissemination of trustworthy data. For the physical data to be trustworthy, it needs to be cross-validated through multiple sensor sources with overlapping fields of view. Cross-validated data can then be stored on the blockchain, to maintain its integrity and trustworthiness. Once trustworthy data is recorded on the blockchain, product lifecycle events can be fed into data-driven systems for process monitoring, diagnostics, and optimized control. In this regard, Digital Twins (DTs) can be leveraged to draw intelligent conclusions from data by identifying the faults and recommending precautionary measures ahead of critical events. Empowering DTs with blockchain in industrial use-cases targets key challenges of disparate data repositories, untrustworthy data dissemination, and the need for predictive maintenance. In this survey, while highlighting the key benefits of using blockchain-based DTs, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research results for blockchain-based DTs. Based on the current research trends, we discuss a trustworthy blockchain-based DTs framework. We highlight the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in blockchain-based DTs. Furthermore, we discuss current and future research and deployment challenges of blockchain-supported DTs that require further investigation.

Patrik Joslin Kenfack, Daniil Dmitrievich Arapov, Rasheed Hussain et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are one of the greatest advances in AI in recent years. With their ability to directly learn the probability distribution of data, and then sample synthetic realistic data. Many applications have emerged, using GANs to solve classical problems in machine learning, such as data augmentation, class unbalance problems, and fair representation learning. In this paper, we analyze and highlight fairness concerns of GANs model. In this regard, we show empirically that GANs models may inherently prefer certain groups during the training process and therefore they're not able to homogeneously generate data from different groups during the testing phase. Furthermore, we propose solutions to solve this issue by conditioning the GAN model towards samples' group or using ensemble method (boosting) to allow the GAN model to leverage distributed structure of data during the training phase and generate groups at equal rate during the testing phase.

Sabah Suhail, Rasheed Hussain, Raja Jurdak et al.

Industrial processes rely on sensory data for critical decision-making processes. Extracting actionable insights from the collected data calls for an infrastructure that can ensure the trustworthiness of data. To this end, we envision a blockchain-based framework for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to address the issues of data management and security. Once the data collected from trustworthy sources are recorded in the blockchain, product lifecycle events can be fed into data-driven systems for process monitoring, diagnostics, and optimized control. In this regard, we leverage Digital Twins (DTs) that can draw intelligent conclusions from data by identifying the faults and recommending precautionary measures ahead of critical events. Furthermore, we discuss the integration of DTs and blockchain to target key challenges of disparate data repositories, untrustworthy data dissemination, and fault diagnosis. Finally, we identify outstanding challenges faced by the IIoT and future research directions while leveraging blockchain and DTs.

Sabah Suhail, Rasheed Hussain, Abid Khan et al.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining ground as a pervasive presence around us by enabling miniaturized things with computation and communication capabilities to collect, process, analyze, and interpret information. Consequently, trustworthy data act as fuel for applications that rely on the data generated by these things, for critical decision-making processes, data debugging, risk assessment, forensic analysis, and performance tuning. Currently, secure and reliable data communication in IoT is based on public-key cryptosystems such as Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC). Nevertheless, reliance on the security of de-facto cryptographic primitives is at risk of being broken by the impending quantum computers. Therefore, the transition from classical primitives to quantum-safe primitives is indispensable to ensure the overall security of data en route. In this paper, we investigate applications of one of the post-quantum signatures called Hash-Based Signature (HBS) schemes for the security of IoT devices in the quantum era. We give a succinct overview of the evolution of HBS schemes with emphasis on their construction parameters and associated strengths and weaknesses. Then, we outline the striking features of HBS schemes and their significance for the IoT security in the quantum era. We investigate the optimal selection of HBS in the IoT networks with respect to their performance-constrained requirements, resource-constrained nature, and design optimization objectives. In addition to ongoing standardization efforts, we also highlight current and future research and deployment challenges along with possible solutions. Finally, we outline the essential measures and recommendations that must be adopted by the IoT ecosystem while preparing for the quantum world.

Fatima Hussain, Rasheed Hussain, Brett Noye et al.

With the advancements in the enterprise-level business development, the demand for new applications and services is overwhelming. For the development and delivery of such applications and services, enterprise businesses rely on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In essence, API is a double-edged sword. On one hand, API provides ease of expanding the business through sharing value and utility, but on another hand it raises security and privacy issues. Since the applications usually use APIs to retrieve important data, therefore it is extremely important to make sure that an effective access control and security mechanism are in place , and the data does not fall into wrong hands. In this article, we discuss the current state of the enterprise API security and the role of Machine Learning (ML) in API security. We also discuss the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance and its effect on the API security.

Fatima Hussain, Rasheed Hussain, Syed Ali Hassan et al.

The future Internet of Things (IoT) will have a deep economical, commercial and social impact on our lives. The participating nodes in IoT networks are usually resource-constrained, which makes them luring targets for cyber attacks. In this regard, extensive efforts have been made to address the security and privacy issues in IoT networks primarily through traditional cryptographic approaches. However, the unique characteristics of IoT nodes render the existing solutions insufficient to encompass the entire security spectrum of the IoT networks. This is, at least in part, because of the resource constraints, heterogeneity, massive real-time data generated by the IoT devices, and the extensively dynamic behavior of the networks. Therefore, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques, which are able to provide embedded intelligence in the IoT devices and networks, are leveraged to cope with different security problems. In this paper, we systematically review the security requirements, attack vectors, and the current security solutions for the IoT networks. We then shed light on the gaps in these security solutions that call for ML and DL approaches. We also discuss in detail the existing ML and DL solutions for addressing different security problems in IoT networks. At last, based on the detailed investigation of the existing solutions in the literature, we discuss the future research directions for ML- and DL-based IoT security.

Sabah Suhail, Rasheed Hussain, Choong Seon Hong et al.

"Trustworthy data" is the fuel for ensuring transparent traceability, precise decision-making, and cogent coordination in the supply chain (SC) space. However, the disparate data silos act as a trade barrier in orchestrating the provenance of product story starting from the transformation of raw materials into the circuit board to the assembling of electronic components into end products available on the store shelf for customers. Therefore, to bridge the fragmented siloed information across global supply chain partners, the diffusion of blockchain (BC) as one of the advanced distributed ledger technology (DLT) takeover the on-premise legacy systems. Nevertheless, the challenging constraints of blockchain including scalability, accessing off-line data, fee-less microtransactions and many more lead to the third wave of blockchain called IOTA. In this paper, we propose a framework for supporting provenance in the electronic supply chain (ECS) by using permissioned IOTA ledger. Realizing the crucial requirement of trustworthy data, we use Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) channel provided by IOTA that allows the SC players to procure distributed information while keeping confidential trade flows, tamper-proof data, and fine-grained accessibility rights. To identify operational disruption, we devise a transparent product ledger through transaction data and consignment information to keep track of the complete product journey at each intermediary step during SC processes. Furthermore, we evaluate the secure provenance data construction time for varying payload size.

Daniel de Carvalho, Rasheed Hussain, Adil Khan et al.

This paper summarizes the experience of teaching an introductory course to programming by using a correctness by construction approach at Innopolis University, Russian Federation. In this paper we claim that division in beginner and advanced groups improves the learning outcomes, present the discussion and the data that support the claim.

Konstantin Sozykin, Stanislav Protasov, Adil Khan et al.

Automatic analysis of the video is one of most complex problems in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. A significant part of this research deals with (human) activity recognition (HAR) since humans, and the activities that they perform, generate most of the video semantics. Video-based HAR has applications in various domains, but one of the most important and challenging is HAR in sports videos. Some of the major issues include high inter- and intra-class variations, large class imbalance, the presence of both group actions and single player actions, and recognizing simultaneous actions, i.e., the multi-label learning problem. Keeping in mind these challenges and the recent success of CNNs in solving various computer vision problems, in this work, we implement a 3D CNN based multi-label deep HAR system for multi-label class-imbalanced action recognition in hockey videos. We test our system for two different scenarios: an ensemble of $k$ binary networks vs. a single $k$-output network, on a publicly available dataset. We also compare our results with the system that was originally designed for the chosen dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs better than the existing solution.

Muhammad Ahmad, Asad Khan, Adil Mehmood Khan et al.

Hyperspectral image analysis often requires selecting the most informative bands instead of processing the whole data without losing the key information. Existing band reduction (BR) methods have the capability to reveal the nonlinear properties exhibited in the data but at the expense of loosing its original representation. To cope with the said issue, an unsupervised non-linear segmented and non-segmented stacked denoising autoencoder (UDAE) based BR method is proposed. Our aim is to find an optimal mapping and construct a lower-dimensional space that has a similar structure to the original data with least reconstruction error. The proposed method first confronts the original hyperspectral data into smaller regions in a spatial domain and then each region is processed by UDAE individually. This results in reduced complexity and improved efficiency of BR for both semi-supervised and unsupervised tasks, i.e. classification and clustering. Our experiments on publicly available hyperspectral datasets with various types of classifiers demonstrate the effectiveness of UDAE method which equates favorably with other state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction and BR methods.

Rasheed Hussain, Donghyun Kim, Michele Nogueira et al.

Recently an online electric vehicle (OLEV) concept has been introduced, where vehicles are propelled through the wirelessly transmitted electrical power from the infrastructure installed under the road while moving. The absence of secure-and-fair billing is one main hurdle to widely adopt this promising technology. This paper introduces a secure and privacy-aware fair billing framework for OLEV on the move through the charging plates installed under the road. We first propose two extreme lightweight mutual authentication mechanisms, a direct authentication and a hash chain-based authentication between vehicles and the charging plates that can be used for different vehicular speeds on the road. Second we propose a secure and privacy-aware wireless power transfer on move for the vehicles with bidirectional auditability guarantee by leveraging game-theoretic approach. Each charging plate transfers a fixed amount of energy to the vehicle and bills the vehicle in a privacy-aware way accordingly. Our protocol guarantees secure, privacy-aware, and fair billing mechanism for the OLEVs while receiving electric power from the road. Moreover our proposed framework can play a vital role in eliminating the security and privacy challenges in the deployment of power transfer technology to the OLEVs.