Muhammad Bilal Amin

Wenli Yang, Rui Fu, Muhammad Bilal Amin et al.

Metadata management plays a critical role in data governance, resource discovery, and decision-making in the data-driven era. While traditional metadata approaches have primarily focused on organization, classification, and resource reuse, the integration of modern artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has significantly transformed these processes. This paper investigates both traditional and AI-driven metadata approaches by examining open-source solutions, commercial tools, and research initiatives. A comparative analysis of traditional and AI-driven metadata management methods is provided, highlighting existing challenges and their impact on next-generation datasets. The paper also presents an innovative AI-assisted metadata management framework designed to address these challenges. This framework leverages more advanced modern AI technologies to automate metadata generation, enhance governance, and improve the accessibility and usability of modern datasets. Finally, the paper outlines future directions for research and development, proposing opportunities to further advance metadata management in the context of AI-driven innovation and complex datasets.

Byeong Ho Kang, Wenli Yang, Muhammad Bilal Amin

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems increasingly assume consequential decision-making roles, a widening gap has emerged between technical capabilities and institutional accountability. Ethical guidance alone is insufficient to counter this challenge; it demands architectures that embed governance into the execution fabric of the ecosystem. This paper presents the Ten Criteria for Trustworthy Orchestration AI, a comprehensive assurance framework that integrates human input, semantic coherence, audit and provenance integrity into a unified Control-Panel architecture. Unlike conventional agentic AI initiatives that primarily focus on AI-to-AI coordination, the proposed framework provides an umbrella of governance to the entire AI components, their consumers and human participants. By taking aspiration from international standards and Australia's National Framework for AI Assurance initiative, this work demonstrates that trustworthiness can be systematically incorporated (by engineering) into AI systems, ensuring the execution fabric remains verifiable, transparent, reproducible and under meaningful human control.

Khizar Hameed, Saurabh Garg, Muhammad Bilal Amin et al.

In a clone node attack, an attacker attempted to physically capture the devices to gather sensitive information to conduct various insider attacks. Several solutions for detecting clone node attacks on IoT networks have been presented in the viewpoints above. These solutions are focused on specific system designs, processes, and feature sets and act as a high-level abstraction of underlying system architectures based on a few performance requirements. However, critical features like formal analysis, modelling, and verification are frequently overlooked in existing proposed solutions aimed at verifying the correctness and robustness of systems in order to ensure that no problematic scenarios or anomalies exist. This paper presents a formal analysis, modelling, and verification of our existing proposed clone node attack detection scheme in IoT. Firstly, we modelled the architectural components of the proposed scheme using High-Level Petri Nets (HLPNs) and then mapped them using their specified functionalities. Secondly, we defined and analysed the behavioural properties of the proposed scheme using Z specification language. Furthermore, we used the Satisfiability Modulo Theories Library (SMT-Lib) and the Z3 Solver to validate and demonstrate the overall functionality of the proposed scheme. Finally, in addition to modelling and analysis, this work employs Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs), which combine Petri Nets with a high-level programming language, making them more suitable for large-scale system modelling. To perform the simulations in CPN, we used both timed and untimed models, where timed models are used to evaluate performance, and untimed models are used to validate logical validity.

Khizar Hameed, Saurabh Garg, Muhammad Bilal Amin et al.

The rapidly expanding nature of the Internet of Things (IoT) networks is beginning to attract interest across a range of applications, including smart homes, smart transportation, smart health, and industrial contexts. This cutting-edge technology enables individuals to track and control their integrated environment in real-time and remotely via a thousand IoT devices comprised of sensors and actuators that actively participate in sensing, processing, storing, and sharing information. Nonetheless, IoT devices are frequently deployed in hostile environments, wherein adversaries attempt to capture and breach them in order to seize control of the entire network. One such example of potentially malicious behaviour is the cloning of IoT devices, in which an attacker can physically capture the devices, obtain some sensitive information, duplicate the devices, and intelligently deploy them in desired locations to conduct various insider attacks. A device cloning attack on IoT networks is a significant security concern since it allows for selective forwarding, sink-hole, and black-hole attacks. To address this issue, this paper provides an efficient scheme for detecting clone node attacks on IoT networks that makes use of semantic information about IoT devices known as context information sensed from the deployed environment to locate them securely. We design a location proof mechanism by combining location proofs and batch verification of the extended elliptic curve digital signature technique to accelerate the verification process at selected trusted nodes. We demonstrate the security of our scheme and its resilience to secure clone node attack detection by conducting a comprehensive security analysis. The performance of our proposed scheme provides a high degree of detection accuracy with minimal detection time and significantly reduces the computation, communication and storage overhead.

Khizar Hameed, Mutaz Barika, Saurabh Garg et al.

Blockchain technology has taken on a leading role in today's industrial applications by providing salient features and showing significant performance since its beginning. Blockchain began its journey from the concept of cryptocurrency and is now part of a range of core applications to achieve resilience and automation between various tasks. With the integration of Blockchain technology into different industrial applications, many application designs, security and privacy challenges present themselves, posing serious threats to users and their data. Although several approaches have been proposed to address the specific security and privacy needs of targeted applications with functional parameters, there is still a need for a research study on the application, security and privacy challenges, and requirements of Blockchain-based industrial applications, along with possible security threats and countermeasures. This study presents a state-of-the-art survey of Blockchain-based Industry 4.0 applications, focusing on crucial application and security and privacy requirements, as well as corresponding attacks on Blockchain systems with potential countermeasures. We also analyse and provide the classification of different security and privacy techniques used in these applications to enhance the advancement of security features. Furthermore, we highlight some open issues in industrial applications that help to design secure Blockchain-based applications as future directions.