EvacuAI: An Analysis of Escape Routes in Indoor Environments with the Aid of Reinforcement Learning.

There is only a very short reaction time for people to find the best way out of a building in a fire outbreak. Software applications can be used to assist the rapid evacuation of people from the building; however, this is an arduous task, which requires an understanding of advanced technologies. Since well-known pathway algorithms (such as, Dijkstra, Bellman-Ford, and A*) can lead to serious performance problems, when it comes to multi-objective problems, we decided to make use of deep reinforcement learning techniques. A wide range of strategies including a random initialization of replay buffer and transfer learning were assessed in three projects involving schools of different sizes. The results showed the proposal was viable and that in most cases the performance of transfer learning was superior, enabling the learning agent to be trained in times shorter than 1 min, with 100% accuracy in the routes. In addition, the study raised challenges that had to be faced in the future.

Botnet Detection and Mitigation Model for IoT Networks Using Federated Learning.

The Internet of Things (IoT) introduces significant security vulnerabilities, raising concerns about cyber-attacks. Attackers exploit these vulnerabilities to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, compromising availability and causing financial damage to digital infrastructure. This study focuses on mitigating DDoS attacks in corporate local networks by developing a model that operates closer to the attack source. The model utilizes Host Intrusion Detection Systems (HIDS) to identify anomalous behaviors in IoT devices and employs network-based intrusion detection approaches through a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) for comprehensive attack identification. Additionally, a Host Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (HIDPS) is implemented in a fog computing infrastructure for real-time and precise attack detection. The proposed model integrates NIDS with federated learning, allowing devices to locally analyze their data and contribute to the detection of anomalous traffic. The distributed architecture enhances security by preventing volumetric attack traffic from reaching internet service providers and destination servers. This research contributes to the advancement of cybersecurity in local network environments and strengthens the protection of IoT networks against malicious traffic. This work highlights the efficiency of using a federated training and detection procedure through deep learning to minimize the impact of a single point of failure (SPOF) and reduce the workload of each device, thus achieving accuracy of 89.753% during detection and increasing privacy issues in a decentralized IoT infrastructure with a near-real-time detection and mitigation system.

Data Security and Trading Framework for Smart Grids in Neighborhood Area Networks.

Due to the drastic increase of electricity prosumers, i.e., energy consumers that are also producers, smart grids have become a key solution for electricity infrastructure. In smart grids, one of the most crucial requirements is the privacy of the final users. The vast majority of the literature addresses the privacy issue by providing ways of hiding user's electricity consumption. However, open issues in the literature related to the privacy of the electricity producers still remain. In this paper, we propose a framework that preserves the secrecy of prosumers' identities and provides protection against the traffic analysis attack in a competitive market for energy trade in a Neighborhood Area Network (NAN). In addition, the amount of bidders and of successful bids are hidden from malicious attackers by our framework. Due to the need for small data throughput for the bidders, the communication links of our framework are based on a proprietary communication system. Still, in terms of data security, we adopt the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128 bit with Exclusive-OR (XOR) keys due to their reduced computational complexity, allowing fast processing. Our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of privacy protection and trading flexibility in a prosumer-to-prosumer design.