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Phishing attacks remain a significant cybersecurity threat, with phishing websites serving as a primary tool for attackers to deceive users and steal sensitive information. The rapid evolution of phishing tactics has spurred the development of increasingly sophisticated detection mechanisms. This paper provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art techniques for phishing website detection, highlighting recent advancements in the field. In particular, it addresses emerging methods for detection, such as graph-based, large language model (LLM)-based approaches and phishing kit-based detection methods, which have not been extensively covered in previous surveys. By critically reviewing recent works from reliable databases, this study constructs a new taxonomy for phishing detection techniques. This review offers a comparison of these techniques, highlighting their strengths and limitations, and explores the challenges of real-world applications of these detection systems. Furthermore, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in phishing website detection is discussed, and future research directions to improve detection capabilities are suggested. This work addresses emerging and uncovered phishing website detection methods in previous review papers and provides valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners working to develop more robust phishing website detection systems.

Amid the exponential rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol has gained prominence due to its efficiency in facilitating device-cloud interactions. Yet, the surge in IoT device usage and MQTT’s popularity has spotlighted potential security risks. Vulnerabilities in this realm can lead to substantial disturbances and financial setbacks. While there is a noticeable increase in IoT-related attacks, comprehensive reviews on MQTT security remain scarce. Existing studies often exhibit shortcomings, such as a broad but superficial discussion of MQTT attacks and countermeasures. Additionally, many essential components and roles in building or implementing MQTT-based applications have not been adequately addressed. This research fills this void by offering a contemporary analysis of MQTT ecosystem security challenges, encompassing prevalent attacks, their repercussions, mitigation strategies, and prospective areas for further research. This study presents a comprehensive taxonomy of security attacks within the MQTT ecosystem, offering a systematic framework to guide researchers, businesses, and end-users in mitigating these risks. As a result, this work serves as a crucial resource for enhancing the security of IoT devices utilizing MQTT, marking a significant stride in safeguarding IoT infrastructure.

The IoT, or Internet of Things has been a major talking point amongst technology enthusiasts in recent years. The internet of thing (IoT) has been emerged and evolved rapidly, making the world’s fabric around us smarter and more responsive. The smart home uses one such transformation of IoT, which seems to be the wave of the future. However, with the increasing wide adoption of IoT, data security, and privacy concerns about how our data is collected and shared with others, has also risen. To solve these challenges, an approach to data privacy and security in a smart home using blockchain technology is proposed in this paper. We propose authentication scheme that combines attribute-based access control with smart contracts and edge computing to create a secure framework for IoT devices in smart home systems. The edge server adds scalability to the system by offloading heavy processing activities and using a differential privacy method to aggregate data to the cloud securely and privately. We present several aspects of testing and implementing smart contracts, the differential private stochastic gradient descent algorithm, and system architecture and design. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed system by fully examining its security and privacy goals in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Our framework achieves desired security and privacy goals and is resilient against modification, DoS attacks, data mining and linkage attacks. Finally, we undertake a performance evaluation to demonstrate the proposed scheme’s feasibility and efficiency.

The availability of an enormous amount of unlabeled datasets drives the anomaly detection research towards unsupervised machine learning algorithms. Deep clustering algorithms for anomaly detection gain significant research attention in this era. We propose an intelligent anomaly detection for extensive network traffic analysis with an Optimized Deep Clustering (ODC) algorithm. Firstly, ODC does the optimization of the deep AutoEncoder algorithm by tuning the hyperparameters. Thereby we can achieve a reduced reconstruction error rate from the deep AutoEncoder. Secondly, ODC feeds the optimized deep AutoEncoder’s latent view to the BIRCH clustering algorithm to detect the known and unknown malicious network traffic without human intervention. Unlike other deep clustering algorithms, ODC does not require to specify the number of clusters needed to analyze the network traffic dataset. We experiment ODC algorithm with the CoAP off-path dataset obtained from our testbed and the MNIST dataset to compare our algorithm’s accuracy with state-of-art clustering algorithms. The evaluation results show ODC deep clustering method outperforms the existing deep clustering methods for anomaly detection.

Mobile cloud computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to facilitate computation-intensive and delay-sensitive mobile applications. Computation offloading services at the edge mobile cloud environment are provided by small-scale cloud infrastructures such as cloudlets. While offloading tasks to in-proximity cloudlets enjoys benefits of lower latency and smaller energy consumption, new issues related to the cloudlets are rising. For instance, unbalanced task distribution and huge load gaps among heterogeneous mobile cloudlets are becoming more challenging, concerning the network dynamics and distributed task offloading. In this paper, we propose `FairEdge', a Fairness-oriented computation offloading scheme to enable balanced task distribution for mobile Edge cloudlet networks. By integrating the balls-and-bins theory with fairness index, our solution promotes effective load balancing with limited information at low computation cost. The evaluation results from extensive simulations and experiments with real-world datasets show that, FairEdge outperforms conventional task offloading methods, and it can achieve a network fairness up to 0.85 and reduce the unbalanced task offload by 50%.

With the explosive usage of smart mobile devices, sustainable access to wireless networks (e.g., Wi-Fi) has become a pervasive demand. Most mobile users expect seamless network connection with low cost. Indeed, this can be achieved by using an accurate received signal strength (RSS) map of wireless access points. While existing methods are either costly or unscalable, the recently emerged mobile crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm is a promising technique for building RSS maps. MCS applications leverage pervasive mobile devices to collaboratively collect data. However, the heterogeneity of devices and the mobility of users could cause inherent noises and blank spots in collected data set. In this paper, we study how to: 1) tame the sensing noises from heterogenous mobile devices and 2) construct accurate and complete RSS maps with random mobility of crowdsensing participants. First, we build a mobile crowdsensing system called iMap to collect RSS measurements with heterogeneous mobile devices. Second, through observing experimental results, we build statistical models of sensing noises and derive different parameters for each kind of mobile device. Third, we present the signal transmission model with measurement error model, and we propose a novel signal recovery scheme to construct accurate and complete RSS maps. The evaluation results show that the proposed method can achieve 90% and 95% recovery rate in geographic coordinate system and polar coordinate system, respectively.

With the advancement of wireless networking technologies and communication infrastructures, mobile cloud computing has emerged as a pervasive paradigm to execute computing tasks for capacity-limited mobile devices. More specifically, at the network edge, the resource-rich and trusted cloudlet system can provide in-proximity computing services by executing the workloads for nearby devices. Nevertheless, there are chances for malicious users to generate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) flooding tasks to overwhelm cloudlet servers and block computing services from legitimate users. Load balancing is one of the most effective methods to solve DDoS attacks in distributed networks. However, existing solutions require overall load information to achieve load balancing in cloudlet networks, making it costly in both communication and computation. To achieve more efficient and low-cost load balancing, we propose CTOM, a novel collaborative task offloading scheme to avoid DDoS attacks for secure and sustainable mobile cloudlet networks. The proposed solution is based on the balls-and-bins theory and it can balance the task loads with extremely limited information. The CTOM reduces the number of overloaded cloudlets smoothly, thus handling the potential DDoS attacks in mobile cloudlet networks. Extensive simulations and evaluation demonstrate that, the proposed CTOM outperforms the conventional random and proportional allocation schemes in reducing the task gaps between maximum load and minimum load among mobile cloudlets by 65% and 55%, respectively.