The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as interconnected digital and mechanical devices with intelligent and interactive data transmission features over a defined network. The ability of the IoT to collect, analyze and mine data into information and knowledge motivates the integration of IoT with grid and cloud computing. New job scheduling techniques are crucial for the effective integration and management of IoT with grid computing as they provide optimal computational solutions. The computational grid is a modern technology that enables distributed computing to take advantage of a organization’s resources in order to handle complex computational problems. However, the scheduling process is considered an NP-hard problem due to the heterogeneity of resources and management systems in the IoT grid. This paper proposed a Greedy Firefly Algorithm (GFA) for jobs scheduling in the grid environment. In the proposed greedy firefly algorithm, a greedy method is utilized as a local search mechanism to enhance the rate of convergence and efficiency of schedules produced by the standard firefly algorithm. Several experiments were conducted using the GridSim toolkit to evaluate the proposed greedy firefly algorithm’s performance. The study measured several sizes of real grid computing workload traces, starting with lightweight traces with only 500 jobs, then typical with 3000 to 7000 jobs, and finally heavy load containing 8000 to 10,000 jobs. The experiment results revealed that the greedy firefly algorithm could insignificantly reduce the makespan makespan and execution times of the IoT grid scheduling process as compared to other evaluated scheduling methods. Furthermore, the proposed greedy firefly algorithm converges on large search spacefaster , making it suitable for large-scale IoT grid environments.

The computational cloud aims to move traditional computing from personal computers to cloud providers on the internet. Cloud security represents an important research area. Confidentiality, integrity, and availability are the main cloud security characteristics addressed. Cloud providers apply dynamic load balancing and reactive fault tolerance techniques to build secure cloud services to achieve high service availability. Dynamic cloud load balancing approaches distribute submitted tasks to virtual machines during tasks execution and the load of virtual machines is updated based on the system's state. Reactive cloud fault tolerance is activated for system process failures after failure effectively happens. Reactive cloud fault tolerance handles failure after the fault has occurred. Despite the significance of dynamic load balancing and reactive fault tolerance techniques and mechanisms, few reviews focus on these approaches in a systematic, unbiased method focusing on integrating cloud dynamic load balancing and reactive fault tolerance techniques. This paper conducts a systematic literature review of the existing literature concerning reactive fault tolerance, dynamic load balancing, and their integration in their basic approaches, types, frameworks, and future directions.

Privacy-preserving techniques allow private information to be used without compromising privacy. Most encryption algorithms, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, cannot perform computational operations on encrypted data without first applying the decryption process. Homomorphic encryption algorithms provide innovative solutions to support computations on encrypted data while preserving the content of private information. However, these algorithms have some limitations, such as computational cost as well as the need for modifications for each case study. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of various homomorphic encryption tools for Big Data analysis and their applications. We also discuss a security framework for Big Data analysis while preserving privacy using homomorphic encryption algorithms. We highlight the fundamental features and tradeoffs that should be considered when choosing the right approach for Big Data applications in practice. We then present a comparison of popular current homomorphic encryption tools with respect to these identified characteristics. We examine the implementation results of various homomorphic encryption toolkits and compare their performances. Finally, we highlight some important issues and research opportunities. We aim to anticipate how homomorphic encryption technology will be useful for secure Big Data processing, especially to improve the utility and performance of privacy-preserving machine learning.

Software reliability is prioritised as the most critical quality attribute. Reliability prediction models participate in the prevention of software failures which can cause vital events and disastrous consequences in safety-critical applications or even in businesses. Predicting reliability during design allows software developers to avoid potential design problems, which can otherwise result in reconstructing an entire system when discovered at later stages of the software development life-cycle. Several reliability models have been built to predict reliability during software development. However, several issues still exist in these models. Current models suffer from a scalability issue referred to as the modeling of large systems. The scalability solutions usually come at a high computational cost, requiring solutions. Secondly, consideration of the nature of concurrent applications in reliability prediction is another issue. We propose a reliability prediction model that enhances scalability by introducing a system-level scenario synthesis mechanism that mitigates complexity. Additionally, the proposed model supports modeling of the nature of concurrent applications through adaption of formal statistical distribution toward scenario combination. The proposed model was evaluated using sensors-based case studies. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model from the view of computational cost reduction compared to similar models. This reduction is the main parameter for scalability enhancement. In addition, the presented work can enable system developers to know up to which load their system will be reliable via observation of the reliability value in several running scenarios.

Mobile devices have become very important for our daily needs. The user authentication protocols with the key agreement are required to deal with the security issues that arise from the use of mobile devices through Internet applications. However, existing user authentication protocols are only suitable if the client and the server use a similar cryptographic approach. Therefore, it is important to develop an authentication protocol for mobile environments with heterogeneous cryptographic approaches. In this paper, an efficient user authentication and key agreement protocol is proposed for a heterogeneous client-server mobile environment. The security of the proposed scheme is formally proved under the q-strong Diffie-Hellman problem (q-SDH), the q-bilinear Diffie-Hellman inversion problem (q-BDHI), and the modified bilinear Diffie-Hellman inversion problem (mBDHI), respectively. Our scheme has reasonable processing costs and communication costs on the client and server sides. Moreover, our scheme is suitable for applications that use different cryptographic approaches. In particular, the proposed protocol can work when the client applies the identity-based cryptosystem and the server applies the certificateless cryptosystem.