Cloud computing has become a widely exploited research area in academia and industry. Cloud computing benefits both cloud services providers (CSPs) and consumers. The security challenges associated with cloud computing have been widely studied in the literature. This systematic literature review (SLR) is aimed to review the existing research studies on cloud computing security, threats, and challenges. This SLR examined the research studies published between 2010 and 2020 within the popular digital libraries. We selected 80 papers after a meticulous screening of published works to answer the proposed research questions. The outcomes of this SLR reported seven major security threats to cloud computing services. The results showed that data tampering and leakage were among the highly discussed topics in the chosen literature. Other identified security risks were associated with the data intrusion and data storage in the cloud computing environment. This SLR's results also indicated that consumers' data outsourcing remains a challenge for both CSPs and cloud users. Our survey paper identified the blockchain as a partnering technology to alleviate security concerns. The SLR findings reveal some suggestions to be carried out in future works to bring data confidentiality, data integrity, and availability.

The need for timely identification of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT) has become critical in minimizing security risks as the number of IoT devices deployed rapidly grows globally and the volume of such attacks rises to unprecedented levels. Instant detection facilitates network security by speeding up warning and disconnection from the network of infected IoT devices, thereby preventing the botnet from propagating and thereby stopping additional attacks. Several methods have been developed for detecting botnet attacks, such as Swarm Intelligence (SI) and Evolutionary Computing (EC)-based algorithms. In this study, we propose a Local-Global best Bat Algorithm for Neural Networks (LGBA-NN) to select both feature subsets and hyperparameters for efficient detection of botnet attacks, inferred from 9 commercial IoT devices infected by two botnets: Gafgyt and Mirai. The proposed Bat Algorithm (BA) adopted the local-global best-based inertia weight to update the bat’s velocity in the swarm. To tackle with swarm diversity of BA, we proposed Gaussian distribution used in the population initialization. Furthermore, the local search mechanism was followed by the Gaussian density function and local-global best function to achieve better exploration during each generation. Enhanced BA was further employed for neural network hyperparameter tuning and weight optimization to classify ten different botnet attacks with an additional one benign target class. The proposed LGBA-NN algorithm was tested on an N-BaIoT data set with extensive real traffic data with benign and malicious target classes. The performance of LGBA-NN was compared with several recent advanced approaches such as weight optimization using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO-NN) and BA-NN. The experimental results revealed the superiority of LGBA-NN with 90% accuracy over other variants, i.e., BA-NN (85.5% accuracy) and PSO-NN (85.2% accuracy) in multi-class botnet attack detection.

With the increased usage of Web 2.0 and data-affluent tools such as social media platforms and web blog services, the challenge of extracting public sentiment and disseminating personal health information has become more common than ever in the last decade. This paper proposes a novel model for Dengue disease detection based on social media posts alone. The model does not access any personal information of people or any medical record. The model extracts the presence of a Dengue disease based on tweets only and decides whether it is a general discussion about the disease, and no one is actually infected, or people are actually infected with that disease. This paper uses efficient machine/deep learning approaches to utilize tweets data for automatic and efficient disease detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is able to achieve 92% accuracy compared to the current state-of-theart techniques in this domain.

Agricultural food production is projected to be 70% higher by 2050 than it is today, with the world population rising to more than 9 billion, 34% higher than it is now. The farmers have been forced to produce more with the same resources. This pressure means that optimizing productivity is one of the main objectives of the producers but also in a sustainable way. Not only does agriculture face a decline in production, but it has also had to face limitations in data collection, storing, securing, and sharing, climate change, increases in input prices, traditional food supply chain systems where there is no direct connection between the farmer and the buyer, and limitations on energy use. Existing IoT-based agriculture systems have a centralized format and operate in isolation, leaving room for unresolved issues and major concerns, including data security, manipulation, and single failure points. This paper proposes a futuristic IoT with a blockchain model to meet these challenges. Further, this paper also proposes and novel energy-efficient clustering IoT-based agriculture protocol for lower energy consumption and network stability and compares its results with its counterpart low-energy adoptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol network stability is 23% higher as compared to LEACH as first node of LEACH dies at 168 rounds while IoT-based agriculture first node dies after 463 rounds. Similarly, IoT-based agriculture protocol energy consumption is 68% lower than that of LEACH. The proposed protocol also extends the network life to more rounds and demonstrates an increase of 112%.

A wireless sensor network is a large sensor hub with a confined power supply that performs limited calculations. Due to the degree of restricted correspondence and the large size of the sensor hub, packets sent through the sensor network are based primarily on multihop data transmission. Current wireless sensor networks are widely used in a range of applications, such as precision agriculture, healthcare, and smart cities. The network covers a wide domain and addresses multiple aspects in agriculture, such as soil moisture, temperature, and humidity. Therefore, issues of precision agriculture at the output of the network are analyzed using a star and mesh topology with TCP as the transmission protocol. The system is equipped with two sensors: Arduino DFRobot for soil moisture and DHT11 for relative temperature and humidity. The experiments are performed using the NS2 simulator, which provides an improved interface to analyze the results. The results showed that the proposed mechanism has good performance and output.

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Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is a population-based intelligent stochastic search technique used to search for food with the intrinsic manner of bee swarming. PSO is widely used to solve the diverse problems of optimization. Initialization of population is a critical factor in the PSO algorithm, which considerably influences the diversity and convergence during the process of PSO. Quasirandom sequences are useful for initializing the population to improve the diversity and convergence, rather than applying the random distribution for initialization. The performance of PSO is expanded in this paper to make it appropriate for the optimization problem by introducing a new initialization technique named WELL with the help of low-discrepancy sequence. To solve the optimization problems in large-dimensional search spaces, the proposed solution is termed as WE-PSO. The suggested solution has been verified on fifteen well-known unimodal and multimodal benchmark test problems extensively used in the literature, Moreover, the performance of WE-PSO is compared with the standard PSO and two other initialization approaches Sobol-based PSO (SO-PSO) and Halton-based PSO (H-PSO). The findings indicate that WE-PSO is better than the standard multimodal problem-solving techniques. The results validate the efficacy and effectiveness of our approach. In comparison, the proposed approach is used for artificial neural network (ANN) learning and contrasted to the standard backpropagation algorithm, standard PSO, H-PSO, and SO-PSO, respectively. The results of our technique has a higher accuracy score and outperforms traditional methods. Also, the outcome of our work presents an insight on how the proposed initialization technique has a high effect on the quality of cost function, integration, and diversity aspects.

Breast cancer is a dangerous disease with a high morbidity and mortality rate. One of the most important aspects in breast cancer treatment is getting an accurate diagnosis. Machine-learning (ML) and deep learning techniques can help doctors in making diagnosis decisions. This paper proposed the optimized deep recurrent neural network (RNN) model based on RNN and the Keras–Tuner optimization technique for breast cancer diagnosis. The optimized deep RNN consists of the input layer, five hidden layers, five dropout layers, and the output layer. In each hidden layer, we optimized the number of neurons and rate values of the dropout layer. Three feature-selection methods have been used to select the most important features from the database. Five regular ML models, namely decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), naive Bayes (NB), and K-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN) were compared with the optimized deep RNN. The regular ML models and the optimized deep RNN have been applied the selected features. The results showed that the optimized deep RNN with the selected features by univariate has achieved the highest performance for CV and the testing results compared to the other models.