An AI-Based Solution for Secure Service Provisioning in IoT

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues its rapid expansion, the attack surface grows accordingly, with emerging threats targeting smart objects and their interactions. In this evolving landscape, securing service provisioning is crucial to ensure the proper functioning, security, and reliability of the IoT ecosystem. Service provisioning encompasses key tasks such as device registration, configuration, authentication, authorization, and software deployment, all of which are essential for seamless and secure IoT operations. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework designed to select the most suitable smart objects to deliver a target service within a given IoT environment while also monitoring the behavior of the entities involved during the service provisioning phase. To achieve this, we employ a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach in which an intelligent agent learns, through interaction with a complex, dynamic environment, how to adapt to changes while adhering to predefined security constraints. For behavioral monitoring, we leverage Federated Learning (FL) to develop a global Behavioral Fingerprinting (BF) model that is fully distributed and can analyze how IoT devices interact within the network. In addition, the BF is used to compute a reliability score for each service provider, reflecting its degree of compliance with the defined security constraints. This score is then incorporated into the service provisioning process, allowing smart objects to select providers not only according to functional suitability but also to their reliability level. Finally, we conduct an extensive experimental evaluation to assess the robustness and scalability of our approach. The results demonstrate that our solution can be effectively deployed even on resource-constrained IoT devices, making it a viable and scalable security-enhancing mechanism for modern IoT ecosystems.

Account Consistency from Gameplay Traces: Same-Player Verification in Counter-Strike 2

In competitive first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Counter-Strike 2 (CS2), account-integrity review often asks whether an account's recent behavior remains consistent with its historical operator. This consistency question arises in cases such as temporary substitution, rank boosting, and high-skill players using lower-ranked accounts, where manual review requires comparing a current match against multiple historical matches. We formulate this review task as same-player verification: we encode the behavioral trajectory of a single player in a match replay (demo) as a demo-player behavioral fingerprint, and train a model to judge whether two behavioral observations come from the same real player. Using CS2-specific domain knowledge, the fingerprints cover crosshair control, movement-stop-fire coordination, economy/buy, combat/engagement, and temporal rhythm. We construct strict six-fold evaluations on the Perfect dataset (3,570 demos and 35,700 demo-player observations) and the Professional dataset (539 demos and 5,390 demo-player observations). The final pairwise model reaches ROC AUCs of 0.926 and 0.956, respectively. Feature analysis shows that the strongest identity signals come from aiming/crosshair and other low-level mechanical behaviors, indicating that stable mechanics are more informative for this verification task than single-match performance outcomes. On fixed eligible query cohorts, aggregating pairwise evidence between a current demo and multiple historical demos raises account-history AUC on Perfect from 0.923 at K=1 to 0.982 at K=10, and on Professional from 0.914 at K=1 to 0.975 at K=5. These results show that CS2 demo behavior can support supervised same-player verification and account-level identity-consistency modeling through multi-demo history aggregation.