Amir Al Sadi, Carlo Mazzocca, Andrea Melis, Rebecca Montanari · 6 authors
The recent widespread novel network technologies for programming data planes are remarkably enhancing the customization of data packet processing. In this direction, the Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) is envisioned as a disruptive technology, capable of configuring network devices in a highly customizable way. P4 enables network devices to adapt their behaviors to mitigate malicious attacks (e.g., denial of service). Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), such as blockchain, allow secure reporting alerts on malicious actions detected across different areas. However, the blockchain suffers from major scalability concerns due to the consensus protocols needed to agree on a global state of the network. To overcome these limitations, new solutions have recently emerged. IOTA is a next-generation distributed ledger engineered to tackle the scalability limits while still providing the same security capabilities such as immutability, traceability, and transparency. This article proposes an architecture that integrates a P4-based data plane software-defined network (SDN) and an IOTA layer employed to notify about networking attacks. Specifically, we propose a fast, secure, and energy-efficient DLT-enabled architecture that combines the IOTA data structure, named Tangle, with the SDN layer to detect and notify about network threats.
In the current 5th Generation (5G) networking paradigm, the enforcement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is a non-trivial measure to ensure the scope and the quality of services and standards between tenants and service providers (SPs). On top of this, Secure Service Level Agreements (SSLA) are introduced to ensure that SPs deliver the most critical and required security-related standards defined in the contract, such as integrity, confidentiality, availability, non-repudiation, and privacy assurance. However, with the tendency for more distributed and multi-stakeholder networking architectures in next-generation networks, the management process of such SSLAs will be challenging due to the diversified security vulnerabilities and complexity of underlying technologies. Although blockchain is emerging as a platform to facilitate such distributed SSLA/SLA management frameworks, its currently available consensus mechanisms are more generic. Still, they need to improve in terms of applying in multi-stakeholder networks. Therefore, this paper presents a novel consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Monitoring (PoM) for a blockchain-based novel SSLA management framework. Moreover, we provide details about the prototype implementation of our proposed consensus algorithm and SSLA management framework. It is proven by comparing our proposal with the other existing solutions that our solution outperforms in many aspects, such as energy consumption, computation cost, and security features.
Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are now operational to deploy all over the world. The technology of 5G’s objective is to link heterogeneous machines and devices with significant improvements high quality of service (QoS), internet bandwidth, and improved system throughput to enable several upright applications. Despite all these benefits that 5G will provide, still, significant issues need to be resolved, such as decentralization, transparency, and risks associated with data interoperability, network privacy, and security vulnerabilities. Modern networks link an enormous number of devices to the Internet, and in this complicated situation, the use of BC and SDN has been effectively advocated to assure security, privacy, and secrecy. This study offers a blockchain-enabled SDN framework for securing transactions that makes use of Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to overcome these issues. The proposed framework can address the man-in-the-middle attack between control and data plane in SDN networks. A controller authentication scheme is provided using smart contracts. Smart contracts automatically authenticate the SDN controller to increase the efficiency of controller verification. The communicated data can also be authenticated using smart contracts. The proposed framework can enhance network transparency, data security, and user privacy. Each SDN controller can access verifiable data using the proposed framework.
Sidra Tul Muntaha, Pavlos I. Lazaridis, Maryam Hafeez, Qasim Zeeshan Ahmed · 6 authors
Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) and network slicing are some of the principal concepts to realize the emerging applications in Beyond 5th Generation (B5G) and 6th Generation (6G) networks. The frequency spectrum remains scarce and underutilized, while the performance requirements in terms of data throughput and latency of the network tenants have diversified. DSA allows for the efficient utilization of spectrum resources, while network slicing aims to serve network users with highly distinctive service needs. Lack of incentivization, sharing of spectrum resources among multiple operators, and lack of trust between operators are some of the challenges faced by centralized DSA approaches. Similarly, secure network slice orchestration, slice-isolation, secure access to network resources, privacy of user sensitive data, assuring the provision of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are some of the challenges in existing network slicing techniques. Blockchain due to its innate capabilities can be a promising technology to solve the key issues pertaining to current DSA and network slicing approaches. Blockchain through smart contracts, provides traceability of network resources, auditability and accountability of network operators and service providers. Smart contracts facilitate the automation of resource sharing and network slice orchestration, while ensuring that SLAs are met, and network operators are compensated. This paper first provides a comprehensive overview of the DSA concept, the existing DSA techniques, and the challenges posed by these techniques. This is followed by a detailed description of network slicing, its key elements and architecture, various network slicing parameters, existing network slicing techniques and their challenges. Then an in- depth review on blockchain, its working principle, factors that affect blockchain implementation, and a comparison of various open-source blockchain platforms that support smart contracts is presented. This discussion is summarized by presenting the state-of-the-art in the blockchain-enabled DSA and network slicing, challenges and trade-offs of these techniques, and the gaps and future directions in this research area. Finally, we conclude by providing some future research directions.
Stephen W. Turner, Murat Karakuş, Evrim Güler, Suleyman Uludag
The state of computer network technologies has continually advanced at a rapid pace. Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Blockchain (BC) have emerged as complementary technologies providing support that facilitates greater security and greater network performance for many domains of application, including the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, ideally resulting in an improvement in our collective quality of life. The proliferation of IoT devices, driven by a wide variety of use cases and its ubiquitous availability, combined with the emergence of SDN and BC, presents rich opportunities for various emerging research efforts. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the studies in which BC and SDN have been integrated into the IoT ecosystem, referred to hereafter as BC-enabled Software- Defined IoT (BC-SDIoT). First, we discuss the motivations and drivers for integrating BC-enabled SDN and BC-SDIoT, as well as the benefits and drawbacks. Second, we categorize the relevant studies according to six key implementation objectives and ideas that combine BC, SDN, and IoT technologies to create smart, secure, and effective frameworks: Security, computing paradigms (edge and fog computing), trust management, access control & authentication, privacy, and networking. In the corresponding sections, we present the categories (i.e., problem domains) of the aforementioned novel taxonomy and discuss related studies (i.e., solutions) in depth. Finally, we outline potential major challenges, open issues, and future prospects that require further research attention and intensive endeavors for complete and ground-breaking frameworks to broaden newer research domains in BC-SDIoT. This survey paper may be a fruitful primer for a reader investigating the exploitation of BC in SDN and IoT ecosystems.
This article shows a brief history of Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) in Communications, a proposed redefinition of TEA as well as the new challenges derived from a dynamic context with cloud-native virtualized networks, the Helium Network & alike blockchain-based decentralized networks, the new network as a platform (NaaP) paradigm, carbon pricing, network sharing, and web3, metaverse and blockchain technologies. The authors formulate the research question and show the need to improve TEA models to integrate and manage all this increasing complexity. This paper also proposes the characteristics TEA models should have and their current degree of compliance for several use cases: 5G and beyond, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), secure access service edge (SASE), secure service edge (SSE), and cloud cybersecurity risk assessment. The authors also present TEA extensibility to request for proposals (RFP) processes and other industries, to conclude that there is an urgent need for agile and effective TEA in Comms that allows industrialization of agile decision-making for all market stakeholders to choose the optimal solution for any technology, scenario and use case.
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are highly susceptible to malicious cyberattacks due to their reliance on communication networks. For this reason, many different attack detection techniques have been developed to guarantee the safety of CPSs. This article introduces BlockChain (BC) to address CPS issues such as data security and privacy. Additionally, BC is not well suited for CPS due to its high computing complexity, limited scalability, significant bandwidth overhead, and latency. To meet the requirements of CPS, a light-weight blockchain-based signature algorithm (LWBSA) model is developed in this work. The concept's resource constraints are alleviated by having a single centrally managed manager generate shared keys for outward-bound data transmission requests. The LWBSA paradigm provided herein produces an overlay network where extremely equipped resources can merge into a community BC, hence ensuring both dedicated privileges. Lightweight consensus, the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), and distributed throughput management (DTM) are the three optimizations implemented in the ELIB model discussed here. Extensive simulation is carried out to examine the implications of different situations on processing time, energy usage, and overhead. The experimental outcomes show that the LWBSA achieves the best possible performance across a wide variety of measures.
Yustus Eko Oktian, Thi-Thu-Huong Le, Uk Jo, Howon Kim
With the limited Internet bandwidth in a given area, unlimited data plans can create congestion because there is no retribution for transmitting many packets. The real-time pricing mechanism can inform users of their Internet consumption to limit congestion during peak hours. However, implementing real-time pricing is opex-heavy from the network provider side and requires high-integrity operations to gain consumer trust. This paper aims to leverage the software-defined network to solve the opex issues and blockchain technology to solve trust issues. First, the network congestion level in a given area is analyzed. Then, the price is adjusted accordingly. Devices that send a lot of traffic during congestion will be charged more expensive bills than if transmitting traffic during an off-peak period. To prevent over-charging, the consumers can pre-configure a customized Internet profile stating how many data bytes they are willing to send during congestion. The software-defined controller also authenticates consumers and checks whether they have enough token deposits in the blockchain as Internet usage fees. We implement our work using Ethereum and POX controllers. The experiment results show that the proposed real-time pricing can be performed seamlessly, and the network provider can reap up to 72.91% more profits than existing approaches, such as usage-based pricing or time-dependent pricing. The fairness and trustability of real-time pricing is also guaranteed through the proof-of-usage mechanism and the transparency of the blockchain.
Network slicing has gained popularity as a result of the advances in the fifth generation (5G) mobile network. Network slicing facilitates the support of different service types with varying requirements, which brings into light the slicing-aware next generation mobile network architecture. While allowing resource sharing among multiple stakeholders, there is a long list of administrative negotiations among parties that have not established mutual trust. Distributed ledger technology may be a solution to mitigate the above issues by taking its decentralized yet immutable and auditable ledger, which may help to ease administrative negotiations and build mutual trust among multi-stakeholders. There have been many research interests in this direction which focus on handling various problems in network slicing. This paper aims at constructing this area of knowledge by introducing network slice from a standardization point of view to start with, and presenting security, privacy, and trust challenges of network slicing in 5G and beyond networks. Furthermore, this paper covers distributed ledger technologies basics and related approaches that tackle security, privacy, and trust threats in network slicing for 5G and beyond networks. The various proposals proposed in the literature are compared and presented. Lastly, limitations of current work and open challenges are illustrated as well.
Alexey Finogeev, Michael Deev, Данила Парыгин, Антон Финогеев
The article deals with the creation of an intelligent architecture of the Internet of Things transport environment based on software-defined network (SDN) and blockchain for detecting threats and attacks. The transport environment is created for the monitoring system of critical events in the road transport infrastructure. Blockchain technology is used to authenticate network nodes, store sensor data in a distributed ledger. The network packet clustering method based on a fuzzy neural network is used to detect packets with possible malicious content. The intelligent SDN architecture is a hierarchy of four layers with six levels and includes: a) edge computing layer (sensor nodes and routers level, SDN switches data level), b) fog computing layer (zone server level, control level in SDN controllers), c) a cloud computing layer with data center servers, d) a layer for presenting monitoring results on user devices and applications. Detection of threats and attacks is implemented by validating network nodes and analyzing header fields of IP packets and TCP segments. The intrusion detection system includes a parser and analyzer of data packets, a module for filtering traffic by type, port numbers and other characteristics of packets, a module for synthesizing digital signatures of trusted nodes and their validation, a module for analyzing and clustering packets based on fuzzy logic and a neural network, modules for logging procedures. The probability function of packets belonging to clusters is tuned through deep learning of a five-layer neural network. The conclusion about belonging and degree of similarity with malicious packages is formed using the fuzzy logic apparatus. To train the neural network, the previously synthesized rules of the flow tables and the identified signs of atypical data packets are used. The functionality and effectiveness of the SDN architecture with an intrusion detection system is validated by simulating procedures in the NS3 Simulator system, evaluating authenticity, latency, throughput, response time, and accuracy in detecting atypical data packets.
Mizna Khalid, Sufian Hameed, Abdul Qadir, Syed Attique Shah · 5 authors
Access control is essential for the IoT environment to ensure that only approved and trusted parties are able to configure devices, access sensor information, and command actuators to execute activities. The IoT ecosystem is subject to various access control complications due to the limited latency between IoT devices and the Internet, low energy requirements of IoT devices, the distributed framework, ad-hoc networks, and an exceptionally large number of heterogeneous IoT devices that need to be managed. The motivation for this proposed work is to resolve the incurring challenges of IoT associated with management and access control security. Each IoT domain implementation has particular features and needs separate access control policies to be considered in order to design a secure solution. This research work aims to resolve the intricacy of policies management, forged policies, dissemination, tracking of access control policies, automation, and central management of IoT nodes and provides a trackable and auditable access control policy management system that prevents forged policy dissemination by applying Software Defined Network (SDN) and blockchain technology in an IoT environment. Integration of SDN and blockchain provides a robust solution for IoT environment security. Recently, smart contracts have become one of blockchain technology’s most promising applications. The integration of smart contracts with blockchain technology provides the capability of designing tamper-proof and independently verifiable policies. In this paper, we propose a novel, scalable solution for implementing immutable, verifiable, adaptive, and automated access control policies for IoT devices together with a successful proof of concept that demonstrates the scalability of the proposed solution. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated in terms of throughput and resource access delay between the blockchain component and the controller as well as from node to node. The number of nodes in the IoT network and the number of resource access requests were independently and systematically increased during the evaluations. The results illustrate that the resource access delay and throughput were affected neither linearly nor exponentially; hence, the proposed solution shows no significant degradation in performance with an increase in the number of nodes and/or requests.
This paper presents an inter-domain transport net-work slice management with Service Level Agreements (SLA) using the ETSI TeraFlowSDN (TFS) controller. Different instances of the TFS controller are deployed for each involved domain. The communication between the TFS instances is supported by a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)-based database. The different TFS instances upload the abstracted view of their topologies and retrieve that from remote peers. When the end- to-end SLA of the transport network slice is violated, the slice is reconfigured avoiding the domain that originated the violation.
Digitization in the power industry enables wide connectivity among multiple new entrants such as DERs, prosumers, and P2P counterparts within or outside the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The use of DLT to improve resilience in the power grid has growing support, but new technology provides new opportunities for adversaries to cause harm. This work completed by the Cybersecurity focused task force of IEEE SA P2418.5 evaluates the potential risks by applying the MITRE ATT&CK ICS matrix to the DLT Engineering and Cybersecurity Stack designed for power systems applications.
The high energy consumption of proof of work-based distributed ledgers has become an important environmental concern. Bitcoin, for example, consumes as much energy in a year as a developed country. Alternative consensus mechanisms, such as proof of stake, have been shown to use drastically less energy than proof of work-based DLTs. For example, the IOTA DLT, built upon a directed acyclic graph (DAG) architecture, uses an alternative consensus mechanism that requires significantly less energy than other DLTs. Because the (DLT) space is constantly and rapidly evolving, the question of how much energy DLTs actually consume demands to be continuously studied and answered. Previous research into the energy consumption of the IOTA network has shown that an optimization in the overall protocol correlates to an optimization in energy consumption. The planned IOTA 2.0 update, built upon the GoShimmer research prototype, promises to further optimize the protocol by removing the network's centralized Coordinator. This report presents the results of measuring the energy consumption of a private GoShimmer network while comparing these findings to previous research into the current mainnet, which is called Chrysalis. The main findings of this report are that the IOTA 2.0 research prototype shows both improvements and increase in the energy consumption metrics compared to the Chrysalis network. Additionally, this report defines a model to estimate the total annual energy consumption of an IOTA network. This model should be significant for future research as it enables a way to estimate the total cost of running the IOTA network as well as its carbon emissions. Moreover, having an annual power consumption metric allows for better objective comparisons to different DLTs.
Sasikumar Asaithambi, Logesh Ravi, Hossam Kotb, Ahmad H. Milyani · 8 authors
The number of unsecured and portable Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the smart industry is growing exponentially. A diversity of centralized and distributed platforms have been implemented to defend against security attacks; however, these platforms are insecure because of their low storage capacities, high power utilization, single node failure, underutilized resources, and high end-to-end delay. Blockchain and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are growing technologies to create a secure system and to ensure safe network connectivity. Blockchain technology offers a strong and trustworthy foundation to deal with threats and problems, including safety, privacy, adaptability, scalability, and security. However, the integration of blockchain with SDN is still in the implementation phase, which provides an efficient resource allocation and reduced latency that can overcome the issues of industrial IoT networks. We propose an energy-efficient blockchain-integrated software-defined networking architecture for Industrial IoT (IIoT) to overcome these challenges. We present a framework for implementing decentralized blockchain integrated with SDN for IIoT applications to achieve efficient energy utilization and cluster-head selection. Additionally, the blockchain-enabled distributed ledger ensures data consistency throughout the SDN controller network and keeps a record of the nodes enforced in the controller. The simulation result shows that the proposed model provides the best energy consumption, end-to-end latency, and overall throughput compared to the existing works.
Georgios Fragkos, Jay Johnson, Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou
A global transition to power grids with high penetrations of renewable energy generation is being driven in part by rapid installations of distributed energy resources (DER). New DER equipment includes standardized IEEE 1547-2018 communication interfaces and proprietary communications capabilities. Interoperable DER provides new monitoring and control capabilities. The existence of multiple entities with different roles and responsibilities within the DER ecosystem makes the Access Control (AC) mechanism necessary. In this paper, we introduce and compare two novel architectures, which provide a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) service to the DER ecosystem’s entities. Selecting an appropriate RBAC technology is important for the RBAC administrator and users who request DER access authorization. The first architecture is centralized, based on the OpenLDAP, an open source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). The second approach is decentralized, based on a private Ethereum blockchain test network, where the RBAC model is stored and efficiently retrieved via the utilization of a single Smart Contract. We have implemented two end-to-end Proofs-of-Concept (PoC), respectively, to offer the RBAC service to the DER entities as web applications. Finally, an evaluation of the two approaches is presented, highlighting the key speed, cost, usability, and security features.
Eder J. Scheid, Muriel Figueredo Franco, Fabian Kuffer, Niels Kubler · 6 authors
Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been a key part of evolving communication systems in the last few years. However, the life-cycle management of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) is still a not trivial task. Blockchains (BC), due to their decentralization and immutability characteristics, together with the automation provided by Smart Contracts (SC), can be employed to enable such automated and trustworthy VNF management.Thus, this paper proposes VeNiCE to automate the deployment and life-cycle management of VNFs using events emitted on SCs. VeNiCE provides automation and auditability by relying on a BC to provide a decentralized approach for VNF management, which performs management actions, such as VNF deployment and deletion, and based on events and communicates with an SC to provide immutable logging of the VNF life-cycle. VeNiCE provides (i) a frontend for user interaction, (ii) a backend implementing the communication with the NFV framework, and (iii) an SC that emits events, stores VNF allocations, and authenticates users. A prototype of VeNiCE was developed and deployed in the Ethereum BC using OpenStack Tacker as an NFV platform. Experiments were conducted in a real-world deployment of such a prototype to analyze the economic costs of using SCs and the time required to process requests by each component of VeNiCE and the BC. Those results obtained show VeNiCE’s feasibility, highlight its benefits achieved with the automation and provide insights on reducing costs by exploring additional BC platforms and different deployment types, which introduce centralization and management concerns.
Saurabh Singh, C. Rajesh Babu, Kadiyala Ramana, In-Ho Ra · 5 authors
Fifth-generation (5G) technology is anticipated to allow a slew of novel applications across a variety of industries. The wireless communication of the 5G and Beyond-5G (B5G) networks will accommodate a wide variety of services and user expectations, including intense end-user connectivity, sub-1 ms delay, and a transmission rate of 100 Gbps. Network slicing is envisioned as an appropriate technique that can meet these disparate requirements. The intrinsic qualities of a blockchain, which has lately acquired prominence, mean that it is critical for the 5G network and B5G networks. In particular, the incorporation of blockchain technology into B5G enables the network to effectively monitor and control resource utilization and sharing. Using blockchain technology, a network-slicing architecture referred to as the Blockchain Consensus Framework is introduced that allows resource providers to dynamically contract resources, especially the radio access network (RAN) schedule, to guarantee that their end-to-end services are effortlessly executed. The core of our methodology is comprehensive service procurement, which offers the fine-grained adaptive allocation of resources through a blockchain-based consensus mechanism. Our objective is to have Primary User-Secondary User (PU-SU) interactions with a variety of services, while minimizing the operation and maintenance costs of the 5G service providers. A Blockchain-Enabled Network Slicing Model (BENS), which is a learning-based algorithm, is incorporated to handle the spectrum resource allocation in a sophisticate manner. The performance and inferences of the proposed work are analyzed in detail.
Abstract Blockchain (BC) and software-defined networking (SDN) are leading technologies which have recently found applications in several network-related scenarios and have consequently experienced a growing interest in the research community. Indeed, current networks connect a massive number of objects over the Internet and in this complex scenario, to ensure security, privacy, confidentiality, and programmability, the utilization of BC and SDN have been successfully proposed. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey regarding these two recent research trends and review the related state-of-the-art literature. We first describe the main features of each technology and discuss their most common and used variants. Furthermore, we envision the integration of such technologies to jointly take advantage of these latter efficiently. Indeed, we consider their group-wise utilization—named BC–SDN—based on the need for stronger security and privacy. Additionally, we cover the application fields of these technologies both individually and combined. Finally, we discuss the open issues of reviewed research and describe potential directions for future avenues regarding the integration of BC and SDN. To summarize, the contribution of the present survey spans from an overview of the literature background on BC and SDN to the discussion of the benefits and limitations of BC–SDN integration in different fields, which also raises open challenges and possible future avenues examined herein. To the best of our knowledge, compared to existing surveys, this is the first work that analyzes the aforementioned aspects in light of a broad BC–SDN integration, with a specific focus on security and privacy issues in actual utilization scenarios.
João Paulo de Brito Gonçalves, Gustavo Alochio, Rodolfo da Silva Villaça, Roberta Lima Gomes
The fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are expected to provide various services compared to the 4G and previous generations of networks. The Quality of Service requirements can be quite different in terms of latency, bandwidth, reliability, and availability. 5G technology allows the fragmentation of the network into small pieces, known as network slices. This network slicing is done by specific tools and the configuration must be protected from attacks that may be performed by malicious users. Thus in this paper, a solution to protect and prevent these failures from happening is addressed. For this solution to be carried out, a study was conducted on the Blockchain technology, as well as the use of Oracles in order to implement an integrity verification system, a system capable of assuring 5G network slices' configuration integrity through a complete architecture involving Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Oracles.
The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks technologies support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines, promising drastic improvements in terms of low latency, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages that 5G will bring about, there are still major challenges to be addressed, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, and above all, network privacy and security vulnerabilities. On paper, Distributed Ledger Technologies provide a framework to effectively handle most challenges in 5G networks. The panel provides a forum to discuss recent developments in 5G services, focusing on the potential of key 5G technologies, including edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and M2M communications,