An open question recently posed by Fawzi and Ferme [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2024], asks whether non-signaling (NS) assistance can increase the capacity of a broadcast channel (BC). We answer this question in the affirmative, by showing that for a certainK-receiver BC model, called Coordinated Multipoint broadcast (CoMP BC) that arises naturally in wireless networks, NS-assistance provides multiplicative gains in both capacity and degrees of freedom (DoF), even achievingK-fold improvements in extremal cases. Somewhat surprisingly, this is shown to be true even for 2-receiver broadcast channels that are semi-deterministic and/or degraded. In a CoMP BC,Bsingle-antenna transmitters, supported by a backhaul that allows them to share data, act as oneB-antenna transmitter, to send independent messages toKreceivers, each equipped with a single receive antenna. A fixed and globally known connectivity matrix specifies for each transmit antenna, the subset of receivers that are connected to (have a non-zero channel coefficient to) that antenna. Besides the connectivity, there is no channel state information at the transmitter. The receivers have perfect channel knowledge. We show that NS-assistance has no DoF advantage in a fully connected CoMP BC. The DoF region is fully characterized for a class of connectivity patterns associated with tree graphs, for which the classical sum-DoF value is shown to be the number of leaf nodes, while the NS-assisted sum-DoF value is the total number of all (non-root) nodes. For arbitrary connectivity patterns, the sum-capacity with NS-assistance is bounded above and below by the min-rank and triangle number of the connectivity matrix, respectively, leading to matching bounds in many cases, e.g., if min(B,K) ≤ 6. While translations to Gaussian settings are demonstrated, for simplicity most of our results are presented under noise-free, finite-field (Fq) models. Converse proofs for classical DoF are found by adapting the Aligned Images bounds to the finite field model. Converse bounds for NS-assisted DoF/capacity extend the same-marginals property to the BC with NS-assistance available to all parties. Beyond the BC setting, even stronger (unbounded) gains in capacity due to NS-assistance are established for certain ‘communication with side-information’ settings, such as the fading dirty paper channel.
We present a secure and efficient federated learning protocol for autonomous vehicles that resists data leaks, redundancy, and adversarial attacks. Our system combines fast zero-knowledge proofs and compressed Bloom filters to verify updates without exposing private data. Compared to traditional approaches, our method reduces proof sizes by 90 % (under 10 KB), memory by up to 75 %, and maintains accuracy with less than 4% degradation under 30% attack rates. The entire update cycle completes in under 600 ms, making it practical for real-time use in vehicles. This work advances trustworthy AI deployment in dynamic, resource-limited networks.
Daniel Hindemburg de Miranda Marques, Dalton Cézane Gomes Valadares
5G is the most recent technology standard for cellular networks, and one of its key elements is the Radio Access Networks (RAN), which furthers the enabling of the 5G basic capabilities: enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), Massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC), and Ultra-Reliable, Low-Latency Communication (URLLC). To meet the capabilities required by 5G use cases, 5G is distributed, virtualized, and architecturally more complex than previous generations. These capabilities bring benefits but introduce risks and security challenges that must be addressed through controls designed to support and secure 5G services across any operator cloud. Therefore, this paper focuses on studying and evaluating security mechanisms used in RANs. Special attention is given to Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) since they are one of the most studied topics regarding security enhancement. DLTs could bring advantages for improving network security through encryption to protect the information and automate verification and execution of transactions. For this reason, we carried out a systematic review, extracting and analyzing data from 39 papers from 2010 to 2023. Our main results list RAN-related susceptible security dimensions, vulnerabilities, and possible attacks and threats. We also show how DLTs can enhance RANs and present other considered mechanisms to increase RAN security. • The evolution of mobile communication based on openness, softwarization, and virtualization inserts new vulnerabilities into networks. • The increasing number of connected devices, especially IoT ones, is a security attention point in mobile networks. • Various security mechanisms, including Distributed ledger technologies (DLT), may enhance RAN security once these technologies can increase system resilience. • Other security approaches may also address RAN security issues.
Threshold multi-party fully homomorphic encryption (TMFHE) schemes enable efficient computation to be performed on sensitive data while maintaining privacy. These schemes allow a subset of parties to perform threshold decryption of evaluation results via a distributed protocol without the need for a trusted dealer, and provide a degree of fault tolerance against a set of corrupted parties. However, existing TMFHE schemes can only provide correctness and security against honest-but-curious parties. We construct a compact TMFHE scheme based on the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem. The scheme applies Shamir secret sharing and share resharing to support an arbitrary t-out-of-N threshold access structure, and enables non-interactive reconstruction of secret key shares using additive shares derived from the current set of online participants. Furthermore, the scheme implements commitment and non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof techniques to verify the TMFHE operations. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves active security against malicious adversaries. It overcomes the limitation of existing TMFHE schemes that can only guarantee correct computation under passive semi-honest adversaries.
Forks in the Bitcoin network result from the natural competition in the blockchain's Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. Their frequency is a critical indicator for the efficiency of a distributed ledger as they can contribute to resource waste and network insecurity. We introduce a model for the estimation of natural fork rates in a network of heterogeneous miners as a function of their number, the distribution of hash rates and the block propagation time over the peer-to-peer infrastructure. Despite relatively simplistic assumptions, such as zero propagation delay within mining pools, the model predicts fork rates which are comparable with the empirical stale blocks rate. In the past decade, we observe a reduction in the number of mining pools approximately by a factor 3, and quantify its consequences for the fork rate, whilst showing the emergence of a truncated power-law distribution in hash rates, justified by a rich-get-richer effect constrained by global energy supply limits. We demonstrate, both empirically and with the aid of our quantitative model, that the ratio between the block propagation time and the mining time is a sufficiently accurate estimator of the fork rate, but also quantify its dependence on the heterogeneity of miner activities. We provide empirical and theoretical evidence that both hash rate concentration and lower block propagation time reduce fork rates in distributed ledgers. Our work introduces a robust mathematical setting for investigating power concentration and competition on a distributed network, for interpreting discrepancies in fork rates -- for example caused by selfish mining practices and asymmetric propagation times -- thus providing an effective tool for designing future and alternative scenarios for existing and new blockchain distributed mining systems.
Nischal Aryal, Fariba Ghaffari, E. Bertin, Noël Crespi
The rise of internet and data usage highlights the importance of service provisioning for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in expanding their operations and meeting user demands. Implementing scalable and secure authentication and access control mechanisms is crucial for enabling service utilization among eligible users and ensuring the viability of emerging business models. Conventional centralized approaches face limitations such as single-point-of-failure, low scalability, computational overhead, and privacy vulnerabilities. MNOs must explore innovative business models to augment revenue streams and address these challenges. Realizing such models involves automating user contracts with service providers and safeguarding user privacy regarding data sharing with external entities. Blockchain technology offers a transformative avenue for integration within existing MNO infrastructures, providing novel distributed authentication and access control methodologies. We propose a new business model for MNOs and service providers in which an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) framework handles user access to services on top of Blockchain. Moreover, a tokenized data-sharing method facilitates selective data sharing with service providers through MNO channels based on user-defined permissions. Central to this approach are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) paradigm, where NFTs ensure secure, decentralized tokenization of user data, and SSI empowers users with ownership and control over their data. Assessments confirm the scalability of this solution, making it suitable for different use-case requirements.
Data aggregation management is paramount in data-driven distributed systems. Conventional solutions premised on centralized networks grapple with security challenges concerning authenticity, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy. Recently, distributed ledger technology has gained popularity for its decentralized nature to facilitate overcoming these challenges. Nevertheless, insufficient identity management introduces risks like impersonation and unauthorized access. In this paper, we propose Degator, a data aggregation management framework that leverages self-sovereign identity and functions in decentralized networks to address security concerns and mitigate identity-related risks. We formulate fully decentralized aggregation protocols for data persistence and acquisition in Degator. Degator is compatible with existing data persistence methods, and supports cost-effective data acquisition minimizing dependency on distributed ledgers. We also conduct a formal analysis to elucidate the mechanism of Degator to tackle current security challenges in conventional data aggregation management. Furthermore, we showcase the applicability of Degator through its application in the management of decentralized neuroscience data aggregation and demonstrate its scalability via performance evaluation.
Federated Learning (FL) addresses the challenges posed by data silos, which arise from privacy, security regulations, and ownership concerns. Despite these barriers, FL enables these isolated data repositories to participate in collaborative learning without compromising privacy or security. Concurrently, the advancement of blockchain technology and decentralized applications (DApps) within Web 3.0 heralds a new era of transformative possibilities in web development. As such, incorporating FL into Web 3.0 paves the path for overcoming the limitations of data silos through collaborative learning. However, given the transaction speed constraints of core blockchains such as Ethereum (ETH) and the latency in smart contracts, employing one-shot FL, which minimizes client-server interactions in traditional FL to a single exchange, is considered more apt for Web 3.0 environments. This paper presents a practical one-shot FL system for Web 3.0, termed OFL-W3. OFL-W3 capitalizes on blockchain technology by utilizing smart contracts for managing transactions. Meanwhile, OFL-W3 utilizes the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) coupled with Flask communication, to facilitate backend server operations to use existing one-shot FL algorithms. With the integration of the incentive mechanism, OFL-W3 showcases an effective implementation of one-shot FL on Web 3.0, offering valuable insights and future directions for AI combined with Web 3.0 studies.
Distributed ledger technology, with its multitude of advantages including immutability, transparency, decentralization, and security, has excellent potential to promote and even revolutionize future 6G mobile networks. Large-scale distributed ledger deployment within or for mobile networks relies on distributed ledger-focused standards to facilitate and ensure interoperability. The European Telecommunications Standards (ETSI) Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Permissioned Distributed Ledger (PDL) develops PDL-related standards, targeting various application verticals, especially within the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) domain. This article aims to give an overview of ETSI ISG PDL and describes selected PDL standards, which have synergies with future 6G mobile networks.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) has emerged in 2015 as a promising peerto-peer (P2P) distributed file-sharing system poised to become the backbone of Web3.However, its BitSwap protocol, responsible for block exchange, encounters redundancy issues when multiple peers respond with duplicate blocks.To address this limitation, we propose CodedBitSwap, an innovative network coding-based data exchange protocol that integrates Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) into BitSwap.Considering that RLNC operations incur additional computational overhead, the RLNC-based protocol is designed with careful attention to its computational complexity that is investigated through trial experiments guiding the selection of coding parameters and structures.To assess the feasibility and performance of CodedBitSwap, an experimental evaluation that compares it with BitSwap was conducted in different scenarios xv using a controlled testbed environment consisting of 11 nodes exchanging three files of different sizes.During file exchange, the amount of data transmitted, download time, and encoding and decoding times were measured for each node.The evaluation results demonstrate that CodedBitSwap effectively eliminates redundancy at a relatively low cost of increased download time.The introduced RLNC computational complexity was optimized by the generation-based design strategy that minimizes it, ensuring that the cost of the reduced redundancy remains relatively low.The undertaken design methodology of CodedBitSwap offers a practical approach for future systems, which balances the overhead of RLNC coding with the benefits it brings.This work contributes to the advancement of network coding in P2P networks and demonstrates its potential to improve the efficiency of IPFS, opening up avenues for future research.
Summary Small cell networks can fulfill the increasing demandfor the high data rate of wireless applications. Energy efficiency is an important design parameter of the ultra dense small cell network (UDSCN). The sleeping strategy of small base stations (s‐BSs) is used to enhance the network's energy efficiency. An efficient sleeping strategy of s‐BSs is required while preserving users' quality of service (QoS). The idle s‐BSs can be switched to sleep mode. This paper proposes a blockchain‐enabled solution for the sleeping strategy of s‐BSs. Here, a blockchain‐enabled small cell network is created between the s‐BSs. The network is decentralized, which eliminates the workload of the macro base station (MBS). The proposed network architecture is enabled as a decentralized network through blockchain. The blockchain provides distributed control over the s‐BS operations through a smart contract. Here, smart contracts act as distributed self organizing network features to handle self‐transactions among small cells for switching off s‐BSs in the network. All the software logic required to perform s‐BS operations is written in a smart contract using Ethereum. The proposed solution improves energy efficiency and enables the ultra dense small cell network to be decentralized.
Named-Data Networking (NDN) is a novel network that secures network communication by fetching semantically named and secured data. All data packets in NDN are signed by producers and verified by data consumers. Therefore, it is vital to have producers' certificates available all the time. In this paper, we describe the design of CLedger, a secure distributed certificate ledger, to ensure certificate availability in NDN. CLedger logs certificate records in an immutable Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure and replicates the DAG among a set of distributed loggers. We implemented CLedger using NDN's pub/sub API, and evaluated our design through an emulated deployment setting. Our initial evaluation results show that CLedger is effective, efficient, and resilient to failures.
Relay Mining presents a scalable solution employing probabilistic mechanisms, crypto-economic incentives, and new cryptographic primitives to estimate and prove the volume of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) made from a client to a server. Distributed ledgers are designed to secure permissionless state transitions (writes), highlighting a gap for incentivizing full non-validating nodes to service non-transactional (read) RPCs. This leads applications to have a dependency on altruistic or centralized off-chain Node RPC Providers. We present a solution that enables multiple RPC providers to service requests from independent applications on a permissionless network. We leverage digital signatures, commit-and-reveal schemes, and Sparse Merkle Sum Tries (SMSTs) to prove the amount of work done. This is enabled through the introduction of a novel ClosestMerkleProof proof-of-inclusion scheme. A native cryptocurrency on a distributed ledger is used to rate limit applications and disincentivize over-usage. Building upon established research in token bucket algorithms and distributed rate-limiting penalty models, our approach harnesses a feedback loop control mechanism to adjust the difficulty of mining relay rewards, dynamically scaling with network usage growth. By leveraging crypto-economic incentives, we reduce coordination overhead costs and introduce a mechanism for providing RPC services that are both geopolitically and geographically distributed. We use common formulations from rate limiting research to demonstrate how this solution in the Web3 ecosystem translates to distributed verifiable multi-tenant rate limiting in Web2.
We propose a novel model for teaching and learning called Decentralized Autonomous Education (DAE for short). DAE exploits the dual principles of freedom and responsibility, meritocracy and inclusivity, privacy and transparency in the educational process. It also fits well the philosophy of blockchain technology, and more generally of Web3 – the third iteration of the World Wide Web – specifically the tenets of decentralization, disintermediation, incentive and sovereignty of the individual. In this paper, we fully illustrate the DAE model, highlighting the theoretical and practical links between DAE and Web3, dissecting the pros and cons of the proposed learning method and reviewing related pedagogical approaches. Finally, we describe the front-end and back-end design of the DAE app, a decentralized application that implements the DAE learning model.
Abstract Named data networking (NDN) has been viewed as a promising future Internet architecture due to its data-centric design. It requires a new security model that is orienting data but not devices. In this paper, an advanced hierarchical identity-based security mechanism by blockchain (AHISM-B) is to be proposed for the NDN networks. On one hand, the hierarchical identity-based cryptology is used to bind the data name to a public key. The valid public parameters would be requested by consumers with the Interest packets so that consumers would compose producers’ public keys to authenticate producers and verify the integrity of the Data packets. On the other hand, a blockchain is employed to manage public parameters to avoid catastrophes due to a single node failure. Both of the security proof result and the formal validation result indicate that the proposed AHISM-B is secure. Moreover, the simulation results show that the performance of our AHISM-B outperforms that of the classic NDN scheme. Especially, the average response delay of the AHISM-B scheme is less by 8% than that of the classic NDN scheme. With the increase of the average arrival rate of Interest packets, the advantage of the AHISM-B could be enhanced further to 11%.
We have built a bare-metal testbed in order to perform large-scale, reproducible evaluations of erasure coding algorithms. Our testbed supports at least 1000 Ethereum Swarm peers running on 30 machines. Running experimental evaluation is time-consuming and challenging. Researchers must consider the experimental software's limitations and artifacts. If not controlled, the network behavior may cause inaccurate measurements. This paper shares the lessons learned from a bare-metal evaluation of erasure coding algorithms and how to create a controlled-environment in a cluster consisting of 1000 Ethereum Swarm peers.
Decentralization is essential when trust and performance must not depend on a single organization. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and Decentralized Hash Tables (DHTs) are examples where the DLT is useful for transactional events, and the DHT is useful for large-scale data storage. The combination of these two technologies can meet many challenges. The blockchain is a DLT with immutable history protected by cryptographic signatures in data blocks. Identification is an essential issue traditionally provided by centralized trust anchors. Self-sovereign identities (SSIs) are proposed decentralized models where users can control and manage their identities with the help of DHT. However, slowness is a challenge among decentralized identification systems because of many connections and requests among participants. In this article, we focus on decentralized identification by DLT and DHT, where users can control their information and store biometrics. We survey some existing alternatives and address the performance challenge by comparing different decentralized identification technologies based on execution time and throughput. We show that the DHT and machine learning model (BioIPFS) performs better than other solutions such as uPort, ShoCard, and BBID.
We present a new stochastic model for the evolution of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG)-based distributed ledgers (DL), under the presence of heterogeneous delay. This model is used to analyse the performance metrics of the DL, showing in particular that the number of unapproved messages does not diverge to infinity, even under the presence of delay. We propose an analysis based on conveniently defined sets, as well as an alternative drift-based analysis. The former allows to get a bound on the number of unapproved messages, while the latter, through a simpler analysis, allows to probe the existence of such bound. For particular scenarios, we are able to derive the expected value of the drift of unapproved messages, through a Markov process-based approach. State-of-the-art mathematical models trying to capture the impact of delays on the performance of such DLs rely on some particular simplifications. In contrast, through our model, we are able to analytically derive similar performance guarantees, in a more realistic setup. In particular, we focus on IOTA foundation's tangle, while our results can be extended to other DAG-based distributed ledgers. We compare our results to results obtained in a real testbed, showing good accordance between them.
Yeow Meng Chee, Tuvi Etzion, Han Mao Kiah, Alexander Vardy
<p style='text-indent:20px;'>The Hamming ball of radius <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ w $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> in <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$ \{0,1\}^n $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is the set <inline-formula><tex-math id="M3">\begin{document}$ \mathcal{B}(n,w) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> of all binary words of length <inline-formula><tex-math id="M4">\begin{document}$ n $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> and Hamming weight at most <inline-formula><tex-math id="M5">\begin{document}$ w $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. We consider injective mappings <inline-formula><tex-math id="M6">\begin{document}$ \varphi : \{0,1\}^m \to \mathcal{B}(n,w) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> with the following <i>domination property:</i> every position <inline-formula><tex-math id="M7">\begin{document}$ j \in [n] $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is dominated by some position <inline-formula><tex-math id="M8">\begin{document}$ i \in [m] $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, in the sense that if position <inline-formula><tex-math id="M9">\begin{document}$ i $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> in <inline-formula><tex-math id="M10">\begin{document}$ {\mathit{\boldsymbol{x}}} \in \{0,1\}^m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is "switched off" (equal <i>zero</i>), then necessarily position <inline-formula><tex-math id="M11">\begin{document}$ j $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> in its image <inline-formula><tex-math id="M12">\begin{document}$ \varphi({\mathit{\boldsymbol{x}}}) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is switched off. This property may be described more precisely in terms of a bipartite <i>domination graph</i> <inline-formula><tex-math id="M13">\begin{document}$ G = \bigl([m] \cup [n], E\bigr) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> with no isolated vertices; for all <inline-formula><tex-math id="M14">\begin{document}$ (i,j) \in E $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> and all <inline-formula><tex-math id="M15">\begin{document}$ {\mathit{\boldsymbol{x}}}\in \{0,1\}^m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, we require that <inline-formula><tex-math id="M16">\begin{document}$ x_i = 0 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> implies <inline-formula><tex-math id="M17">\begin{document}$ y_j = 0 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula><tex-math id="M18">\begin{document}$ {\mathit{\boldsymbol{y}}} = \varphi({\mathit{\boldsymbol{x}}}) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. Although such domination mappings recently found applications in the context of coding for high-performance interconnects, to the best of our knowledge, they were not previously studied. The concept of domination mapping is thus interesting from both practical and combinatorial points of view. <p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, we begin with simple necessary conditions for the existence of an <i><inline-formula><tex-math id="M19">\begin{document}$ (m,n,w) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-domination mapping <inline-formula><tex-math id="M20">\begin{document}$ \varphi : \{0,1\}^m \to \mathcal{B}(n,w) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula></i>. We then provide several explicit constructions of such mappings, which show that the necessary conditions are also sufficient when <inline-formula><tex-math id="M21">\begin{document}$ w = 1 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, when <inline-formula><tex-math id="M22">\begin{document}$ w = 2 $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><tex-math id="M23">\begin{document}$ m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is odd, or when <inline-formula><tex-math id="M24">\begin{document}$ m \leqslant 3w $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>. One of our main results herein is a proof that the trivial necessary condition <inline-formula><tex-math id="M25">\begin{document}$ | \mathcal{B}(n,w)| \geqslant 2^m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is, in fact, sufficient for the existence of an <inline-formula><tex-math id="M26">\begin{document}$ (m,n,w) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-domination mapping whenever <inline-formula><tex-math id="M27">\begin{document}$ m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> is sufficiently large. We also present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given any <inline-formula><tex-math id="M28">\begin{document}$ m $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula><tex-math id="M29">\begin{document}$ n $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, and <inline-formula><tex-math id="M30">\begin{document}$ w $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, determines whether an <inline-formula><tex-math id="M31">\begin{document}$ (m,n,w) $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-domination mapping exists for a domination graph with an equitable degree distribution.
Runze Cheng, Yao Sun, Yi‐Jing Liu, Le Xia · 6 authors
Cache-enabled device-to-device (D2D) communication is a potential approach to tackle the resource shortage problem. However, public concerns of data privacy and system security still remain, which thus arises an urgent need for a reliable caching scheme. Fortunately, federated learning (FL) with a distributed paradigm provides an effective way to privacy issue by training a high-quality global model without any raw data exchanges. Besides the privacy issue, blockchain can be further introduced into the FL framework to resist the malicious attacks occurred in D2D caching networks. In this study, we propose a double-layer blockchain-based deep reinforcement FL (BDRFL) scheme to ensure privacy-preserved and caching-efficient D2D networks. In BDRFL, a double-layer blockchain is utilized to further enhance data security. Simulation results first verify the convergence of the BDRFL-based algorithm, and then demonstrate that the download latency of the BDRFL-based caching scheme can be significantly reduced under different types of attacks when compared to some existing caching policies.
The innovation provided by network virtualization in 5G, together with standardization and openness boosted by the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) Alliance, has paved the way to a collaborative future in cellular systems, driven by flexible network sharing. Such advents are expected to attract new players like content providers and verticals, increasing competitiveness in the telecom market. However, scalability and trust issues are expected to arise, given the criticality of ownership traceability and resource exchanging in a sharing ecosystem. To address that, we propose integrating blockchain technology for enabling mobile operators and other players to exchange radio access network (RAN) resources (e.g., infrastructure) in the form of virtual network functions autonomously and dynamically. Blockchain will provide automation, robustness, trustworthiness, and reliability to mobile networks, thus bringing confidence to open RAN environments. In particular, we define a novel O-RAN-based blockchain-enabled architecture that allows automating RAN sharing procedures through either auction or marketplace-based mechanisms. The potential advantages of the proposed solution are demonstrated through simulation results. The used simulation platform is openly released.
Hazay, Carmit, Venkitasubramaniam, Muthuramakrishnan, Weiss, Mor
Leakage-resilient cryptography aims to protect cryptographic primitives from so-called "side channel attacks" that exploit their physical implementation to learn their input or secret state. Starting from the works of Ishai, Sahai and Wagner (CRYPTO`03) and Micali and Reyzin (TCC`04), most works on leakage-resilient cryptography either focus on protecting general computations, such as circuits or multiparty computation protocols, or on specific non-interactive primitives such as storage, encryption and signatures. This work focuses on leakage-resilience for the middle ground, namely for distributed and interactive cryptographic primitives. Our main technical contribution is designing the first secret-sharing scheme that is equivocal, resists adaptive probing of a constant fraction of bits from each share, while incurring only a constant blowup in share size. Equivocation is a strong leakage-resilience guarantee, recently introduced by Hazay et al. (ITC`21). Our construction is obtained via a general compiler which we introduce, that transforms any secret-sharing scheme into an equivocal scheme against adaptive leakage. An attractive feature of our compiler is that it respects additive reconstruction, namely, if the original scheme has additive reconstruction, then the transformed scheme has linear reconstruction. We extend our compiler to a general paradigm for protecting distributed primitives against leakage, and show its applicability to various primitives, including secret sharing, verifiable secret sharing, function secret sharing, distributed encryption and signatures, and distributed zero-knowledge proofs. For each of these primitives, our paradigm transforms any construction of the primitive into a scheme that resists adaptive party corruptions, as well as adaptive probing leakage of a constant fraction of bits in each share when the share is stored in memory (but not when it is used in computations). Moreover, the transformation incurs only a constant blowup in the share size, and respects additive reconstruction - an important feature for several of these primitives, such as function secret sharing and distributed encryption.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT) have gained more popularity in recent years as an underlying infrastructure for connected devices and sensors in smart cities. The data generated from these sensors are used by smart cities to strengthen their infrastructure, utilities, and public services. WSNs are suitable for long periods of data acquisition in smart cities. To make the networks of smart cities more reliable for sensitive information, the blockchain mechanism has been proposed. The key issues and challenges of WSNs in smart cities is efficiently scheduling the resources; leading to extending the network lifetime of sensors. In this paper, a linear network coding (LNC) for WSNs with blockchain-enabled IoT devices has been proposed. The consumption of energy is reduced for each node by applying LNC. The efficiency and the reliability of the proposed model are evaluated and compared to those of the existing models. Results from the simulation demonstrate that the proposed model increases the efficiency in terms of the number of live nodes, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and the optimized residual energy compared to other current techniques.
Existing communication protocols in security networks are highly centralized. While this naively makes the controls easier to physically secure, external actors require fewer resources to disrupt the system because there are fewer points in the system can be interrupted without the entire system failing. We present a solution to this problem using a proof-of-work-based blockchain implementation built on MultiChain. We construct a test-bed network containing visual imagers and microwave sensor information. These data types are ubiquitous in perimeter security systems and allow a realistic representation of a real-world network architecture. The cameras in this system use an object detection algorithm to find important targets in the scene. The raw data from both the sensors and imagers are placed in a transaction. These transactions are then bundled into blocks and broadcast to the rest of the network using the Bitcoin-based MultiChain protocol. We develop five tests to examine the security metrics of our network. We performed the five security metric test using different sized networks from 7 to 39 nodes to determine how the metrics scale with respect to size. We find that when compared to a centralized architecture our implementation provides a resiliency increase that is expected from a blockchain- based protocol without slowing the system so much that a human operator would notice. Furthermore, our approach is able to detect tampering in real time. Based on these results, we theorize that security networks in general could use a blockchain- based approach in a meaningful way.