Tomasz Sadowy, Constantine Doumanidis, Maria Apostolaki
BGP hijacking remains a persistent threat as existing defenses, including RPKI/ROV suffer from a fundamental incentive misalignment: the networks best positioned to filter malicious announcements bear operational costs but receive no direct benefit, while the victim prefix owner captures all the value. We advocate a market-based alternative in which prefix owners post standing bounties for filtering invalid announcements of their prefixes, turning filtering from altruism into a private transaction. Our insight is that neither a propagating hijack nor its absence can hide from public route collectors, whose committed routing tables could become an independent root of trust for releasing funds of the bounty. We build on this insight to design BGPay, an escrow protocol in which filterers and monitors commit before either reveals, and a smart contract pays out on evidence rather than on the prefix owner's judgment. Analyzing 1K real hijack incidents, we find that today's collectors already provide enough visibility where it matters: ASes that are more important for containing the hijack are also highly visible from the public monitors. Hence, setting rewards proportionately to containment impact discourages misbehavior.
Homomorphic-encryption blockchain frameworks for IoT sensor aggregation generally rely on classical cryptographic hardness assumptions and seldom account for network topology in liveness and performance analysis. This work introduces Phi-PHE-BC, a topology-aware homomorphic blockchain architecture for secure and privacy-preserving IoT sensor data aggregation. The framework combines threshold Paillier decryption with graph-parameterized security and performance analysis, linking protocol behavior to the validator graph. On-chain Paillier ciphertexts support homomorphic aggregation while providing IND-CPA confidentiality under the Decisional Composite Residuosity assumption, and authentication signatures provide EUF-CMA transaction integrity. Threshold partial-decryption shares are protected by a noise-flooding wrapper that provides information-theoretic privacy under the configured statistical-hiding condition. Under partial synchrony and Byzantine fault-tolerance assumptions, liveness requires validator connectivity kappa(Gv) >= f+1. We derive topology-dependent throughput bounds for tree, star, mesh, and scale-free networks, together with a per-block communication-cost model. A game-theoretic analysis shows that honest validator participation is a dominant strategy under the stated utility model, yielding an all-honest Nash equilibrium. Experiments on Hyperledger Fabric 2.5 show lower end-to-end latency than the selected traditional PHE-blockchain baseline while maintaining controllable threshold-decryption overhead. Results across topology scaling, validator sensitivity, threshold decryption, and Byzantine-load experiments indicate that Phi-PHE-BC is a practical architecture for secure, privacy-preserving, and topology-aware IoT sensor aggregation.
Sunder Ali Khowaja, Kapal Dev, George C. Alexandropoulos
With the progression in open and disaggregated 6G radio access networks, it is expected that the system will be able to host multi-vendors. In order to host multi-vendors, it is essential that AI-assisted control loops remain safe, verifiable, and auditable under concurrent operator intents and untrusted model inputs. The existing studies address the agentic coordination, formal intent constraints, zero-trust prompt verification and cryptographic accountability in isolation, which leaves pre-realization safety, continuous semantic verification and cross-domain audit incomplete when used individually. In this regard, we propose zero-knowledge auditable control and zero-trust verifiable agentic intent architecture ($Z^2$-ACT), which integrates the aforementioned four primitives across the non-real-time and near-real-time RICs. We encode the typed Intent Contracts as operator goals while the large language model inputs are only admitted after a practical adversarial intent check. The skill sequences in the proposed study are released only when a self-management gate is satisfied while every successful commit is recorded as a binding commitment with a zero-knowledge proof. Our experimental evaluation on public ColO-RAN measurements compares the full architecture against targeted ablations and a conventional reinforcement-learning baseline. A live large language model is used in the non-real-time path to translate operator intents into Intent Contracts; we report translation accuracy, the rate of invalid or hallucinated contracts, non-real-time latency, and behavior under adversarial or misleading intents. Near-real-time control remains trace-driven on the public KPM sequences. Results indicate improved actuation filtering and attack resilience at modest latency and signaling cost inside the near-real-time envelope.
Agentic AI networking (AgentNet) systems rely heavily on third-party skillset implementations and distributed multi-agent collaboration, yet they face major claim-to-capability inconsistencies and security vulnerabilities under trust-by-declaration assumptions. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes TrustAgentNet, a dual-tier blockchain-secured zero-trust framework. Specifically, a global Chain of Skillsets (CoS) governs the lifecycle of skillset metadata with protocols empowered by specialized agents to enforce off-chain auditing while maintaining lightweight on-chain cryptographic consensus. Furthermore, transient, task-oriented Chains of Collaboration (CoC) are dynamically established to enable trustless distributed multi-agent collaboration. Theoretical analysis of the three-way trade-off among security level, task performance, and resource overhead is provided and empirically validated. Experimental results on a hardware prototype demonstrate that compared with no-blockchain trust-by-default baselines, the zero-trust overhead of TrustAgentNet is dominated by off-chain inference, while the blockchain layer incurs minor ledger costs via the ledger-IPFS storage and on/off-chain integration design. Crucially, the proposed verification pipeline achieves a flawless 100% accuracy across 50 AI models, correctly validating 40 honest skillsets and intercepting 10 adversarial ones, and generalizes to non-AI domains with an 83.91% accuracy and a 0.85 F1-score across 1478 features from 171 ClawHub skills. Adversarial experiments further show that TrustAgentNet enables autonomous skillset self-recovery against various malicious attacks.
Sushila Dhaka, Jane-Hwa Huang, Chin-Min Yu, Li-Chun Wang
This paper proposes an SNR-adaptive optimal threshold design framework for energy detection in Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA). Unlike conventional constant false-alarm rate (CFAR)-based schemes that determine the sensing threshold solely from a predefined false-alarm constraint, the proposed method directly minimizes the total probability of error by deriving a closed-form analytical solution. The threshold optimization problem is formulated as a quadratic expression whose coefficients explicitly characterize the effects of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and number of samples. This analytical structure enables adaptive threshold selection under heterogeneous SNR conditions without exhaustive numerical search. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the error probability compared with fixed-threshold and detection-constrained schemes, particularly in low-SNR regimes. Furthermore, the impact of SNR and number of samples on detection performance is systematically analyzed, providing deeper insight into the trade-off between false alarm and missed detection. The proposed framework improves sensing reliability and practical adaptability in dynamic spectrum access systems. It also establishes a foundation for secure cooperative spectrum sensing, including blockchain-assisted aggregation mechanisms.
Sepideh Avizheh, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, Shiwei Sun
Group signatures are privacy preserving signature schemes in which a group member can anonymously sign messages on behalf of the group, while providing accountability, by allowing the signature of a misbehaving group member be ``opened'' and the identity of the signer be revealed. In group signature members are admitted to the group by a (trusted) group manager. We motivate the need for a flexible mechanism in applications, such as privacy preserving access in smart environments, and propose a two-level member-join group signature that we call SPonsored Group Signature (SPGS) where group members of level 1 can ``sponsor'' new members, in level 2, to join the group. This relaxation of user join comes with additional accountability mechanisms: we require that the signature of a sponsored member can be opened to the identity of the sponsor (that is sponsor is responsible for the sponsored member), and while all signatures are anonymous, for the sponsored members, the signatures are linkable. This allows a sponsor to efficiently identify an undesirable sponsored member. We formalize SPGS scheme, define its security using a game-based approach, and give a generic construction of SPGS that uses a (dynamic) group signature scheme, a commitment scheme, and a knowledge-sound non-interactive zero knowledge proof of knowledge, and prove its security. We also give an instantiation of our construction. To show applicability of SPGS in practice, we consider the problem of providing guest access in a smart building, and introduce Anonymous Guest Access Token (AGAT) that allows a temporary guest to anonymously access (a subset of) the building resources. We show how SPGS can be used (together with an IND-CPA secure public key encryption scheme) to give a direct construction for AGAT, and show the efficiency of our guest access protocol when it is instantiated with existing schemes.
With the rapid development of the Low-Altitude Economy (LAE) ecosystem, Low-Altitude Embodied Artificial Intelligence (LAEAI) agents have become the core carriers of autonomous aerial services, thereby enabling dynamic Low-altitude Computility Networks (LACNets) for distributed computing resource sharing. However, resource-constrained LAEAI agents in decentralized LACNets face a fundamental trilemma of autonomy, security, and efficiency. Existing solutions primarily focus on either optimizing computational performance or enhancing security in isolation, failing to address the inherent trade-offs among trust, performance, and overhead in untrusted dynamic environments with malicious agents. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes SkyChain Intelligence, a holistic framework that synergistically integrates agentic AI, consortium blockchain, and Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL). We design a lightweight blockchain-based decentralized trust management system with a dynamic reputation mechanism and develop a hybrid-action-space MADDPG algorithm that embeds on-chain reputation scores into the reward function to jointly optimize offloading decisions, resource allocation, and drone 3D trajectories. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in task completion latency and energy consumption, while achieving a 94.1% task completion rate in the baseline scenario and stable convergence within 300 training episodes. This work provides a viable path for building secure, autonomous, and efficient machine-to-machine computing ecosystems in the low-altitude domain.
Constantine Doumanidis, Anya Kalogerakos, Maria Apostolaki
BGP hijacking enables impersonation attacks in which adversaries divert traffic at the prefix level and serve malicious content to unsuspecting clients. Detecting such attacks has traditionally been the responsibility of network operators, leaving end hosts exposed for hours. We argue that end hosts can detect prefix-level impersonation independently, exploiting a fundamental asymmetry: a BGP hijack diverts traffic for an entire IP prefix, but impersonating every co-hosted service within that prefix is prohibitively difficult at scale, especially if each service is authenticated by a different Certificate Authority. We propose HOWLR, a tool that operationalizes this insight by using co-hosted, TLS-authenticated services as witnesses: if a client can no longer authenticate them, it has evidence of an ongoing attack. This work evaluates the feasibility of this method by quantifying the existence and diversity of witnesses in the wild. We show that HOWLR can protect 89% of Tor relay prefixes, and 75% of Bitcoin pool gateway prefixes.
Distributed systems handle adversarial nodes through redundancy, which imposes a significant performance overhead. In blockchain systems, Byzantine fault-tolerant state-machine replication (BFT-SMR) is the replicated service that totally orders client transactions before execution. While prior research has primarily focused on designing novel consensus algorithms with improved performance, recent studies have shown that further gains can be achieved through configuration optimization. More precisely, replicas can monitor network latency to dynamically assign the leader role and tune voting weights, thereby improving consensus performance. However, we identify three vulnerabilities in this process that Byzantine nodes can exploit. To address these weaknesses, we propose Beware, a reconfiguration framework that filters out falsified latency reports, computes robust weight distributions, and applies machine learning to converge towards Byzantine-resilient configurations. Our evaluation shows that Beware reduces consensus latency by up to 45% compared to existing solutions.
Thomas Bakaysa, Ahmet Kurt, Abdul-Salem Beibitkhan, J E Hernández Leon · 9 authors
Bitcoin's Lightning Network (LN) can be exploited as a covert, low-cost command-and-control (C&C) channel for botnets, as demonstrated by the LNBot and D-LNBot designs. However, both remain proof-of-concept prototypes evaluated only through simulation, leaving key questions about real-world topology formation, propagation complexity, and resilience to takedowns unanswered. We present LNTest, the first reusable testbed for LN-based botnets, built from Core Lightning nodes containerized with Docker over a shared Bitcoin Core regtest chain. LNTest supports three overlay topology modes (a deterministic chain, autonomous peer discovery, and user-supplied graphs), enabling controlled experiments across different botnet structures. Using LNTest, we report three main findings. First, D-LNBot's autonomous formation protocol does not produce the uniform chain from its design; instead, it creates a clustered chain in which cliques are linked by bridge nodes whose removal fragments the network. Second, command propagation scales linearly with botnet size ($Θ(n)$), not the $O(m \log n)$ previously claimed, and gains nothing from higher neighbor connectivity. Third, the overlay topology determines the effectiveness of takedown strategies: uniform-degree chains resist targeted removal but fragment under random failure, scale-free topologies show the opposite pattern, and the autonomous clustered chain is fragile under both, making it the most vulnerable of the three. LNTest is released as open source, with a script that reproduces all our experiments, to support reproducible research on LN-based botnet defenses.
Bitcoin recently introduced a new protocol for the encryption of peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. The protocol, known as V2 P2P transport, represents a big step towards securing the overlay network against various previously-known attack vectors. Based on an analysis of V2 P2P transport, this work examines the current viability of said attacks and concludes that while they are now remediated, alternative attacks and paths to similar objectives exist. The identified shortcomings are conceptual (and not implementation bugs) and even applicable to other P2P networks. We show how a network-level attacker can identify application messages using the length of TCP payloads, can eclipse a target node by taking advantage of how encrypted communication channels work and can downgrade all of a node's connections to the unencrypted protocol by using the mechanisms designed for compatibility. We validate our contributions using a combination of network measurements, emulations and simulations. Finally, we propose a series of short-term and long-term countermeasures towards securing Bitcoin's P2P network. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study Bitcoin's security under V2 P2P transport.
The Ethereum blockchain utilizes the EIP-1559 algorithm to manage transaction inclusion and block assembly. However, EIP-1559 and much of the existing literature study this problem from a static perspective, focusing on price evolution without modelling transaction dynamics within the mempool. Motivated by this limitation, we study a dynamic transaction scheduling problem in which transactions with heterogeneous sizes and per-unit values arrive over time and remain in the mempool until scheduled. To capture the stochastic mempool evolution, we formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) whose state represents the mempool configuration and whose actions correspond to block prices. We first provide a primal-dual interpretation of the static EIP-1559 mechanism, showing that block prices arise naturally as dual variables of a social-welfare maximization problem. Building on this perspective, we extend the framework to the dynamic setting and formulate an objective that maximizes long-run discounted reward while incorporating holding costs and overshoot penalties. We then employ a Natural Policy Gradient (NPG) algorithm to compute the optimal policy. Our results show that dynamic pricing stabilizes the mempool while maximizing long-run discounted reward. In particular, as the overshoot penalty increases, the average scheduled transaction volume converges to the target block capacity, and the resulting NPG updates closely resemble the EIP-1559 price update rule. Finally, we study two special cases of the MDP formulation: homogeneous transactions and uniform arrivals. In the homogeneous setting, where the protocol directly controls scheduled volume, we show that the optimal policy has a threshold structure. We then propose a bang-bang pricing mechanism for uniform arrivals and derive a lower bound on the block capacity needed to ensure system stability.
Sulyab Thottungal Valapu, John Heidemann, Mattijs Jonker, Raffaele Sommese
DNS integrations leverage the discovery, trust, and uniqueness of the global Domain Name System with a linkage to another naming ecosystem, so the DNS name can help identify resources such as a cryptocurrency wallet or software component. While DNS ownership is verified at linkage creation, many ecosystems do not track subsequent DNS changes. The result is zombie linkages, where the DNS ownership has expired or changed, but the mapping to the linked resource persists. We define a threat model for DNS integrations, identifying five classes of attacks that leverage or exploit zombie linkages. We measure zombie occurrence across three DNS integrations -- Web PKI; ENS, a blockchain naming system; and Maven Central, a Java software repository. We show that zombies exist in every ecosystem, but at very different fractions -- zombies make up roughly 3% of TLS certificates for new domains, 24% of ENS on-chain imports, and 15% of Maven Central namespaces. We evaluate how integration design choices affect outcomes, with validate-once integrations (ENS on-chain, Maven Central) accumulating long-lasting zombies, linkages with expiration (Web PKI) limiting damage, while integrations that validate on every use (ENS gasless) are zombie-free by design. We look for specific attacks, finding attacks actively available for exploitation in both Web PKI and Maven Central. Finally, we recommend steps to reduce zombie occurrence.
Muhammad Umair Basharat, Jawad Hussain, Waqas Khalid, Chiew Foong Kwong
The growing adoption of IoT and cloud computing, combined with rapid advancements in digital technologies, has considerably increased the cyber-attack surface, resulting in increasingly complex and persistent attacks. Traditional security methods, primarily based on perimeter defenses, are insufficient to meet these developing threats, especially within the context of a Zero Trust Security (ZTS) architecture. This study investigates the application of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques, including the use of the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), to improve anomaly detection and threat intelligence systems. This study focuses on how Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and Decision Tree (DT) classifiers might increase threat detection accuracy in IoT environments. The research endeavors to improve cybersecurity resilience by mitigating false positives and providing actionable intelligence through supervised learning algorithms. The KDD Cup 1999 dataset is used in the study to assess how well these models perform in simulating various network intrusions and regular traffic. The application of SMOTE significantly enhanced the performance of these models by addressing class imbalance, leading to improved detection accuracy. Furthermore, as supplementary methods for detecting malicious URLs and advanced persistent threats (APTs), edge-based machine learning and blockchain technology are investigated. This study addresses the shortcomings of conventional security systems and supports the growing demand for reliable threat detection in a world that is becoming more interconnected. It also advances the creation of more proactive and adaptable cybersecur
The Lightning Network (LN) is a rapidly evolving payment channel network that enables scalable, off-chain transactions on top of Bitcoin. While prior research has documented its topological structure and liquidity concentration, the joint relationships between node lifetime, connectivity, and capacity remain insufficiently understood. This study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of these relationships using a large-scale dataset of LN topology snapshots spanning the period 2019-2023. We examine whether node lifetime influences shared channel capacity, and whether this effect is mediated and moderated by node degree. In addition, we account for hierarchical geographic structure and explore the role of country-level economic conditions. The results show that node lifetime has a positive but relatively modest direct effect on capacity. This relationship is largely mediated by node degree, indicating that liquidity accumulation primarily occurs through increased connectivity. Furthermore, the interaction between lifetime and degree reveals significant heterogeneity, with stronger effects observed among highly connected and high-capacity nodes. Mixed-level models demonstrate superior explanatory power, highlighting the importance of country- and region-level variation. The inclusion of GDP per capita confirms that broader economic conditions significantly influence capacity distribution. Overall, the findings suggest that liquidity in the LN emerges from the interplay of temporal dynamics, network structure, and economic context. This study contributes to a more integrated understanding of payment channel networks and provides a foundation for future research on their evolution and efficiency.
Khandoker Ashik Uz Zaman, Mahdi H. Miraz, Mohammed N. M. Ali
INTRODUCTION: The proliferation of the amalgamation of IoT and edge computing has increased the demand for decentralised trust and security mechanisms capable of operating across heterogeneous and resource-limited devices. Approaches such as federated learning, Zero Trust architectures, lightweight blockchain and distributed neural models offer alternatives to centralised control. OBJECTIVES: This review examines various state-of-the-art decentralised mechanisms and evaluates their effectiveness in terms of securing IoT networks at the edge. METHODS: Thirty recent studies were analysed to compare how decentralised architectures establish trust, support secure communication and enable intrusion and anomaly detection. Frameworks, such as DFGL-LZTA, SecFedDNN and COSIER were assessed. RESULTS: Decentralised designs enhance privacy, reduce single points of failure and improve adaptive threat response, though challenges remain in scalability, efficiency and interoperability. CONCLUSION: The study identifies key considerations and future research needs for building secure and resilient trust-aware IoT edge ecosystems.
Web 3.0 is envisioned as a decentralized paradigm, where blockchain serves as a core technology for transparent and tamper-proof data management. Among various blockchain architectures, consortium blockchains have emerged as the preferred platform for enterprise-grade Web 3.0. For consortium blockchains, newly generated blocks are generally propagated to all consensus nodes for validation through the gossip protocol. However, gossip-based propagation may introduce substantial message redundancy and tail latency. Moreover, the consensus nodes exhibit heterogeneous availability patterns, and existing block propagation schemes often overlook such temporal constraints. Therefore, the joint optimization of propagation timeliness and delivery coverage remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a deliverable block propagation optimization framework for consortium blockchain-enabled Web 3.0. We first propose a delivery-aware timeliness metric called Age of Validated Block (AoVB), which excludes block receptions occurring outside the availability window of each consensus node, thereby measuring only actionable synchronization latency. This metric is unified with the block arrival rate into a hybrid cost objective that balances timeliness against delivery. To solve this complex optimization problem, we propose a Graph-based Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning (GHDRL) method, which comprises a graph isomorphism network-based assignment module and a graph attention network-based propagation module. The two modules are optimized jointly under a two-stage training strategy. Numerical results show that GHDRL consistently outperforms all compared schemes across network scales from 50 to 500 peers, achieving up to 19.2% lower hybrid cost than the best-performing neural baseline. Moreover, the model generalizes from 100-peer training instances to 500-peer deployments without retraining.
The management of radio frequency spectrum is undergoing a paradigm shift from static, centralized command-and-control models to dynamic, market-driven approaches. However, the realization of Dynamic Spectrum Management has been hindered by the lack of an automated, trustworthy, and intelligent coordination infrastructure that can operate without a central authority while preserving participant privacy. In this paper, we introduce BLAST (Blockchain-based LLM-powered Agentic Spectrum Trading), a comprehensive framework that integrates Large Language Model (LLM) Agents with a permissioned blockchain infrastructure to create a fully autonomous, private, and secure spectrum trading ecosystem. We propose a novel agent architecture that implements the Cognitive Radio cycle through a sequential decision pipeline (perceive, plan, act) enabling agents to reason strategically about economic value and market dynamics. We evaluate the framework through three distinct market mechanisms: Direct Sale, First-Price Sealed-Bid, and Second-Price (Vickrey) Sealed-Bid auctions. Experimental results demonstrate that the Second-Price (Vickrey) auction is the optimal choice for maximizing social welfare and allocative efficiency, capturing up to 71% of the theoretical surplus by incentivizing truthful bidding. We also compare the proposed model against a baseline non-LLM heuristic agentic model and show that utilizing LLM agents yields significant improvements in market competition, reduced wealth and asset concentration, and increased system welfare. Furthermore, we validate the system's privacy preservation, confirming that sensitive bid values remain isolated in private data collections while only cryptographic hashes are committed to the public ledger.
Blockchain ecosystems face a significant issue with liquidity fragmentation, as applications and assets are distributed across many public chains with each only accessible by subset of users. Cross-chain communication was designed to address this by allowing chains to interoperate, but existing solutions limit communication to directly connected chains or route traffic through hubs that create bottlenecks and centralization risks. In this paper, we introduce xRoute, a cross-chain routing and message-delivery framework inspired by traditional networks. Our design brings routing, name resolution, and policy-based delivery to the blockchain setting. It allows applications to specify routing policies, enables destination chains to verify that selected routes satisfy security requirements, and uses a decentralized relayer network to compute routes and deliver messages without introducing a trusted hub. Experiments on the chains supporting the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol show that our approach improves connectivity, decentralization, and scalability compared to hub-based designs, particularly under heavy load.
Oliver Aleksander Larsen, Rasmus Stenbak Larsen, Mahyar Tourchi Moghaddam
Today's internet concentrates identity, payments, communication, and content hosting under a small number of corporate intermediaries, creating single points of failure, enabling censorship, and extracting economic rent from participants. We present BitSov, an architectural framework for sovereign internet infrastructure that composes existing decentralized technologies (Bitcoin, Lightning Network, decentralized storage, federated messaging, and mesh connectivity) into a unified, eight-layer protocol stack anchored to Bitcoin's base layer. The framework introduces three architectural patterns: (1) payment-gated messaging, where every transmitted message requires cryptographic proof of a Bitcoin payment, deterring spam through economic incentives rather than moderation; (2) timechain-locked contracts, which anchor subscriptions and licenses to Bitcoin block height (the timechain) rather than calendar dates; and (3) a self-sustaining economic flywheel that converts service revenue into infrastructure growth. A dual settlement model supports both on-chain transactions for permanence and auditability and Lightning micropayments for high-frequency messaging. As a position paper, we analyze the quality attributes, discuss open challenges, and propose a research agenda for empirical validation.
Distributed systems in which concurrent proposals are mutually exclusive face a fundamental stability constraint under network delay. In open systems where global state progression is event-driven rather than round-driven, propagation delay creates a conflict window within which overlapping proposals may generate competing branches. This paper derives a density-delay law for such exclusive state progression processes. Under independent proposal arrivals and bounded propagation delay, overlap is approximated by a Poisson model and fork depth is represented by a birth-death process. The analysis shows that maintaining bounded fork depth as the number of participants grows requires the density-delay product $λΔ$ to remain $O(1)$, implying that aggregate proposal intensity must stay bounded and yielding an inverse-scaling law $g(N)=O(1/N)$ at the unit level. Simulation experiments across varying network sizes and propagation delays align with a common density-delay curve, supporting the predicted scaling behavior. The result provides a compact law for stable event-driven state progression in open distributed systems and offers a scaling-based interpretation of Bitcoin-style difficulty adjustment as a decentralized way to regulate effective event density.
Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology has been introduced to enable could computing at the edge of the network in order to help resource limited mobile devices with time sensitive data processing tasks. In this paradigm, mobile devices can offload their computationally heavy tasks to more efficient nearby MEC servers via wireless communication. Consequently, the main focus of researches on the subject has been on development of efficient offloading schemes, leaving the privacy of mobile user out. While the Blockchain technology is used as the trust mechanism for secured sharing of the data, the privacy issues induced from wireless communication, namely, usage pattern and location privacy are the centerpiece of this work. The effects of these privacy concerns on the task offloading Markov Decision Process (MDP) is addressed and the MDP is solved using a Deep Recurrent Q-Netwrok (DRQN). The Numerical simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Due to the scalability and portability, low-altitude intelligent networks (LAINs) are essential in various fields such as surveillance and disaster rescue. However, in LAINs, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are characterized by the distributed topology and high mobility, thus vulnerable to security threats, which may degrade routing performances for data transmissions. Hence, how to ensure the routing stability and security of LAINs is challenging. In this paper, we focus on the routing with multiple UAV clusters in LAINs. To minimize the damage caused by potential threats, we present the zero-trust architecture with the software-defined perimeter and blockchain techniques to manage the identify and mobility of UAVs. Besides, we formulate the routing problem to optimize the end-to-end (E2E) delay and transmission success ratio (TSR) simultaneously, which is an integer nonlinear programming problem and intractable to solve. Therefore, we reformulate the problem into a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process. We design the multi-agent double deep Q-network-based routing algorithms to solve the problem, empowered by the soft-hierarchical experience replay buffer and prioritized experience replay mechanisms. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted and the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces the average E2E delay by 59\% and improves the TSR by 29\% on average compared to benchmarks, while simultaneously enabling faster and more robust identification of low-trust UAVs.
Zibin Lin, Taotao Wang, Shengli Zhang, Long Shi · 6 authors
Web 3.0 platforms need an onboarding mechanism that can admit real users at scale without forcing them to reveal identity documents or pay one on-chain verification cost per user. Existing approaches typically rely on KYC-style disclosure, per-request on-chain verification, or trusted batching, making onboarding cost and latency difficult to predict under bursty demand. We present \textbf{ZK-AMS}, a credibly anonymous admission infrastructure that maps Personhood Credentials to anonymous on-chain Soul Accounts. Rather than introducing a new primitive, ZK-AMS composes zero-knowledge credential validation, permissionless batch submission, recursive proof aggregation, and anonymous post-admission account provisioning into one end-to-end workflow. Its key design feature is a confidential batching pipeline in which admission instances of a common relation are folded off-chain under multi-key homomorphic encryption, allowing an untrusted batch submitter to coordinate aggregation without direct access to individual user witnesses during batching; the confidentiality scope is characterized explicitly in the security analysis. The resulting batch is settled on-chain with constant verification cost per batch rather than per admitted user. We implement ZK-AMS on an Ethereum testbed and evaluate admission throughput, end-to-end latency, gas consumption, and parameter trade-offs. Results show stable batch-verification gas across evaluated batch sizes, substantially lower amortized on-chain cost than the non-recursive baseline, and practical cost-latency trade-offs for high-concurrency onboarding in Web 3.0 platforms.