Priyanka Bothra, Raja Karmakar, Sanjukta Bhattacharya, Sayantani De
In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), massive computing devices surrounding us operate and interact with each other to provide several significant services in industries, medical as well as in daily life activities at home, office, education sectors, and so on. The participating devices in an IoT network usually have resource constraints and the devices are prone to different cyber attacks, leading to the loopholes in the security and authentication. As a revolutionized and innovated technology, blockchain, that is applied in cryptocurrency, market prediction, etc., uses a distributed ledger that records transactions securely and efficiently. To utilize the great potential of blockchain, both industries and academia have paid a significant attention to integrate it with the IoT, as reported by several existing literature. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is able to embed intelligence in a system, and thus the AI can be integrated with IoT devices in order to automatically cope with different environments according to the demands. Furthermore, both blockchain and AI can be integrated with the IoT to design an automated secure and robust IoT model, as mentioned by numerous existing works. In this survey, we present a discussion on the IoT, blockchain, and AI, along with the descriptions of several research works that apply blockchain and AI in the IoT. In this direction, we point out strengths and limitations of the related existing researches. We also discuss different open challenges to exploit the full capacities of blockchain and AI in designing an IoT-based model. Therefore, the highlighted challenging issues can open the door for the development of future IoT models which will be intelligent and secure based on the integration of blockchain and AI with the IoT.
The metaverse is regarded as a new wave of technological transformation that provides a virtual space for people to interact through digital avatars. To achieve immersive user experiences in the metaverse, real-time rendering is the key technology. However, computing-intensive tasks of real-time rendering from metaverse service providers cannot be processed efficiently on a single resource-limited mobile device. Alternatively, such mobile devices can offload the metaverse rendering tasks to other mobile devices by adopting the collaborative computing paradigm based on Coded Distributed Computing (CDC). Therefore, this paper introduces a hierarchical game-theoretic CDC framework for the metaverse services, especially for the vehicular metaverse. In the framework, idle resources from vehicles, acting as CDC workers, are aggregated to handle intensive computation tasks in the vehicular metaverse. Specifically, in the upper layer, a miner coalition formation game is formulated based on a reputation metric to select reliable workers. To guarantee the reliable management of reputation values, the reputation values calculated based on the subjective logical model are maintained in a blockchain database. In the lower layer, a Stackelberg game-based incentive mechanism is considered to attract reliable workers selected in the upper layer to participate in rendering tasks. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed framework is resistant to malicious workers. Compared with the best-effort worker selection scheme, the proposed scheme can improve the utility of metaverse service provider and the average profit of CDC workers.
In the coming 6G era, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been evolving towards 6G-enabled IoV with super-high data rate, seamless networking coverage, and ubiquitous intelligence by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Transfer Learning (TL) has great potential to empower promising 6G-enabled IoV, such as smart driving assistance, with its outstanding features including enhancing quality and quantity of training data, speeding up learning processes and reducing computing demands. Although TL had been widely adopted in wireless applications (e.g., spectrum management and caching), its reliability and security in 6G-enabled IoV were still not well investigated. For instance, malicious vehicles in source domains may transfer and share untrustworthy models (i.e., knowledge) about connection availability to target domains, thus adversely affecting the performance of learning processes. Therefore, it is important to select and also incentivize trustworthy vehicles to participate in TL. In this article, we first introduce the integration of TL and 6G-enbaled IoV and provide TL applications for 6G-enabled IoV. We then design a secure and reliable transfer learning framework by using reputation to evaluate the reliability of pre-trained models and utilizing the consortium blockchain to achieve secure and efficient decentralized reputation management. Moreover, a deep learning-based auction scheme for the TL model market is designed to motivate high-reputation vehicles to participate in model sharing. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework is secure and reliable with well-design incentives for TL in 6G-enabled IoV.
Phan The Duy, Hien Do Hoang, Do Thi Thu Hien, Anh Gia-Tuan Nguyen · 5 authors
Software-Defined Network (SDN) is a new arising terminology of network architecture with outstanding features of orchestration by decoupling the control plane and the data plane in each network element. Even though it brings several benefits, SDN is vulnerable to a diversity of attacks. Abusing the single point of failure in the SDN controller component, hackers can shut down all network operations. More specifics, a malicious OpenFlow application can access to SDN controller to carry out harmful actions without any limitation owing to the lack of the access control mechanism as a standard in the Northbound. The sensitive information about the whole network such as network topology, flow information, and statistics can be gathered and leaked out. Even worse, the entire network can be taken over by the compromised controller. Hence, it is vital to build a scheme of access control for SDN's Northbound. Furthermore, it must also protect the data integrity and availability during data exchange between application and controller. To address such limitations, we introduce B-DAC, a blockchain-based framework for decentralized authentication and fine-grained access control for the Northbound interface to assist administrators in managing and protecting critical resources. With strict policy enforcement, B-DAC can perform decentralized access control for each request to keep network applications under surveillance for preventing over-privileged activities or security policy conflicts. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we also implement a prototype of this framework to evaluate the security impact, effectiveness, and performance through typical use cases.
In order to solve security and privacy issues of centralized cloud services, the edge computing network is introduced, where computing and storage resources are distributed to the edge of the network. However, native edge computing is subject to the limited performance of edge devices, which causes challenges in data authorization, data encryption, user privacy, and other fields. Blockchain is currently the hottest technology for distributed networks. It solves the consistent issue of distributed data and is used in many areas, such as cryptocurrency, smart grid, and the Internet of Things. Our work discussed the security and privacy challenges of edge computing networks. From the perspectives of data authorization, encryption, and user privacy, we analyze the solutions brought by blockchain technology to edge computing networks. In this work, we deeply present the benefits from the integration of the edge computing network and blockchain technology, which effectively controls the data authorization and data encryption of the edge network and enhances the architecture's scalability under the premise of ensuring security and privacy. Finally, we investigate challenges on storage, workload, and latency for future research in this field.
As a disruptive technology that originates from cryptocurrency, blockchain provides a trusted platform to facilitate industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. However, implementing a blockchain platform in IIoT scenarios confronts various security challenges due to the rigorous deployment condition. To this end, we present a novel design of secure blockchain based on trusted computing hardware for IIoT applications. Specifically, we employ the trusted execution environment (TEE) module and a customized security chip to safeguard the blockchain against different attacking vectors. Furthermore, we implement the proposed secure IIoT blockchain on the ARM-based embedded device and build a small-scale IIoT network to evaluate its performance. Our experimental results show that the secure blockchain platform achieves a high throughput (150TPS) with low transaction confirmation delay (below 66ms), demonstrating its feasibility in practical IIoT scenarios. Finally, we outline the open challenges and future research directions.
The smart city is an emerging notion that is leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) technique to achieve more comfortable, smart and controllable cities. The communications crossing domains between smart cities is indispensable to enhance collaborations. However, crossing-domain communications are more vulnerable since there are in different domains. Moreover, there are huge different devices with different computation capabilities, from sensors to the cloud servers. In this paper, we propose a lightweight two-layer blockchain mechanism for reliable crossing-domain communication in smart cities. Our mechanism provides a reliable communication mechanism for data sharing and communication between smart cities. We defined a two-layer blockchain structure for the communications inner and between smart cities to achieve reliable communications. We present a new block structure for the lightweight IoT devices. Moreover, we present a reputation-based multi-weight consensus protocol in order to achieve efficient communication while resistant to the nodes collusion attack for the proposed blockchain system. We also conduct a secure analysis to demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme. Finally, performance evaluation shows that our scheme is efficient and practical.
The proliferation of blockchains has given developers a variety of platforms on which to run their smart contracts based on application features and requirements for throughput, security, and cost. However, a consequence of this freedom is severe fragmentation; Each chain is isolated, forcing users to silo their liquidity and limiting options to move liquidity and state between walled ecosystems. This paper presents LayerZero, the first trustless omnichain interoperability protocol, which provides a powerful, low level communication primitive upon which a diverse set of cross-chain applications can be built. Using this new primitive, developers can implement seamless inter-chain applications like a cross-chain DEX or multi-chain yield aggregator without having to rely on a trusted custodian or intermediate transactions. Simply put, LayerZero is the first system to trustlessly enable direct transactions across all chains. Allowing transactions to flow freely between chains provides opportunities for users to consolidate fragmented pockets of liquidity while also making full use of applications on separate chains. With LayerZero, we provide the network fabric underlying the fully-connected omnichain ecosystem of the future.
The Tangle is the data structure used to store transactions in the IOTA cryptocurrency. In the Tangle, each block has two parents. As a result, the blocks do not form a chain, but a directed acyclic graph. In traditional Blockchain, a new block is appended to the heaviest chain in case of fork. In the Tangle, the parent selection is done by the Tip Selection Algorithm (TSA). In this paper, we make some important observations about the security of existing TSAs. We then propose a new TSA that has low complexity and is more secure than previous TSAs.
Zeshun Shi, Cees de Laat, Paola Grosso, Zhiming Zhao
In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models.
We consider the following network model motivated, in particular, by blockchains and peer-to-peer live streaming. Data packet flows arrive at the network nodes and need to be disseminated to all other nodes. Packets are relayed through the network via links of finite capacity. A packet leaves the network when it is disseminated to all nodes. Our focus is on two communication disciplines, which determine the order in which packets are transmitted over each link, namely {\em Random-Useful} (RU) and {\em Oldest-Useful} (OU). We show that RU has the maximum stability region in a general network. For the OU we demonstrate that, somewhat surprisingly, it does {\em not} in general have the maximum stability region. We prove that OU does achieve maximum stability in the important special case of a symmetric network, given by the full graph with equal capacities on all links and equal arrival rates at all nodes. We also give other stability results, and compare different disciplines' performances in a symmetric system via simulation. Finally, we study the cumulative delays experienced by a packet as it propagates through the symmetric system, specifically the delay asymptotic behavior as $N \to \infty$. We put forward some conjectures about this behavior, supported by heuristic arguments and simulation experiments.
The integration of air and ground smart vehicles is becoming a new paradigm of future transportation. A decent number of smart unmanned vehicles or UAS will be sharing the national airspace for various purposes, such as express delivery, surveillance, etc. However, the proliferation of UAS also brings challenges considering the safe integration of them into the current Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. Especially when the current Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcasting (ADS-B) systems do not have message authentication mechanisms, it can not distinguish whether an authorized UAS is using the corresponding airspace. In this paper, we aim to address these practical challenges in two folds. We first use blockchain to provide a secure authentication platform for flight plan approval and sharing between the existing ATM facilities. We then use the fountain code to encode the authentication payloads and adapt them into the de facto communication protocol of ATM. This maintains backward compatibility and ensures the verification success rate under the noisy broadcasting channel. We simulate the realistic wireless communication scenarios and theoretically prove that our proposed authentication framework is with low latency and highly compatible with existing ATM communication protocols.
Man Zeng, Dandan Li, Pei Zhang, Kun Xie · 5 authors
In the inter-domain network, a route leak occurs when a routing announcement is propagated outside of its intended scope, which is a violation of the agreed routing policy. The route leaks can disrupt the internet traffic and cause large outages. The accurately detection of route leaks requires the share of AS business relationship information of ASes. However, the business relationship information between ASes is confidential due to economic issues. Thus, ASes are usually unwilling to revealing this information to the other ASes, especially their competitors. Recent advancements in federated learning make it possible to share data while maintaining privacy. Motivated by this, in this paper we study the route leak problem by considering the privacy of business relationships between ASes, and propose a method for route leak detection with privacy guarantee by using blockchain-based federated learning framework, in which ASes can train a global detection model without revealing their business relationships directly. Moreover, the proposed method provides a self-validation scheme by labeling AS triples with local routing policies, which mitigates route leaks' lack of ground truth. We evaluate the proposed method under a variety of datasets including unbalanced and balanced datasets. The different deployment strategies of the proposed method under different topologies are also examined. The results show that the proposed method has a better performance in detecting route leaks than a single AS detection regardless of whether using balanced or unbalanced datasets. In the analysis of the deployment, the results show that ASes with more peers have more possible route leaks and can contribute more on the detection of route leaks with the proposed method.
Sita Rani, Meetali Chauhan, Aman Kataria, Alex Khang
The fundamental aim of the healthcare sector is to incorporate different technologies to observe and keep a track of the various clinical parameters of the patients in day to day life. Distant patient observation applications are becoming popular as economical healthcare services are facilitated by these apps. The process of data management gathered through these applications also require due attention. Although cloud facilitated healthcare applications cater a variety of solutions to store patients record and deliver the required data as per need of all the stakeholders but are affected by security issues, more response time and affecting the continues availability of the system. To overcome these challenges, an intelligent IoT based distributed framework to deploy remote healthcare services is proposed in this chapter. In the proposed model, various entities of the system are interconnected using IoT and Distributed Database Management Systems is used to cater secure and fast data availability to the patients and health care workers. The concept of Blockchain is used to ensure the security of the patient medical records. The proposed model will comprise of intelligent analysis of the clinical records fetched from Distributed Database Management Systems secured with Blockchain. Proposed model is tested with true clinical data and results are discussed in detail.
Lei Yang, Seo Jin Park, Mohammad Alizadeh, Sreeram Kannan · 5 authors
The success of blockchains has sparked interest in large-scale deployments of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols over wide area networks. A central feature of such networks is variable communication bandwidth across nodes and across time. We present DispersedLedger, an asynchronous BFT protocol that provides near-optimal throughput in the presence of such variable network bandwidth. The core idea of DispersedLedger is to enable nodes to propose, order, and agree on blocks of transactions without having to download their full content. By enabling nodes to agree on an ordered log of blocks, with a guarantee that each block is available within the network and unmalleable, DispersedLedger decouples bandwidth-intensive block downloads at different nodes, allowing each to make progress at its own pace. We build a full system prototype and evaluate it on real-world and emulated networks. Our results on a geo-distributed wide-area deployment across the Internet shows that DispersedLedger achieves 2x better throughput and 74% reduction in latency compared to HoneyBadger, the state-of-the-art asynchronous protocol.
Albenzio Cirillo, Vito Dalena, Antonio Mauro, Francesco Mogavero · 8 authors
A Robinson list protects phone subscribers against commercial spam calls. Its least basic functionality is to collect the denial of the subscribers to be contacted by market operators. Nowadays, Robinson lists run as centralised services, which implies that citizens should trust third parties for the management of their choices. In this paper, we show a design that allows us to realise a Robinson list as a decentralised service. Our work leverages the experience developed by Fondazione Ugo Bordoni as the manager of the Italian Robinson list. We present a general solution and a proof-of-concept (PoC) adopting the Algorand technology. We evaluate the performances of our PoC in terms of its scalability and of the latency perceived by the involved actors. We also discuss aspects related to identity management and privacy.
Beatriz Soret, Lam Duc Nguyen, Jan Seeger, Arne Bröring · 10 authors
An Intelligent IoT Environment (iIoTe) is comprised of heterogeneous devices that can collaboratively execute semi-autonomous IoT applications, examples of which include highly automated manufacturing cells or autonomously interacting harvesting machines. Energy efficiency is key in such edge environments, since they are often based on an infrastructure that consists of wireless and battery-run devices, e.g., e-tractors, drones, Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV)s and robots. The total energy consumption draws contributions from multiple iIoTe technologies that enable edge computing and communication, distributed learning, as well as distributed ledgers and smart contracts. This paper provides a state-of-the-art overview of these technologies and illustrates their functionality and performance, with special attention to the tradeoff among resources, latency, privacy and energy consumption. Finally, the paper provides a vision for integrating these enabling technologies in energy-efficient iIoTe and a roadmap to address the open research challenges.
Kai Li, Yuzhe Tang, Jiaqi Chen, Yibo Wang · 5 authors
Ethereum relies on a peer-to-peer overlay network to propagate information. The knowledge of Ethereum network topology holds the key to understanding Ethereum's security, availability, and user anonymity. From a measurement perspective, an Ethereum network's topology is routing-table information hidden inside individual Ethereum nodes, measuring which poses challenges and remains an open research problem in the existing literature. This paper presents TopoShot, a new method uniquely repurposing Ethereum's transaction replacement/eviction policies for topology measurement. TopoShot can be configured to support Geth, Parity, and other major Ethereum clients. As validated on local nodes, TopoShot achieves 100% measurement precision and high recall 88% - 97%. To efficiently measure the large Ethereum networks in the wild, we propose a non-trivial schedule to run pair-wise measurements in parallel. To enable ethical measurement on Ethereum mainnet, we propose workload-adaptive configurations of TopoShot to minimize the service interruption to target nodes/network. We systematically measure a variety of Ethereum networks and obtain new knowledge including the full-network topology in major testnets (Ropsten, Rinkeby and Goerli) and critical sub-network topology in the mainnet. The results on testnets show interesting graph-theoretic properties, such as all testnets exhibit graph modularity significantly lower than random graphs, implying resilience to network partitions. The mainnet results show biased neighbor selection strategies adopted by critical Ethereum services such as mining pools and transaction relays, implying a degree of centralization in real Ethereum networks.
Payment channel networks (PCNs) have been designed and utilized to address the scalability challenge and throughput limitation of blockchains. Routing is a core problem of PCNs. An ideal PCN routing method needs to achieve 1) high scalability that can maintain low per-node memory and communication cost for large PCNs, 2) high resource utilization of payment channels, and 3) the privacy of users. However, none of the existing PCN systems consider all these requirements. In this work, we propose WebFlow, a distributed routing solution for PCNs, which only requires each user to maintain localized information and can be used for massive-scale networks with high resource utilization. We make use of two distributed data structures: multi-hop Delaunay triangulation (MDT) originally proposed for wireless networks and our innovation called distributed Voronoi diagram. We propose new protocols to generate a virtual Euclidean space in order to apply MDT to PCNs and use the distributed Voronoi diagram to enhance routing privacy. We conduct extensive simulations and prototype implementation to further evaluate WebFlow. The results using real and synthetic PCN topologies and transaction traces show that WebFlow can achieve extremely low per-node overhead and a high success rate compared to existing methods.
Automated and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasing daily. As the number of IoT devices grows, the volume of data generated by them will also grow. Managing these rapidly expanding IoT devices and enormous data efficiently to be available to all authorized users without compromising its integrity will become essential in the near future. On the other side, many information security incidents have been recorded, increasing the requirement for countermeasures. While safeguards against hostile third parties have been commonplace until now, operators and parties have seen an increase in demand for data falsification detection and blocking. Blockchain technology is well-known for its privacy, immutability, and decentralized nature. Single-board computers are becoming more powerful while also becoming more affordable as IoT platforms. These single-board computers are gaining traction in the automation industry. This study focuses on a paradigm of IoT-Blockchain integration where the blockchain node runs autonomously on the IoT platform itself. It enables the system to conduct machine-to-machine transactions without the intervention of a person and to exert direct access control over IoT devices. This paper assumed that the readers are familiar with Hyperledger Fabric basic operations and focus on the practical approach of integration. A basic introduction is provided for the newbie on the blockchain.
Decentralized control, low-complexity, flexible and efficient communications are the requirements of an architecture that aims to scale blockchains beyond the current state. Such properties are attainable by reducing ledger size and providing parallel operations in the blockchain. Sharding is one of the approaches that lower the burden of the nodes and enhance performance. However, the current solutions lack the features for resolving concurrency during cross-shard communications. With multiple participants belonging to different shards, handling concurrent operations is essential for optimal sharding. This issue becomes prominent due to the lack of architectural support and requires additional consensus for cross-shard communications. Relying on the advantages of hybrid Proof-of-Work/Proof-of-Stake (PoW/PoS), like Ethereum , hybrid consensus and 2-hop blockchain , we propose Reinshard , a new blockchain that inherits the properties of hybrid consensus for optimal sharding. Reinshard uses PoW and PoS chain-pairs with PoS sub-chains for all the valid chain-pairs where the hybrid consensus is attained through Verifiable Delay Function (VDF). Our architecture provides a secure method of arranging nodes in shards and resolves concurrency conflicts using the delay factor of VDF. The applicability of Reinshard is demonstrated through security and experimental evaluations. A practical concurrency problem is considered to show the efficacy of Reinshard in providing optimal sharding.
Han Wang, Hui Li, Zixian Wang, Baofu Han · 10 authors
Decentralized cryptocurrency systems, known as blockchains, have shown promise as infrastructure for mutually distrustful parties to agree on transactions safely. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchains and their variants suffer from the limitations of the CAP Trilemma, which is difficult to be solved through optimizing consensus protocols. Moreover, the P2P network of blockchains have problems in efficiency and reliability without considering the matching of physical and logical topologies. For the CAP Trilemma in consortium blockchains, we propose a physical topology based on the multi-dimensional hypercube with excellent partition tolerance in probability. On the other hand, the general hypercube has advantages in solving the mismatch problems in P2P networks. The general topology is further extended to a hierarchical recursive topology with more medium links or short links to balance the reliability requirements and the costs of physical network. We prove that the hypercube topology has better partition tolerance than the regular rooted tree topology and the ring lattice topology, and effectively fits the upper-layer protocols. As a result, blockchains constructed by the proposed topology can reach the CAP guarantee bound through adopting the proper transmission and the consensus protocols protocols that have strong consistency and availability.
The internet of things (IoT) refers to a framework of interrelated, web associated objects that can gather and move information over a remote network without human interference. With a quick development in the arrangement of IoT gadgets and expanding want to make medical care more financially savvy, customized, and proactive, IoT is ready to assume a solid function in all perspectives of the healthcare industry. In this context, IoT-based healthcare provides several benefits such as instant and reliable treatment, cost reduction, improved communication, etc. by using different new technologies. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) technologies can enhance the quality of data gathering and data transferring in smart systems. Machine Learning(ML) are put to use at every level of smart healthcare systems. Fog computing reduces communication cost and provides low latency. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies provide less complex and more flexible network structures. Blockchain technology offers a better way of protection of users' sensitive information. This paper aims to provide comprehensive descriptions of ongoing research projects and the utilization of the above-mentioned technologies in smart healthcare systems. In this paper, the latest studies, proposed techniques, and the current solutions of smart healthcare systems are elaborated in the context of emerging technologies, applications and challenges of these systems to provide a better understanding of what IoT means in the healthcare industry now and what it will mean in the future.
Abstract The Bitcoin P2P network currently represents a reference benchmark for modern cryptocurrencies. Its underlying protocol defines how transactions and blocks are distributed through all participating nodes. To protect user privacy, the identity of the node originating a message is kept hidden. However, an adversary observing the whole network can analyze the spread pattern of a transaction to trace it back to its source. This is possible thanks to the so-called rumor centrality , which is caused by the symmetry in the spreading of gossip -like protocols. Recent works try to address this issue by breaking the symmetry of the Diffusion protocol, currently used in Bitcoin, and leveraging proxied broadcast. Nonetheless, the complexity of their design can be a barrier to their adoption in real life. In this work, we propose Clover, a novel transaction relay protocol that protects the source of transaction messages with a simple, yet effective, design. Compared to previous solutions, our protocol does not require building propagation graphs, and reduces the ability of the adversary to gain precision by opening multiple connections towards the same node. Experimental results show that the deanonymization accuracy of an eavesdropper adversary against Clover is up to 10 times smaller compared to Diffusion.