The user can organize a social network together with other peoples, in the manner of the consortium blockchain, so that expected contents can be accessed via collecting pieces of data (sub-flows) from members. This promising mechanism heavily relies on the multipath data transmission to transfer sub-flows to the user over the social network. However, the performance differentiation and link overlapping of transmission paths between the user and members could result in severe traffic congestion and packet scrambling. To solve these problems, we design a novel SDN (Software-Defined Networking)-based framework because the global traffic engineering can perform more flexible flow transferring. Our SDN controller has three modules of topology discovery, sub-flow association and path selection. We quickly capture the social network from the most appropriate consortium blockchain where a set of paths with minimal link overlapping and performance differentiation can be found to transfer correlated sub-flows the user wants. The simulation results show that our solution achieves a higher network throughput compared with traditional methods while guaranteeing a low data retransmission rate.
La aparición de las tecnologías Blockchain/Distributed Ledger está significando una revolución en los paradigmas de Internet. En el presente proyecto, se ha aplicado HyperLedger Fabric, una tecnología de Distributed Ledger permisionado y privado, en un escenario entre varias empresas.
Igor D. Alvarenga, Gabriel Antonio F. Rebello, Otto Carlos M. B. Duarte
The integration of network function visualization (NFV) and service function chaining (SFC) adds intelligence to the core of the network. The programmability of the network core, however, raises new vulnerabilities and increases the number of victims, since a simple modification in the core can affect multiple network users. Thus, the provision of secure virtual network service functions (VNFs) is mandatory to guarantee a correct chaining of network functions. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture for secure management, configuration and migration of VNFs, which ensures: (i) immutability, non-repudiation, and auditability of the configuration update history; (ii) integrity and consistency of stored information; and (iii) the anonymity of VNFs, tenants, and configuration information. Furthermore, the proposed architecture guarantees the secure update and migration of configurations at the core of the network. A prototype of the proposed architecture using the Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) indicates parameter trade-offs and performance bottlenecks.
Blockchain, as secure means for asset transfer, greatly attracts the attention of the global economic community. However, scalability strongly hampers the growth of economic systems based on the blockchain technology. Bidirectional micropayment channels are suitable solutions for scalability on economic systems based on blockchain. However, the challenge presented by micropayment channels is the inefficient routing mechanisms and timelocks generated per channel for a given path chosen to execute a transaction. In this paper, we develop suitable routing algorithms for economic systems based on blockchain. We additionally derive suitable equations to generate unique timelocks for channels belonging to selected paths chosen to execute a transaction. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of the protocol based on number of connections and bandwidth with evidence showing the efficiency and scalability of the routing mechanism.
Wireless network virtualization is regarded as an emerging paradigm to enhance RF spectrum utilization to support exponentially increasing demand caused by emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. To create virtual wireless networks (VWNs), there are no automated secure approaches for allocating RF spectrum to meet the dynamically changing quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the users. In wireless networks, RF spectrum is shared among many users and the given RF spectrum could be easily overcrowded because of the over commitment of limited resources by the service providers. There is a direct incentive in terms of revenue to service providers to have more number of users. In this paper, we propose to leverage a distributed Blockchain - also known as a public ledger - based scheme to create VWNs where primary wireless resource-owners (PWROs) sublease their wireless resources (e.g., slice of RF spectrum, infrastructure) to mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) using machine-to-machine communication based on the service level agreements (SLAs) between PWROs and MVNOs. The proposed distributed Blockchain-based scheme provides security to participating PWROs and MVNOs as well as prevents PWROs from over committing their resources (that stops double spending) and helps MVNOs to meet the QoS requirements of their users. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or similar regulatory bodies in other countries participate in this framework by providing the guidelines and regulations about maximum power levels, licensing and geographic coverages, etc. This essentially helps users to meet their desired QoS requirements while complying the government regulations. Performance is evaluated using numerical results.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) develops and expands, management of IoT communications becomes a major challenge. A large number of IoT devices may be installed anywhere end users wish, then left unattended and be misused to attack others. In edge networks, it is difficult to properly prevent undesired communication without knowledge of the properties of an IoT service and its devices. In this paper, we argue that application service providers, developers, and network operators should 1) verify and know the authenticity of IoT services, devices, and their communications, and 2) prevent unwanted traffic from IoT devices in a trustworthy, scalable, and distributed manner. This paper proposes a Trust List that represents the distribution of trust among IoT-related stakeholders and provides autonomous enforcement of IoT traffic management at the edge networks by integrating blockchains and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The principle of Trust List is automating the process of doubting, verifying, and trusting IoT services and devices to effectively prevent attacks and abuses. The proof of concept implementation and experiment of the Trust List using both public and private blockchains reveal its good practice and suggest studies for realistic deployment.
The increasing demand for mobile network capacity driven by Internet of Things (IoT) applications results in the need for understanding better the potential and limitations of 5G networks. Vertical application areas like smart mobility, energy networks, industrial IoT applications, and AR/VR enhanced services all pose different requirements on the use of 5G networks. Some applications need low latency, whereas others need high bandwidth or security support. The goal of this paper is to identify the requirements and to understand the limitations for 5G driven applications. We review application areas and list the typical challenges and requirements posed on 5G networks. A main challenge will be to develop a network architecture being able to dynamically adapt to fluctuating traffic patterns and accommodating various technologies such as edge computing, blockchain based distributed ledger, software defined networking, and virtualization. To inspire future research, we reveal open problems and highlight the need for piloting with 5G applications, with tangible steps, to understand the configuration of 5G networks and the use of applications across multiple vertical industries.
The majority of business activity of our integrated and connected world takes place in networks based on cloud computing infrastructure that cross national, geographic and jurisdictional boundaries. Such an efficient entity interconnection is made possible through an emerging networking paradigm, Software Defined Networking (SDN) that intends to vastly simplify policy enforcement and network reconfiguration in a dynamic manner. However, despite the obvious advantages this novel networking paradigm introduces, its increased attack surface compared to traditional networking deployments proved to be a thorny issue that creates skepticism when safety-critical applications are considered. Especially when SDN is used to support Internet-of-Things (IoT)-related networking elements, additional security concerns rise, due to the elevated vulnerability of such deployments to specific types of attacks and the necessity of inter-cloud communication any IoT application would require. The overall number of connected nodes makes the efficient monitoring of all entities a real challenge, that must be tackled to prevent system degradation and service outage. This position paper provides an overview of common security issues of SDN when linked to IoT clouds, describes the design principals of the recently introduced Blockchain paradigm and advocates the reasons that render Blockchain as a significant security factor for solutions where SDN and IoT are involved.
Jere Backman, Seppo Yrjölä, Kristiina Valtanen, Olli Mämmelä
5G Network Slice Broker concept aims to enable mobile virtual network operators, over-the-top providers, and industry vertical market players to request and lease resources from infrastructure providers dynamically according to needs. In the future digital factory, the leasing of resources could also happen autonomously by manufacturing equipment. This paper presents Blockchain Slice Leasing Ledger Concept and analysis of its applicability in the Factory of the Future. The novel concept utilizes 5G Network Slice Broker in a Blockchain to reduce service creation time and enable manufacturing equipment autonomously and dynamically acquire the slice needed for more efficient operations.
The blockchain technology is gaining momentum because of its possible application to other systems than the cryptocurrency one. Indeed, blockchain, as a de-centralized system based on a distributed digital ledger, can be utilized to securely manage any kind of assets, constructing a system that is independent of any authorization entity. In this paper, we briefly present blockchain and our work in progress, the VMOA blockchain, to secure virtual machine orchestration operations for cloud computing and network functions virtualization systems. Using tutorial examples, we describe our design choices and draw implementation plans.
Recently, blockchains have been gathering a lot of interest. Many applications can benefit from the advantages of blockchains. Nevertheless, applications with more restricted privacy or participation requirements cannot rely on public blockchains. First, the whole blockchain can be downloaded at any time, thus making the data available to the public. Second, anyone can deploy a node, join the blockchain network and take part in the consensus building process. Private and consortium blockchains promise to combine the advantages of blockchains with stricter requirements on the participating entities. This is also the reason for the comparably small number of nodes that store and extend those blockchains. However, by targeting specific nodes, an attacker can influence how consensuses are reached and possibly even halt the blockchain operation. To provide additional security to the blockchain nodes, ChainGuard utilizes SDN functionalities to filter network traffic, thus implementing a firewall for blockchain applications. ChainGuard communicates with the blockchain nodes it guards to determine which origin of the traffic is legitimate. Packets from illegitimate sources are intercepted and thus cannot have an effect on the blockchain. As is shown with experiments, ChainGuard provides access control functionality and can effectively mitigate flooding attacks from several sources at once.
This paper presents a multi-layer secure IoT network model based on blockchain technology. The model reduces the difficulty of actual deployment of the blockchain technology by dividing the Internet of Things into a multi-level de-centric network and adopting the technology of block chain technology at all levels of the network, with the high security and credibility assurance of the blockchain technology retaining. It provides a wide-area networking solution of Internet of Things.
DNS Protocol was originally designed with no security protection in place. Subsequent DNSSEC added a layer of trust on top of DNS by providing authentication, but it still did not address issues such as DoS/DDoS attacks and deployment difficulties. Blockchain technology offers an innovative perspective to tackle those challenges. By reviewing and analyzing two prevail blockchain-based DNS alternatives (Namecoin and Blockstack), it is concluded that although blockchain presently have problems that have to be solved, it is a promising approach to build decentralized, secure and human-friendly naming systems.
Abstract The exponential increase of the traffic volume makes Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks a top security threat to service providers. Existing DDoS defense mechanisms lack resources and flexibility to cope with attacks by themselves, and by utilizing other’s companies resources, the burden of the mitigation can be shared. Technologies as blockchain and smart contracts allow distributing attack information across multiple domains, while SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) enables to scale defense capabilities on demand for a single network domain. This proposal presents the design of a novel architecture combining these elements and introducing novel opportunities for flexible and efficient DDoS mitigation solutions across multiple domains.
The constant rise of over-the-top video consumption nowadays challenges the current Internet architecture. In this article, we propose a user-centric approach that helps the necessary reshaping of the content delivery ecosystem. We study how blockchain-powered smart contracts and network service chaining can be exploited to support such novel collaboration schemes. Finally, our findings suggest that the proposed solution can complement existing technologies by supporting a wide range of business cases while at the same time significantly reducing costs.
Bruno Rodrigues, Thomas Bocek, Andri Lareida, David Hausheer · 6 authors
Abstract The rapid growth in the number of insecure portable and stationary devices and the exponential increase of traffic volume makes Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks a top security threat to services provisioning. Existing defense mechanisms lack resources and flexibility to cope with attacks by themselves, and by utilizing other’s companies resources, the burden of the mitigation can be shared. Emerging technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts allows for the sharing of attack information in a fully distributed and automated fashion. In this paper, the design of a novel architecture is proposed by combining these technologies introducing new opportunities for flexible and efficient DDoS mitigation solutions across multiple domains. Main advantages are the deployment of an already existing public and distributed infrastructure to advertise white or blacklisted IP addresses, and the usage of such infrastructure as an additional security mechanism to existing DDoS defense systems, without the need to build specialized registries or other distribution mechanisms, which enables the enforcement of rules across multiple domains.
Pradip Kumar Sharma, Saurabh Singh, Young‐Sik Jeong, Jong Hyuk Park
The rapid increase in the number and diversity of smart devices connected to the Internet has raised the issues of flexibility, efficiency, availability, security, and scalability within the current IoT network. These issues are caused by key mechanisms being distributed to the IoT network on a large scale, which is why a distributed secure SDN architecture for IoT using the blockchain technique (DistBlockNet) is proposed in this research. It follows the principles required for designing a secure, scalable, and efficient network architecture. The DistBlockNet model of IoT architecture combines the advantages of two emerging technologies: SDN and blockchains technology. In a verifiable manner, blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-confident members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary. A new scheme for updating a flow rule table using a blockchains technique is proposed to securely verify a version of the flow rule table, validate the flow rule table, and download the latest flow rules table for the IoT forwarding devices. In our proposed architecture, security must automatically adapt to the threat landscape, without administrator needs to review and apply thousands of recommendations and opinions manually. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed model architecture and compared it to the existing model with respect to various metrics. The results of our evaluation show that DistBlockNet is capable of detecting attacks in the IoT network in real time with low performance overheads and satisfying the design principles required for the future IoT network.
Current IoT systems tend to be cloud-centric which in turn introduces network latency and constrained interaction with sensors and actuators. This paper presents the idea of using restful micro-services called Virtual Resources. A Virtual Resource is a software-defined IoT management construct that enables multi-tenancy support and load distribution onto edge hosts. The paper presents a performance analysis of our Golang implementation of Virtual Resources in various settings.
Moving IoT components from the cloud onto edge hosts helps in reducing overall network traffic and thus minimizes latency. However, provisioning IoT services on the IoT edge devices presents new challenges regarding system design and maintenance. One possible approach is the use of software-defined IoT components in the form of virtual IoT resources. This, in turn, allows exposing the thing/device layer and the core IoT service layer as collections of micro services that can be distributed to a broad range of hosts.
We describe a new methodology that enables the di-rect execution of multi-threaded applications inside of Shadow, an existing parallel discrete-event network sim-ulation framework. Our methodology utilizes function interposition and an application-layer thread library to emulate the ordinary thread interface to the application. Using this methodology, we implement a new Shadow plug-in that directly executes the Bitcoin reference client software. We describe optimizations that enable scalable execution of thousands of Bitcoin nodes on a single ma-chine, and discuss how to model the Bitcoin network for experimental purposes. Finally, we present novel denial-of-service attacks against the Bitcoin software, which exploit low-level implementation artifacts in the Bitcoin reference client. We demonstrate these attacks using our methodology, tools, and models. 1