Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols enable distributed ledgers to operate without a single trusted party, tolerating up to a threshold of Byzantine faults. While traditional BFT was designed for closed systems with few participants, blockchain applications are open systems with thousands of internet-connected participants. This transition introduces two critical vulnerabilities unaddressed by classical BFT: (1) nodes' susceptibility to internet Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, and (2) potential correlated failures when participants use similar configurations, violating the fault independence assumption. This thesis addresses these vulnerabilities through three contributions. First, it introduces the Mobile Crash Adaptive Byzantine (MCAB) adversary model, capturing mobile DoS attacks. Protocols are proven to require either concealment (hiding node identities until after broadcasting) or abundance (having more nodes per role than the adversary can target) to maintain liveness under MCAB. Second, it expands modern Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based BFT for system models captured by MCAB. The first constant latency dynamically available DAG-based BFT protocol is proposed. A novel primitive, Graded Common Prefix (GCP), enables nodes to agree on a common DAG subset without standard consensus. Combining these yields a flexible protocol allowing clients to choose between prioritizing liveness or safety while benefiting from modern DAG BFT's high performance. Third, the thesis addresses fault independence through incentive mechanisms encouraging diverse node configurations. Since costs related to various configurations—from software implementation to geo-location—are hard to quantify, control mechanisms from reinforcement learning and control theory are leveraged, as they function without requiring analytical solutions to the underlying system.
Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organized system comprised of mobile wireless nodes, and MANET allows one to instantly build a network between terminals and the entire of area by multi-hop connection. MANET is expected to provide a means of communication in crowded event venues and post-disaster environments. It also supports applications that require network communication because it does not require a contract with a telecommunications carrier. However, the MANET relay node is in the state of a volunteer providing a communication environment to maintain the network, and there is no reward for continuing to forward other people’s data without sending. In some cases, a function to monitor transfer results can be provided. In this case, since MANET is distributed environments, a centralized monitoring function is not always reliable. In this article, we propose a protocol that can manage the transfer record even in a network composed of unreliable nodes by using a blockchain that can realize a distributed ledger even between unreliable nodes. Since the protocol uses smart contracts such as Ethereum, a data structure in which messages are concatenated with hashes is adopted to reduce the gas equivalent to the execution fee.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery networks (CDNs) have demonstrated immense potential to mitigate escalating network traffic. Meanwhile, blockchain emerges as a promising technology that can overcome the shortcomings confronted by P2P CDNs via acting as a trusted third party (TTP) to ensure critical security properties such as fairness and offering monetary incentivization. However, existing protocols for blockchain-based P2P CDNs still encounter the delivery efficiency issue, one of the primary reasons being the absence or failure to identify the most suitable deliverers. Specifically, some overlook the process of selecting deliverers, entrusting them haphazardly, and some merely consider a single evaluation dimension for a deliverer, resulting in a lack of comprehensiveness. Even when multiple dimensions are considered, the outcome of each dimension is not verifiable, leading to unreliability. To this end, we propose an optimized deliverer selection method in blockchain-based P2P CDNs. Our designs encompass a proof of delivery quality (PoQD) protocol to quantify the accumulative verifiable contributions of a deliverer, a comprehensive credibility evaluation mechanism based on neighborhood entropy, and a provider budget constraint optimized deliverer selection algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted on Ethereum test network to justify our adaptive selection of k optimized deliverers, desired delivery efficiency and feasible on-chain costs. The experiment results indicate the efficacy and effectiveness of our proposed method.
We hypothesize that peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network nodes can be attractive to attackers due to their visibility, sustained uptime, and resource potential. Towards validating this hypothesis, we investigate the state of active reconnaissance attacks on Ethereum P2P network nodes by deploying a series of honeypots alongside actual Ethereum nodes across globally distributed vantage points. We find that Ethereum nodes experience not only increased attacks, but also specific types of attacks targeting particular ports and services. Furthermore, we find evidence that the threat assessment on our nodes is applicable to the wider P2P network by having performed port scans on other reachable peers. Our findings provide insights into potential mitigation strategies to improve the security of the P2P networking layer.
Peter Howson, Antulio Rosales, Olivier Jutel, Inte Gloerich · 8 authors
This paper explores how so-called ‘Web3’ blockchain projects are materially and socially constituted. A blockchain is an append-only distributed database. The technology is being hyped as applicable for a whole range of industries, social service provisions, and as a fix for economic disparities in communities left behind by mainstream financial systems. Drawing on case studies from our ongoing research we explain how, despite being virtual, Web3 projects are dependent on clearly defined spaces of production from which they derive their speculative value. We conceptualise this relationship as Crypto/Space, where space and blockchain software are mutually constituted. We consider how Crypto/Spaces are produced in three ways: 1) how project developers are adopting a parasitic relationship with host locations to appropriate energy, infrastructure, and local resources; 2) how projects enable ‘virtual land grabs’ where developers are engaging in land acquisitions, and associated displacement of local people, with no real intention to use the land for the declared purpose; and 3) how blockchain technology and speculative finance imaginaries are inspiring new anarcho-capitalist crypto-utopian ‘Exit zones’, often in the Global South. Far from being a zero-sum virtual game world, we argue that cryptocurrency projects are parasitic, often requiring predation on poor and otherwise marginalised communities to appropriate resources, onboard new users and enable favourable regulation.
Juhani Latvakoski, Jouni Heikkinen, Jari Palosaari, Vesa Kyllönen · 5 authors
The aim of this research has been to enable the management of trustworthy relationships between stakeholders, service providers, and physical assets, which are required in critical energy and mobility cyber–physical systems (CPS) applications. The achieved novel contribution is the concept of trustworthy communities with respective experimental solutions, which are developed by relying on verifiable credentials, smart contracts, trust over IP, and an Ethereum-based distributed ledger. The provided trustworthy community solutions are validated by executing them in two practical use cases, which are called energy flexibility and hunting safety. The energy flexibility case validation considered the execution of the solutions with one simulated and two real buildings with the energy flexibility aggregation platform, which was able to trade the flexibilities in an energy flexibility marketplace. The provided solutions were executed with a hunting safety smartphone application for a hunter and the smartwatch of a person moving around in the forest. The evaluations indicate that conceptual solutions for trustworthy communities fulfill the purpose and contribute toward making energy flexibility trading and hunting safety possible and trustworthy enough for participants. A trustworthy community solution is required to make value sharing and usage of critical energy resources and their flexibilities feasible and secure enough for their owners as part of the energy flexibility community. Sharing the presence and location in mobile conditions requires a trustworthy community solution because of security and privacy reasons, but it can also save lives in real-life elk hunting cases. During the evaluations, the need for further studies related to performance, scalability, community applications, verifiable credentials with wallets, sharing of values and incentives, authorized trust networks, dynamic trust situations, time-sensitive behavior, autonomous operations with smart contracts through security assessment, and applicability have been detected.
As the device complexity keeps increasing, the blockchain networks have been celebrated as the cornerstone of numerous prominent platforms owing to their ability to provide distributed and immutable ledgers and data-driven autonomous organizations. The distributed consensus algorithm is the core component that directly dictates the performance and properties of blockchain networks. However, the inherent characteristics of the shared wireless medium, such as fading, interference, and openness, pose significant challenges to achieving consensus within these networks, especially in the presence of malicious jamming attacks. To cope with the severe consensus problem, in this paper, we present a distributed jamming-resilient consensus algorithm for blockchain networks in wireless environments, where the adversary can jam the communication channel by injecting jamming signals. Based on a non-binary slight jamming model, we propose a distributed four-stage algorithm to achieve consensus in the wireless blockchain network, including leader election, leader broadcast, leader aggregation, and leader announcement stages. With high probability, we prove that our jamming-resilient algorithm can ensure the validity, agreement, termination, and total order properties of consensus with the time complexity of$O(n)$. Both theoretical analyses and empirical simulations are conducted to verify the consistency and efficiency of our algorithm.
Mohammad Fardad, Elham Mohammadzadeh Mianji, Gabriel‐Miro Muntean, Irina Tal
Permissioned distributed ledgers (PDLs) provide security and trust for Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications, but face scalability issues due to resource-intensive consensus mechanisms. To address this, we propose a novel hybrid consensus network (HCN) architecture that leverages the computational capabilities of parked connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) through a multi-layer vehicular edge computing (VEC) framework. The HCN is designed following guidelines outlined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) regarding the structuring of PDLs. It aims to improve the performance, reliability and scalability of PDL-based IoV networks while maintaining their security and trust guarantees.
Establishing strong security protocols is crucial in the quickly changing internet of things (IoT) environment to reduce potential risks and weaknesses. It is possible to manage security risks more effectively, but there are also challenges because of the interconnected nature of IoT devices, the introduction of 6G networks, and the incorporation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). The focus of this note is on proactive methods of protecting infrastructure and sensitive data. It explores different management strategies that are intended to mitigate threats in IoT environments. Using a security-by-design methodology is a fundamental tactic for threat mitigation in internet of things settings. Every phase of the lifecycle of an IoT device, from design and development to deployment and operation, must incorporate security measures.
In this paper, we present a decentralized network protocol, Space Network Protocol, based on Communication Satellite Services. The protocol outlines a method for distributing information about the status of satellite communication services across the entire blockchain network, facilitating fairness and transparency in all communication services. Our primary objective is to standardize the services delivered by all satellite networks under the communication satellite protocol. This standard remains intact regardless of potential unreliability associated with the satellites or the terminal hardware. We proposed PoD (Proof of Distribution) to verify if the communication satellites are online and PoF (Proof of Flow) to authenticate the actual data flow provided by the communication satellites. In addition, we also proposed PoM (Proof of Mesh) to verify if the communication satellites have successfully meshed together. Utilizing zero-knowledge proof and multi-party cryptographic computations, we can evaluate the service provisioning parameters of each satellite, even in the presence of potential terminal or network node fraud. This method offers technical support for the modeling of distributed network services.
This conceptual modelling research investigates infrastructure designs supporting decentralized social media leveraging blockchain verified identities and non-fungible token (NFT) facilitated content transactions.Diagrammatic analysis following the object-oriented methodology depicts economic and software mechanisms allowing participant monetization of original posts through cryptocurrency micropayments and resale royalties.Systematic ownership protections aim to foster trust and transparency deactivated in conventional models exploiting uncompensated user data.While limitations persist in underlying platform maturity, regulatory uncertainty, and mass adoption prerequisites, envisioned participatory architectures offer renewed pathways to reconcile open exchange with personal agency and value.
Information-centric networking (ICN) has received a wide attention as a next-generation network. Unlike conventional IP networks, which forward packets based on IP addresses, ICNs packets are sent based on the name of the contents which are cached to the routers involved, then delivered to the consumer. Since any participating party can upload content to the ICN, the risk of content poisoning attack (CPA) is ever-present. In CPA, an attacker degrades the cache efficiency by uploading fake content under a real name posting as a legitimate publisher. As a countermeasure to CPA, many existing methods determine the legitimacy of content using digital signatures with public keys, and alerts routers of unjustified content upon detection. However, it is difficult for them to detect fake-CPA attacks which use public keys of fabricated content to generate digital signatures. Most methods also lack counter-measures to spoofed fake-CPA attacks, in which the certification authority (CA) that manages the public key or its staff member colludes with the attacker to rewrite the legitimate publisher’s public key to the attacker’s and inject fake contents that pretends to be authentic contents that are high in popularity into the cache. In this paper, we propose a method to prevent the spoofed fake-CPA by managing content names with IOTA, a distributed ledger technology that blocks tampering of contents registered on the system. We also numerically compare the search time and memory requirement of four search methods that search content names managed in the ledger in the proposed method. As a result, we confirm the trade-off between the search time and memory requirement.
Sung-Min Choi, Zhuochen Xie, Tat Woo Tan, Yifan Liu · 6 authors
In the context of the telecom network trending towards centralization, the relatively decentralized and citizen-centric, non-profit network architecture known as Wireless Community Network (WCN) has emerged. However, WCN faces challenges related to unintentional shifts towards centralization, the lack of automation and verifiability to handle increasing volumes of information, and the absence of real-time and more flexible incentive mechanisms to incentivize a diverse range of contributors based on the quality of their contributions. As the network expands, maintenance becomes more challenging for small volunteer teams, potentially compromising network performance, reliability, and overall trustworthiness. With the development of the decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), this paper proposes a methodology for designing a decentralized wireless community network (DeWCN) system. This methodology includes the design of a consensus layer, a trust and reputation management layer, and presents incentive-driven oracle design methodologies for verifiable common resource pools. This is the first work in the DePIN domain discussing the design of DeWCNs. Unlike projects like Helium [1], we eliminate the need for specialized devices and mining-based token systems.
Recent advances in aerial robotics and wireless transceivers have generated an enormous interest in networks constituted by multiple compact unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAV adhoc networks, i.e., aerial networks with dynamic topology and no centralized control, are found suitable for a unique set of applications, yet their operation is vulnerable to cyberattacks. In many applications, such as IoT networks or emergency failover networks, UAVs augment and provide support to the sensor nodes or mobile nodes in the ground network in data acquisition and also improve the overall network performance. In this situation, ensuring the security of the adhoc UAV network and the integrity of data is paramount to accomplishing network mission objectives. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to secure UAV adhoc networks, referred to as the blockchain-assisted security framework (BCSF). We demonstrate that the proposed system provides security without sacrificing the performance of the network through blockchain technology adopted to the priority of the message to be communicated over the adhoc UAV network. Theoretical analysis for computing average latency is performed based on queuing theory models followed by an evaluation of the proposed BCSF approach through simulations that establish the superior performance of the proposed methodology in terms of transaction delay, data secrecy, data recovery, and energy efficiency.
Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANET) is an emerging area of research due to its low cost, high coverage and fast transmission features. In these networks, the flying nodes are connected with ground stations and communicate wirelessly, especially when the networks are congested and complex. Due to mobility, and lack of predefined infrastructure, these networks have suffered from various security and trust issues. The traditional trust and security solutions are designed for ground networks and are not feasible for these networks. This paper proposes a trust and authentication model including Trust Establishment Mechanism for FANET (TEM-FANET) and authentication system by using Block-chain method. The trust is calculated to evaluate the node’s trust status and ensure the existence of the trustworthy nodes by using direct, indirect, and cumulative trust values. Whereas the authentication system is utilizing blockchain technology for nodes authentication and evaluate its feasibility. The proposed model is lightweight and able to monitor the node’s behavior and compute the trusted quality and broadcast the node status with neighbor nodes. The proposed model is also integrated with ground stations for record keeping and decision-making processes. The proposed model is evaluated in simulation with state-of-the-art trust solutions where the results show the better performance in terms of overhead, data delivery, node detection rate, and computational time.
With the increasing popularization and application of the smart grid, the harm of the data silo issue in the smart grid is more and more prominent. Therefore, it is especially critical to promote data interoperability and sharing in the smart grid. Existing data-sharing schemes generally lack effective incentive mechanisms, and data holders are reluctant to share data due to privacy and security issues. Because of the above issues, a dynamic incentive mechanism for smart grid data sharing based on evolutionary game theory is proposed. Firstly, several basic assumptions about the evolutionary game model are given, and the evolutionary game payoff matrix is established. Then, we analyze the stabilization strategy of the evolutionary game based on the payoff matrix, and propose a dynamic incentive mechanism for smart grid data sharing based on evolutionary game theory according to the analysis results, aiming to encourage user participation in data sharing. We further write the above evolutionary game model into a smart contract that can be invoked by the two parties involved in data sharing. Finally, several factors affecting the sharing of data between two users are simulated, and the impact of different factors on the evolutionary stabilization strategy is discussed. The simulation results verify the positive or negative incentives of these parameters in the data-sharing game process, and several factors influencing the users’ data sharing are specifically analyzed. This dynamic incentive mechanism scheme for smart grid data sharing based on evolutionary game theory provides new insights into effective incentives for current smart grid data sharing.
Opportunistic networks (OppNets) are usually a set of smart, wearable, and portable devices or entities with mobility that connect wirelessly without requiring infrastructure. Such a network is of great importance in data transmission, particularly in incidents and disasters, whether man-made or natural. However, message integrity and confidentiality are of concern when it deals with vital and physiological data transmission with strict privacy regulations. In this work, we offered a structure to classify messages based on their priority in different queues. Furthermore, due to the decentralized architecture of OppNets, we proposed a blockchain-based structure for providing security for high-priority messages. It contains three sequences of functional blocks with a light and simplified implementation that makes it suitable for battery-powered wearable devices that are limited in energy consumption and computational units. The simulation results showed that by increasing the number of nodes in the network, the average of the changes in block sizes are neglectable which addresses the computation bottleneck. Furthermore, we analyzed the performance of the proposed structure in terms of message delivery and network overhead compared with Epidemic and Prophet routing algorithms. These results indicated advancing the overall performance of the proposed algorithm.
Engin Zeydan, Luis Blanco, Josep Mangues, Şuayb S. Arslan · 5 authors
Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) has recently emerged as an identity and access management framework based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that enables users or organizations to control their own data. The Open RAN (O-RAN), on the other hand, provides a framework for sharing infrastructure-related data between users and mobile network operators (MNOs). By leveraging SSI, O-RAN can benefit from decentralized and secure identity management that enables a more transparent, efficient, and user-centric network ecosystem. This paper examines identity, inventory and configuration management, and authentication of users or MNOs for a resource sharing scenario in an O-RAN architecture. At the end of the paper, we explain the potential limitations and possible solutions for applying SSI to improve security, privacy, trust, and interoperability in O-RANs.
In Antarctica, many studies in various fields are conducted every year. Some of these studies use sensors to collect relevant data for scientific research. However, Antarctica's lack of communication resources makes it difficult to automate this data collection. In most cases, this collection is done manually and the time and space of the study are limited. Over the past few years, several alternatives for deploying remote wireless sensor networks in Antarctica have been explored. Therefore, in this paper, the analysis of the delay-tolerant network was performed based on the partial Δ-synchronized proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain model. 82% (=1-1/(2e)) of active honest nodes must satisfy the quorum to ensure the security of the proof-of-stake blockchain. If the adversary has less than 18% of the total stake and sets the overall growth rate low, the longest chain protocol is secure. However, as Nakamoto argues in proof-of-stake blockchain protocols, an adversary cannot secure the longest-chain protocol at less than 50% of total stake. In this study, we analyzed how this network delay and balance attack could affect the proof-of-stake consensus protocol in order to find a way for an adversary to secure the longest-chain protocol at less than 50% of the total stake.