Eugenio Balistri, Francesco Casellato, Salvatore Collura, Carlo Giannelli · 6 authors
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its spread in industrial environments has changed production lines by dramatically fostering the dynamicity of data sharing and the connectivity of machines. However, such increased flexibility (also pushed by the adoption of edge devices) must not negatively affect the security and safety of industrial environments. The proposed solution adopts the blockchain to securely store in distributed ledgers topology information and access rules, maximizing the cyber resiliency of industrial networks. Topology information and access rules are stored and queried in a completely distributed manner, ensuring data availability even in case a centralized controller is temporarily down or the network partitioned. Moreover, blockchain consensus algorithms foster a participative validation of topology information, to ensure the identity of interacting machines/nodes, to securely distribute topology information and commands in a privacy-preserving manner, and to trace any past modification in a nonrepudiable manner. Finally, the adoption of configurable edge gateways allows to take prompt countermeasures in case potential threats are identified, by activating access rules stored in ledgers in a secure and distributed manner. In addition to solution design guidelines and architectural considerations, the article also presents performance results achieved with our CyberChain working prototype, with the goal of not only demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed solution but also its suitability in industrial environments.
Xiantao Jiang, F. Richard Yu, Tian Song, Victor C. M. Leung
Reliable detection of objects is a crucial requirement to improve the safety of the visual Internet of Vehicles (V-IoVs). The resemblance of objects to each other or the background makes the detection of objects difficult. The traditional connectionist artificial intelligence (All-based object detection model is a potential approach to increase detection performance, but it has poor interpretability and high computational complexity. Edge intelligence has demonstrated a considerably good balance between efficiency and computation complexity, integrating multi-access edge computing and AI. In this article, an edge AI framework is designed to perform the object detection task, and a novel abductive learning algorithm is proposed to realize the interpretability and robustness of AI in the V-IoV system. Based on the you only look once (YOLO) classifier, the abductive model is used to learn from the data, which combines symbolic and connectionist AI. Moreover, blockchain is developed for model sharing. Compared to the state of the art, simulation results show the high accuracy of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, the proposed approach has interpretability and strong robustness.
Zhihan Lv, Liang Qiao, M. Shamim Hossain, Bong Jun Choi
In order to solve the problem of privacy protection of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) big data, it is necessary to design a privacy protection scheme that guarantees safe sharing of UAV big data. In this work, blockchain technology is adopted to solve the privacy protection problem of UAV big data. In particular, the proposed privacy protection scheme uses a number theory research unit cryptosystem for encryption of blockchain data. Privacy analysis is provided to validate the security requirements. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed UAV big data privacy protection scheme based on blockchain technology has low computing cost in terms of key production, encryption, and decryption. It also outperforms the conventional approaches. This work aims to provide a guideline for future research on the privacy protection of UAV data.
In the traditional image copyright protection system, watermarking technology is considered as an important technology to overcome the data protection problem and verify the data ownership relationship. However, the existing watermarking technology often needs a trusted third party to arbitrate in the implementation process, which may be difficult to find or costly. Meanwhile, the common image watermarking algorithm needs to operate the image data, which will inevitably lead to the image data loss. With the development of blockchain technology, the functions of de-trusted third parties and the fair and automatic processing characteristics of smart contracts attached to it have entered the public view. In this paper, we study the function of the zero-watermarking algorithm in image protection and its complete storage and authentication scheme, then propose a secure blockchain-based image copyright protection framework and build a system according to this framework. This framework combines blockchain and zero-watermark technology and uses interplanetary file system to solve the blockchain data expansion problem. Besides, the image owner can authenticate the image and realize the copyright traceability of the image. Furthermore, the keyword search function of the stored images in the system is realized based on a smart contract, which solves the problem of lack of trusted third parties. Experiment illustrates that the proposed scheme is feasible.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Multiobject tracking is a basic task in video analysis. Due to the strict requirements on efficiency and resource consumption, most of the applications on edge devices are online or near-online methods. Besides motion modeling, appearance information is also widely used for tracking. However, the influence of occlusion is usually ignored. In this article, spatial-temporal co-occurrence constraints (STCCs) features are introduced to resist occlusions by exploring the rich spatial and temporal information of tracklets. In addition, a novel blockchain-based near-online framework called co-occurrence constraints tracklet tracker (CoCTs) is proposed for cross-camera tracking. It inherits the advantages of the blockchain technology in sharing information. Based on blockchain, an efficient association mechanism and a reliable information sharing method are introduced. Experimental results show that CoCT performs high computational efficiency and low resource consumption. In the edge computing environment, it achieves real-time performance on cross-camera tracking. On the MOT17 benchmark, our method shows the state-of-the-art results compared with other online trackers.
Blockchain applications in vehicular networks can offer many advantages, including decentralization and improved security. However, most of the consensus algorithms in blockchain are difficult to be implemented in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) without the help of edge computing services. For example, the connectivity in VANET only remains for a short period of time, which is not sufficient for highly time-consuming consensus algorithms, e.g., Proof of Work, running on mobile-edge nodes (vehicles). Other consensus algorithms also have some drawbacks, e.g., Proof of Stake (PoS) is biased toward nodes with a higher amount of stakes and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) is not highly secure against malicious nodes. For these reasons, we propose a voting blockchain based on the Proof-of-Quality-Factor (PoQF) consensus algorithm, where the threshold number of votes is controlled by edge computing servers. Specifically, PoQF includes voting for message validation and a competitive relay selection process based on the probabilistic prediction of channel quality between the transmitter and receiver. The performance bounds of failure and latency in message validation are obtained. This article also analyzes the throughput of block generation, as well as the asymptotic latency, security, and communication complexity of PoQF. An incentive distribution mechanism to reward honest nodes and punish malicious nodes is further presented and its effectiveness against the collusion of nodes is proved using the game theory. Simulation results show that PoQF reduces failure in validation by 11% and 15% as compared to PoS and PoET, respectively, and is 68 ms faster than PoET.
Massive amounts of multimedia data (i.e., text, audio, video, graphics and animation) are being generated everyday. Conventionally, multimedia data are managed by the platforms maintained by multimedia service providers, which are generally designed using centralised architecture. However, such centralised architecture may lead to a single point of failure and disputes over royalties or other rights. It is hard to ensure the data integrity and track fulfilment of obligations listed on the copyright agreement. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present a blockchain-based platform architecture for multimedia data management. We adopt self-sovereign identity for identity management and design a multi-level capability-based mechanism for access control. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype using the proposed approach and evaluate it using a use case. The results show that the proposed approach is feasible and has scalable performance.
Today's video-sharing systems are platforms that have been developed to be a hub for the introduction and sharing of videos created by video creators from all over the world. These systems generate significant revenue through advertising or copyright transferring they receive from video viewers, which share only certain percentage with video creators. However, To make more profit for video creators, in this paper we proposed a distributed video sharing architecture with the possibility of performing financial transactions that works on the Ethereum. In this new architecture, the Blockchain network separated from storage; because video storage in Blockchain results to be costly for mining in the nodes in the network. Ethereum's smart contract is responsible for monitoring the validity, transparency, immutability, integrity, and security of transactions as well as controlling video access. On the other side of the architecture, there is an Ethereum-compatible distributed file storage called Swarm for video storage. Due to the lack of video storage in the Blockchain network, the integrity of the videos is questionable. To solve this problem in the proposed scheme, a Merkel tree of video hashes in the swarm is created and stored in the Blockchain to ensure the immutability and integrity of the videos and, to be transparent and valid to everyone. Finally, the performance of the proposed architecture in terms of security, structure distribution, downtime probability, fault tolerance, transparency, content integrity, immutability, and sustainability has been compared with similar systems and its performance has been proven.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali
Drones are equipped with high-vision cameras, advanced sensors, and GPS receivers to deliver diverse services from high altitude thereby creating an airborne network. In this environment, physical things (drones, sensors, etc.,) are controlled using computational algorithms to form a cyber-physical system for the Internet of drones. Although the drones provide manifold benefits still there are many issues (security, privacy, and data integrity) which must be resolved before the usage of drones in smart cyber-physical systems. So, in this paper, a blockchain-based security mechanism for cyber-physical systems is proposed to ensure secure transfer of information among drones. In this mechanism, the miner node is selected using a deep learning-based approach, i.e., a deep Boltzmann machine, using features like computational resources, the available battery power, and flight time of the drone. The proposed mechanism is evaluated based on different performance metrics and the results obtained show the potential benefits of the proposed scheme.
Shuming Seng, Changqing Luo, Xi Li, Heli Zhang · 5 authors
The popularity of mobile devices has driven the occurrence of ultra-dense wireless networks (UDNs) to accommodate high volumes of data therein generated by mobile users (MUs) running various mobile applications, such as virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) and online gaming. Since many such mobile applications are computation-intensive, mobile edge computing (MEC), a promising computing paradigm that can provide on-demand computation resources (i.e., virtual machines (VMs)), is considered to adopt for allowing MUs to offload their computation tasks to EgSvrs in the proximity. Previous works have developed many schemes to schedule computation tasks to be offloaded to edge servers (EgSvrs). However, these developed schemes are centralized, which are vulnerable to congested coordination operations, and have no trustworthiness guarantee as well. In this paper, we propose to design a decentralized coordination scheme to orchestrate MUs and EgSvrs for scheduling computation tasks to their right VMs by taking advantage of blockchain technology. Specifically, we develop an efficient task-VM matching algorithm that jointly considers task execution time and energy consumption. Particularly, we prove the stability of the task-VM matching achieved by the developed matching algorithm. Besides, we further implement the developed task-VM matching algorithm on the blockchain by developing a smart matching contract to perform task-VM matching on the blockchain without trusted third parties. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our decentralized coordination scheme can improve the performance significantly and converge to a stable state very quickly.
With the rapid development of industrial internet of thing (IIoT), the distributed topology of IIoT and resource constraints of edge computing conduct new challenges to traditional data storage, transmission, and security protection. A distributed trust and allocated ledger of blockchain technology are suitable for the distributed IIoT, which also becomes an effective method for edge computing applications. This paper proposes a resource constrained Layered Lightweight Blockchain Framework (LLBF) and implementation mechanism. The framework consists of a resource constrained layer (RCL) and a resource extended layer (REL) blockchain used in IIoT. We redesign the block structure and size to suit to IIoT edge computing devices. A lightweight consensus algorithm and a dynamic trust right algorithm is developed to improve the throughput of blockchain and reduce the number of transactions validated in new blocks respectively. Through a high throughput management to guarantee the transaction load balance of blockchain. Finally, we conducted kinds of blockchain simulation and performance experiments, the outcome indicated that the method have a good performance in IIoT edge application.
Frederik Temmermans, Deepayan Bhowmik, Fernando Pereira, Touradj Ebrahimi · 5 authors
Privacy and security, copyright violations and fake news are emerging challenges in digital media. Social media and data leaks increase risk of user privacy. Creative media particularly images are often susceptible to copyright violations which poses a serious problem to the industry. On the other hand, doctored images using photo editing tools and computer generated images may give a false impression of reality and add to the problem of fake news. These problems demand solutions to protect images and associated metadata as well as methods that can proof the integrity of digital media. For these reasons, the JPEG standardization committee has been working on a new Privacy and Security standard that provides solutions to support privacy and security focused workflows. The standard defines tools to support protection and integrity across the wide range of JPEG image standards. Related to image integrity, blockchain technology provides a solution for creating tamper proof distributed ledgers. However, adopting blockchain technology for digital image integrity poses several challenges at the technology level as well as at the level of privacy legislation. In addition, if blockchain technology is adopted to support media applications, it needs to be closely integrated with a widely adopted standard to ensure broad interoperability. Therefore, the JPEG committee initiated an activity to explore standardization needs related to media blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT). This paper explains the scope and implementation of the JPEG Privacy and Security standard and presents the current state of the exploration on standardization needs related to media blockchain applications.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mengting Liu, Yinglei Teng, F. Richard Yu, Victor C. M. Leung · 5 authors
Blockchain technology is reshaping the video streaming industry by changing how humans create, distribute and consume videos. Leveraging blockchain technology, some emerging video streaming platforms aim to eliminate the centralized video streaming servers by building peer-to-peer content distribution architectures and cryptocurrency-based payment systems. On these blockchain-based platforms, the source video streams are required to be transcoded into multiple versions to meet heterogeneous user demands, which is a computationally intensive and energy consuming process. Meanwhile, the block size of the blockchain has significant impacts on the performance of blockchain-based video streaming systems. In this article, we propose a novel MEC-enabled transcoding framework for blockchain-based video streaming while an adaptive block size scheme is designed for the underlying blockchains. The system architecture of the proposed framework is presented to enable coordination of different aspects. Then we address the video transcoding and block size issues by using the ADMM method, and smart contract is used to facilitate distributed optimization among non-trusting entities. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Image and Video Quality Assessment
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A disruptive technology often used in finance, Internet of Things (IoT) and healthcare, blockchain can reach consensus within a decentralised network-potentially composed of large amounts of unreliable nodes-and to permanently and irreversibly store data in a tamper-proof manner. In this paper, we present a reputation system for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It considers the users interested in traffic information as the main actors of the architecture. They securely share their data which are collectively validated by other users. Users can choose to employ either such crowd-sourced validated data or data generated by the system to travel between two locations. The data saved is reliable, based on the providers' reputation and cannot be modified. We present results with a simulation for three cities: San Francisco, Rome and Beijing. We have demonstrated the impact of malicious attacks as the average speed decreased if erroneous information was stored in the blockchain as an implemented routing algorithm guides the honest cars on other free routes, and thus crowds other intersections.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Negli ultimi anni la tecnologia blockchain si sta diffondendo sempre più su larga scala in diversi settori di ricerca, inclusi i Beni Culturali. Esistono diverse tipologie di blockchain, che possono essere classificate sia in base al tipo di utenti che possono accedervi, sia in base alle funzionalità che offrono. Questo articolo descrive uno studio teorico in cui si confrontano due blockchain molto diverse tra di loro: Ethereum e Hyperledger, al fine di definire quale delle due è maggiormente indicata per la memorizzazione di beni culturali tangibili contenuti in archivi digitali. Dopo una breve descrizione delle due tecnologie, verrà descritto un possibile scenario di applicazione abbastanza generico per poter capire quale delle due tecnologie meglio soddisfa i requisiti. Verrà quindi effettuato il confronto tra le due blockchain sulla base di problematiche generali, requisiti architetturali e considerazioni varie. Come risultato del confronto, emergerà che Hyperledger Fabric è più adatta nel contesto degli archivi digitali.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yiming Liu, F. Richard Yu, Xi Li, Hong Ji · 5 authors
The blockchain-based video systems are designed to build a decentralized and flexible video ecosystem by enabling a direct interaction among users, video providers (VPs), and service providers. In blockchain-based video systems, the heterogeneous qualities and formats of the video streams usually require massive computational resources to transcode them into different versions and formats to meet distinct requirements of users. However, current blockchains cannot handle massive and heterogeneous video streaming due to limited computing capacity and long transaction times. To deal with this issue, in this paper, leveraging mobile edge computing (MEC) technology, we propose a blockchain-based MEC architecture, where small base stations (SBSs) allocate their computation as well as communication resources for providing video streaming in a distributed and secure manner. Moreover, to improve the operation efficiency, we use a series of smart contracts to enable a self-organized video transcoding and delivery service without a centralized controller. Then, users, SBSs, and VP could adjust their strategies according to the transactional information on blockchain. Moreover, we formulate the video transcoding and delivery problem as a three-stage Stackelberg game. We analyze the sub-game equilibrium in each stage and the interplays of the three-stage game. Last, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve the problem. Simulation results show that the proposed approach could obtain the good performance in terms of average time to finality (TTF), average access delay, and network cost.
Witnessing the increasingly pervasive deployment of security video surveillance systems(VSS), more and more individuals have become concerned with the issues of privacy violations. While the majority of the public have a favorable view of surveillance in terms of crime deterrence, individuals do not accept the invasive monitoring of their private life. To date, however, there is not a lightweight and secure privacy-preserving solution for video surveillance systems. The recent success of blockchain (BC) technologies and their applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) shed a light on this challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight, Blockchain-based Privacy protection (Lib-Pri) scheme for surveillance cameras at the edge. It enables the VSS to perform surveillance without compromising the privacy of people captured in the videos. The Lib-Pri system transforms the deployed VSS into a system that functions as a federated blockchain network capable of carrying out integrity checking, blurring keys management, feature sharing, and video access sanctioning. The policy-based enforcement of privacy measures is carried out at the edge devices for real-time video analytics without cluttering the network.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques