Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus is a foundational achievement indistributed systems theory, providing dual guarantees of safety and liveness forasynchronous networks with malicious nodes. However, this theoretical frameworkimplicitly relies on a presupposition that has not been sufficiently examined: allhonest nodes are homogeneous in their cognition of the protocol’sobjectives. Whena decentralized system evolves from a closed task-oriented network into an opengovernance ecosystem, the functional differentiation of nodes in storage strategies,verification preferences, and governance commitments deprives this presuppositionof descriptive validity. This paper does not deny the security contributions of BFT,but argues that security alone is insufficient to constitute a complete consensus.The full logic of consensus requires a complementary dimension: the capacity toaccommodate functional differentiation. Integrating recent empirical classificationstudies of blockchain nodes, protocol architecture design experiences that acknowledge functional differentiation, and Ostrom’s polycentric governance theory, thispaper proposes“Cognitive Niche Equilibrium”(CNE) as an extension of the consensus concept. System stability does not require all nodes to be isomorphic inevery function; rather, it requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three stabilityconditions: feedback anchoring, cross-validation, and evolutionary stability. Using Bitcoin and Ethereum as comparative cases, this paper translates these threeconditions into a layered implementation architecture symbiotic with existing BFTprotocol stacks, and discusses the security engineering principles and trade-offsunder this framework.
The fast communication networks are crucial to support the modern digital services like cloud computing, massive data transmissions and real time multimedia applications. Since network traffic is constantly increasing exponentially, a proper approach to managing congestion is required to ensure the delivery of information is stable, minimize delays, and efficiently use bandwidth. Conventional congestion control mechanisms tend to use systems that are based on fixed rules and thresholds, and may be unable to be flexible in highly dynamic network situations. A graphical congestion control model is intelligent based on a multi-agent Deep Q-Learning model in which the distributed agents are tasked with monitoring network conditions such as queue length, delay, packet loss, and available bandwidth. The agents are taught the best acting policies in traffic regulation by means of interaction with their network environment and dynamically change their rates of transmission to reduce congestion. Learning organization is decentralized and enhances adaptability and scalability within large network systems. In comparison to traditional methods that attained a throughput of 780-910 Mbps, 2.9-5.8% packet loss, and 84-120 ms end-toend delay, performance evaluation has shown to achieve better network performance of 960 Mbps throughput, 1.8 end-to-end delay, and 0.8% end-to end packet loss. These enhancements underscore the success of smart use of reinforcement learning methods in adaptive congestion control in high-speed networking settings.
This paper explores the application of distributed ledger technology to facilitate dynamic resource allocation in virtualized radio access networks (RANs). A novel architecture is presented that leverages blockchain to automate the exchange of network functions among diverse stakeholders. This approach addresses challenges related to trust and scalability in open RAN environments, enabling autonomous and secure sharing of infrastructure resources. The proposed system employs auction-based mechanisms and network virtualization to allow entities to transact RAN resources, such as virtual network functions (VNFs), in a decentralized manner. Simulation results demonstrate the potential of this framework to enhance flexibility and efficiency in next-generation mobile networks.
Lyudmila Kovalchuk, Mariia Rodinko, Roman Oliynykov, Volodymyr Artemchuk
This paper studies the probability of a double-spend attack in an Ouroboros-like Proof-of-Stake (PoS) setting when confirmation decisions must be made for a finite number of blocks. Existing security analyses of Ouroboros-family protocols are mainly asymptotic and therefore do not directly provide the attack probability for a fixed confirmation depth. We consider an analytically tractable model that allows empty slots and multiple slot leaders, and assumes fixed stake distribution within an epoch, one-block growth of the public longest chain in any slot containing at least one honest leader, and next-slot block visibility. These assumptions hold when the time slot length is much greater than the network delay, and are applicable to practical deployment scenarios such as Cardano. Under these assumptions, for the first time, an exact closed-form solution for the success probability of a double-spend attack considering a realistic model with multiple leaders and empty time slots. Numerical examples illustrate how the required confirmation depth depends on the adversarial stake ratio and the active slot coefficient. The results apply to the stated analytical model and do not yet cover delayed fork resolution or the full protocol-level fork-choice and finality mechanisms of Ouroboros Praos.
O presente artigo investiga como o tamanho do bloco afeta a propagação em redes blockchain, recorrendo à modelagem estocástica para quantificar os trade-offs entre throughput, segurança e descentralização. Estudos teóricos e empíricos indicam que blocos maiores elevam o tempo médio de propagação e a variância desse tempo, aumentando a probabilidade de forks e de blocos órfãos em mecanismos de consenso baseados em Prova de Trabalho (PoW) e variantes de Nakamoto. Modelos analíticos e de simulação demonstram que a relação entre o intervalo médio de geração de blocos e o atraso médio de propagação pode ser tratada por meio de sistemas de filas ou de processos de Poisson, nos quais a taxa de forks cresce quando o produto “taxa de blocos × atraso de propagação” se aproxima de um limiar crítico associado a um regime congestionado. Resultados de trabalhos de otimização de tamanho de bloco em PoW sugerem a existência de um tamanho “ótimo” que maximiza a eficiência econômica da rede – isto é, transações por segundo ponderadas pelo risco de órfãos –, e que esse ótimo depende fortemente da largura de banda média da rede e do grau de heterogeneidade entre nós. Evidências empíricas da rede Bitcoin mostram ainda que melhorias de protocolo, tais como Compact Blocks e redes de relay dedicadas, reduzem significativamente o impacto negativo de blocos maiores sobre a propagação, conquanto não eliminem o viés estrutural em favor de nós com melhor conectividade. Conclui-se que a modelagem estocástica do impacto do tamanho de bloco é fundamental para parametrizar blockchains de modo a manter a rede em regime funcional, minimizando taxa de forks e força centralizadora, ao mesmo tempo em que se atende à demanda por maior capacidade transacional na Web3.Blockchain
Modern passport systems face significant challenges in secure data sharing, real-time verification, and user-controlled authorization, particularly in cross-border scenarios. Existing digital passport solutions, often built on permissioned blockchains, suffer from limited transparency, scalability, and high operational costs. This paper proposes a decentralized passport management system based on an Ethereum Layer 2 architecture that combines global governance with high-throughput and cost-efficient passport operations. The system adopts a hybrid design in which a Global Passport Registry smart contract is deployed on the Ethereum mainnet for cross-country coordination, while passport issuance, access control, and identity management are handled on Layer 2 networks through country-operated Passport Managers and user-specific Personal Passport smart contracts. Extensive performance evaluations show that Ethereum Layer 1 throughput saturates at approximately 40–50 transactions per second (TPS), whereas the proposed Layer 2 deployment consistently exceeds 150 TPS and reaches up to 300 TPS under higher-performance environments, significantly surpassing the estimated system requirement of 70 TPS. These improvements result in faster response times, reduced congestion, and substantially lower transaction costs, demonstrating that public Ethereum Layer 2 infrastructures can effectively support a scalable, self-sovereign, privacy-preserving, and globally verifiable digital passport system suitable for real-world deployment.
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks rely on economic staking guarantees to align validator behavior with network security. However, a growing class of architectures permits validators to reuse, rehypothecate, or synthetically represent the same stake across multiple validation contexts. This paper defines <i>Double-Staking Validator Drift</i> as a structural vulnerability in which a validator’s effective economic exposure diverges from its apparent security contribution. We demonstrate how this drift undermines slashing guarantees, enables risk amplification, and creates false decentralization signals across PoS Layer-1 and restaking ecosystems. Existing mitigations—including slashing, social governance, and restaking policies—are shown to be insufficient due to enforcement blind spots and cross-domain opacity. We propose a logic-layer enforcement model that introduces validator-level stake exclusivity, temporal binding, and deterministic enforcement across consensus domains. This approach restores economic integrity to PoS security models and closes a critical gap in current network designs.
Matthieu Pigaglio, Onur Ascigil, Michał Król, Felix Lange · 9 authors
Layer-2 protocols such as rollups can help address Ethereum's throughput limits. An efficient data availability layer is key for layer-2 support in Ethereum, but broadcast methods do not scale. A promising approach is the selective distribution of layer-2 data and its verification by data availability sampling (DAS). Integrating DAS with Ethereum consensus is, however, a challenge, as data must be shared and sampled within 4 seconds of each consensus slot.
This paper presents a framework for analyzing and modeling validator behavior in dynamic consensus protocols. A discrete state-based model is proposed in order to represent four key validator states: majority, non-faulty minority, faulty minority, and non-validator, enabling systematic behavioral analysis through three complementary metrics: Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) for entropy-based behavioral differences, the Bhattacharyya Coefficient for distribution similarity, and Wasserstein distance for state transition costs. To identify coherent validator groups and detect outliers, an HDBSCAN (Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) clustering is used since it is well-suited for detecting clusters in data with varying densities. Using JSD-based similarity measures in HDBSCAN, transient convergence patterns and stable behavioral clusters are uncovered, even in decentralized networks with diverse fault conditions. Simulation results on a 50-node network demonstrate the framework’s effectiveness, providing insights into system dynamics and offering tools for validator selection, fault detection, and stability monitoring in distributed ledger systems. This approach is particularly relevant, as consensus protocols evolve beyond traditional PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) implementations, combining theoretical metrics with clustering techniques to enhance consensus robustness.
Ethereum’s transaction pool (mempool) dynamics and fee market efficiency critically affect transaction inclusion, validator workload, and overall network performance. This research empirically analyzes gas price variations, mempool clearance rates, and block finalization times in Ethereum’s proof-of-stake ecosystem using real-time data from Geth and Prysm nodes. We observe that high-fee transactions are consistently prioritized, while low-fee transactions face delays or exclusion—despite EIP-1559’s intended improvements. Mempool congestion remains a key factor in validator efficiency and proposal latency. We provide empirical evidence of persistent fee-based disparities and show that extremely high fees do not always guarantee faster confirmation, revealing inefficiencies in the current fee market. To address these issues, we propose congestion-aware fee adjustments, reserved block slots for low-fee transactions, and improved handling of out-of-gas vulnerabilities. By mitigating prioritization bias and execution inefficiencies, our findings support more equitable transaction inclusion, enhance validator performance, and promote scalability. This work contributes to Ethereum’s long-term decentralization by reducing dependence on high transaction fees for network participation.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the backbone of the Internet, but remains highly centralised, creating<br/>risks related to censorship, surveillance, and single points of failure. While much of the focus has been on<br/>securing and decentralising DNS as a whole, recursive resolvers continue to rely on central infrastructure.<br/>This paper proposes a decentralised DNS resolver architecture that replaces traditional recursive resolvers<br/>with a decentralised alternative. The system uses the Chord protocol and distributed ledger technology<br/>(DLT) to distribute DNS resolution across a network of cooperating nodes, without altering existing<br/>zone authority structures. We present the key components of the architecture, including peer discovery,<br/>query routing, caching, updating and trust handling, and we analyse how this architecture overcomes<br/>the previously mentioned limitations.
With the promise of greater decentralization and sustainability, Ethereum transitioned from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. The new consensus protocol introduces novel vulnerabilities that warrant further investigation. The goal of this paper is to investigate the security of Ethereum's PoS system from an Internet routing perspective. To this end, this paper makes two contributions: First, we devise a novel framework for inferring the distribution of validators on the Internet without disturbing the real network. Second, we introduce a class of network-level attacks on Ethereum's PoS system that jointly exploit Internet routing vulnerabilities with the protocol's reward and penalty mechanisms. We describe two representative attacks: StakeBleed, where the attacker triggers an inactivity leak, halting block finality and causing financial losses for all validators; and KnockBlock, where the attacker increases her expected MEV gains by preventing targeted blocks from being included in the chain. We find that both attacks are practical and effective. An attacker executing StakeBleed can inflict losses of almost 300 ETH in just 2 hours by hijacking as few as 30 IP prefixes. An attacker implementing KnockBlock could increase their MEV expected gains by 44.5% while hijacking a single prefix for less than 2 minutes. Our paper serves as a call to action for validators to reinforce their Internet routing infrastructure and for the Ethereum P2P protocol to implement stronger mechanisms to conceal validator locations.
The future mobile networks are transforming into multidimensional, adaptive networks, aka beyond 5G (B5G), where the digital services are delivered over network slices whose network definition is virtual. It is also important that such slices are available to users with a wide variety of needs on a safe and efficient basis. The current solutions are mainly aimed at ensuring that things are faster and reliable; however, in the majority of situations, they fail to give much consideration to the security threat from malicious users. This reflection paper examines the limitations of existing approaches and argues for embedding security mechanisms directly within resource allocation frameworks. It explores the integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for user verification and integer linear programming (ILP) for secure allocation, forming a unified adversary-aware model. This perspective encourages a shift from purely performance-driven strategies toward security-by-design methods capable of addressing dynamic threats in real time.
Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap assumes that adoption of layer-2 (L2) rollups will relieve congestion on the layer-1 (L1) mainnet, but there is little causal evidence on how large that relief is across major protocol changes. We construct a daily panel for Ethereum from August 2021 to December 2024 and estimate the total effect of L2 adoption on L1 congestion using a regime-aware interrupted time-series design that spans the London, Merge, and Dencun upgrades and adjusts for macro demand. In the pre-Dencun regime, a 10 percentage point increase in L2 adoption reduces median L1 base fees by about 11%—roughly 4–5 Gwei per 21k-gas transfer—and yields similar declines in a harmonized congestion index, with only modest changes in block utilization. Combining these elasticities with a Merge-era counterfactual path for L2 adoption, we estimate that observed adoption avoided about $80–$90 million in base and priority fees over 137 days, or roughly $0.6–$0.7 million per day. These effects are precise while L2 adoption is still ramping up but become statistically local once adoption exceeds 85% after Dencun, implying that congestion relief is economically meaningful yet regime-specific. Our findings support continued investment in L2 infrastructure alongside L1 mechanism design and illustrate how to benchmark congestion relief in other multi-layer digital platforms.
Maede Hojjati, Arian Arabnouri, Alireza Shafieinejad, Halim Yanıkömeroğlu
Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) is an essential part of the mobile network mainly for providing identification and authentication of the subscriber. The activation and deactivation of USIMs are the two most critical services that must be supported by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). The current solutions suffer from several limitations such as the lack of round-the-clock services and the presence of a single point of failure. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based scheme for USIM management. Each MNO creates its own smart contract and publishes its address to subscribers. Subscribers can then directly submit their requests by registering a transaction that invokes a specific function of the smart contract. The proposed scheme provides an anytime-anywhere service while at the same time it leverages the benefits of blockchain technology, such as a decentralized architecture that prevents Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, as well as a secure auditable log and payment using cryptocurrency. Moreover, we provide a security proof for the scheme through formal verification. Our results demonstrate that our scheme ensures subscriber privacy while providing mutual authentication among participants. Finally, our evaluation on the Ethereum blockchain confirms the efficiency of the scheme in terms of both transaction and execution costs.
The last decade has changed the trends of using peering networks. One of the areas of use of P2P networks is communication between people. Today, it is very important that communication is as protected as possible, especially if it is carried out between employees of the enterprise, because the number of cyber threats is constantly increasing. Modern approaches to the security of peering networks consist of data encryption, node authentication, detection and prevention of malicious nodes, access restriction, traffic monitoring, etc. However, one of the very first steps is the exchange of identification data itself, and this process must be as secure and secure as possible. The article proposes a method of secure exchange of identification data between peering network nodes, based on the use of NFC technology in combination with proof of zero knowledge. NFC is used for direct data exchange over the radio interface, which, thanks to its short range, makes it impossible to intercept data. To establish a connection, nodes must exchange identifiers, public encryption keys, and network addresses. In order to find out whether a node is not malicious, mutual verification of nodes using zero-knowledge proof is assumed. A unique identifier of the GUID type generated by each of the nodes acts as a secret that is not disclosed. Nodes first exchange public keys that encrypt and exchange identifiers. After decryption with their private keys, the nodes check whether the received value is equal to the initial one. In case of equality of values, the nodes are mutually verified and exchange identification data. The method proposed in the article is aimed at ensuring fault tolerance and confidentiality. It also provides protection against traffic interception attacks and the reliability of the verification process.
This paper presents a novel QoE provisioning system with micropayment for Voice of Internet Protocol (VoIP) and video streaming services (QmV2). QmV2leverages Software Defined Networking (SDN) to provide guaranteed QoE and the distributed ledger IOTA technology micropayment. More specifically, QmV2's SDN controller has an innovative QoE calculation mechanism utilizing Mean Opinion Score (MOS) that considers service flow monitoring parameters, including packet loss rate and delay. Upon a QoE request and receiving the IOTA payment, QmV2can provide the requested QoE for the service flow. We have implemented and evaluated QmV2using the POX SDN controller, the network emulator Mininet-WiFi with VoIP and video streaming. The results confirm QmV2delivers satisfactory user experiences (i.e., aligned with the guaranteed MOS values) for VoIP and video streaming applications with the confirmed IOTA payment.
Blockchain based E-voting system can be revolution- ary in terms of security and tamper proof, transparent elections and hence empower the democracy. Blockchain E-voting is already implemented at organisational level. But at state/national level it faces challenges such as privacy, stability, latency etc. To counter them we require advanced implementation techniques from multiple disciplines. These techniques are 2-layer-solution, sharding for scalability issue, optimizing consensus algorithm and off-chain transaction for reducing latency, zero knowledge proof, using multiple protocols for user privacy etc. General architecture of blockchain is explained in details which combines election creation, voter registration, voter transaction, tallying the results and vote verification. We have discussed how integrating E-voting with blockchain document verification system can be benificial. It is complicated to implement at state, national level and need additional research and implementation to make blockchain E- voting acceptable in elections across the world. Through research and innovation we can make blockchain voting mainstream.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Network Traffic and Congestion Control
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Dan Zhuo, Jia‐Wei Tang, Yang Chen, Shaobin Wang · 5 authors
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a representative decentralized data storage system that has been widely used in recent years. IPFS plays an important role in the emerging Web3-related applications. As a global peer-to-peer system, a good understanding of IPFS nodes’ session time is meaningful. In this work, we introduce a measurement study to uncover the issues that are related to the session time of IPFS nodes. Based on the collected massive data of all online IPFS nodes for over one month, we gain a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between various node attributes and session time. In addition, we build a supervised machine learning-based model to predict the session time with a high prediction performance.
With the progress of the internet from web 2.0 to web 3.0, the increased use of decentralized applications has emerged. Popularized by BlockChain but not limited to decentralized finance, decentralized applications have vast applications with regards to security, storage, and delivery of content over the web. In this paper we outlines the development of a web application prototype using JavaScript programming language, JavaScript based libraries such as BugOut and PeerJS, and the WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication) framework. We have also discuss the brief comparisons between the existing centralized applications and our proposed model. An essential component of this prototype is outlined via the use of P2P networking, which is the backbone of decentralization.