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Quantum computing represents an emerging threat to the public key infrastructure underlying transport layer security (TLS) widely used in the Internet. This paper describes how QKD symmetric keys can be used with TLS to provide quantum computing resistant security for existing Internet applications. We also implement and test a general hybrid key delivery architecture with QKD over long distance fibers between secure sites, and wireless key distribution over short distance within each site Finally we show how this same capability can be extended to a TLS cipher scheme with perfect security.
We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the perception of IoMT as well as the enhanced security and immutability of the blockchain. However, the synergy of IoMT and blockchain is also faced with challenges in privacy, latency, and context-absence. The emerging edge intelligence technologies bring opportunities to tackle these issues. In this article, we present a blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT in addressing the COVID-19 crisis. We first review IoMT, edge intelligence, and blockchain in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We then present an architecture of blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT after discussing the opportunities of integrating blockchain and edge intelligence. We next offer solutions to COVID-19 brought by blockchain-empowered edge intelligence from 1) monitoring and tracing COVID-19 pandemic origin, 2) traceable supply chain of injectable medicines and COVID-19 vaccines, and 3) telemedicine and remote healthcare services. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and open issues in blockchain-empowered edge intelligence.
Blockchain technology has drawn attention fromvarious communities. The underlying consensus mechanism inBlockchain enables a myriad of applications for the integrityassurance of stored data. In this paper, we utilize Blockchaintechnology to verify the authenticity of a video captured by astreaming IoT device for forensic investigation purposes. Theproposed approach computes the hash of video frames beforethey leave the IoT device and are transferred to a remote basestation. To guarantee the transmission, we ensure that this hashis sent through a TCP-based connection. The hash is then storedon multiple nodes on a permissioned blockchain platform. Incase the video is modified, the discrepancy will be detected byinvestigating the previously stored hash on the blockchain andcomparing it with the hash of the existing frame in question.In this work, we present the prototype as proof-of-concept withexperiment results. The system has been tested on a RaspberryPi with different quality of videos to evaluate performance. Theresults show that the concept can be implemented with moderatevideo resolutions.
Today, wearable internet-of-things (wIoT) devices continuously flood the cloud data centers at an enormous rate. This increases a demand to deploy an edge infrastructure for computing, intelligence, and storage close to the users. The emerging paradigm of fog computing could play an important role to make wIoT more efficient and affordable. Fog computing is known as the cloud on the ground. This paper presents an end-to-end architecture that performs data conditioning and intelligent filtering for generating smart analytics from wearable data. In wIoT, wearable sensor devices serve on one end while the cloud backend offers services on the other end. We developed a prototype of smart fog gateway (a middle layer) using Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi. We discussed the role of the smart fog gateway in orchestrating the process of data conditioning, intelligent filtering, smart analytics, and selective transfer to the cloud for long-term storage and temporal variability monitoring. We benchmarked the performance of developed prototypes on real-world data from smart e-textile gloves. Results demonstrated the usability and potential of proposed architecture for converting the real-world data into useful analytics while making use of knowledge-based models. In this way, the smart fog gateway enhances the end-to-end interaction between wearables (sensor devices) and the cloud.
The Quantum Internet is envisioned as the final stage of the quantum revolution, opening fundamentally new communications and computing capabilities, including the distributed quantum computing. But the Quantum Internet is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Phenomena with no counterpart in classical networks, such as no-cloning, quantum measurement, entanglement and teleporting, impose very challenging constraints for the network design. Specifically, classical network functionalities, ranging from error-control mechanisms to overhead-control strategies, are based on the assumption that classical information can be safely read and copied. But this assumption does not hold in the Quantum Internet. As a consequence, the design of the Quantum Internet requires a major network-paradigm shift to harness the quantum mechanics specificities. The goal of this work is to shed light on the challenges and the open problems of the Quantum Internet design. To this aim, we first introduce some basic knowledge of quantum mechanics, needed to understand the differences between a classical and a quantum network. Then, we introduce quantum teleportation as the key strategy for transmitting quantum information without physically transferring the particle that stores the quantum information or violating the principles of the quantum mechanics. Finally, the key research challenges to design quantum communication networks are described.
Blockchain is a distributed database which is cryptographically protected against malicious modifications. While promising for a wide range of applications, current blockchain platforms rely on digital signatures, which are vulnerable to attacks by means of quantum computers. The same, albeit to a lesser extent, applies to cryptographic hash functions that are used in preparing new blocks, so parties with access to quantum computation would have unfair advantage in procuring mining rewards. Here we propose a possible solution to the quantum era blockchain challenge and report an experimental realization of a quantum-safe blockchain platform that utilizes quantum key distribution across an urban fiber network for information-theoretically secure authentication. These results address important questions about realizability and scalability of quantum-safe blockchains for commercial and governmental applications.