No Arabic abstract
Fog computing is a paradigm for distributed computing that enables sharing of resources such as computing, storage and network services. Unlike cloud computing, fog computing platforms primarily support {em non-functional properties} such as location awareness, mobility and reduced latency. This emerging paradigm has many potential applications in domains such as smart grids, smart cities, and transport management. Most of these domains collect and monitor personal information through edge devices to offer personalized services. A {em centralized} server either at the level of cloud or fog, has been found ineffective to provide a high degree of security and privacy-preserving services. Blockchain technology supports the development of {em decentralized} applications designed around the principles of immutability, cryptography, consistency preserving consensus protocols and smart contracts. Hence blockchain technology has emerged as a preferred technology in recent times to build trustworthy distributed applications. The chapter describes the potential of blockchain technology to realize security services such as authentication, secured communication, availability, privacy and trust management to support the development of dependable fog services.
Services computing can offer a high-level abstraction to support diverse applications via encapsulating various computing infrastructures. Though services computing has greatly boosted the productivity of developers, it is faced with three main challenges: privacy and security risks, information silo, and pricing mechanisms and incentives. The recent advances of blockchain bring opportunities to address the challenges of services computing due to its build-in encryption as well as digital signature schemes, decentralization feature, and intrinsic incentive mechanisms. In this paper, we present a survey to investigate the integration of blockchain with services computing. The integration of blockchain with services computing mainly exhibits merits in two aspects: i) blockchain can potentially address key challenges of services computing and ii) services computing can also promote blockchain development. In particular, we categorize the current literature of services computing based on blockchain into five types: services creation, services discovery, services recommendation, services composition, and services arbitration. Moreover, we generalize Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) architecture and summarize the representative BaaS platforms. In addition, we also outline open issues of blockchain-based services computing and BaaS.
The advancement in cloud networks has enabled connectivity of both traditional networked elements and new devices from all walks of life, thereby forming the Internet of Things (IoT). In an IoT setting, improving and scaling network components as well as reducing cost is essential to sustain exponential growth. In this domain, software-defined networking (SDN) is revolutionizing the network infrastructure with a new paradigm. SDN splits the control/routing logic from the data transfer/forwarding. This splitting causes many issues in SDN, such as vulnerabilities of DDoS attacks. Many solutions (including blockchain based) have been proposed to overcome these problems. In this work, we offer a blockchain-based solution that is provided in redundant SDN (load-balanced) to service millions of IoT devices. Blockchain is considered as tamper-proof and impossible to corrupt due to the replication of the ledger and consensus for verification and addition to the ledger. Therefore, it is a perfect fit for SDN in IoT Networks. Blockchain technology provides everyone with a working proof of decentralized trust. The experimental results show gain and efficiency with respect to the accuracy, update process, and bandwidth utilization.
In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based computing verification protocol, called EntrapNet, for distributed shared computing networks, an emerging underlying network for many internet of things (IoT) applications. EntrapNet borrows the idea from the practice of entrapment in criminal law to reduce the possibility of receiving incorrect computing results from trustless service providers who have offered the computing resources. Furthermore, we mathematically optimize EntrapNet to deal with the fundamental tradeoff of a network: security and efficiency. We present an asymptotic optimal solution to this optimization. It will be seen that EntrapNet can be performed as an independent and low-cost layer atop any trustless network that requires outsourced computing, thus making secure computing affordable and practical.
There has been an intense concern for security alternatives because of the recent rise of cyber attacks, mainly targeting critical systems such as industry, medical, or energy ecosystem. Though the latest industry infrastructures largely depend on AI-driven maintenance, the prediction based on corrupted data undoubtedly results in loss of life and capital. Admittedly, an inadequate data-protection mechanism can readily challenge the security and reliability of the network. The shortcomings of the conventional cloud or trusted certificate-driven techniques have motivated us to exhibit a unique Blockchain-based framework for a secure and efficient industry 4.0 system. The demonstrated framework obviates the long-established certificate authority after enhancing the consortium Blockchain that reduces the data processing delay, and increases cost-effective throughput. Nonetheless, the distributed industry 4.0 security model entails cooperative trust than depending on a single party, which in essence indulges the costs and threat of the single point of failure. Therefore, multi-signature technique of the proposed framework accomplishes the multi-party authentication, which confirms its applicability for the real-time and collaborative cyber-physical system.
Blockchain protocols come with a variety of security guarantees. For example, BFT-inspired protocols such as Algorand tend to be secure in the partially synchronous setting, while longest chain protocols like Bitcoin will normally require stronger synchronicity to be secure. Another fundamental distinction, directly relevant to scalability solutions such as sharding, is whether or not a single untrusted user is able to point to *certificates*, which provide incontrovertible proof of block confirmation. Algorand produces such certificates, while Bitcoin does not. Are these properties accidental? Or are they inherent consequences of the paradigm of protocol design? Our aim in this paper is to understand what, fundamentally, governs the nature of security for permissionless blockchain protocols. Using the framework developed in (Lewis-Pye and Roughgarden, 2021), we prove general results showing that these questions relate directly to properties of the user selection process, i.e., the method (such as proof-of-work or proof-of-stake) which is used to select users with the task of updating state. Our results suffice to establish, for example, that the production of certificates is impossible for proof-of-work protocols, but is automatic for standard forms of proof-of-stake protocols. As a byproduct of our work, we also define a number of security notions and identify the equivalences and inequivalences among them.