The sixth generation (6G) network must provide performance superior to previous generations in order to meet the requirements of emerging services and applications, such as multi-gigabit transmission rate, even higher reliability, sub 1 millisecond latency and ubiquitous connection for Internet of Everything. However, with the scarcity of spectrum resources, efficient resource management and sharing is crucial to achieve all these ambitious requirements. One possible technology to enable all of this is blockchain, which has recently gained significance and will be of paramount importance to 6G networks and beyond due to its inherent properties. In particular, the integration of blockchain in 6G will enable the network to monitor and manage resource utilization and sharing efficiently. Hence, in this article, we discuss the potentials of blockchain for resource management and sharing in 6G using multiple application scenarios namely, Internet of things, device-to-device communications, network slicing, and inter-domain blockchain ecosystems.
Data sharing is very important for accelerating scientific research, business innovations, and for informing individuals. Yet, concerns over data privacy, cost, and lack of secure data-sharing solutions have prevented data owners from sharing data. To overcome these issues, several research works have proposed blockchain-based data-sharing solutions for their ability to add transparency and control to the data-sharing process. Yet, while models for decentralized data sharing exist, how to incentivize these structures to enable data sharing at scale remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we…
The Covid-19 pandemic has made individuals and organizations to rethink the way of handling identity verification and credentials sharing particularly in quarantined situations. In this study, we investigate the inefficiencies of traditional identity systems, and discuss how a proper implementation of Blockchain technology would result in safer, more secure, privacy respecting and remote friendly identity systems. As a result, we propose a Blockchain based framework for digital identity verification, record attestation and record sharing, and we explain the framework in details with certain us…
The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has caused a powerful transition in the cyber threat landscape. As a result, organisations have had to find new ways to better manage the risks associated with their infrastructure. In response, a significant amount of research has focused on developing efficient Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing platforms. However, most existing solutions are highly centralised and do not provide a way to exchange information in a distributed way. In this chapter, we subsequently seek to evaluate how blockchain technology can be used to address a …
Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are current hot topics in research and practice. However, the potentials of their combination have been studied just recently to a larger extend. While different use cases for combining AI and blockchain have been discussed, the idea of enabling blockchain-based smart contracts to perform "smarter" decisions by using AI or machine learning (ML) models has only been considered on the conceptual level so far. It remained open, how such AI-enabled smart contracts could be implemented in a robust way for real-world applications. Therefore, in …
In this letter we propose Meta-key, a data-sharing mechanism that enables users share their encrypted data under a blockchain-based decentralized storage architecture. All the data-encryption keys are encrypted by the owner's public key and put onto the blockchain for safe and secure storage and easy key-management. Encrypted data are stored in dedicated storage nodes and proxy re-encryption mechanism is used to ensure secure data-sharing in the untrusted environment. Security analysis of our model shows that the proxy re-encryption adopted in our system is naturally free from collusion-attack…
The intelligent vehicle (IV) has become a promising technology that could revolutionize our life in smart cities sooner or later. However, it yet suffers from many security vulnerabilities. Traditional security methods are incapable to secure the IV data sharing against malicious attacks. Blockchain, as expected by both research and industry communities, has emerged as a good solution to address these issues. The major issues in IV data sharing are trust, data accuracy and reliability of data sharing in the communication channel. Blockchain technology, previously working for the cryptocurrency…
In modern healthcare systems, being able to share electronic health records is crucial for providing quality care and for enabling a larger spectrum of health services. Health data sharing is dependent on obtaining individual consent which, in turn, is hindered by a lack of resources. To this extend, blockchain-based platforms facilitate data sharing by inherently creating a trusted distributed network of users. These users are enabled to share their data without depending on the time and resources of specific players (such as the health services). In blockchain-based platforms, data governanc…
Low throughput has been the biggest obstacle of large-scale blockchain applications. During the past few years, researchers have proposed various schemes to improve the systems' throughput. However, due to the inherent inefficiency and defects of the Internet, especially in data broadcasting tasks, these efforts all rendered unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain protocol which utilizes the satellite broadcasting network instead of the traditional Internet for data broadcasting and consensus tasks. An automatic resumption mechanism is also proposed to solve the unique com…
Internet censorship has been implemented in several countries to prevent citizens from accessing information and to suppress discussion of specific topics. This paper presents Infnote, a platform that helps eliminate the problem of sharing content in these censorship regimes. Infnote is a decentralized information sharing system based on blockchain and peer-to-peer network, aiming to provide an easy-to-use medium for users to share their thoughts, insights and views freely without worrying about data tampering and data loss. Infnote provides a solution that is able to work on any level of Inte…
Blokchain is a promising technology to enable distributed and reliable data sharing at the network edge. The high security in blockchain is undoubtedly a critical factor for the network to handle important data item. On the other hand, according to the dilemma in blockchain, an overemphasis on distributed security will lead to poor transaction-processing capability, which limits the application of blockchain in data sharing scenarios with high-throughput and low-latency requirements. To enable demand-oriented distributed services, this paper investigates the relationship between capability and…
Edge computing is a novel paradigm designed toimprove the quality of service for latency sensitive cloud applications. However, the state-of-the-art edge services are designedfor specific applications, which are isolated from each other.To better improve the utilization level of edge nodes, publicresource sharing among edges from distinct service providersshould be encouraged economically. In this work, we employ thepayment channel techniques to design and implement EdgeToll,a blockchain-based toll collection system for heterogeneous public edge sharing. Test-bed has been developed to validate…
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is the knowledge of cyber and physical threats that help mitigate potential cyber attacks. The rapid evolution of the current threat landscape has seen many organisations share CTI to strengthen their security posture for mutual benefit. However, in many cases, CTI data contains attributes (e.g., software versions) that have the potential to leak sensitive information or cause reputational damage to the sharing organisation. While current approaches allow restricting CTI sharing to trusted organisations, they lack solutions where the shared data can be verified …
Scalability and security problems of the centralized architecture models in cyberphysical systems have great potential to be solved by novel blockchain based distributed models.A decentralized energy trading system takes advantage of various sources and effectively coordinates the energy to ensure optimal utilization of the available resources. It achieves that goal by managing physical, social and business infrastructures using technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and network systems. Addressing the importance of blockchain-enabled energy trading in the context of cy…
A new framework for a secure and robust consensus in blockchain-based IoT networks is proposed using machine learning. Hyperledger fabric, which is a blockchain platform developed as part of the Hyperledger project, though looks very apt for IoT applications, has comparatively low tolerance for malicious activities in an untrustworthy environment. To that end, we propose AI-enabled blockchain (AIBC) with a 2-step consensus protocol that uses an outlier detection algorithm for consensus in an IoT network implemented on hyperledger fabric platform. The outlier-aware consensus protocol exploits a…
Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with little transparency and fairness in terms of number of views or revenue. On the other hand, consumers are distanced from the publishers and cannot authenticate originality of the content. In this paper, we develop a reliable and fair platform for content sharing without a central facilitator. The platform is built as a decentralized data storage layer to store a…
Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), one of the most popular private blockchains, has recently received attention for blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT). However, for IoT applications to handle time-sensitive data, the processing latency in HLF has emerged as a new challenge. In this article, therefore, we establish a practical HLF latency model for HLF-enabled IoT. We first discuss the structure and transaction flow of HLF-enabled IoT. After implementing real HLF, we capture the latencies that each transaction experiences and show that the total latency of HLF can be modeled as a Gamma distribu…
Off-grid networks are recently emerging as a solution to connect the unconnected or provide alternative services to networks of possibly untrusted participants. The systems currently used, however, exhibit limitations due to their centralized nature and thus prove inadequate to secure trust. Blockchain technology can be the tool that will enable trust and transparency in such networks. In this paper, we introduce a platform for secure and privacy-respecting decentralized data sharing among untrusted participants in off-grid networks. The proposed architecture realizes this goal via the integra…
Easy access to data is one of the main avenues to accelerate scientific research. As a key element of scientific innovations, data sharing allows the reproduction of results, helps prevent data fabrication, falsification, and misuse. Although the research benefits from data reuse are widely acknowledged, the data collections existing today are still kept in silos. Indeed, monitoring what happens to data once they have been handed to a third party is currently not feasible within the current data-sharing practices. We propose a blockchain-based system to trace data collections, and potentially …
Today the cloud plays a central role in storing, processing, and distributing data. Despite contributing to the rapid development of IoT applications, the current IoT cloud-centric architecture has led into a myriad of isolated data silos that hinders the full potential of holistic data-driven analytics within the IoT. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based design for the IoT that brings a distributed access control and data management. We depart from the current trust model that delegates access control of our data to a centralized trusted authority and instead empower the users with da…
In the traditional mobile edge computing (MEC) system, the availability of MEC services is greatly limited for the edge users of the cell due to serious signal attenuation and inter-cell interference. User-centric MEC (UC-MEC) can be seen as a promising solution to address this issue. In UC-MEC, each user is served by a dedicated access point (AP) cluster enabled with MEC capability instead of a single MEC server, however, at the expense of more energy consumption and greater privacy risks. To achieve efficient and reliable resource utilization with user-centric services, we propose an energy …
In recent years Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have been targeted increasingly by sophisticated cyberattacks. Improving ICS security has drawn significant attention in the literature that emphasises the importance of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing in accelerating detection, mitigation, and prevention of cyberattacks. However, organisations are reluctant to exchange CTI due to fear of exposure, reputational damage, and lack of incentives. Furthermore, there has been limited discussion about the factors influencing participation in sharing CTI about ICS. The existing CTI-sharing platf…
IoT provides services by connecting smart devices to the Internet, and exploiting data generated by said devices to enable value-added services to individuals and businesses. In such cases, if data is exposed, tampered or lost, the service would not behave correctly. In this article, we discuss data security in IoT applications across five dimensions: confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, non-repudiation and availability. We discuss how distributed ledger technology could be used to overcome these issues and propose to use a fog computing architecture as decentralized computational support…
We outline a quantum-enabled blockchain architecture based on a consortium of quantum servers. The network is hybridised, utilising digital systems for sharing and processing classical information combined with a fibre--optic infrastructure and quantum devices for transmitting and processing quantum information. We deliver an energy efficient interactive mining protocol enacted between clients and servers which uses quantum information encoded in light and removes the need for trust in network infrastructure. Instead, clients on the network need only trust the transparent network code, and tha…
Blockchain-enabled Federated Learning (BFL) enables mobile devices to collaboratively train neural network models required by a Machine Learning Model Owner (MLMO) while keeping data on the mobile devices. Then, the model updates are stored in the blockchain in a decentralized and reliable manner. However, the issue of BFL is that the mobile devices have energy and CPU constraints that may reduce the system lifetime and training efficiency. The other issue is that the training latency may increase due to the blockchain mining process. To address these issues, the MLMO needs to (i) decide how m…
Existing education systems are facing a threat of question paper leaking (QPL) in the exam which jeopardizes the quality of education. Therefore, it is high time to think about a more secure and flexible question sharing system which can prevent QPL issue in the future education system. Blockchain enables a way of creating and storing transactions, contracts or anything that requires protection against tampering, accessing etc. This paper presents a new scheme for smart education, by utilizing the concept of blockchain, for question sharing. A two-phase encryption technique for encrypting ques…
Metaverse has rekindled human beings' desire to further break space-time barriers by fusing the virtual and real worlds. However, security and privacy threats hinder us from building a utopia. A metaverse embraces various techniques, while at the same time inheriting their pitfalls and thus exposing large attack surfaces. Blockchain, proposed in 2008, was regarded as a key building block of metaverses. it enables transparent and trusted computing environments using tamper-resistant decentralized ledgers. Currently, blockchain supports Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) …
The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an urgent need for effective contact tracing solutions through mobile phone applications to prevent the infection from spreading further. However, due to the nature of contact tracing, public concern on privacy issues has been a bottleneck to the existing solutions, which is significantly affecting the uptake of contact tracing applications across the globe. In this paper, we present a blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving contact tracing scheme: BeepTrace, where we propose to adopt blockchain bridging the user/patient and the authorized solvers to…
Although Metaverse has recently been widely studied, its practical application still faces many challenges. One of the severe challenges is the lack of sufficient resources for computing and communication on local devices, resulting in the inability to access the Metaverse services. To address this issue, this paper proposes a practical blockchain-based mobile edge computing (MEC) platform for resource sharing and optimal utilization to complete the requested offloading tasks, given the heterogeneity of servers' available resources and that of users' task requests. To be specific, we first ela…
The Internet of Things (IoT) bears unprecedented security and scalability challenges due to the magnitude of data produced and exchanged by IoT devices and platforms. Some of those challenges are currently being addressed by coupling IoT applications with blockchains. However, current blockchain-backed IoT systems simply use the blockchain to store access control policies, thereby underutilizing the power of blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a new framework named Sash that couples IoT platforms with blockchain that provides a number of advantages compared to state of the art. In…
Smart Grids and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) are neither a dream nor a near-future thing anymore, rather it is happening now. The integration of more and more embedded systems and IoT devices is pushing smart grids and I4.0 forward at a breakneck speed. To cope up with this, the modification of age-old SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in terms of decentralization, near-real-time operation, security, and privacy is necessary. In this context, blockchain technology has the potential of providing not only these essential features of the data acquisition process of future SCADA syst…
Federated learning (FL), thanks in part to the emergence of the edge computing paradigm, is expected to enable true real-time applications in production environments. However, its original dependence on a central server for orchestration raises several concerns in terms of security, privacy, and scalability. To solve some of these worries, blockchain technology is expected to bring decentralization, robustness, and enhanced trust to FL. The empowerment of FL through blockchain (also referred to as FLchain), however, has some implications in terms of ledger inconsistencies and age of informatio…
To promote the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart communities and smart cities, a real-time data marketplace middleware platform, called the Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3), has been recently proposed. While facilitating the easy exchanges of real-time IoT data streams between device owners and third-party applications through the marketplace, I3 is presently a monolithic, centralized platform for a single community. Although the service oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted in the IoT and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture …
For the modern world where data is becoming one of the most valuable assets, robust data privacy policies rooted in the fundamental infrastructure of networks and applications are becoming an even bigger necessity to secure sensitive user data. In due course with the ever-evolving nature of newer statistical techniques infringing user privacy, machine learning models with algorithms built with respect for user privacy can offer a dynamically adaptive solution to preserve user privacy against the exponentially increasing multidimensional relationships that datasets create. Using these privacy a…
Advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), dynamic data driven application systems (DDDAS), and hierarchical cloud-fog-edge computing paradigm provide opportunities for enhancing multi-domain systems performance. As one example that represents multi-domain scenario, a "fly-by-feel" system utilizes DDDAS framework to support autonomous operations and improve maneuverability, safety and fuel efficiency. The DDDAS "fly-by-feel" avionics system can enhance multi-domain coordination to support domain specific operations. However, conventional enabling technologies rely o…
The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoTs) allows heterogeneous embedded smart devices to collaboratively provide smart services with or without human intervention. While leveraging the large scale IoT based applications like Smart Gird or Smart Cities, IoTs also incur more concerns on privacy and security. Among the top security challenges that IoTs face, access authorization is critical in resource sharing and information protection. One of the weaknesses in today's access control (AC) is the centralized authorization server, which can be the performance bottleneck or the single point of fa…
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of bl…
In teleradiology, medical images are transmitted to offsite radiologists for interpretation and the dictation report is sent back to the original site to aid timely diagnosis and proper patient care. Although teleradiology offers great benefits including time and cost efficiency, after-hour coverages, and staffing shortage management, there are some technical and operational limitations to overcome in reaching its full potential. We analyzed the current teleradiology workflow to identify inefficiencies. Image unavailability and delayed critical result communication stemmed from lack of system …
At present, more than a billion closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are watching the world. These cameras garner a lot of visual information that is often processed and stored in remote and centralized cloud servers. Multiple occasions have revealed that this traditional approach is plagued with security and privacy breaches. The breaches could be the interception of raw videos while in transit to distant surveillance analytics centers (SAC), infiltration to cameras and network video records (NVR), or abuse of cameras and stored videos. Hence, the traditional video surveillance system (VS…
While the smart surveillance system enhanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) technology becomes an essential part of Smart Cities, it also brings new concerns in security of the data. Compared to the traditional surveillance systems that is built following a monolithic architecture to carry out lower level operations, such as monitoring and recording, the modern surveillance systems are expected to support more scalable and decentralized solutions for advanced video stream analysis at the large volumes of distributed edge devices. In addition, the centralized architecture of the conventional s…
Quantum Cloud and Distributed Systems (qCLOUDS) Lab, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia（量子云与分布式系统实验室，计算机与信息系统学院，墨尔本大学，澳大利亚）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University, India（计算机科学与工程系，维萨瓦拉亚工程学院，班加罗尔大学，印度）
