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The amalgamation of heterogeneous generations of mobile cellular networks around the globe has resulted in diverse data speed experiences for end users. At present, there are no defined mechanisms in place for subscribers of a mobile network operator (MNO) to use the services of third-party WiFi providers. MNOs also have no standardized procedures to securely interact with each other, and allow their subscribers to use third-party services on a pay-as-you-go basis. This paper proposes a blockchain-enabled offloading framework that allows a subscriber of a mobile operator to temporarily use another MNO or WiFi provider’s higher-speed network. A smart contract is employed to allow diverse entities, such as MNOs, brokers and WiFi providers, to automatically execute mutual agreements, to enable the utilization of third-party infrastructure in a secure and controlled manner. The proposed framework is tested using Ethereum’s testnet on the Goerli network using Alchemy and Hardhat. The analysis of the results obtained shows that the proposed technique helps mobile operators to offer improved user experience in the form of average speed and latency. The experiments show that the average time taken to deliver a 500 MB file is reduced from 10.23 s to 0.91 s for the global average scenario, from 6.09 s to 0.50 s for 5G, from 13.50 s to 0.50 s for 4G-LTE, from 41.11 s to 0.49 s for 4G, and from 339.11 s to 0.49 s for the 3G scenario. The results also show that, with WiFi offloading, users from all cellular generations can enjoy a similar quality of services, because delivery time ranges from 0.49 s to 0.91 s for offloaded experiments whereas for the non-offloaded scenario it ranges from 6.09 s to 339.11 s.

All anonymous identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes that are group homomorphic (to the best of our knowledge) require knowledge of the identity to compute the homomorphic operation. This paper is motivated by this open problem, namely to construct an anonymous group-homomorphic IBE scheme that does not sacrifice anonymity to perform homomorphic operations. Note that even when strong assumptions, such as indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), are permitted, no schemes are known. We succeed in solving this open problem by assuming iO and the hardness of the DBDH problem over rings (specifically, ZN2 for RSA modulus N). We then use the existence of such a scheme to construct an IBE scheme with re-randomizable anonymous encryption keys, which we prove to be IND-ID-RCCA secure. Finally, we use our results to construct identity-based anonymous aggregation protocols.

The utilization of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in various smart city and industrial applications is growing rapidly. Within a trusted authority (TA), such as an industry or smart city, all IoT devices are closely monitored in a controlled infrastructure. However, in cases where an IoT device from one TA needs to communicate with another IoT device from a different TA, the trust establishment between these devices becomes extremely important. Obtaining a digital certificate from a certificate authority for each IoT device can be expensive. To solve this issue, a group authentication framework is proposed that can establish trust between group IoT devices owned by different entities. The Chebyshev polynomial has many important properties, semigroup is one of the most important. These properties make the Chebyshev polynomial a good candidate for the proposed group authentication mechanism. The secure exchange of information between trusted authorities is supported by Blockchain technology. The proposed framework was implemented and tested using Python and deployed on Blockchain using Ethereum’s Goerli’s testnet. The results show that the proposed framework can reasonably use Chebyshev polynomials with degrees up to four digits in length. The values of various parameters related to Blockchain are also discussed to understand the usability of the proposed framework.

The evolution of smart contracts in recent years inspired a crucial question: do smart contract evaluation protocols provide the required level of privacy when executing contracts on the blockchain? The Hawk (IEEE S&P ’16) paper introduces a way to solve the problem of privacy in smart contracts by evaluating the contracts off-chain, albeit with the trust assumption of a manager. To avoid the partially trusted manager altogether, a novel approach named zkHawk (IEEE BRAINS ’21) explains how we can evaluate the contracts privately off-chain using a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol instead of trusting said manager. This paper dives deeper into the detailed construction of a variant of the zkHawk protocol titled V-zkHawk using formal proofs to construct the said protocol and model its security in the universal composability (UC) framework (FOCS ’01). The V-zkHawk protocol discussed here does not support immediate closure, i.e., all the parties (n) have to send a message to inform the blockchain that the contract has been executed with corruption allowed for up to t parties, where t

5G technology is expected to enable many innovative applications in different verticals. These applications have heterogeneous performance requirements (e.g., high data rate, low latency, high reliability, and high availability). In order to meet these requirements, 5G networks endorse network flexibility through the deployment of new emerging technologies, mainly network slicing and mobile edge computing. This article introduces a distributed blockchain-enabled network slicing (DBNS) framework that enables service and resource providers to dynamically lease resources to ensure high performance for their end-to-end services. The key component of our framework is global service provisioning, which provides admission control for incoming service requests along with dynamic resource assignment by means of a blockchain-based bidding system. The goal is to improve users’ experience with diverse services and reduce providers’ capital and operational expenditure.

PUBLISHED, The Mobile IP protocol has evolved from providing mobility support for portable computers to support for wireless handheld devices with high mobility patterns. A new category of micromobility protocols has been proposed to deal with the increased signaling loads that will be generated with large populations of such devices on a network. We argue that the authentication schemes presently employed in these networks do not scale well for large numbers of nodes, and that the lack of accounting procedures prevents the mass deployment of these networks. We envisage that future access networks will he operated by independent service providers, who will charge users for access to services in the fixed network but may not have long-term contractual relationships with them. These access networks may also employ a variety of micromobility protocols for fast handover support. We present a scheme based on hash chains, which allows for fast authentication of datagrams for secure updating of router entries within the access network, and real-time accounting of network usage by mobile nodes. Such a system will alleviate problems of fraud in mobile networks and eliminate the need for interoperator billing agreements.