Search

In general, the Internet of Things (IoT) is used for many applications and plays an essential role in the digital communications of smart city applications. However, securing the sensor-based IoT communication is difficult because it is highly vulnerable to malicious actions like Denial of Service (DOS), ransomware, and node impersonation. In the past several works were presented like Diffie–Hellman, supersingular isogeny, Merkle hash tree, etc., to secure the IoT communication. But, those techniques failed to identify the malicious events, which happened unexpectedly. Also, these procedures were limited to predict malicious events as the harmful attacks look like normal users. Hence, to enhance the privacy measure in IoT communication, a novel post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithm is introduced in this research. Here, powerful IoT devices concern with smart devices such as smartphones, smart security systems, and smartwatches. Furthermore, this paper has introduced a novel Diffie Supersingular Multiplication (DSM) for securing communication in powerful IoT devices. The developed approaches were validated by launching the Mirai botnet attack in the transmission channel. Moreover, the proposed DSM model has been implemented using the Xilinx ISE14.5 tool, which has improved 30% frequency, 24% area, 10% confidential rate and also has reduced the power up to 15%, error 10% and 20% delay, which are quite better than other compared techniques.

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

Cryptocurrencies have received a lot of research attention in recent years following the release of the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin. With the rise in cryptocurrency transactions, the need for smart contracts has also increased. Smart contracts, in a nutshell, are digitally executed contracts wherein some parties execute a common goal. The main problem with most of the current smart contracts is that there is no privacy for a party's input to the contract from either the blockchain or the other parties. Our research builds on the Hawk project that provides transaction privacy along with support for smart contracts. However, Hawk relies on a special trusted party known as a manager, which must be trusted not to leak each party's input to the smart contract. In this paper, we present a practical private smart contract protocol that replaces the manager with an MPC protocol such that the function to be executed by the MPC protocol is relatively lightweight, involving little overhead added to the smart contract function, and uses practical sigma protocols and homomorphic commitments to prove to the blockchain that the sum of the incoming balances to the smart contract matches the sum of the outgoing balances., 9 pages, 6 figures, published in IEEE BRAINS'21 Conference Proceedings

Zero-knowledge proofs have always provided a clear solution when it comes to conveying information from a prover to a verifier or vice versa without revealing essential information about the process. Advancements in zero-knowledge have helped develop proofs which are succinct and provide non-interactive arguments of knowledge along with maintaining the zero-knowledge criteria. zk-SNARKs (Zero knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge) are one such method that outshines itself when it comes to advancement of zero-knowledge proofs. The underlying principle of the Zcash algorithm is such that it delivers a full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees and the root of ensuring privacy lies fully on the construction of a proper zk-SNARK. In this paper we elaborate and construct a concrete zk-SNARK proof from scratch and explain its role in the Zcash algorithm., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Over the past decade, we have witnessed the Internet becoming increasingly centralized in the hands of a small number of giant technology firms, that control many of the most popular applications and the content they host on their platforms. In addition, in the majority of instances today, access to the Internet is usually provided through local internet service providers (ISPs) in each country. Governments in different jurisdictions can exert pressure on these technology firms and ISPs to enforce restrictions on Internet usage by their citizens, such as the blocking access to certain sites and/or content. In this paper, we present a promising new approach to circumventing some of these issues. Our decentralized web (DWeb) proposal makes use of a mesh network to connect community based routers. In addition, objects on the DWeb are indexed using Bblockchain technology, which allows for secure storage of immutable object references, and integrity checking of the data being served to users. Our DWeb design is also capable of operating during network partitions, and is able to quickly re-synchronize with the larger network once connectivity has been restored., 7 pages

5G technology is expected to enable a plethora of new applications with distinct requirements. Provisioning resources to accommodate such applications implies having a flexible network infrastructure that can be tailored to the specific needs of each application. This can be achieved through network slicing. Still, several applications might request network slices, but their request may not be fulfilled due to lack of resources or lack of coverage and provisioning such resources is a cumbersome task. This paper describes an architecture that facilitates the dynamic leasing of resources among network operators to support cross-domain services. The cornerstone of this architecture is a brokering layer, called DBB, that relies on a blockchain-based bidding system to request resources and evaluate resource provisioning offers. The paper also presents a simulation-based use case scenario that illustrates the need for DBB and which was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture.

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.

The traditional Domain Name System (DNS) does not include any security details, making it vulnerable to a variety of attacks which were discovered in 1990. The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) attempted to address these concerns and extended the DNS protocol to add origin authentication and message integrity whilst remaining backwards compatible. Yet despite the fact that issues with DNS have been well known since the late 90s, there has been very little adoption of DNSSEC. This paper proposes a new system using blockchain technology. Our system aims to provide the same security benefits as DNSSEC whilst addressing the concerns that led to its slow adoption.