Web3: The Next Internet Revolution

Since the first appearance of the World Wide Web, people more rely on the Web for their cyber social activities. The second phase of World Wide Web, named Web 2.0, has been extensively attracting worldwide people that participate in building and enjoying the virtual world. Nowadays, the next internet revolution: Web3 is going to open new opportunities for traditional social models. The decentralization property of Web3 is capable of breaking the monopoly of the internet companies. Moreover, Web3 will lead a paradigm shift from the Web as a publishing medium to a medium of interaction and participation. This change will deeply transform the relations among users and platforms, forces and relations of production, and the global economy. Therefore, it is necessary that we technically, practically, and more broadly take an overview of Web3. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of Web3, with a focus on current technologies, challenges, opportunities, and outlook. This article first introduces several major technologies of Web3. Then, we illustrate the type of Web3 applications in detail. Blockchain and smart contracts ensure that decentralized organizations will be less trusted and more truthful than that centralized organizations. Decentralized finance will be global, and open with financial inclusiveness for unbanked people. This paper also discusses the relationship between the Metaverse and Web3, as well as the differences and similarities between Web 3.0 and Web3. Inspired by the Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, we further conduct a novel hierarchy of needs theory within Web3. Finally, several worthwhile future research directions of Web3 are discussed.Comment: Preprint. 5 figures, 2 table

SoK: A Systematic Review of TEE Usage for Developing Trusted Applications

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a feature of modern central processing units (CPUs) that aim to provide a high assurance, isolated environment in which to run workloads that demand both confidentiality and integrity. Hardware and software components in the CPU isolate workloads, commonly referred to as Trusted Applications (TAs), from the main operating system (OS). This article aims to analyse the TEE ecosystem, determine its usability, and suggest improvements where necessary to make adoption easier. To better understand TEE usage, we gathered academic and practical examples from a total of 223 references. We summarise the literature and provide a publication timeline, along with insights into the evolution of TEE research and deployment. We categorise TAs into major groups and analyse the tools available to developers. Lastly, we evaluate trusted container projects, test performance, and identify the requirements for migrating applications inside them.Comment: In The 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2023), August 29 -- September 01, 2023, Benevento, Italy. 15 page

The Symbiosis of Distributed Ledger and Machine Learning as a Relevance for Autonomy in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the fusion of the physical and digital world which enables assets on the edge to send data to a platform where it gets analyzed. Defined actions are then triggered to influence cross-functional edge activities. Furthermore, on the platform tier functionalities and relations need to be identified and implemented to realize assets operating autonomously and ubiquitously. The exploration of this paper results in the identification of autonomous characteristics and shows functional components to implement autonomous assets on the edge. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and its fusion with Machine Learning (ML) as an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides an integral part to realize the described outline. Thus, the recognition of DLT’s and ML’s usage in the IoT and the evaluation of the relevance as well as the synergies build the main focus of this paper

Results and achievements of the ALLIANCE Project: New network solutions for 5G and beyond

Leaving the current 4th generation of mobile communications behind, 5G will represent a disruptive paradigm shift integrating 5G Radio Access Networks (RANs), ultra-high-capacity access/metro/core optical networks, and intra-datacentre (DC) network and computational resources into a single converged 5G network infrastructure. The present paper overviews the main achievements obtained in the ALLIANCE project. This project ambitiously aims at architecting a converged 5G-enabled network infrastructure satisfying those needs to effectively realise the envisioned upcoming Digital Society. In particular, we present two networking solutions for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G), such as Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualisation (SDN/NFV) on top of an ultra-high-capacity spatially and spectrally flexible all-optical network infrastructure, and the clean-slate Recursive Inter-Network Architecture (RINA) over packet networks, including access, metro, core and DC segments. The common umbrella of all these solutions is the Knowledge-Defined Networking (KDN)-based orchestration layer which, by implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, enables an optimal end-to-end service provisioning. Finally, the cross-layer manager of the ALLIANCE architecture includes two novel elements, namely the monitoring element providing network and user data in real time to the KDN, and the blockchain-based trust element in charge of exchanging reliable and confident information with external domains.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under contract FEDER TEC2017-90034-C2 (ALLIANCE project) and by the Generalitat de Catalunya under contract 2017SGR-1037 and 2017SGR-605.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

BECA: A Blockchain-Based Edge Computing Architecture for Internet of Things Systems

The scale of Internet of Things (IoT) systems has expanded in recent times and, in tandem with this, IoT solutions have developed symbiotic relationships with technologies, such as edge Computing. IoT has leveraged edge computing capabilities to improve the capabilities of IoT solutions, such as facilitating quick data retrieval, low latency response, and advanced computation, among others. However, in contrast with the benefits offered by edge computing capabilities, there are several detractors, such as centralized data storage, data ownership, privacy, data auditability, and security, which concern the IoT community. This study leveraged blockchain’s inherent capabilities, including distributed storage system, non-repudiation, privacy, security, and immutability, to provide a novel, advanced edge computing architecture for IoT systems. Specifically, this blockchain-based edge computing architecture addressed centralized data storage, data auditability, privacy, data ownership, and security. Following implementation, the performance of this solution was evaluated to quantify performance in terms of response time and resource utilization. The results show the viability of the proposed and implemented architecture, characterized by improved privacy, device data ownership, security, and data auditability while implementing decentralized storage

Virtualization services: scalable methods for virtualizing multicore systems

Multi-core technology is bringing parallel processing capabilities from servers to laptops and even handheld devices. At the same time, platform support for system virtualization is making it easier to consolidate server and client resources, when and as needed by applications. This consolidation is achieved by dynamically mapping the virtual machines on which applications run to underlying physical machines and their processing cores. Low cost processor and I/O virtualization methods efficiently scaled to different numbers of processing cores and I/O devices are key enablers of such consolidation. This dissertation develops and evaluates new methods for scaling virtualization functionality to multi-core and future many-core systems. Specifically, it re-architects virtualization functionality to improve scalability and better exploit multi-core system resources. Results from this work include a self-virtualized I/O abstraction, which virtualizes I/O so as to flexibly use different platforms' processing and I/O resources. Flexibility affords improved performance and resource usage and most importantly, better scalability than that offered by current I/O virtualization solutions. Further, by describing system virtualization as a service provided to virtual machines and the underlying computing platform, this service can be enhanced to provide new and innovative functionality. For example, a virtual device may provide obfuscated data to guest operating systems to maintain data privacy; it could mask differences in device APIs or properties to deal with heterogeneous underlying resources; or it could control access to data based on the ``trust' properties of the guest VM. This thesis demonstrates that extended virtualization services are superior to existing operating system or user-level implementations of such functionality, for multiple reasons. First, this solution technique makes more efficient use of key performance-limiting resource in multi-core systems, which are memory and I/O bandwidth. Second, this solution technique better exploits the parallelism inherent in multi-core architectures and exhibits good scalability properties, in part because at the hypervisor level, there is greater control in precisely which and how resources are used to realize extended virtualization services. Improved control over resource usage makes it possible to provide value-added functionalities for both guest VMs and the platform. Specific instances of virtualization services described in this thesis are the network virtualization service that exploits heterogeneous processing cores, a storage virtualization service that provides location transparent access to block devices by extending the functionality provided by network virtualization service, a multimedia virtualization service that allows efficient media device sharing based on semantic information, and an object-based storage service with enhanced access control.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Schwan, Karsten; Committee Member: Ahamad, Mustaq; Committee Member: Fujimoto, Richard; Committee Member: Gavrilovska, Ada; Committee Member: Owen, Henry; Committee Member: Xenidis, Jim