133 research outputs found
Federated Learning for 6G: Paradigms, Taxonomy, Recent Advances and Insights
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to play an instrumental role in the
next generation of wireless systems, such as sixth-generation (6G) mobile
network. However, massive data, energy consumption, training complexity, and
sensitive data protection in wireless systems are all crucial challenges that
must be addressed for training AI models and gathering intelligence and
knowledge from distributed devices. Federated Learning (FL) is a recent
framework that has emerged as a promising approach for multiple learning agents
to build an accurate and robust machine learning models without sharing raw
data. By allowing mobile handsets and devices to collaboratively learn a global
model without explicit sharing of training data, FL exhibits high privacy and
efficient spectrum utilization. While there are a lot of survey papers
exploring FL paradigms and usability in 6G privacy, none of them has clearly
addressed how FL can be used to improve the protocol stack and wireless
operations. The main goal of this survey is to provide a comprehensive overview
on FL usability to enhance mobile services and enable smart ecosystems to
support novel use-cases. This paper examines the added-value of implementing FL
throughout all levels of the protocol stack. Furthermore, it presents important
FL applications, addresses hot topics, provides valuable insights and explicits
guidance for future research and developments. Our concluding remarks aim to
leverage the synergy between FL and future 6G, while highlighting FL's
potential to revolutionize wireless industry and sustain the development of
cutting-edge mobile services.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures; 9 Table
Security and Privacy Preservation in Mobile Crowdsensing
Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a compelling paradigm that enables a crowd of individuals to cooperatively collect and share data to measure phenomena or record events of common interest using their mobile devices. Pairing with inherent mobility and intelligence, mobile users can collect, produce and upload large amounts of data to service providers based on crowdsensing tasks released by customers, ranging from general information, such as temperature, air quality and traffic condition, to more specialized data, such as recommended places, health condition and voting intentions. Compared with traditional sensor networks, MCS can support large-scale sensing applications, improve sensing data trustworthiness and reduce the cost on deploying expensive hardware or software to acquire high-quality data.
Despite the appealing benefits, however, MCS is also confronted with a variety of security and privacy threats, which would impede its rapid development. Due to their own incentives and vulnerabilities of service providers, data security and user privacy are being put at risk. The corruption of sensing reports may directly affect crowdsensing results, and thereby mislead customers to make irrational decisions. Moreover, the content of crowdsensing tasks may expose the intention of customers, and the sensing reports might inadvertently reveal sensitive information about mobile users. Data encryption and anonymization techniques can provide straightforward solutions for data security and user privacy, but there are several issues, which are of significantly importance to make MCS practical. First of all, to enhance data trustworthiness, service providers need to recruit mobile users based on their personal information, such as preferences, mobility pattern and reputation, resulting in the privacy exposure to service providers. Secondly, it is inevitable to have replicate data in crowdsensing reports, which may possess large communication bandwidth, but traditional data encryption makes replicate data detection and deletion challenging. Thirdly, crowdsensed data analysis is essential to generate crowdsensing reports in MCS, but the correctness of crowdsensing results in the absence of malicious mobile users and service providers become a huge concern for customers. Finally yet importantly, even if user privacy is preserved during task allocation and data collection, it may still be exposed during reward distribution. It further discourage mobile users from task participation.
In this thesis, we explore the approaches to resolve these challenges in MCS. Based on the architecture of MCS, we conduct our research with the focus on security and privacy protection without sacrificing data quality and users' enthusiasm. Specifically, the main contributions are, i) to enable privacy preservation and task allocation, we propose SPOON, a strong privacy-preserving mobile crowdsensing scheme supporting accurate task allocation. In SPOON, the service provider recruits mobile users based on their locations, and selects proper sensing reports according to their trust levels without invading user privacy. By utilizing the blind signature, sensing tasks are protected and reports are anonymized. In addition, a privacy-preserving credit management mechanism is introduced to achieve decentralized trust management and secure credit proof for mobile users; ii) to improve communication efficiency while guaranteeing data confidentiality, we propose a fog-assisted secure data deduplication scheme, in which a BLS-oblivious pseudo-random function is developed to enable fog nodes to detect and delete replicate data in sensing reports without exposing the content of reports. Considering the privacy leakages of mobile users who report the same data, the blind signature is utilized to hide users' identities, and chameleon hash function is leveraged to achieve contribution claim and reward retrieval for anonymous greedy mobile users; iii) to achieve data statistics with privacy preservation, we propose a privacy-preserving data statistics scheme to achieve end-to-end security and integrity protection, while enabling the aggregation of the collected data from multiple sources. The correctness verification is supported to prevent the corruption of the aggregate results during data transmission based on the homomorphic authenticator and the proxy re-signature. A privacy-preserving verifiable linear statistics mechanism is developed to realize the linear aggregation of multiple crowdsensed data from a same device and the verification on the correctness of aggregate results; and iv) to encourage mobile users to participating in sensing tasks, we propose a dual-anonymous reward distribution scheme to offer the incentive for mobile users and privacy protection for both customers and mobile users in MCS. Based on the dividable cash, a new reward sharing incentive mechanism is developed to encourage mobile users to participating in sensing tasks, and the randomization technique is leveraged to protect the identities of customers and mobile users during reward claim, distribution and deposit
Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges
In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging
technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing
online activities over public networks. As an essential market process,
auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to
their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features
between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research
and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can
provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the
auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design
incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These
opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in
both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of
existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive
state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing
solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some
application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open
research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction
models
A Survey on Off-chain Networks: Frameworks, Technologies, Solutions and Challenges
Blockchain has received increasing attention in academia and industry.
However, the increasing transaction volumes and limited on-chain storage
underscore scalability as a key challenge hindering the widespread adoption of
blockchain. Fortunately, off-chain networks that enable transactions outside
the blockchain show promising potential to mitigate the scalability challenge.
Off-chain solutions that address blockchain scalability hurdles, such as
payment channel networks, facilitate secure and fast off-chain transactions,
thus relieving the main chain's strain. In this article, we provide a
comprehensive review of key technologies, solutions, and challenges of
off-chain networks. First, we introduce the background of off-chain networks
encompassing design motivation, framework, overview, and application scenarios.
We then review the key issues and technologies associated with off-chain
networks. Subsequently, we summarize the mainstream solutions for the
corresponding key issues. Finally, we discuss some research challenges and open
issues in this area.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure
ESIA: An Efficient and Stable Identity Authentication for Internet of Vehicles
Decentralized, tamper-proof blockchain is regarded as a solution to a
challenging authentication issue in the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs). However,
the consensus time and communication overhead of blockchain increase
significantly as the number of vehicles connected to the blockchain. To address
this issue, vehicular fog computing has been introduced to improve efficiency.
However, existing studies ignore several key factors such as the number of
vehicles in the fog computing system, which can impact the consensus
communication overhead. Meanwhile, there is no comprehensive study on the
stability of vehicular fog composition. The vehicle movement will lead to
dynamic changes in fog. If the composition of vehicular fog is unstable, the
blockchain formed by this fog computing system will be unstable, which can
affect the consensus efficiency. With the above considerations, we propose an
efficient and stable identity authentication (ESIA) empowered by hierarchical
blockchain and fog computing. By grouping vehicles efficiently, ESIA has low
communication complexity and achieves high stability. Moreover, to enhance the
consensus security of the hierarchical blockchain, the consensus process is
from the bottom layer to the up layer (bottom-up), which we call B2UHChain.
Through theoretical analysis and simulation verification, our scheme achieves
the design goals of high efficiency and stability while significantly improving
the IoV scalability to the power of 1.5 (^1.5) under similar security to a
single-layer blockchain. In addition, ESIA has less communication and
computation overhead, lower latency, and higher throughput than other baseline
authentication schemes
Vehicle as a Service (VaaS): Leverage Vehicles to Build Service Networks and Capabilities for Smart Cities
Smart cities demand resources for rich immersive sensing, ubiquitous
communications, powerful computing, large storage, and high intelligence
(SCCSI) to support various kinds of applications, such as public safety,
connected and autonomous driving, smart and connected health, and smart living.
At the same time, it is widely recognized that vehicles such as autonomous
cars, equipped with significantly powerful SCCSI capabilities, will become
ubiquitous in future smart cities. By observing the convergence of these two
trends, this article advocates the use of vehicles to build a cost-effective
service network, called the Vehicle as a Service (VaaS) paradigm, where
vehicles empowered with SCCSI capability form a web of mobile servers and
communicators to provide SCCSI services in smart cities. Towards this
direction, we first examine the potential use cases in smart cities and
possible upgrades required for the transition from traditional vehicular ad hoc
networks (VANETs) to VaaS. Then, we will introduce the system architecture of
the VaaS paradigm and discuss how it can provide SCCSI services in future smart
cities, respectively. At last, we identify the open problems of this paradigm
and future research directions, including architectural design, service
provisioning, incentive design, and security & privacy. We expect that this
paper paves the way towards developing a cost-effective and sustainable
approach for building smart cities.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure
A Survey on Privacy-preserving Blockchain Systems (PPBS) and A Novel PPBS-based Framework for Smart Agriculture
Blockchain and smart contracts have seen significant application over the last decade, revolutionising many industries, including cryptocurrency, finance and banking, and supply chain management. In many cases, however, the transparency provided potentially comes at the cost of privacy. Blockchain does have potential uses to increase privacy-preservation. This paper outlines the current state of privacy preservation utilising Blockchain and Smart Contracts, as applied to a number of fields and problem domains. It provides a background of blockchain, outlines the challenges in blockchain as they relate to privacy, and then classifies into areas in which this paradigm can be applied to increase or protect privacy. These areas are cryptocurrency, data management and storage, e-voting, the Internet of Things, and smart agriculture. This work then proposes PPSAF, a new privacy-preserving framework designed explicitly for the issues that are present in smart agriculture. Finally, this work outlines future directions of research in areas combining future technologies, privacy-preservation and blockchain
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