skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: PEPPER: Privacy-prEserving, auditable, and fair Payment based resource discovery at the PERvasive edge
Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC), a recent addition to the edge computing paradigm, leverages the computing resources of end-user devices to execute computation tasks in close proximity to users. One of the primary challenges in the PEC environment is determining the appropriate servers for offloading computation tasks based on factors, such as computation latency, response quality, device reliability, and cost of service. Computation outsourcing in the PEC ecosystem requires additional security and privacy considerations. Finally, mechanisms need to be in place to guarantee fair payment for the executed service(s). We present 𝑃𝐸𝑃𝑃𝐸𝑅, a novel, privacy-preserving, and decentralized framework that addresses aforementioned challenges by utilizing blockchain technology and trusted execution environments (TEE). 𝑃𝐸𝑃𝑃𝐸𝑅 improves the performance of PEC by allocating resources among end-users efficiently and securely. It also provides the underpinnings for building a financial ecosystem at the pervasive edge. To evaluate the effectiveness of 𝑃𝐸𝑃𝑃𝐸𝑅, we developed and deployed a proof of concept implementation on the Ethereum blockchain, utilizing Intel SGX as the TEE technology. We propose a simple but highly effective remote attestation method that is particularly beneficial to PEC compared to the standard remote attestation method used today. Our extensive comparison experiment shows that 𝑃𝐸𝑃𝑃𝐸𝑅 is 1.23Γ— to 2.15Γ— faster than the current standard remote attestation procedure. In addition, we formally prove the security of our system using the universal composability (UC) framework.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2148358 2133407
PAR ID:
10502900
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM AsiaCCS)
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM AsiaCCS)
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
Auditable resource discovery, Ethereum, Privacy-preserving auction, Edge Computing, Trusted Execution Environment.
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Singapore
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Communications (EDGE))
    New breed of applications, such as autonomous driving and their need for computation-aided quick decision making has motivated the delegation of compute-intensive services (e.g., video analytic) to the more powerful surrogate machines at the network edge–edge computing (EC). Recently, the notion of pervasive edge computing (PEC) has emerged, in which users’ devices can join the pool of the computing resources that perform edge computing. Inclusion of users’ devices increases the computing capability at the edge (adding to the infrastructure servers), but in comparison to the conventional edge ecosystems, it also introduces new challenges, such as service orchestration (i.e., service placement, discovery, and migration). We propose uDiscover, a novel user-driven service discovery and utilization framework for the PEC ecosystem. In designing uDiscover, we considered the Named-Data Networking architecture for balancing users workloads and reducing user-perceived latency. We propose proactive and reactive service discovery approaches and assess their performance in PEC and infrastructure-only ecosystems. Our simulation results show that (i) the PEC ecosystem reduces the user-perceived delays by up to 70%, and (ii) uDiscover selects the most suitable server–"accurate" delay estimates with less than 10% error–to execute any given task. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Virtual Event, Republic of Korea, November 15 - 19, 2021)
    Edge Computing is a new computing paradigm where applications operate at the network edge, providing low-latency services with augmented user and data privacy. A desirable goal for edge computing is pervasiveness, that is, enabling any capable and authorized entity at the edge to provide desired edge services--pervasive edge computing (PEC). However, efficient access control of users receiving services and edge servers handling user data, without sacrificing performance is a challenge. Current solutions, based on "always-on" authentication servers in the cloud, negate the latency benefits of services at the edge and also do not preserve user and data privacy. In this paper, we present APECS, an advanced access control framework for PEC, which allows legitimate users to utilize any available edge services without need for communication beyond the network edge. The APECS framework leverages multi-authority attribute-based encryption to create a federated authority, which delegates the authentication and authorization tasks to semi-trusted edge servers, thus eliminating the need for an "always-on" authentication server in the cloud. Additionally, APECS prevents access to encrypted content by unauthorized edge servers. We analyze and prove the security of APECS in the Universal Composability framework and provide experimental results on the GENI testbed to demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of APECS. 
    more » « less
  3. ; (, IEEE wireless communications)
    In edge computing deployments, where devices may be in close proximity to each other, these devices may offload similar computational tasks (i.e., tasks with similar input data for the same edge computing service or for services of the same nature). This results in the execution of duplicate (redundant) computation, which may become a pressing issue for future edge computing environments, since such deployments are envisioned to consist of small-scale data-centers at the edge. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we highlight the importance of paradigms for the deduplication and reuse of computation at the network edge. Such paradigms have the potential to significantly reduce the completion times for offloaded tasks, accommodating more users, devices, and tasks with the same volume of deployed edge computing resources, however, they come with their own technical challenges. Finally, we present a multi-layer architecture to enable computation deduplication and reuse at the network edge and discuss open challenges and future research directions. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Computing Surveys)
    Cloud computing is a network model of on-demand access for sharing configurable computing resource pools. Compared with conventional service architectures, cloud computing introduces new security challenges in secure service management and control, privacy protection, data integrity protection in distributed databases, data backup, and synchronization. Blockchain can be leveraged to address these challenges, partly due to the underlying characteristics such as transparency, traceability, decentralization, security, immutability, and automation. We present a comprehensive survey of how blockchain is applied to provide security services in the cloud computing model and we analyze the research trends of blockchain-related techniques in current cloud computing models. During the reviewing, we also briefly investigate how cloud computing can affect blockchain, especially about the performance improvements that cloud computing can provide for the blockchain. Our contributions include the following: (i) summarizing the possible architectures and models of the integration of blockchain and cloud computing and the roles of cloud computing in blockchain; (ii) classifying and discussing recent, relevant works based on different blockchain-based security services in the cloud computing model; (iii) simply investigating what improvements cloud computing can provide for the blockchain; (iv) introducing the current development status of the industry/major cloud providers in the direction of combining cloud and blockchain; (v) analyzing the main barriers and challenges of integrated blockchain and cloud computing systems; and (vi) providing recommendations for future research and improvement on the integration of blockchain and cloud systems. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; (, MOBIMEDIA 2019, June 29-30, Weihai, People's Republic of China)
    With distributed communication, computation, and storage resources close to end users, edge computing has great potentials to support delay-sensitive industrial applications involving intelligent edge devices. Cognitive portable ground penetrating radars (GPRs) are expected to achieve high-quality sensing performance in a variety of industrial environments by operating intelligently and adaptively under varying sensing conditions. Although edge computing makes it very promising to develop cognitive portable GPRs, both strict performance requirement and trade-offs between communication and computation pose significant challenges. This paper presents an edge computing framework for cognitive portable GPRs. Specifically, the system architecture of an EC-enabled cognitive portable GPR is developed. Based on the identification of various involved computation tasks, an offloading policy was proposed to determine whether computation tasks should be executed locally or offloaded to the edge server. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed methods. The framework also provides insight into the design of cognitive Internet of things (IoT) supported by edge computing. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email