Jinyue Song

Jinyue Song, Tianbo Gu, Prasant Mohapatra

In order to solve security and privacy issues of centralized cloud services, the edge computing network is introduced, where computing and storage resources are distributed to the edge of the network. However, native edge computing is subject to the limited performance of edge devices, which causes challenges in data authorization, data encryption, user privacy, and other fields. Blockchain is currently the hottest technology for distributed networks. It solves the consistent issue of distributed data and is used in many areas, such as cryptocurrency, smart grid, and the Internet of Things. Our work discussed the security and privacy challenges of edge computing networks. From the perspectives of data authorization, encryption, and user privacy, we analyze the solutions brought by blockchain technology to edge computing networks. In this work, we deeply present the benefits from the integration of the edge computing network and blockchain technology, which effectively controls the data authorization and data encryption of the edge network and enhances the architecture's scalability under the premise of ensuring security and privacy. Finally, we investigate challenges on storage, workload, and latency for future research in this field.

Jinyue Song, Tianbo Gu, Yunjie Ge et al.

In recent years, there is an emerging trend that some computing services are moving from cloud to the edge of the networks. Compared to cloud computing, edge computing can provide services with faster response, lower expense, and more security. The massive idle computing resources closing to the edge also enhance the deployment of edge services. Instead of using cloud services from some primary providers, edge computing provides people with a great chance to actively join the market of computing resources. However, edge computing also has some critical impediments that we have to overcome. In this paper, we design an edge computing service platform that can receive and distribute the computing resources from the end-users in a decentralized way. Without centralized trade control, we propose a novel hierarchical smart contract-based decentralized technique to establish the trading trust among users and provide flexible smart contract interfaces to satisfy users. Our system also considers and resolves a variety of security and privacy challenges when utilizing the encryption and distributed access control mechanism. We implement our system and conduct extensive experiments to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed system.