Search

Blockchain technologies can enable secure computing environments among mistrusting parties. Permissioned blockchains are particularly enlightened by companies, enterprises, and government agencies due to their efficiency, customizability, and governance-friendly features. Obviously, seamlessly fusing blockchain and cloud computing can significantly benefit permissioned blockchains; nevertheless, most blockchains implemented on clouds are originally designed for loosely-coupled networks where nodes communicate asynchronously, failing to take advantages of the closely-coupled nature of cloud servers. In this paper, we propose an innovative cloud-oriented blockchain – CloudChain, which is a modularized three-layer system composed of the network layer, consensus layer, and blockchain layer. CloudChain is based on a shared-memory model where nodes communicate synchronously by direct memory accesses. We realize the shared-memory model with the Remote Direct Memory Access technology, based on which we propose a shared-memory consensus algorithm to ensure presistence and liveness, the two crucial blockchain security properties countering Byzantine nodes. We also implement a CloudChain prototype based on a RoCEv2-based testbed to experimentally validate our design, and the results verify the feasibility and efficiency of CloudChain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important concept to depict the freshness of an information when it arrives at the destination, the Age-of-Information (AoI) and its relative scheduling works can be a very useful tool to aggregate the information from the end devices to the edge servers in Internet of Vehicles, which can strongly support those time-sensitive services in intelligent transportation system. However, most of the previous works about the AoI scheduling on edge computing are the centralized ones, rely on the reliable communications, and ignore the mobility of vehicles, which may not suit the dynamic environment in Internet of Vehicles. In this paper, we consider the AoI optimization problem in a more comprehensive vehicle model, and present a distributed AoI optimization algorithm based on a single hop end-to-edge wireless network. With an arbitrary power control technique, our algorithm reaches an asymptotically optimal performance on minimizing the expectation of AoI. Both of theoretical analysis and extensive simulations are conducted to verify the correctness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blockchain creates a secure environment on top of strict cryptographic assumptions and rigorous security proofs. It permits on-chain interactions to achieve trustworthy properties such as traceability, transparency, and accountability. However, current blockchain trustworthiness is only confined to on-chain, creating a “trust gap” to the physical, off-chain environment. This is due to the lack of a scheme that can truthfully reflect the physical world in a real-time and consistent manner. Such an absence hinders further blockchain applications in the physical world, especially for the security-sensitive ones. In this paper, we propose a framework to extend blockchain trust from on-chain to off-chain, and take trustworthy vaccine tracing as an example scheme. Our scheme consists of 1) a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-enabled trusted environment monitoring system built with the Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller that continuously senses the inside of a vaccine box through trusted sensors and generates anti-forgery data; and 2) a consistency protocol to upload the environment status data from the TEE system to blockchain in a truthful, real-time consistent, continuous and fault-tolerant fashion. Our security analysis indicates that no adversary can tamper with the vaccine in any way without being captured. We carry out an experiment to record the internal status of a vaccine shipping box during transportation, and the results indicate that the proposed system incurs an average latency of 84 ms in local sensing and processing followed by an average latency of 130 ms to have the sensed data transmitted to and been available in the blockchain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Person reidentification (ReID) is a challenging computer vision task for identifying or verifying one or more persons when the faces are not available. In ReID, the indistinguishable background usually affects the model's perception of the foreground, which reduces the performance of ReID. Generally, the background of the same camera is similar, whereas that of different cameras is quite different. Based on this finding, we propose a template-aware transformer (TAT) method which can learn intersample indistinguishable features by introducing a learnable template for the transformer structure to cut down the model's attention to regions of the image with low discrimination, including backgrounds and occlusions. In the multiheaded attention module of the encoder, this template directs template-aware attention to indistinguishable features of the image and gradually increases the attention to distinguishable features as the encoder block deepens. We also increase the number of templates using side information considering the characteristics of ReID tasks to adapt the model to backgrounds that vary significantly with different camera IDs. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of our theories using various public data sets and achieve competitive results via a quantitative evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a robust communication-efficient decentralized learning algorithm, named RCEDL , to address data heterogeneity , communication heterogeneity and communication efficiency simultaneously in real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address the above challenges in a united framework. In detail, we design a compressed cross-gradient aggregation mechanism with delay to resolve the Non-IID issues, a blocking-resilient mechanism which allows receiving delayed parameters and gradients, and a communication-efficient mechanism including parameters compression and adaptive neighbors selection methods to reduce the communication cost as much as possible. In addition, we also provide convergence analysis of RCEDL and prove its convergence rate O (1 N K ) same with the state-of-the-art decentralized learning algorithms. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate RCEDL algorithm on two widely used datasets CIFAR-10 and MNIST under different experimental settings. Compared with the state-of-the-art baseline methods, the proposed RCEDL is much more robust with higher accuracy and at least 3.4 × communication cost reduction under the heterogeneous environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]