ZTE Communications ›› 2022, Vol. 20 ›› Issue (4): 3-14.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202204002

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Security in Edge Blockchains: Attacks and Countermeasures

CAO Yinfeng(), CAO Jiannong, WANG Yuqin, WANG Kaile, LIU Xun   

  1. Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR 852, China
  • Received:2022-09-16 Online:2022-12-30 Published:2022-12-30
  • About author:CAO Yinfeng (csyfcao@comp.polyu.edu.hk) received his BS degree in information security from Xidian University (cyberspace security experimental class), China. He is currently a PhD candidate with the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China. His research interests include blockchain systems and cryptography. He received the best paper reward from BlockSys in 2021.|CAO Jiannong is currently the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Professor in data science and the Chair Professor of distributed and mobile computing in the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), China. He is also the Dean of Graduate School, the director of Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Things (RIAIoT) in PolyU, and the director of the Internet and Mobile Computing Lab (IMCL) . He was the founding director and now the associate director of University’s Research Facility in Big Data Analytics (UBDA) in PolyU. He served as the department head from 2011 to 2017. Prof. CAO is a member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of IEEE, a fellow of China Computer Federation (CCF), and an ACM distinguished member. His research interests include distributed systems and blockchain, wireless sensing and networking, big data and machine learning, and mobile cloud and edge computing.|WANG Yuqin is currently a PhD student at the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China. Before that, he received a BE degree from Beijing Forestry University, China in 2021. His research interests include blockchain, edge computing, and wireless algorithm designs.|WANG Kaile received her BE degree in data science and big data technology from the University of International Business and Economics, China in 2021. She is currently a Mphil student at the Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China. Her research interests include federated learning, data mining, and deep learning.|LIU Xun received her BS degree in computer science from Jilin University, China. She received her MS degree in computer science from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China. Her research interests include cryptography and zero-knowledge proof.
  • Supported by:
    the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence of Things, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK RGC Collaborative Research Fund (CRF)(C2004-21GF)

Abstract:

Edge blockchains, the blockchains running on edge computing infrastructures, have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Thanks to data privacy, scalable computing resources, and distributed topology nature of edge computing, edge blockchains are considered promising solutions to facilitating future blockchain applications. However, edge blockchains face unique security issues caused by the deployment of vulnerable edge devices and networks, including supply chain attacks and insecure consensus offloading, which are mostly not well studied in previous literature. This paper is the first survey that discusses the attacks and countermeasures of edge blockchains. We first summarize the three-layer architecture of edge blockchains: blockchain management, blockchain consensus, and blockchain lightweight client. We then describe seven specific attacks on edge blockchain components and discuss the countermeasures. At last, we provide future research directions on securing edge blockchains. This survey will act as a guideline for researchers and developers to design and implement secure edge blockchains.

Key words: blockchain, edge computing, security, survey