I-Corps: Blockchain-Based Web of Trust for Edge Computing

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The broader impact of this I-Corps project is in enabling more comprehensive, secure, private, and real-time analysis of internet of things (IoT) data generated by connected devices such as mobile phones and connected vehicles. Vast amounts of IoT data are generated each year. Even the most useful IoT data is often transferred through and stored in systems that can have privacy and security problems. This I-Corps project has the potential to refactor how existing IoT workloads work in a secure fashion, enabling the processing of this data to be secured and anonymized directly in the networks in which they are generated. From a commercial standpoint, this technology can refactor how existing corporations deploy analytics to utilize IoT data. Much like cloud infrastructure refactored how large digital workloads were handled into specialized computing centers, this technology can refactor deployment of large-scale, real-time data analytics onto the networks of devices generating them. Ultimately, this means corporations will have access to data processing capabilities that can scale to how fast they generate data, and consumers will benefit from privacy and data security guarantees.This I-Corps project is based on two novel technological developments surrounding blockchain and decentralized systems. The first is a context aware reputation system for digital devices that acts as a peer-to-peer credit system for machines. The second is a way of routing and storing data such that it is impossible to recover any information from a single compromised machine. These two innovations are inspired by the original idea of decentralization as taken from the internet, with the reputation system motivated by Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and the routing/storage mechanism inspired by Named Data Networking and polynomial-based cryptographic techniques. This inspiration is applied and mixed with current understanding of blockchain systems to create a more secure yet still highly scalable peer to peer network. Ultimately, these two systems working together can vastly scale data storage transactions per data shard as contrasted with existing blockchain systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.