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

I-Corps项目的广泛影响在于，能够对手机和联网车辆等联网设备生成的物联网（IoT）数据进行更全面、安全、私密和实时的分析。每年都会产生大量的物联网数据。即使是最有用的物联网数据也经常通过可能存在隐私和安全问题的系统传输和存储。这个I-Corps项目有可能以安全的方式重构现有物联网工作负载的工作方式，使这些数据的处理能够在生成数据的网络中得到保护和匿名化。从商业角度来看，这项技术可以重构现有企业如何部署分析以利用物联网数据。就像云基础设施重构了如何将大型数字工作负载处理到专门的计算中心一样，这项技术可以重构大规模、实时数据分析的部署到生成数据的设备网络上。最终，这意味着企业将获得数据处理能力，可以扩展到他们生成数据的速度，而消费者将从隐私和数据安全保障中受益。这个I-Corps项目是基于围绕区块链和分散系统的两项新技术发展。第一个是数字设备的上下文感知信誉系统，作为机器的点对点信用系统。第二种是一种路由和存储数据的方法，这样就不可能从一台受损的机器上恢复任何信息。这两项创新的灵感来自互联网的去中心化的原始想法，声誉系统的动机是相当好的隐私（PGP），路由/存储机制的灵感是命名数据网络和基于多项式的加密技术。将这种灵感与当前对区块链系统的理解相结合并加以应用，以创建更安全但仍具有高度可扩展性的点对点网络。最终，与现有的区块链系统相比，这两个系统一起工作可以极大地扩展每个数据分片的数据存储事务。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.