News

News /

Talk by Salil Kanhere

21-03-2018
feature image

Salil Kanhere who is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia, will give a talk on "A Lightweight Scalable Blockchain for Internet of Things" on Tuesday, March 22nd, on the 6th floor (606 room) of the Evelpidon Str. building (graduate program building) of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB)

Talk abstract: BlockChain (BC) has attracted tremendous attention due to its immutable nature and the associated security and privacy benefits. In this talk, we argue that BC has the potential to overcome security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). However, traditional instantiations of BC are computationally expensive, have limited scalability and incur significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited to the IoT context. We propose a tiered Lightweight Scalable BC (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements. We explore LSB in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Low resource devices in a smart home benefit from a centralized manager that establishes shared keys for communication and processes all incoming and outgoing requests. LSB achieves decentralization by forming an overlay network where high resource devices jointly manage a public BC that ensures end-to-end privacy and security. The overlay is organized as distinct clusters to reduce overheads and the cluster heads are responsible for managing the public BC. LSB incorporates several optimizations which include algorithms for lightweight consensus, distributed trust and throughput management. Qualitative arguments demonstrate that LSB is resilient to several security attacks. Extensive simulations show that LSB decreases packet overhead and delay and increases BC scalability compared to relevant baselines.

Presenter's biography: Salil Kanhere is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia. His research interests include Internet of Things, blockchain, pervasive and mobile computing, crowdsourcing, privacy and security. He has published 175 peer-reviewed articles and delivered over 20 keynote talks and technical tutorials on these topics. Salil regularly serves on the organizing committee of a number of IEEE and ACM international conferences. He currently serves as the Area Editor for Pervasive and Mobile Computing and Computer Communications. Salil is a Senior Member of both the IEEE and the ACM. He is a recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship.