Smart contracts, as an added functionality to blockchain, have received increased attention recently. They are executable programs whose instance and state are stored in blockchain. Hence, smart contracts and blockchain enable a trustable, trackable, and irreversible protocol without the need for trusted third parties which generally constitute a single point of failure. If a user creates and distributes a smart contract, others will be able to interact with it while the underlying blockchain ensures a trustable execution. In this paper, we aim to introduce state-of-the-art technologies of the smart contract protocol. We firstly introduce the history of blockchain and smart contracts followed by their step-by-step operations. Then, we introduce the survey results which are classified into four categories based on their purposes: cryptography, access management, social application, and smart contract structure. By presenting the most recent knowledge, this paper will contribute to the advances and proliferation of smart contracts.

This paper introduces the concept of a new service for social Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-based clouds called incentives-based vehicle witnesses as a service (IVWaaS), which employs vehicles moving on the road as the witnesses to designated events. Specifically, we focus on two key enablers, a new secure and privacy preserving service framework as well as a new incentive mechanism to promote the wide adoption of the aforementioned social service. In IVWaaS, when confronted any events, the vehicles in the vicinity with mounted cameras collaborate with other roadside cameras to take pictures of the site of interest around them, and send the pictures to the cloud infrastructure anonymously so that the privacy of the vehicles can be preserved. To stimulate active participation from the users, we also introduce a new privacy-aware incentives mechanism called privacy-aware proportionate receipt collection, in which the contributors are credited according to their contribution to the service and can claim their incentives in a privacy-aware fashion. Service providers can also use the stored pictures as “on-demand picture service.” Other law enforcement agencies can obtain the stored pictorial information and use it as forensics in the investigations.

Cryptographic network protocols play a crucial role in enabling secure data exchange over insecure media in modern network environments. However, even minor vulnerabilities can make protocols an easy target for cyber attackers. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the threats and vulnerabilities stemming from the cryptographic network protocols. Furthermore, it is necessary to comprehensively investigate the weaknesses of network protocols that use cryptographic primitives to inform users and developers about potential attack points. This comprehensive survey examines the relationship between encryption schemes and network protocols and presents an in-depth review of associated threats and vulnerabilities. Given that most cryptographic protocols operate in the Transport and Application layers of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol stack, our investigation primarily centers around encryption algorithms used by representative and notable cryptographic network protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Shell (SSH). Furthermore, we delve into the attackers’ methods to exploit the already identified and existing vulnerabilities, seeking to understand the mechanisms employed to compromise these protocols. Through this survey, we aim to provide the readership with an in-depth understanding of the existing and new vulnerabilities associated with modern cryptographic protocols and provide valuable insights into securing them effectively. We also discuss the existing challenges and future research directions in this domain.

During the past few years, serverless computing has changed the paradigm of application development and deployment in the cloud and edge due to its unique advantages, including easy administration, automatic scaling, built-in fault tolerance, etc. Nevertheless, serverless computing is also facing challenges such as long latency due to the cold start. In this paper, we present an in-depth performance analysis of cold start in the serverless framework and propose HotC, a container-based runtime management framework that leverages the lightweight containers to mitigate the cold start and improve the network performance of serverless applications. HotC maintains a live container runtime pool, analyzes the user input or configuration file, and provides available runtime for immediate reuse. To precisely predict the request and efficiently manage the hot containers, we design an adaptive live container control algorithm combining the exponential smoothing model and Markov chain method. Our evaluation results show that HotC introduces negligible overhead and can efficiently improve the performance of various applications with different network traffic patterns in both cloud servers and edge devices.

Recently an online electric vehicle (OLEV) concept has been introduced, where vehicles are propelled by the wirelessly transmitted electrical power from the infrastructure installed under the road while moving. The absence of secure-and-fair billing is one of the main hurdles to widely adopt this promising technology. This paper introduces a new secure and privacy-aware fair billing framework for OLEV on the move through the charging plates installed under the road. We first propose two extreme lightweight mutual authentication mechanisms, a direct authentication and a hash chain-based authentication between vehicles and the charging plates that can be used for different vehicular speeds on the road. Second, we propose a secure and privacy-aware wireless power transfer on move for the vehicles with bidirectional auditability guarantee by leveraging game theoretic approach. Each charging plate transfers a fixed amount of energy to the vehicle and bills the vehicle in a privacy-aware way accordingly. Our protocol guarantees secure, privacy-aware, and fair billing mechanism for the OLEVs while receiving electric power from the infrastructure installed under the road. Moreover, our proposed framework can play a vital role in eliminating the security and privacy challenges in the deployment of power transfer technology to the OLEVs.