Traditionally, the data plane has been designed with fixed functions to forward packets using a small set of protocols. This closed-design paradigm has limited the capability of the switches to proprietary implementations which are hard-coded by vendors, inducing a lengthy, costly, and inflexible process. Recently, data plane programmability has attracted significant attention from both the research community and the industry, permitting operators and programmers in general to run customized packet processing functions. This open-design paradigm is paving the way for an unprecedented wave of innovation and experimentation by reducing the time of designing, testing, and adopting new protocols; enabling a customized, top-down approach to develop network applications; providing granular visibility of packet events defined by the programmer; reducing complexity and enhancing resource utilization of the programmable switches; and drastically improving the performance of applications that are offloaded to the data plane. Despite the impressive advantages of programmable data plane switches and their importance in modern networks, the literature has been missing a comprehensive survey. To this end, this paper provides a background encompassing an overview of the evolution of networks from legacy to programmable, describing the essentials of programmable switches, and summarizing their advantages over Software-defined Networking (SDN) and legacy devices. The paper then presents a unique, comprehensive taxonomy of applications developed with P4 language; surveying, classifying, and analyzing more than 200 articles; discussing challenges and considerations; and presenting future perspectives and open research issues.

In centralized environments, the results of voting events have always been questionable and perceived differently by voters. Most existing E-Voting systems are based on centralized servers where the voters must trust the organizing authority for the integrity of the results. In this paper we propose a novel approach for a decentralized trustless voting platform that relies on Blockchain technology to solve the trust issues. The main features of this system include ensuring data integrity and transparency, and enforcing one vote per mobile phone number for every poll with ensured privacy. To accomplish this, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is used as the Blockchain runtime environment, on which transparent, consistent and deterministic smart contracts will be deployed by organizers for each voting event to run the voting rules. Users are authenticated through their mobile phone numbers without the need of a third party server. Results showed that the system is feasible and may offer a step towards ideal environments for such experience.

One particular concern that Public Safety Organizations (PSO) must account for whilst engaging in many activities is decreasing the effect of vehicle accidents, aiding as many injured people as possible and providing 24/7 on the spot rescue. The Red Cross humanitarian organization is one of the most known PSOs to be present on-site whenever an accident or a disaster takes place. However, some of the rescue teams face difficulty in reaching the injured people to due late alerts and insufficient information of the specific accident location. The advent of the mobile phone and Internet of Things (IoT) industries reshaped the way people communicate and brought a paradigm shift to public and private services [1]. This ever-evolving technology marked the beginning of new era affecting the lives of people and various businesses. This paper conveys a smart and reliable IoT system solution which instantly notifies the PSO headquarter whenever an accident takes place and pinpoints its geographic coordinates on the map. When an accident takes place, a shock sensor detects it. Then, an algorithm is applied to process the sensor signal and send the geographic location along with some ancillary information to the PSO headquarter, indicating accident occurrence. This is a promising system expected to aid in the tedious rescuing process by reporting in a matter of seconds the location of an accident, the passengers injured, blood types, thus lowering death's rates. The geographical data collected from this system could be relied upon as admissible evidence or indicator of the road state and conditions.

The end of Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling has slowed processor improvements in the past decade. While multi-core processors have improved performance, they are limited by the application’s level of parallelism, as prescribed by Amdahl’s Law. This has led to the emergence of domain-specific processors that specialize in a narrow range of functions. Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) can be seen as a revolutionary technology that combines heterogeneous domain-specific processors and general-purpose cores to offload infrastructure tasks. Despite the impressive advantages of SmartNICs and their importance in modern networks, the literature has been missing a comprehensive survey. To this end, this paper provides a background encompassing an overview of the evolution of NICs from basic to SmartNICs, describing their architectures, development environments, and advantages over legacy NICs. The paper then presents a comprehensive taxonomy of applications offloaded to SmartNICs, covering network, security, storage, and compute functions. Challenges associated with SmartNIC development and deployment are discussed, along with current initiatives and open research issues.

Public key distribution and device authentication remain the main security challenges in many systems and applications. Existing solutions are based on Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) backed by Certificate Authorities (CA) to validate the authenticity of the devices. However, distributing and provisioning certificates for each client showed to be impractical especially for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In this paper we propose a distributed PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) platform based on the Ethereum Blockchain. It contains a decentralized key-store that holds the public keys of all devices, and includes a generic protocol for PSK (Pre-Shared Keys) distribution. PSK keys can then be used by PSK-based security protocols (TLS-PSK, DTLS-PSK, SRTP...) for securing the communication channel between two devices. This platform includes a client-side module, a public key management module configured on the server, and a smart contract software deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain network. This generic platform can be used by many applications for client and server authentication, data integrity, and secure peer to peer communications. Moreover, this promising system may potentially eliminate the trust requirement imposed by the existing PKI/CAs infrastructure on clients.