This work introduces a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)-based trust verification protocol integrated within a Pyramid Tree peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, designed to enable secure and scalable communication in decentralized systems. The protocol ensures verifiable peer authentication at each hop without revealing private information, fostering trust in dynamic, trustless environments. Our analysis shows that the ZKP message overhead grows linearly with the tree depth d and the number of puzzles k , while remaining independent of the total number of peers N . Since d ≪ n ≪ N , where n is the number of distinct resources types, the protocol ensures high security with low message complexity. This makes it ideal for large-scale, resource-constrained applications such as federated learning, IoT, and edge computing. The proposed solution offers an effective balance between trust, efficiency, and scalability, positioning it as a robust foundation for next-generation distributed architectures.

The integration of blockchain with Internet of Things (IoT) systems offers promising opportunities for decentralized, auditable, and tamper resistant access control. However, most existing approaches rely solely on software simulations, leaving a critical gap in understanding blockchain based authorization performance on real IoT hardware. This paper presents a federated IoT access control framework in which a Raspberry Pi operates as the Primary Group Head, coordinating role assignments, resource governance, and behavioral evaluation through Ethereum smart contracts. The system replaces centralized authority with a decentralized enforcement model, enabling on chain policy verification, misbehavior reporting, and immutable auditability of access events. A functional prototype is implemented to evaluate feasibility, performance, and operational constraints in realistic IoT settings. Experimental results demonstrate that average latency ranges from 300 to 600 milliseconds for key blockchain operations. Gas cost ranges from few hundreds to million for access control deployment function. The proposed architecture achieves reliable decentralized access management while maintaining practicality for resource-constrained environments, offering a concrete pathway for deploying blockchain enabled access control in next generation smart systems.

Residue Class (RC)-based peer-to-peer (P2P) networks employ structured group-head overlays to achieve scalable, locality-aware routing; however, the reliance on intermediate group heads exposes the forwarding process to insider attacks. A malicious group head can modify, replace, or forge forwarded data while remaining undetected, undermining end-to-end integrity. This paper proposes a Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof (NIZKP)–based forwarding mechanism that enforces cryptographically verifiable hop-by-hop integrity in RC-based P2P networks. Each group head attaches a NIZKP proving that the outgoing ciphertext is a correct re-encryption of the same plaintext received, while preserving a Pedersen commitment to the file hash. We formally define the forwarding relation, construct a Sigma protocol and its Fiat–Shamir-based non-interactive instantiation, and analyze the resulting completeness, soundness, and zero-knowledge guarantees. We evaluate the proposed mechanism using lightweight simulations over a ten–group-head backbone with forwarding paths of varying lengths. Results show that proof generation incurs an average overhead of approximately 0.12 ms per hop, while proof verification averages 0.10 ms per hop, leading to near-linear end-to-end forwarding latency of 0.19 ms (2 hops), 0.29 ms (3 hops), and 0.37 ms (4 hops). In adversarial scenarios, all tampering attempts are detected at the next honest hop, yielding a 0

Access control in P2P network is extremely challenging due to several reasons such as decentrailized network, anonymous connectivity, high churn, resource constraints and large attack surface. The number of attributes to be tracked grows exponentially as P2P networks scale, exacerbating issues in traditional approaches such as RBAC, ABAC, RuBAC. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based access control framework for P2P networks using Ethereum smart contracts to offer an adaptable, decentralized, and scalable solution. Our token economy framework incentivizes nodes that demonstrate consistent compliance and penalize malicious actions using fungible ERC-20 tokens. Hierarchical static role-based structure consisting of regular members, primary and secondary group is the foundational layer of role management. Dynamic state management through a finite state machine classifies peers as benign, suspicious, or malicious mapping their behavior to the STRIDE threat model. We have used standard blockchain tool stack consisting of OpenZeppelin (contract library), Mocha (testing), and Web3.js (deployment). Our framework is tested with eight test cases, such as privilege escalation and denial-of-service attacks, and built using three types of Ethereum smart contracts. Our focus is on collecting four metrics gas cost, latency, execution time, simultaneous requests that provides a comprehensive view of realistic network activity. This study goes beyond conceptual nature of state-of-art architecture to showcase the realistic mapping between resources, peer roles and standard threats in a P2P network. The experimental results shows low gas costs (upto 1.4 million gas) and fast execution times (80–550 ms), confirming the design efficiency. The framework handles up to five concurrent requests with minimal performance impact, demonstrating strong scalability across roles and threat conditions. This framework enables scalable, behavior-driven governance in P2P networks, enhancing IoT and Web3 security.

Blockchain networks often operate on static, predefined rules for consensus and policy enforcement, which limits their ability to adapt to dynamic conditions or emerging challenges. This paper introduces a consensus framework that replaces rigid policies with automated, real-time decision-making informed by on-chain analytics. The framework integrates a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol to ensure fault tolerance, allowing the network to remain operational even in the presence of malicious nodes. A Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism is also adopted to reduce computational overhead and improve transaction throughput compared to traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems. To improve user accessibility and engagement, we have developed a web-based wallet interface with streamlined account management, transaction tracking, and role-based access controls. The wallet includes a token history chart to visualize daily changes in user balances, such as rewards, penalties, and governance token accumulation. A secure sign-up process keeps sensitive user data safe. The governance token economy lets stakeholders take part in decision-making, vote on policy updates, and help shape the network's future.

This paper presents a cryptographic solution for establishing trust in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, addressing issues of privacy, performance, and anonymity. Our protocol utilizes Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) for continuous trust validation during data transfers. This procedure compels each node to continually demonstrate its integrity, significantly decreasing the potential for network at- tacks. Upon evaluation, the protocol proved to be highly scalable and efficient, expanding network reach without requiring additional control messages. This result validates the protocol’s robustness, suggesting its potential use in larger and more intricate P2P network architectures.

This paper presents a novel approach to developing an innovative prompt tree structure for cybersecurity education and training. It aims to address the challenges of accessibility and technical complexity within the field. The proposed framework utilizes customizable prompts and recipe-style interactions with Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide users in addressing cybersecurity issues. This framework is inspired by the popular fishbone diagram and utilizes credible cybersecurity frameworks such as OWASP and NVD. The system is designed to empower individuals, regardless of their expertise, to effectively understand and implement cybersecurity measures.

This paper introduces a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture tailored for resource discovery in sensor-based health-monitoring devices. Departing from traditional publish/subscribe methods, this architecture employs location-, interest-, and resource-based mechanisms to enhance efficiency and security without relying on a centralized communication model. The proposed architecture comprises a two-level overlay network: a transit ring housing group-heads representing specific resource types, and a fully connected group of peers. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that search latency remains independent of the number of peers, with constant complexity for intra-group data lookup and O(n) complexity for inter-group data lookup, where n signifies the total number of resource types. This architecture enables efficient, cost-effective, and secure management of large data throughput for medical IoT systems, offering an alternative to the centralized communication model.

Ensuring security for highly dynamic peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has always been a challenge, especially for services like online transactions and smart devices. These networks experience high churn rates, making it difficult to maintain appropriate access control. Traditional systems, particularly Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), often fail to meet the needs of a P2P environment. This paper presents a blockchain-based access control framework that uses Ethereum smart contracts to address these challenges. Our framework aims to close the gaps in existing access control systems by providing flexible, transparent, and decentralized security solutions. The proposed framework includes access control contracts (ACC) that manage access based on static and dynamic policies, a Judge Contract (JC) to handle misbehavior, and a Register Contract (RC) to record and manage the interactions between ACCs and JC. The security model combines impact and severity-based threat assessments using the CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) and STRIDE principles, ensuring responses are tailored to different threat levels. This system not only stabilizes the fundamental issues of peer membership but also offers a scalable solution, particularly valuable in areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Web 3.0 technologies.

Cloud-computing capabilities have revolutionized the remote processing of exploding volumes of healthcare data. However, cloud-based analytics capabilities are saddled with a lack of context-awareness and unnecessary access latency issues as data are processed and stored in remote servers. The emerging network infrastructure tier of fog computing can reduce expensive latency by bringing storage, processing, and networking closer to sensor nodes. Due to the growing variety of medical data and service types, there is a crucial need for efficient and secure architecture for sensor-based health-monitoring devices connected to fog nodes. In this paper, we present publish/subscribe and interest/resource-based non-DHT-based peer-to-peer (P2P) RC-based architecture for resource discovery. The publish/subscribe communication model provides a scalable way to handle large volumes of data and messages in real time, while allowing fine-grained access control to messages, thus enabling heightened security. Our two − level overlay network consists of (1) a transit ring containing group-heads representing a particular resource type, and (2) a completely connected group of peers. Our theoretical analysis shows that our search latency is independent of the number of peers. Additionally, the complexity of the intra-group data-lookup protocol is constant, and the complexity of the inter-group data lookup is O(n), where n is the total number of resource types present in the network. Overall, it therefore allows the system to handle large data throughput in a flexible, cost-effective, and secure way for medical IoT systems.

In this paper, we have considered a recently reported 2-layer non-DHT-based structured P2P network. It is an interest-based system and consists of different clusters such that peers in a given cluster possess instances of a particular resource type. It offers efficient data look-up protocols with low latency. However, the architecture lacks in one very important aspect: it is assumed that no peer in any cluster can have more than one resource type, and this could be a very hard restriction practically. This is true for all interest-based works existing in the literature. Therefore, in the present work, we have addressed this issue of generalizing the architecture to overcome this restriction and so far, have come up with some significant initial results. Work is being on to complete the generalization process. We have identified some of our previously reported data look-up protocols that will need to be modified in order to accommodate the new findings toward the generalization and while doing so, we aim at keeping the data look-up latencies of these probable modified protocols unchanged. In addition, our objective is to consider security in communication in the generalized architecture as well. To achieve it, we aim at using mainly public key-based approach for the different look-up protocols reported earlier, because results obtained so far in this direction indicate that the required number of public-private key pairs will be much smaller than the number of symmetric keys if symmetric key-based approach is used.

In recent years, there has been massive growth in the usage of IoT devices. Cloud computing architecture is unable to meet the requirements of bandwidth, real-time response, and latency. To overcome these limitations, fog computing architecture is introduced, which responds to requests from IoT devices and only, if necessary, forwards requests to the cloud. Nonetheless, there are still some requests that need to go to the cloud and get affected by the shortcomings of the cloud. In this work, we propose to add a peer-to-peer (P2P) structure to the fog layer. We have considered our recently reported 2-layer non-DHT-based architecture for P2P networks in which at each level of the hierarchy existing networks are all structured and each such network has a diameter of 1 overlay hop. Such low diameters have huge significance in our proposed P2P fog model and improve fog computing by presenting very efficient data lookup algorithms. In this model, fog nodes can work together to complete the client requests. Consequently, fog nodes are able to fulfill the client requests in the fog layer, which ultimately decreased overheads on the cloud. Additionally, to improve the security in communication in the architecture, we have utilized ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) and presented a new secure algorithm.

Objective: The burden of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) is higher in low- and middle-income countries, but HAIs are often missed because surveillance is not conducted. Here, we describe the identification of and response to a cluster of Burkholderia cepacia complex (BCC) bloodstream infections (BSIs) associated with high mortality in a surgical ICU (SICU) that joined an HAI surveillance network. Setting: A 780-bed, tertiary-level, public teaching hospital in northern India. Methods: After detecting a cluster of BCC in the SICU, cases were identified by reviewing laboratory registers and automated identification and susceptibility testing outputs. Sociodemographic details, clinical records, and potential exposure histories were collected, and a self-appraisal of infection prevention and control (IPC) practices using assessment tools from the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was conducted. Training and feedback were provided to hospital staff. Environmental samples were collected from high-touch surfaces, intravenous medications, saline, and mouthwash. Results: Between October 2017 and October 2018, 183 BCC BSI cases were identified. Case records were available for 121 case patients. Of these 121 cases, 91 (75%) were male, the median age was 35 years, and 57 (47%) died. IPC scores were low in the areas of technical guidelines, human resources, and monitoring and evaluation. Of the 30 environmental samples, 4 grew BCC. A single source of the outbreak was not identified. Conclusions: Implementing standardized HAI surveillance in a low-resource setting detected an ongoing Burkholderia cepacia outbreak. The outbreak investigation and use of a multimodal approach reduced incident cases and informed changes in IPC practices.

Compared to 5G, 6G networks will demand even more ambitious reduction in endto-end latency for packet communication. Recent attempts at breaking the barrier of end-to-end millisecond latencies have focused on re-engineering networks using a hybrid approach consisting of an optical-fiber based backbone network architecture coupled with high-speed wireless networks to connect end-devices to the backbone network. In our approach, a wide area network (WAN) is considered with a high-speed optical fiber grid network as its backbone. After messages from a source node enter the backbone network through a local wireless network, these are delivered very fast to an access point in the backbone network closest to the destination node, followed by its transfer to the local wireless network for delivery to the destination node. We propose a novel routing strategy which is based on distributing the messages in the network in such a way that the average queuing delay of the messages through the backbone network is minimized, and also the route discovery time at each router in the backbone network is drastically reduced. Also, multiple messages destined towards a particular destination router in the backbone network are packed together to form a mailbag, allowing further reductions in processing overheads at intermediate routers and pipelining of mailbag formation and route discovery operations in each router. The performance of the proposed approach green based on these ideas has been theoretically analyzed and then simulated using the ns-3 simulator. Our results show that the average end-to-end latency is less than 380 µs (with only 46-79 µs within the backbone network under varying traffic conditions) for a 1 KB packet size, when using a 500 Gbps optical fiber based backbone network laid over a 15 Km × 15 Km area, a 50 Mbps uplink channel from the source to the backbone network, and a 1 Gbps downlink channel from the backbone network to the destination. The significant reduction in end-to-end latency as compared to existing routing solutions clearly demonstrates the potential of our proposed routing strategy for meeting the ultra-low latency requirements of current 5G and future 6G networks, particularly for mobile edge computing (MEC) application scenarios.

This chapter describes blockchain technology by introducing what this technology is, the history behind it, and various applications of this approach in financial and nonfinancial sectors. Several key features of using this technology are explained, with the "how" and "why" behind the technology, which is having a big impact in the digital world. Finally, this chapter provides real-world examples that utilize this method. Blockchain technology has reached the height of popularity with the advancement of Bitcoin and other digital currencies; but there are various other sectors where it could also be used. Blockchain is a combination of files that are the same on many computers and software that writes and verifies the files. Depending on the technology being used, a file contains various kinds of information, with a stamp that verifies the information. Each transaction is verified by a majority of the parties involved, and once entered, information can never be erased. Since a majority of the people or computers need to verify a transaction, there is much less chance of this technology being hacked. In other words, blockchain is much more secure than other storage systems. No one oversees this technology, and the transactions processed in it are very transparent.

In this paper, we have considered an existing non-DHT-based structured P2P network. It is known as pyramid tree. A node i in this tree represents a group (cluster) of peers that are interested in a particular resource of type i. It is not a conventional tree. In the present work, such a P2P architecture has been the choice because in a pyramid tree, search latency for its inter-group data lookup algorithm is bounded by the tree diameter and is independent of the total number of peers present in the system. In addition, any intra-group data look up communication needs only one overlay hop. In the present work, we have explored some important structural properties of the tree and incorporated them to design an efficient inter cluster broadcast protocol with complexity O(log n) for complete pyramid tree architecture, where n denotes the number of nodes in the tre

In this paper, we have considered a recently reported 2-layer non-DHT-based structured P2P network. Residue Class based on modular arithmetic has been used to realize the overlay topology. At the heart of the architecture (layer-1), there exists a tree like structure, known as pyramid tree. It is not a conventional tree. A node i in this tree represents the cluster-head of a cluster of peers which are interested in a particular resource of type Ri (i.e. peers with a common interest). The cluster-head is the first among these peers to join the system. Root of the tree is assumed to be at level 1. Such a tree is a complete one if at each level j, there are j number of nodes. It is an incomplete one if only at its leaf level, say k, there are less than k number of nodes. Layer 2 consists of the different clusters. The network has some unique structural properties, e.g. each cluster has a diameter of only 1 overlay hop and the diameter of the network is just (2+2d); d being the number of levels of the layer-1 pyramid tree and d depends only on the number of distinct resources. Therefore, the diameter of the network is independent of the number of peers in the whole network. In the present work, we have used some such properties to design low latency intra and inter cluster data lookup protocols. Our choice of considering non-DHT and interest-based overlay networks is justified by the following facts: 1) intra-cluster data lookup protocol has constant complexity and complexity of inter-cluster data lookup is O(d) if tree traversal is used and 2) search latency is independent of the total number of peers present in the overlay network unlike any structured DHT-based network (as a matter fact unlike any existing P2P network, structured or unstructured). Experimental results as well show superiority of the proposed protocols to some noted structured networks from the viewpoints of search latency and complexity involved in it. In addition, we have presented in detail the process of handling churns and proposed a simple yet very effective technique related to cluster partitioning, which, in turn, helps in reducing the number of messages required to be exchanged to handle churns.

Shared tree multicast uses a single core to handle entire multicast traffic load in a domain. In this paper, we present a new multicast approach with multiple cores to reduce the traffic load. Main objective of our present work is to create a group-to-core mapping table a priori, i.e. even before a multicast session begins; it is done immediately after the network is booted. To the best of our knowledge, there does not exist any such multicast architecture for PIM SM related to load sharing. We select statically a set of k primary cores for possible load share with complexity O(n2). This selection is done immediately after the network is booted. At the same time, we create statically k partitions on all possible multicast addresses. The ith partition maps to the ith core in the list of k cores – this means that any new multicast session with multicast group address belonging to the ith partition will use the ith core from the list of k cores to implement PIM SM. In addition, we have incorporated fault tolerance in our approach to tackle the problem of any number of primary core failures.

In this paper, we have applied modular arithmetic, specifically residue class (RC), to design a non-DHT-based structured P2P network. It is an interest based tree architecture. It is known as pyramid tree. A node i in this tree represents a group of peers that are interested in a particular resource of type i. It is not a conventional tree. In the present work, such a P2P architecture has been the choice because in a complete pyramid tree, multiple paths exist between most of its nodes. Such a structural characteristic can be helpful from the viewpoints of designing load balanced as well as robust communication protocols. Besides, search latency for its inter- group data lookup algorithm is bounded by the tree diameter and is independent of the number of the distinct resource types as well as the total number of peers present in the system. In addition, any intra-group data look up communication needs only one overlay hop.