Blockchain Trust Management for Integrated Heterogeneous Networks
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current trust management solutions for integrated heterogeneous networks (HetNets) lack generality, universality, scalability, and trustworthiness, and are vulnerable to single-point attacks and internal threats.
Innovation Solution
A decentralized trust management framework based on blockchain is proposed, which establishes a permissioned blockchain system to evaluate and record trust values of network nodes across different communication networks, ensuring secure and trustworthy network access, routing, and data transmission.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a centralized network management framework is used to realize secure authentication and management, then security and trust can be ensured through trusted parties, but the system becomes vulnerable to single-point attacks and internal hackers, and cannot support authentication on network node trust, user identity and routing trust in a uniform way with high scalability
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the centralized trust management into distributed trust evaluation across multiple autonomous domains. Each domain independently evaluates trust of its nodes and shares evaluations via blockchain, eliminating the single-point vulnerability while maintaining comprehensive trust assessment across the integrated network.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces blockchain as an intermediary layer that mediates trust information exchange between autonomous domains. The blockchain records and verifies trust evaluations from different domains, enabling uniform authentication support across heterogeneous networks without requiring a centralized trusted party.
2Adaptability or versatility
If different types of networks (Internet, mobile cellular, satellite, marine) are merged into a large-scale integrated network system, then seamless one-world network coverage and highly ensured Quality-of-Service can be provided, but new challenges are introduced into network management causing severe threats to security, privacy and trust in multiple aspects
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal trust management framework that works across all network types (Internet, mobile cellular, satellite, marine) through standardized trust evaluation metrics and blockchain-based information exchange. This multi-functional approach enables seamless integration while maintaining consistent security and trust mechanisms across heterogeneous networks.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent allows each autonomous domain to maintain its own local trust evaluation characteristics and security policies suited to its specific network type, while still participating in the global integrated network through standardized blockchain-based trust information sharing. This enables both local optimization and global coordination.
3Reliability
If blockchain technology is applied to realize decentralized trust management, then high fault tolerance, data consistency and non-repudiation can be achieved, but technical challenges remain regarding how to design an efficient and lightweight blockchain system, how to preserve user privacy when multiple network domains belonging to different operators exist, and how to support secure and trustworthy routing with blockchain
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential trust evaluation results from each autonomous domain and stores them on the blockchain, rather than storing complete trust management data. This extraction approach reduces blockchain storage requirements and computational complexity while maintaining the core benefits of fault tolerance and data consistency.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent transforms complex trust management parameters into standardized trust evaluation metrics that can be efficiently stored and processed on the blockchain. By changing the representation of trust data into standardized parameters, the system achieves both reliability and reduced complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and apparatus for trust management in an integrated network, the integrated network comprising a plurality of different communication networks, each of a plurality of different communication networks comprising at least one miner node, at least one authentication node, and at least one network node. A blockchain system is constituted by miner nodes in the different communication networks. A block of a blockchain of the blockchain system comprises an identity of a previous block of the blockchain, a timestamp of generation of the block, a trust value list that contains a trust value of each of at least one network node in the plurality of different communication networks, and a hash code of trust related data that are used to evaluate trust values in the trust value list. The block can be shared within any of the different communication networks, for trust management on the at least one network node based on its trust value.