The vision of Web 3.0 is to promote decentralized, intelligent, and autonomous Internet by self-learning and self-adaption of user demands. Such Internet evolution is enabled by ubiquitous and ...low-latency communication and powerful computing, imposing significant challenges on the Web 3.0 architecture and its network orchestration. The successful implementation of Web 3.0 relies on dynamic perception and intelligent decision-making, which is difficult to conceive owing to the heterogeneity and dynamics of networks. Digital twins, as an emerging technology, can map the real-time network status and make optimal decisions to enable intelligent low-latency communications. This article introduces a digital twin architecture to achieve networking virtualization and digitalization for Web 3.0. Based on the architecture, the digital twin-empowered low-latency communication scheme is proposed by disseminating tasks to the resource-sufficient infrastructure, while considering the communication cost of deploying digital twins. Illustrated results demonstrate the superiority of digital twins for low-latency communications in Web 3.0.
Web 3.0 promises a more decentralized and valuable Internet by allowing users to truly own and control their data. This is in contrast to Web 2.0, where users and their generated data and traffic ...have been centralized by several major Internet platforms. In this article, we investigate the design of Web 3.0 platforms through a case study. Specifically, we propose a platform targeting the long-tail market comprising customized products. To handle the decentralized user demands, we realize the concept of virtual enterprise (VE) on the platform, such that different users can cooperate through running specific VEs with predefined workflows, thus greatly reducing the transaction costs. Furthermore, we develop the micro-blockchain protocol, allowing users to store consistent copies of transaction data on their own devices. Unlike existing coin-based blockchains, micro-blockchain does not require global consensus, hence it can naturally scale with more concurrent transactions. Moreover, a data-driven trust model is utilized, so that users can evaluate their trust relationship with others solely based on the data of their past activities, instead of requiring the help of a centralized trust authority, which is usually acted by the platform. At last, we point out the key issues on designing general Web 3.0 applications.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the risks of the metaverse ecosystem. This study provides an overview of the metaverse and its evolution and discusses the various fraud risks it poses ...for organizations (including boards of directors, forensic accountants, auditors and accountants). Given the advantages of the metaverse and the growing interest it is attracting from organizations, this paper sheds light on the importance of mitigating its risks.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a systematic review of the literature on the metaverse and analysis of the fraud triangle, this study examines the different fraud risks it poses. More specifically, this study analyzes 21 articles on the metaverse published between 2021 and 2022 and attempts to answer the following research questions: What are the risks inherent in the metaverse? What are the fraud risks associated with it? What are the opportunities and pressures it brings? What is the rationalization underlying its use? This study conducts the analysis on two levels, that of the individual (user) and that of the organization. This paper summarizes the findings of publications on the metaverse in 2021 and 2022 to discover its various definitions and the opportunities and risks it represents.
Findings
This paper offers an insightful discussion of the advantages and risks the metaverse can bring. Because this analysis shows that any organization could be vulnerable to metaverse risks, this study provides organizations with strategies to deter, detect and prevent fraud and reputational risks. Regulatory bodies, financial authorities, board of directors and fraud investigators should all consider these risks before investing in the metaverse.
Originality/value
This paper adds new insights to the scarce research on the metaverse and cybersecurity by exploring the opportunities and risks it presents. It has several implications for organizations, boards of directors, management and regulatory authorities.
The metaverse is a mixed blend of digital and tangible worlds, indicating the future directions of Internet sector development. This study aimed to assess the factors affecting students' intentions ...to use a metaverse platform. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology was applied as the research model. Data were collected using a survey of 240 students. Two steps in SEM AMOS were conducted to analyze data. The results demonstrated that effort expectancy and social influence positively affect students' intentions to utilize metaverse technology. However, effort expectancy had an insignificant effect on students' intentions to utilize metaverse technology. These findings shed light on the acceptance and adoption of metaverse and identify influencing factors that could increase metaverse utilization. Moreover, this study offers a distinctive and fresh perspective on metaverse technology that can be used as a basis for future research in this field.
Blockchain technology can address data falsification, single point of failure (SPOF), and DDoS attacks on centralized services. By utilizing IoT devices as blockchain nodes, it is possible to solve ...the problem that it is difficult to ensure the integrity of data generated by using current IoT devices. However, as the amount of data generated by IoT devices increases, scalability issues are inevitable. As a result, large amounts of data are managed on external cloud storage or distributed file storage. However, this has the disadvantage of being outside the blockchain network. This makes it difficult to ensure reliability and causes high latency during data download and upload. To address these limitations, we propose a method for managing large amounts of data in the local storage node of a blockchain network with improved latency and reliability. Each blockchain network node stores data, which is synchronized and recovered based on reaching a consensus between smart contracts in a cluster network. The cluster network consists of a service leader node that serves as a gateway for services and a cluster node that stores service data in storage. The blockchain network stores synchronization and recovery metadata created in the cluster network. In addition, we showed that the performance of smart contract execution, network transmission, and metadata generation, which are elements of the proposed consensus process, is not significantly affected. In addition, we built a service leader node and a cluster node by implementing the proposed structure. We compared the performance (latency) of IoT devices when they utilized the proposed architecture and existing external distributed storage. Our results show improvements up to 4 and 10 times reduction in data upload (store) and download latency, respectively.
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Internet-of-Things (IoT) has grown, but security for UAV communications still a challenge due to the distributed nature of line-of-sight communication ...networks. This paper analyses the security issues for UAV-assisted MEC systems, in which UAVs are used to support base stations (BSs) in computing offloaded workloads while also operate as jammers to inhibit malicious eavesdroppers. In this paper, a minimum secure computing capacity maximization issues is addressed by jointly optimizing communication link, computation resources, and UAVs trajectories. These issues are of a non-trivial nature and present a significant challenge to be resolved due to the presence of highly coupled variables. In order to effectively overcome these issues, we introduced the concept of WEB 3.0. Firstly, we introduced blockchain method to enhance security to the UAV assisted MEC system and then to train the data locally and to solve various wireless schemes problems, respectively we proposed a FL method. To contribute to the literature, we developed an effective resource allocation strategy that maximizes computational offloading using WEB 3.0, a Blockchain-based FRL method. Finally, numerical findings indicate that the suggested techniques improve the security computation capacity efficiency of the systems when compared to the standards.
Cloud storage plays an important role in the era of big data and Web 3.0. More and more data owners (DOs) store their data on Cloud for convenience and affordability. However, security and integrity ...completely depend on cloud storage service providers (CSPs) after data outsourcing. Once CSPs commit dishonest actions that lead to data tampering or loss, it will cause huge losses to DOs. Therefore, DOs need to audit the integrity of their data regularly. Traditional auditing schemes rely on trusted third parties (TPAs), which are not always trustworthy. This paper utilizes Blockchain instead of a trusted third-party auditor for data integrity auditing to address the trust crisis between data owners and cloud storage providers. Existing Rank-based Merkle Hash Tree (RMHT)-based auditing approaches suffer from high communication cost, limiting its applications to Blockchain scenarios. To address these issues, we enhance the auditing algorithm through extending the Rank-based Merkle Hash Tree (RMHT) for dynamic update of stored data and using a non-leaf node sampling strategy. These modifications significantly reduce the communication overhead during auditing and update phases. Such optimizations enable the algorithm to be well-suited for the Blockchain environment because proofs are stored on the Blockchain with gas fees. We implement a prototype and perform a security analysis of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate the security and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
In the era of Web 3.0, federated learning has emerged as a crucial technical method in resolving conflicts between data security and open sharing. However, federated learning is susceptible to ...various malicious behaviors, including inference attacks, poisoning attacks, and free-riding attacks. These adversarial activities can lead to privacy breaches, unavailability of global models, and unfair training processes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a trustworthy federated learning scheme (TWFL) that can resist the above malicious attacks. Specifically, we firstly propose a novel adaptive method based on two-trapdoor homomorphic encryption to encrypt gradients uploaded by users, thereby resisting inference attacks. Secondly, we design confidence calculation and contribution calculation mechanisms to resist poisoning attacks and free-riding attacks. Finally, we prove the security of our scheme through formal security analysis, and demonstrate through experiments conducted on MNIST and FASHIONMNIST datasets that TWFL achieves a higher model accuracy of 2%-3% compared to traditional methods such as Median and Trim-mean. In summary, TWFL can not only resist a variety of attacks but also ensure improved accuracy, which is enough to prove that it is a trustworthy solution suitable for Web 3.0 privacy protection scenarios.
