PEPPER: Privacy-prEserving, auditable, and fair Payment based resource discovery at the PERvasive edge

Dr. Satyajayant Misra, Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University. April 7th 2-3pm. WWH 335

Pervasive Edge Computing (PEC), a recent addition to the edge computing paradigm, leverages the computing resources of end-user devices to execute computation tasks in close proximity to end users. One of the primary challenges in the PEC environment is determining the appropriate servers for offloading computation tasks based on factors, such as computation latency, response quality, device reliability, and cost of service. Computation outsourcing in the PEC ecosystem requires additional security and privacy considerations. Finally, mechanisms need to be in place to guarantee fair payment for the executed service(s).

We present PEPPER, a novel, privacy-preserving, and decentralized framework that addresses aforementioned challenges by utilizing blockchain technology and trusted execution environments (TEE). PEPPER improves the performance of PEC by allocating requests among end-users efficiently and securely. It also provides the underpinnings for building a financial ecosystem at the pervasive edge, thus democratizing the edge. To evaluate the effectiveness of 𝑃𝐸𝑃𝑃𝐸𝑅, we developed and deployed a proof-of-concept implementation on the Ethereum blockchain, utilizing Intel SGX as the TEE technology. We proposed a simple but highly effective remote attestation method that is particularly beneficial to PEC compared to the standard remote attestation method used today. Our extensive comparison experiment shows that PEPPER is 1.23× to 2.15× faster than the current standard remote attestation procedure. In addition, we formally prove the security of our system using the universal composability (UC) framework. Finally, we will finish this talk with a brief overview of future work and interests.

Professor Misra is a professor in computer science and electrical and computer engineering in New Mexico State University, the Nakayama Endowed Professor of Engineering, and the associate dean of research in the college of engineering. Some of his research interests include anonymity, security and survivability in networks, the future Internet, blockchain and decentralized finance and in Industry 4.0. Dr. Misra has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications with more than 10,000 international citations. He is the TPC co-chair for the IEEE INFOCOM 2026. He has served on the editorial board of several journals and on the program committee of several conferences. Dr. Misra is the Director of the NSF funded, $7M distributed manufacturing research center, DREAM. He has received over $40 million in research funding from several federal funding agencies, including the prestigious NSF RINGS and NSF CREATIV grants as PI. He has also been recognized as an outstanding mentor in NM twice (2019 and 2021).