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Huawei Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Huawei Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Blockchain Infrastructure for Intelligent Cyber--Physical--Social Systems:Post-Quantum Security, Interoperability, and Trustworthy Data Economies in the Era of Embodied AI

The deployment of embodied artificial intelligence via world-model-based robotics presents a transformative opportunity for blockchain infrastructure, establishing urgent demand for trustworthy data provenance, cross-organizational governance, and incentive-compatible sharing across decentralized ecosystems. Simultaneously, quantum computing advances recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics and the Turing Award threaten the cryptographic primitives securing these data economies, creating an interdependent imperative: long-lived verification for embodied AI depends on crypto-agile architectures capable of withstanding quantum adversaries. This tutorial examines blockchain as the coordination layer bridging this dual transition, from financial substrate to foundational Cyber-Physical-Social Systems infrastructure that simultaneously secures against quantum cryptanalysis and enables scalable, trustworthy data economies. The session opens with an immersive AWS Braket demonstration engaging participants with superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom hardware to assess cryptographic threat timelines and witness ECDSA-to-post-quantum signature transitions. Five integrated modules progress from embodied AI and world-model requirements through quantum hardware reality and evidence-based security migration, to scalable cross-shard architectures via BrokerChain protocols, trustworthy data economies implementing Croissant metadata standards and robotic learning provenance, and industry ecosystem integration for multi-modal cloud deployment. By bridging quantum hardware realities with embodied AI data requirements, this tutorial charts blockchain as unified infrastructure for next-generation decentralized intelligent environments, providing open-source frameworks and roadmaps for architecting quantum-resistant, interoperable, and data-trustworthy systems.

cs.CR

ContribChain: A Stress-Balanced Blockchain Sharding Protocol with Node Contribution Awareness

Existing blockchain sharding protocols have focused on eliminating imbalanced workload distributions. However, even with workload balance, disparities in processing capabilities can lead to differential stress among shards, resulting in transaction backlogs in certain shards. Therefore, achieving stress balance among shards in the dynamic and heterogeneous environment presents a significant challenge of blockchain sharding. In this paper, we propose ContribChain, a blockchain sharding protocol that can automatically be aware of node contributions to achieve stress balance. We calculate node contribution values based on the historical behavior to evaluate the performance and security of nodes. Furthermore, we propose node allocation algorithm NACV and account allocation algorithm P-Louvain, which both match shard performance with workload to achieve stress balance. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to compare our work with state-of-the-art baselines based on real Ethereum transactions. The evaluation results show that P-Louvain reduces allocation execution time by 86% and the cross-shard transaction ratio by 7.5%. Meanwhile, ContribChain improves throughput by 35.8% and reduces the cross-shard transaction ratio by 16%.

cs.NI

Efficient Twin Migration in Vehicular Metaverses: Multi-Agent Split Deep Reinforcement Learning with Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Generation

Vehicle Twins (VTs) as digital representations of vehicles can provide users with immersive experiences in vehicular metaverse applications, e.g., Augmented Reality (AR) navigation and embodied intelligence. VT migration is an effective way that migrates the VT when the locations of physical entities keep changing to maintain seamless immersive VT services. However, an efficient VT migration is challenging due to the rapid movement of vehicles, dynamic workloads of Roadside Units (RSUs), and heterogeneous resources of the RSUs. To achieve efficient migration decisions and a minimum latency for the VT migration, we propose a multi-agent split Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework combined with spatio-temporal trajectory generation. In this framework, multiple split DRL agents utilize split architecture to efficiently determine VT migration decisions. Furthermore, we propose a spatio-temporal trajectory generation algorithm based on trajectory datasets and road network data to simulate vehicle trajectories, enhancing the generalization of the proposed scheme for managing VT migration in dynamic network environments. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only enhances the Quality of Experience (QoE) by 29% but also reduces the computational parameter count by approximately 25% while maintaining similar performances, enhancing users' immersive experiences in vehicular metaverses.

cs.NI

Efficient and Trustworthy Block Propagation for Blockchain-enabled Mobile Embodied AI Networks: A Graph Resfusion Approach

By synergistically integrating mobile networks and embodied artificial intelligence (AI), Mobile Embodied AI Networks (MEANETs) represent an advanced paradigm that facilitates autonomous, context-aware, and interactive behaviors within dynamic environments. Nevertheless, the rapid development of MEANETs is accompanied by challenges in trustworthiness and operational efficiency. Fortunately, blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable characteristics, offers promising solutions for MEANETs. However, existing block propagation mechanisms suffer from challenges such as low propagation efficiency and weak security for block propagation, which results in delayed transmission of vehicular messages or vulnerability to malicious tampering, potentially causing severe traffic accidents in blockchain-enabled MEANETs. Moreover, current block propagation strategies cannot effectively adapt to real-time changes of dynamic topology in MEANETs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a graph Resfusion model-based trustworthy block propagation optimization framework for consortium blockchain-enabled MEANETs. Specifically, we propose an innovative trust calculation mechanism based on the trust cloud model, which comprehensively accounts for randomness and fuzziness in the miner trust evaluation. Furthermore, by leveraging the strengths of graph neural networks and diffusion models, we develop a graph Resfusion model to effectively and adaptively generate the optimal block propagation trajectory. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other routing mechanisms in terms of block propagation efficiency and trustworthiness. Additionally, the results highlight its strong adaptability to dynamic environments, making it particularly suitable for rapidly changing MEANETs.

cs.AI

BrokerChain: A Blockchain Sharding Protocol by Exploiting Broker Accounts

State-of-the-art blockchain sharding solutions such as Monoxide, can cause severely imbalanced distribution of transaction (TX) workloads across all blockchain shards due to the deployment policy of their accounts. Imbalanced TX distributions then produce hot shards, in which the cross-shard TXs may experience an unlimited confirmation latency. Thus, how to address the hot-shard issue and how to reduce crossshard TXs become significant challenges of blockchain sharding. Through reviewing the related studies, we find that a crossshard TX protocol that can achieve workload balance among all shards and simultaneously reduce the quantity of crossshard TXs is still absent from the literature. To this end, we propose BrokerChain, which is a cross-shard blockchain protocol dedicated to account-based state sharding. Essentially, BrokerChain exploits fine-grained state partition and account segmentation. We also elaborate on how BrokerChain handles cross-shard TXs through broker accounts. The security issues and other properties of BrokerChain are analyzed rigorously. Finally, we conduct comprehensive evaluations using an opensource blockchain sharding prototype named BlockEmulator. The evaluation results show that BrokerChain outperforms other baselines in terms of transaction throughput, transaction confirmation latency, the queue size of the transaction pool, and workload balance.

cs.CR

GriDB: Scaling Blockchain Database via Sharding and Off-Chain Cross-Shard Mechanism

Blockchain databases have attracted widespread attention but suffer from poor scalability due to underlying non-scalable blockchains. While blockchain sharding is necessary for a scalable blockchain database, it poses a new challenge named on-chain cross-shard database services. Each cross-shard database service (e.g., cross-shard queries or inter-shard load balancing) involves massive cross-shard data exchanges, while the existing cross-shard mechanisms need to process each cross-shard data exchange via the consensus of all nodes in the related shards (i.e., on-chain) to resist a Byzantine environment of blockchain, which eliminates sharding benefits. To tackle the challenge, this paper presents GriDB, the first scalable blockchain database, by designing a novel off-chain cross-shard mechanism for efficient cross-shard database services. Borrowing the idea of off-chain payments, GriDB delegates massive cross-shard data exchange to a few nodes, each of which is randomly picked from a different shard. Considering the Byzantine environment, the untrusted delegates cooperate to generate succinct proof for cross-shard data exchanges, while the consensus is only responsible for the low-cost proof verification. However, different from payments, the database services' verification has more requirements (e.g., completeness, correctness, freshness, and availability); thus, we introduce several new authenticated data structures (ADS). Particularly, we utilize consensus to extend the threat model and reduce the complexity of traditional accumulator-based ADS for verifiable cross-shard queries with a rich set of relational operators. Moreover, we study the necessity of inter-shard load balancing for a scalable blockchain database and design an off-chain and live approach for both efficiency and availability during balancing.

cs.DB

Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning for Edge-enabled AI-Generated Content Services

As Metaverse emerges as the next-generation Internet paradigm, the ability to efficiently generate content is paramount. AIGenerated Content (AIGC) emerges as a key solution, yet the resource intensive nature of large Generative AI (GAI) models presents challenges. To address this issue, we introduce an AIGC-as-a-Service (AaaS) architecture, which deploys AIGC models in wireless edge networks to ensure broad AIGC services accessibility for Metaverse users. Nonetheless, an important aspect of providing personalized user experiences requires carefully selecting AIGC Service Providers (ASPs) capable of effectively executing user tasks, which is complicated by environmental uncertainty and variability. Addressing this gap in current research, we introduce the AI-Generated Optimal Decision (AGOD) algorithm, a diffusion model-based approach for generating the optimal ASP selection decisions. Integrating AGOD with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), we develop the Deep Diffusion Soft Actor-Critic (D2SAC) algorithm, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of ASP selection. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that D2SAC outperforms seven leading DRL algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed AGOD algorithm has the potential for extension to various optimization problems in wireless networks, positioning it as a promising approach for future research on AIGC-driven services. The implementation of our proposed method is available at: https://github.com/Lizonghang/AGOD.

cs.NI

BlockEmulator: An Emulator Enabling to Test Blockchain Sharding Protocols

Numerous blockchain simulators have been proposed to allow researchers to simulate mainstream blockchains. However, we have not yet found a testbed that enables researchers to develop and evaluate their new consensus algorithms or new protocols for blockchain sharding systems. To fill this gap, we developed BlockEmulator, which is designed as an experimental platform, particularly for emulating blockchain sharding mechanisms. BlockEmulator adopts a lightweight blockchain architecture so developers can only focus on implementing their new protocols or mechanisms. Using layered modules and useful programming interfaces offered by BlockEmulator, researchers can implement a new protocol with minimum effort. Through experiments, we test various functionalities of BlockEmulator in two steps. Firstly, we prove the correctness of the emulation results yielded by BlockEmulator by comparing the theoretical analysis with the observed experiment results. Secondly, other experimental results demonstrate that BlockEmulator can facilitate measuring a series of metrics, including throughput, transaction confirmation latency, cross-shard transaction ratio, the queuing status of transaction pools, workload distribution across blockchain shards, etc. We have made BlockEmulator open-source in Github.

cs.CR

A Novel Two-Layer DAG-based Reactive Protocol for IoT Data Reliability in Metaverse

Many applications, e.g., digital twins, rely on sensing data from Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which is used to infer event(s) and initiate actions to affect an environment. This gives rise to concerns relating to data integrity and provenance. One possible solution to address these concerns is to employ blockchain. However, blockchain has high resource requirements, thereby making it unsuitable for use on resource-constrained IoT devices. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach, called two-layer directed acyclic graph (2LDAG), whereby IoT devices only store a digital fingerprint of data generated by their neighbors. Further, it proposes a novel proof-of-path (PoP) protocol that allows an operator or digital twin to verify data in an on-demand manner. The simulation results show 2LDAG has storage and communication cost that is respectively two and three orders of magnitude lower than traditional blockchain and also blockchains that use a DAG structure. Moreover, 2LDAG achieves consensus even when 49\% of nodes are malicious.

cs.DC

MetaOpera: A Cross-Metaverse Interoperability Protocol

With the rapid evolution of metaverse technologies, numerous metaverse applications have arisen for various purposes and scenarios. This makes interoperability across metaverses becomes one of the fundamental technology enablers in the metaverse space. The aim of interoperability is to provide a seamless experience for users to interact with metaverses. However, the development of cross-metaverse interoperability is still in its initial stage in both industry and academia. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art cross-metaverse interoperability schemes. These schemes are designed for specific interoperating scenarios and do not generalize for all types of metaverses. To this end, we propose MetaOpera, a generalized cross-metaverse interoperability protocol. By connecting to the MetaOpera, users, and objects in metaverses that rely on centralized servers or decentralized blockchains are able to interoperate with each other. We also develop a proof-of-concept implementation for MetaOpera, evaluate its performance, and compare it with a state-of-the-art cross-metaverse scheme based on Sidechains. Simulation results demonstrate that the size of cross-metaverse proof and the average time of cross-metaverse transactions using the proposed solution are respectively about eight times and three times smaller than the Sidechains scheme. This paper also suggests a number of open issues and challenges faced by cross-metaverse interoperability that may inspire future research.

cs.CY

Financial Crimes in Web3-empowered Metaverse: Taxonomy, Countermeasures, and Opportunities

At present, the concept of metaverse has sparked widespread attention from the public to major industries. With the rapid development of blockchain and Web3 technologies, the decentralized metaverse ecology has attracted a large influx of users and capital. Due to the lack of industry standards and regulatory rules, the Web3-empowered metaverse ecosystem has witnessed a variety of financial crimes, such as scams, code exploit, wash trading, money laundering, and illegal services and shops. To this end, it is especially urgent and critical to summarize and classify the financial security threats on the Web3-empowered metaverse in order to maintain the long-term healthy development of its ecology. In this paper, we first outline the background, foundation, and applications of the Web3 metaverse. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview and taxonomy of the security risks and financial crimes that have emerged since the development of the decentralized metaverse. For each financial crime, we focus on three issues: a) existing definitions, b) relevant cases and analysis, and c) existing academic research on this type of crime. Next, from the perspective of academic research and government policy, we summarize the current anti-crime measurements and technologies in the metaverse. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges in behavioral mining and the potential regulation of financial activities in the metaverse. The overview of this paper is expected to help readers better understand the potential security threats in this emerging ecology, and to provide insights and references for financial crime fighting.

cs.CR

Economic Systems in Metaverse: Basics, State of the Art, and Challenges

Economic systems play pivotal roles in the metaverse. However, we have not yet found an overview that systematically introduces economic systems for the metaverse. Therefore, we review the state-of-the-art solutions, architectures, and systems related to economic systems. When investigating those state-of-the-art studies, we keep two questions in our mind: (1) what is the framework of economic systems in the context of the metaverse, and (2) what activities would economic systems engage in the metaverse? This article aims to disclose insights into the economic systems that work for both the current and the future metaverse. To have a clear overview of the economic-system framework, we mainly discuss the connections among three fundamental elements in the metaverse, i.e., digital creation, digital assets, and the digital trading market. After that, we elaborate on each topic of the proposed economic-system framework. Those topics include incentive mechanisms, monetary systems, digital wallets, decentralized finance (DeFi) activities, and cross-platform interoperability for the metaverse. For each topic, we mainly discuss three questions: a) the rationale of this topic, b) why the metaverse needs this topic, and c) how this topic will evolve in the metaverse. Through this overview, we wish readers can better understand what economic systems the metaverse needs, and the insights behind the economic activities in the metaverse.

cs.CY

When Digital Economy Meets Web3.0: Applications and Challenges

With the continuous development of web technology, Web3.0 has attracted a considerable amount of attention due to its unique decentralized characteristics. The digital economy is an important driver of high-quality economic development and is currently in a rapid development stage. In the digital economy scenario, the centralized nature of the Internet and other characteristics usually bring about security issues such as infringement and privacy leakage. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how to use Web3.0 technologies to solve the pain points encountered in the development of the digital economy by fully exploring the critical technologies of digital economy and Web3.0. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of Web3.0 that should be integrated with the digital economy to better find the entry point to solve the problems by examining the latest advances of Web3.0 in machine learning, finance, and data management. We hope this research will inspire those who are involved in both academia and industry, and finally help to build a favourable ecology for the digital economy.

cs.CY

Consensusless Blockchain: A Promising High-Performance Blockchain without Consensus

Consensus is unnecessary when the truth is available. In this paper, we present a new perspective of rebuilding the blockchain without consensus. When the consensus phase is eliminated from a blockchain, transactions could be canonized quickly using a well-defined universal rule without consuming hashing power. Thus, the transactions per second(TPS) metric of such the consensusless blockchain can be largely boosted. Although consensus blockchain is promising, several technical challenges are also crucial. For example, double-spending attacks and frequent forking events must be prevented, the credit of block's minting must be carefully defined, and etc. To address those technical challenges, we propose several solutions for our consensusless blockchain (CB), including a naive monotonic scoring mechanism to calculate the ranking of each block in the chain, and a two-stage witness mechanism to add new blocks. The proposed CB chain is promising to offer a simplified and equipment-cheap infrastructure for rich real-world decentralized applications.

cs.NI

Fusing Blockchain and AI with Metaverse: A Survey

Metaverse as the latest buzzword has attracted great attention from both industry and academia. Metaverse seamlessly integrates the real world with the virtual world and allows avatars to carry out rich activities including creation, display, entertainment, social networking, and trading. Thus, it is promising to build an exciting digital world and to transform a better physical world through the exploration of the metaverse. In this survey, we dive into the metaverse by discussing how Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) fuse with it through investigating the state-of-the-art studies across the metaverse components, digital currencies, AI applications in the virtual world, and blockchain-empowered technologies. Further exploitation and interdisciplinary research on the fusion of AI and Blockchain towards metaverse will definitely require collaboration from both academia and industries. We wish that our survey can help researchers, engineers, and educators build an open, fair, and rational future metaverse.

cs.CY

Detecting Mixing Services via Mining Bitcoin Transaction Network with Hybrid Motifs

As the first decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) cryptocurrency system allowing people to trade with pseudonymous addresses, Bitcoin has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, the P2P and pseudonymous nature of Bitcoin make transactions on this platform very difficult to track, thus triggering the emergence of various illegal activities in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Particularly, mixing services in Bitcoin, originally designed to enhance transaction anonymity, have been widely employed for money laundry to complicate trailing illicit fund. In this paper, we focus on the detection of the addresses belonging to mixing services, which is an important task for anti-money laundering in Bitcoin. Specifically, we provide a feature-based network analysis framework to identify statistical properties of mixing services from three levels, namely, network level, account level and transaction level. To better characterize the transaction patterns of different types of addresses, we propose the concept of Attributed Temporal Heterogeneous motifs (ATH motifs). Moreover, to deal with the issue of imperfect labeling, we tackle the mixing detection task as a Positive and Unlabeled learning (PU learning) problem and build a detection model by leveraging the considered features. Experiments on real Bitcoin datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our detection model and the importance of hybrid motifs including ATH motifs in mixing detection.

cs.SI

From Technology to Society: An Overview of Blockchain-based DAO

Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is believed to play a significant role in our future society governed in a decentralized way. In this article, we first explain the definitions and preliminaries of DAO. Then, we conduct a literature review of the existing studies of DAO published in the recent few years. Through the literature review, we find out that a comprehensive survey towards the state-of-the-art studies of DAO is still missing. To fill this gap, we perform such an overview by identifying and classifying the most valuable proposals and perspectives closely related to the combination of DAO and blockchain technologies. We anticipate that this survey can help researchers, engineers, and educators acknowledge the cutting-edge development of blockchain-related DAO technologies.

cs.CR

A Survey of State-of-the-Art on Blockchains: Theories, Modelings, and Tools

To draw a roadmap of current research activities of the blockchain community, we first conduct a brief overview of state-of-the-art blockchain surveys published in the recent 5 years. We found that those surveys are basically studying the blockchain-based applications, such as blockchain-assisted Internet of Things (IoT), business applications, security-enabled solutions, and many other applications in diverse fields. However, we think that a comprehensive survey towards the essentials of blockchains by exploiting the state-of-the-art theoretical modelings, analytic models, and useful experiment tools is still missing. To fill this gap, we perform a thorough survey by identifying and classifying the most recent high-quality research outputs that are closely related to the theoretical findings and essential mechanisms of blockchain systems and networks. Several promising open issues are also summarized finally for future research directions. We wish this survey can serve as a useful guideline for researchers, engineers, and educators about the cutting-edge development of blockchains in the perspectives of theories, modelings, and tools.

cs.DC