arXiv subjects

Ouns Bouachir

Publications and source records attributed to Ouns Bouachir.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

MCPShield: A Security Cognition Layer for Adaptive Trust Calibration in Model Context Protocol Agents

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes tool use for LLM-based agents and enable third-party servers. This openness introduces a security misalignment: agents implicitly trust tools exposed by potentially untrusted MCP servers. However, despite its excellent utility, existing agents typically offer limited validation for third-party MCP servers. As a result, agents remain vulnerable to MCP-based attacks that exploit the misalignment between agents and servers throughout the tool invocation lifecycle. In this paper, we propose MCPShield as a plug-in security cognition layer that mitigates this misalignment and ensures agent security when invoking MCP-based tools. Drawing inspiration from human experience-driven tool validation, MCPShield assists agent forms security cognition with metadata-guided probing before invocation. Our method constrains execution within controlled boundaries while cognizing runtime events, and subsequently updates security cognition by reasoning over historical traces after invocation, building on human post-use reflection on tool behavior. Experiments demonstrate that MCPShield exhibits strong generalization in defending against six novel MCP-based attack scenarios across six widely used agentic LLMs, while avoiding false positives on benign servers and incurring low deployment overhead. Overall, our work provides a practical and robust security safeguard for MCP-based tool invocation in open agent ecosystems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Generative AI for Networking

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing network management systems, paving the way towards fully autonomous and self-optimizing communication systems. These models enable networks to address complex decision-making tasks across both short-term operational scenarios and long-term strategic planning. Through natural language understanding, LLMs can analyze customer inquiries, predict network congestion patterns, and automate troubleshooting processes, leading to more efficient customer support and network maintenance. GenAI can optimize content delivery by generating personalized recommendations, improving user engagement, and dynamically adjusting network resources based on real-time demands, ultimately enhancing overall performance and user experience in telecommunication services. In this paper, we discuss the pivotal role of GenAI in advancing network performance and achieving the ultimate objective of self-adaptive networks. Moreover, we present a use case that leverages the self-attention mechanism of transformers to perform long-term traffic prediction. Harnessing these cutting-edge technologies demonstrates the transformative power of LLM and GenAI in revolutionizing telecommunication networks, elevating resilience and adaptability to unprecedented levels.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

ED-DAO: Energy Donation Algorithms based on Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Energy is a fundamental component of modern life, driving nearly all aspects of daily activities. As such, the inability to access energy when needed is a significant issue that requires innovative solutions. In this paper, we propose ED-DAO, a novel fully transparent and community-driven decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) designed to facilitate energy donations. We analyze the energy donation process by exploring various approaches and categorizing them based on both the source of donated energy and funding origins. We propose a novel Hybrid Energy Donation (HED) algorithm, which enables contributions from both external and internal donors. External donations are payments sourced from entities such as charities and organizations, where energy is sourced from the utility grid and prosumers. Internal donations, on the other hand, come from peer contributors with surplus energy. HED prioritizes donations in the following sequence: peer-sourced energy (P2D), utilitygrid-sourced energy (UG2D), and direct energy donations by peers (P2PD). By merging these donation approaches, the HED algorithm increases the volume of donated energy, providing a more effective means to address energy poverty. Experiments were conducted on a dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results showed that HED increased the total donated energy by at least 0.43% (64 megawatts) compared to the other algorithms (UG2D, P2D, and P2PD).

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Analysis of Blockchain Assisted Energy Sharing Algorithms with Realistic Data Across Microgrids

With escalating energy demands, innovative solutions have emerged to supply energy affordably and sustainably. Energy sharing has also been proposed as a solution, addressing affordability issues while reducing consumers' greed. In this paper, we analyse the feasibility of two energy sharing algorithms, centralized and peer-to-peer, within two scenarios, between microgrids within a county, and between microgrids across counties. In addition, we propose a new sharing algorithm named Selfish Sharing, where prosumers take advantage of consumers' batteries in return for letting them consume part of the shared energy. The results for sharing between microgrids across counties show that the dependency on the grid could be reduced by approximately 5.72%, 6.12%, and 5.93% using the centralized, peer-to-peer and selfish sharing algorithms respectively, compared to trading only. The scenario of sharing between microgrids within a county has an average decrease in dependency on the grid by 5.66%, 6.0%, and 5.80% using the centralized, peer-to-peer and selfish algorithms respectively, compared to trading without sharing. We found that trading with batteries and the proposed sharing algorithms prove to be beneficial in the sharing between microgrids case. More specifically, the case of trading and sharing energy between microgrids across counties outperforms sharing within a county, with P2P sharing appearing to be superior.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Blockchain-enabled Energy Trading and Battery-based Sharing in Microgrids

Carbon footprint reduction can be achieved through various methods, including the adoption of renewable energy sources. The installation of such sources, like photovoltaic panels, while environmentally beneficial, is cost-prohibitive for many. Those lacking photovoltaic solutions typically resort to purchasing energy from utility grids that often rely on fossil fuels. Moreover, when users produce their own energy, they may generate excess that goes unused, leading to inefficiencies. To address these challenges, this paper proposes innovative blockchain-enabled energy-sharing algorithms that allow consumers -- without financial means -- to access energy through the use of their own energy storage units. We explore two sharing models: a centralized method and a peer-to-peer (P2P) one. Our analysis reveals that the P2P model is more effective, enhancing the sharing process significantly compared to the centralized method. We also demonstrate that, when contrasted with traditional battery-supported trading algorithm, the P2P sharing algorithm substantially reduces wasted energy and energy purchases from the grid by 73.6%, and 12.3% respectively. The proposed system utilizes smart contracts to decentralize its structure, address the single point of failure concern, improve overall system transparency, and facilitate peer-to-peer payments.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Integrating Digital Twin and Advanced Intelligent Technologies to Realize the Metaverse

The advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led to technological advancements in a plethora of domains. Healthcare, education, and smart city services are now enriched with AI capabilities. These technological advancements would not have been realized without the assistance of fast, secure, and fault-tolerant communication media. Traditional processing, communication and storage technologies cannot maintain high levels of scalability and user experience for immersive services. The metaverse is an immersive three-dimensional (3D) virtual world that integrates fantasy and reality into a virtual environment using advanced virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices. Such an environment is still being developed and requires extensive research in order for it to be realized to its highest attainable levels. In this article, we discuss some of the key issues required in order to attain realization of metaverse services. We propose a framework that integrates digital twin (DT) with other advanced technologies such as the sixth generation (6G) communication network, blockchain, and AI, to maintain continuous end-to-end metaverse services. This article also outlines requirements for an integrated, DT-enabled metaverse framework and provides a look ahead into the evolving topic.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Blockchain and Fog Computing for Cyberphysical Systems: The Case of Smart Industry

Blockchain has revolutionized how transactions are conducted by ensuring secure and auditable peer-to-peer coordination. This is due to both the development of decentralization, and the promotion of trust among peers. Blockchain and fog computing are currently being evaluated as potential support for software and a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from banking practices and digital transactions to cyber-physical systems. These systems are designed to work in highly complex, sometimes even adversarial, environments, and to synchronize heterogeneous machines and manufacturing facilities in cyber computational space, and address critical challenges such as computational complexity, security, trust, and data management. Coupling blockchain with fog computing technologies has the potential to identify and overcome these issues. Thus, this paper presents the knowledge of blockchain and fog computing required to improve cyber-physical systems in terms of quality-of-service, data storage, computing and security.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Design Guidelines for Blockchain-Assisted 5G-UAV Networks

Fifth Generation (5G) wireless networks are designed to meet various end-user Quality of Service (QoS) requirements through high data rates (typically of Gbps order) and low latencies. Coupled with Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), 5G can achieve high data rates, enabling complex autonomous smart city services such as the large deployment of self-driving vehicles and large-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled industrial manufacturing. However, to meet the exponentially growing number of connected IoT devices and irregular data and service requests in both low and highly dense locations, the process of enacting traditional cells supported through fixed and costly base stations requires rethought to enable on-demand mobile access points in the form of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for diversified smart city scenarios. This article envisions a 5G network environment that is supported by blockchain-enabled UAVs to meet dynamic user demands with network access supply. The solution enables decentralized service delivery (Drones as a Service) and routing to and from end-users in a reliable and secure manner. Both public and private blockchains are deployed within the UAVs, supported by fog and cloud computing devices and data centers to provide wide range of complex authenticated service and data availability. Particular attention is paid tocomparing data delivery success rates and message exchange in the proposed solution against traditional UAV-supported cellular networks. Challenges and future research are also discussed with highlights on emerging technologies such as Federated Learning.

cs.NI↗