Secure Coded Cooperative Computation at the Heterogeneous Edge against Byzantine Attacks

Edge computing is emerging as a new paradigm to allow processing data at the edge of the network, where data is typically generated and collected by exploiting multiple devices at the edge collectively. However, offloading tasks to other devices leaves the edge computing applications at the complete mercy of an attacker. One of the attacks, which is the focus of this work, is Byzantine attacks, where one or more devices can corrupt the offloaded tasks. Furthermore, exploiting the potential of edge computing is challenging mainly due to the heterogeneous and time-varying nature of the devices at the edge. In this paper, we develop a secure coded cooperative computation mechanism (SC3) that provides both security and computation efficiency guarantees by gracefully combining homomorphic hash functions and coded cooperative computation. Homomorphic hash functions are used against Byzantine attacks and coded cooperative computation is used to improve computation efficiency when edge resources are heterogeneous and time-varying. Simulation results show that SC3 improves task completion delay significantly.