Enforcing Service Level Agreements With Verifiability and Privacy in Pervasive Edge Computing Environments

Abstract

Edge computing gained popularity for its promises of low latency and high-quality computing services to users. However, it has also introduced the challenge of mutual untrust between user and edge devices for service level agreement (SLA) compliance. This obstacle hampers wide adoption of edge computing, especially in pervasive edge computing (PEC) where edge devices can freely enter or exit the market, which makes verifying and enforcing SLAs significantly more challenging. In this paper, we propose a framework for verifying and enforcing SLAs in PEC, allowing a user to assess SLA compliance of an edge service and ensure correctness of the service results. Our solution, called VeriEdge, employs a verifiable delayed sampling approach to sample a small number of computation steps, and relies on randomly selected verifiers to verify correctness of the computation results. To make sure the verification process is non-manipulable, we employ verifiable random functions to post-select the verifier(s). A dispute protocol is designed to resolve disputes for potential misbehavior. Building upon the base VeriEdge framework, we further extend it with an anonymity-enhanced design to support privacy-sensitive applications, using blind signature-based tokens to enable anonymous access to edge services. Rigorous security analysis demonstrates that VeriEdge achieves a high probability of detecting SLA violation with a minimal overhead. Experimental results indicate that VeriEdge is lightweight, practical, and efficient.