Verifying Outsourced Computation in an Edge Computing Marketplace

Abstract

An edge computing marketplace could enable IoT devices (Outsourcers) to outsource computation to any participating node (Contractors) in their proximity. In return, these nodes receive a reward for providing computation resources. In this work, we propose a scheme that verifies the integrity of arbitrary deterministic functions in the presence of both dishonest Outsourcers and Contractors who try to maximize their expected payoff. We compile a comprehensive set of threats for this adversary model and show that not all of these threats are addressed when combining verification techniques of related work. Our verification scheme fills the gap by detecting or preventing each identified threat. We tested our verification scheme with state-of-the-art pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network models designed for object detection. On all devices, our verification scheme causes less than 1ms computational overhead and a negligible network bandwidth overhead of at most 84 bytes per frame. Our implementation can also perform our verification scheme’s tasks parallel to the object detection to eliminate any latency overhead.