Collaborative Whitelist Packet Filtering Driven by Smart Contract Forum

Abstract

The massive spread of harmful content on the internet is hard to filter. Meanwhile, blacklist content filtering cannot keep up with the rapid growth of content creations. As a result, an extra protection layer is required to provide a safe internet for children. However, implementing a network or application firewall requires an expert’s knowledge and complicated maintenance. In this paper, we proposed a framework to automate internet protection by using whitelist packet filtering. We use the blockchain smart contract as the secure collaboration media to determine the filtering rules. Meanwhile, the SDN controller automates the packet filtering by installing the determined forwarding rules into the network switches. We evaluate the whitelist packet filtering by using Mininet for the network emulation and Ethereum Rinkeby networks for the smart contract implementation. The result shows that the proposed whitelist system can filter the packet without incurring significant latency. It supports fast content update with a maximum speed of ≈ 1200 valid contents per-minute by using a three-votes verification system.