BAMSL Honors UMSL Researcher Team with
"2020 Inventor of the Year" Award
The Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis has awarded Dr. Jianli Pan, associate professor of computer science, and his co-inventor and graduate student, Mr. Jianyu Wang, the 2020 Inventor of the Year award for their technology that better secures IoT devices on edge servers using blockchain and smart contracts.
They will be recognized in the January 2021 edition of St. Louis Lawyer magazine and at the fall 2021 celebration as the 2020 celebration had to be postponed.
Description of the Technology: The internet is evolving into the Internet of Things (“IoT”) with billions of interconnected devices. This scalability causes significant security challenges. Many weak IoT devices are made with limited security capabilities and poor or no technical maintenance options. These vulnerabilities could make the interconnected IoT devices easily controlled and turned into malicious nodes by hackers forming a botnet and initiating large scale Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Edge server computing is an emerging solution for the IoT scalability issue, but security remains a concern. Dr. Pan and his team developed a new way of resource management in an edge server environment called “Edge Chain”. “Edge Chain” is an Edge-IoT server framework that utilizes blockchain and smart contracts to distribute server resources to the connected devices. The blockchain automatically records all the activities and transactions of the connected devices so that potential malicious and suspicious behavior can be captured and recorded. If the parameters of the smart contracts are not met by the connected device, the network may prevent or limit network access thus stopping/limiting the malicious activity. Dr. Pan’s advancements are user friendly and can secure/monitor every type of network from local home networks to the network computing requirements of large companies. With Dr. Pan’s advancements, it is significantly more difficult for bad actors to gain control of compromised networks for their own nefarious agendas.
The University of Missouri-St. Louis is honored by our faculty innovators' work. This is the second Inventor of the Year award presented by BAMSL to UMSL for its faculty innovation, the first being in 2014 for Dr. Zhi Xu's work on non-invasive blood glucose monitoring technology. Dr. Xu is a retired associate professor of chemistry.
Congratulations to Dr. Pan and all of UMSL's innovative faculty researchers.
