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Future Internet

Future Internet is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on internet technologies and the information society, published monthly online by MDPI.

Quartile Ranking JCR - Q2 (Computer Science, Information Systems)

All Articles (3,264)

Blockchain technology, with its characteristics of decentralization, immutability, auditability, and traceability, has gradually become a core infrastructure in the digital economy era, demonstrating great potential in fields such as finance, government services, and the Internet of Things (IoT). However, as the scale of blockchain networks expands and data volumes surge, issues such as full-node storage redundancy, limited transaction throughput, and inefficient synchronization of historical data have become increasingly prominent, severely restricting the large-scale application of blockchain systems. The storage scalability problem faced by blockchain is therefore becoming more critical. To address the challenge in which on-chain storage expansion still cannot meet the demand for large-scale data storage, a storage method combining the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) with blockchain, referred to as IPFS-BC, is proposed. In IPFS-BC, large-scale raw data are stored in the decentralized and content-addressable IPFS network, while the blockchain only retains the unique content identifier (CID) hash and related metadata. Through smart contracts enabling dynamic permission management and fine-grained access control, efficient interaction and collaborative storage between on-chain and off-chain systems are achieved. In this work, file upload simulation experiments were conducted, and two evaluation indicators—storage space consumption and storage performance (file read/write time and speed)—were used to compare three storage approaches: Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-based off-chain storage, Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Open Source (FISCO BCOS) on-chain storage, and the IPFS-BC on-chain/off-chain collaborative storage model. Experimental results show that the IPFS-BC model reduces storage space consumption by approximately 75% compared with FISCO BCOS blockchain storage when storing file data, significantly decreasing data redundancy. Moreover, IPFS-BC ensures system security during the on-chain process, and through the automated management and auditing provided by smart contracts, it effectively enhances system security and realizes scalable on-chain/off-chain collaborative storage.

10 February 2026

DHT off-chain structure.

This paper develops a framework for monitoring and forecasting episodes of systemic financial stress using a combination of market information, macro-financial indicators, and measures derived from time-varying correlation networks, embedded in a sequential machine-learning setting. The contribution is not tied to a single modelling innovation, but rather to the way these ingredients are brought together under an evaluation protocol designed to mimic real-time supervisory use, and to an interpretability layer that makes the resulting predictions easier to inspect. Monthly data covering the period from 2006 to 2025 are used to construct evolving correlation structures and summary indicators of market co-movement. These features are combined with standard predictors and fed into logistic regression, random forest, and gradient boosting models, all estimated in expanding windows and assessed strictly on future observations. Predictive accuracy remains limited, which is consistent with the difficulty of anticipating stress regimes several months ahead at monthly frequency, although gradient boosting attains the highest average AUC across evaluation folds and displays noticeable variation over time. Inspection of SHAP values points to instability in correlation networks, volatility conditions, and short-horizon return behaviour as recurring drivers of the predicted stress probabilities, suggesting that the models draw on information that goes beyond individual market series. Taken together, the results indicate that recurrent statistical regularities and changes in market structure can be exploited for monitoring purposes when models are trained and tested in a sequential fashion. The overall design is intended to be usable in practice and to support supervisory analysis, while remaining transparent enough to allow scrutiny of the signals driving the forecasts.

9 February 2026

Special Issue on Security and Privacy in Blockchains and the IoT—3rd Edition

  • Christoph Stach,
  • Clémentine Gritti and
  • Iouliana Litou

The rapid digital transformation of modern society is increasingly driven by the convergence of blockchain technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), both of which have become foundational pillars of contemporary distributed systems [...]

9 February 2026

Rethinking the Security Assurances of MTD: A Gap Analysis for Network Defense

  • Łukasz Jalowski,
  • Marek Zmuda and
  • Paulina Rekosz
  • + 1 author

Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a paradigm that has the potential to revolutionize the approach to network security. Although a significant number of papers have been published on the topic, there are still no standards or any dominant implementations of this concept. This article identifies and attempts to bridge the gap in understanding various aspects of MTD security while also defining the research directions necessary to implement MTD techniques in real-world scenarios. It discusses the security of key design principles of MTD, considers problems regarding applying MTD to real networks, and finally addresses threat modeling in the context of MTD. By aggregating various security aspects related to MTD, some of which have not been typically discussed in the available literature on the subject, this work aims to assist in designing future MTD schemes, help navigate around various security caveats, and highlight possible research directions that have not been sufficiently explored in the existing literature.

7 February 2026

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IoT Security
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IoT Security

Threat Detection, Analysis and Defense
Editors: Olivier Markowitch, Jean-Michel Dricot
Virtual Reality and Metaverse
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Virtual Reality and Metaverse

Impact on the Digital Transformation of Society II
Editors: Diego Vergara

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Future Internet - ISSN 1999-5903