SIoTEC '25: Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Secure IoT, Edge and Cloud systems

While cloud computing continues to grow globally, Azerbaijan is actively investing in digital infrastructure to close the adoption gap; however, local small and medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) still face uncertainty due to infrastructural, regulatory, and skill-based challenges. Despite these efforts, there is a lack of region-specific studies to inform hosting choices in Azerbaijan's market conditions. This study compares Amazon Web Services (AWS), AzInCloud, and a self-managed on-premises server for hosting a dockerized Bagisto e-commerce application within the Azerbaijani context. We derive recommendations from our measurement for other developing countries that want to adopt cloud applications similar to those in Azerbaijan.

Contemporary Online Social Networks (OSNs) present critical vulnerabilities in user authentication and data integrity protocols. Since the social network is a multi-user platform, it requires a well-performing authentication mechanism that works along with the blockchain to ensure secure transactions. The existing methodologies exhibit significant limitations, particularly susceptibility to quantum cryptanalysis and privacy vector compromises. This study proposes a novel blockchain-based framework for decentralized OSNs, implementing smart contracts and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocols to establish a distributed authentication architecture that mitigates these vulnerabilities while maintaining computational efficiency. Initially, we propose a post-quantum digital signature followed by a blockchain system using the signatures. Unlike previous OSNs, our solution uses post-quantum approaches, making it secure against both classical and quantum attacks. To enhance the data authentication of social network users, this research leverages the post-quantum multimodal biometric-based approach, where an improved version of Crystals Dilithium 3 is utilized in place of ECDSA in the XRP Ledger (XRPL) blockchain. We have integrated different post-quantum algorithms with XRPL using the open quantum safe library (liboqs) and compared the results in terms of resource consumption. The research explores the advantages of the proposed approach, highlighting its potential to mitigate the shortcomings of conventional methods and ensure secure data transmission in the era of quantum computing.

Metadata play a critical role in structuring and contextualizing data, particularly in security systems where provenance, quality, and traceability directly influence the reliability and accountability of downstream models. However, definitions and practices around metadata remain fragmented across domains, limiting their reuse and interoperability. This paper presents a lightweight, extensible ontology for metadata, based on Semantic Web standards, metadata are designed to support secure data exchange, enhance trust through semantic transparency, and enable robust provenance tracking across complex information systems. Covering key metadata dimensions, descriptive, structural, administrative, and temporal, the ontology also incorporates provenance and dynamic metadata, enabling auditable data flows and consistent handling to strengthen data integrity, traceability, and security in critical systems.

The evolution and the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have led to an increasing need to safeguard such systems against malicious attacks. Among the most prominent threats, poisoning attacks represent a critical challenge, as they aim to compromise the integrity and reliability of models by manipulating training data. Existing solutions have tried to reduce the poisoning risk; however, they are not able to guarantee the dataset's integrity. This paper proposes an innovative Blockchain-based system to attest to the dataset's integrity and to verify it. Specifically, we used Ganache to simulate a local network and MetaMask for the management of secure transactions. Experiments on a real dataset showed the applicability of the system.