Securing Web3: Protocols, Infrastructure, and Decentralized Intelligence

Editors

• Kenza Riahi

  Assistant Professor at De Vinci Higher Education (DVHE), Researcher at De Vinci Research Center (DVRC), Paris, France.

• Abbas Yazdinejad

  Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina, SK, Canada.

• Nour El Madhoun

  Associate Professor at Isep, Grande École d’ingénieurs du numérique, France.

Aims and Scope

Web3 infrastructures support increasingly complex digital services through distributed ledgers, consensus protocols, smart contracts, decentralized storage, cross-chain communication, token-based coordination, and decentralized governance. As these systems expand in scale and functionality, their security can no longer be addressed solely at the application or smart-contract level. Vulnerabilities may emerge across the entire Web3 stack, from peer-to-peer communication and consensus to execution environments, data availability, interoperability mechanisms, wallets, governance processes, and intelligent decentralized services.

Securing Web3, therefore, requires a system-wide perspective that accounts for interactions among protocols, infrastructure, applications, users, and adversaries. It also requires careful analysis of the trade-offs among security, decentralization, scalability, privacy, interoperability, and performance.

Artificial intelligence introduces both new capabilities and new risks within Web3 ecosystems. AI can support vulnerability detection, protocol monitoring, fraud analysis, adaptive defense, and decentralized decision-making. Conversely, integrating AI models and autonomous components into decentralized systems raises concerns related to model integrity, adversarial manipulation, data privacy, verifiability, accountability, and control.

In this book, decentralized intelligence refers to distributed and federated learning, verifiable AI, AI-assisted Web3 security, and autonomous components that interact with decentralized protocols. Contributions in this area should clearly identify the underlying Web3 architecture, the security problem, the threat model, and the trust assumptions.

This volume examines security across the Web3 technology stack, with particular emphasis on protocols, infrastructures, cryptographic mechanisms, decentralized services, and emerging forms of decentralized intelligence. Its objective is to connect security research across different layers of Web3 and identify how vulnerabilities and design decisions propagate across these layers.

The book is intended for researchers, PhD students, advanced practitioners, and system designers working in distributed systems, blockchain, cybersecurity, privacy-enhancing technologies, and decentralized computing.

Contributions may include theoretical advances, protocol and system designs, security analyses, implementation experiences, experimental evaluations, benchmark studies, industrial use cases, critical surveys, and perspectives on emerging Web3 security challenges. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Security foundations for Web3 systems
• Security and resilience of blockchain architectures, peer-to-peer networks, consensus protocols, and distributed ledger infrastructures
• Smart contract and execution-layer security
• Security of Web3 applications and decentralized ecosystems
• Web3 infrastructure security
• Scalability and interoperability security,
• Privacy-enhancing and verifiable technologies for Web3
• AI-assisted Web3 security
• Decentralized intelligence and secure AI-enabled Web3 systems
• Security and resilience of blockchain-enabled applications in areas such as the Internet of Things, healthcare, supply chains, smart cities, industrial and cyber-physical systems, finance, and energy.
• Web3 governance and societal security
• Formal models, security analyses, experimental evaluations, benchmarks, datasets, implementation experiences, and reproducible methodologies for assessing the security and resilience of Web3 systems.

Keywords

Web3 security, blockchain protocols, distributed systems, smart-contract security, consensus security, decentralized infrastructure, interoperability, privacy-enhancing technologies, verifiable computation, decentralized intelligence, federated learning, trustworthy AI.

Submission Guidelines

Authors are required to first submit an abstract of their proposed chapter. This abstract will undergo a brief review by the editors to ensure it aligns with the publication’s scope and standards. If the abstract is approved, the authors will receive a notification of acceptance, after which they can proceed with the full chapter submission.

Please submit both abstracts and full chapters through EasyChair. There are no fees associated with the submission, review, or publication process. The corresponding author of each chapter should insert an ”*” after their name. Corresponding authors will receive a free printed copy of the book from Springer. Publication in this book is entirely free of charge.

Submitted chapters must represent original material that is not currently under review for another book, journal, or conference, and has not been previously published. All submissions must be written in English, with a minimum of sixteen (16) pages and a maximum of thirty (30) pages, following the Springer Book Chapter format in single column:

• The LaTeX template is available via this link.
• The Overleaf template is available via this link.
• The Word template is available via this link.

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: November 1, 2026.
• Abstract acceptance notification: November 15, 2026.
• Chapter submission deadline: January 31, 2027.
• Notification of chapter review outcome: February 28, 2027.
• Final chapter submission deadline: March 31, 2027.