Matthew K. Luka, Okpo U. Okereke, Elijah E. Omizegba, Ejike C. Anene
Regulatory radio spectrum management is evolving from traditional static frequency allocation and assignment schemes towards dynamic spectrum management and access schemes. This evolution is necessitated by a number of factors including underutilization of licensed spectrum bands, changing market and technological developments and increased demand for spectrum for emerging applications in multimedia communications, internet-of-things and fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. In simple terms dynamic spectrum management involves allowing unlicensed users known as secondary users (SUs) to access the licensed spectrum of a licensed user also known as primary user (PU). This is primarily achieved using spectrum sharing schemes that leverage spectrum database and cognitive radio techniques. However, the use of spectrum database and cognitive radio techniques faces reliability, security and privacy concerns for spectrum sharing. There is also a need to support other requirements of dynamic spectrum management such as secondary spectrum trading market and dynamic spectrum access coordination. In this work, we review the use of blockchains for enabling spectrum sharing and other aspects of dynamic spectrum management. The review covers the use of blockchain to record spectrum management information such as spectrum sensing results and spectrum auction transactions in a secure manner. The article also covers the use of smart contracts to support complex service-levelagreements (SLAs) between network operators which is key to supporting a self-organized secondary spectrum sharing market and enforcement of regulatory policies. A taxonomy of the intersection between blockchain and various concepts of dynamic spectrum management is also provided
COVID-19 has made eHealth an imperative. The pandemic has been a true catalyst for remote eHealth solutions such as teleHealth. Telehealth facilitates care, diagnoses, and treatment remotely, making them more efficient, accessible, and economical. However, they have a centralized identity management system that restricts the interoperability of patient and healthcare provider identification. Thus, creating silos of users that are unable to authenticate themselves beyond their eHealth application's domain. Furthermore, the consumers of remote eHealth applications are forced to trust their service providers completely. They cannot check whether their eHealth service providers adhere to the regulations to ensure the security and privacy of their identity information. Therefore, we present a blockchain-based decentralized identity management system that allows patients and healthcare providers to identify and authenticate themselves transparently and securely across different eHealth domains. Patients and healthcare providers are uniquely identified by their health identifiers (healthIDs). The identity attributes are attested by a healthcare regulator, indexed on the blockchain, and stored by the identity owner. We implemented smart contracts on an Ethereum consortium blockchain to facilities identification and authentication procedures. We further analyze the performance using different metrics, including transaction gas cost, transaction per second, number of blocks lost, and block propagation time. Parameters including block-time, gas-limit, and sealers are adjusted to achieve the optimal performance of our consortium blockchain.
With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks, smart devices, and traditional information and communication technologies, there is tremendous growth in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services in our everyday life. IoT systems deal with high volumes of data. This data can be particularly sensitive, as it may include health, financial, location, and other highly personal information. Fine-grained security management in IoT demands effective access control. Several proposals discuss access control for the IoT, however, a limited focus is given to the emerging blockchain-based solutions for IoT access control. In this paper, we review the recent trends and critical needs for blockchain-based solutions for IoT access control. We identify several important aspects of blockchain, including decentralised control, secure storage and sharing information in a trustless manner, for IoT access control including their benefits and limitations. Finally, we note some future research directions on how to converge blockchain in IoT access control efficiently and effectively.
Blockchain technologies can enable secure computing environments among mistrusting parties. Permissioned blockchains are particularly enlightened by companies, enterprises, and government agencies due to their efficiency, customizability, and governance-friendly features. Obviously, seamlessly fusing blockchain and cloud computing can significantly benefit permissioned blockchains; nevertheless, most blockchains implemented on clouds are originally designed for loosely-coupled networks where nodes communicate asynchronously, failing to take advantages of the closely-coupled nature of cloud servers. In this paper, we propose an innovative cloud-oriented blockchain -- CloudChain, which is a modularized three-layer system composed of the network layer, consensus layer, and blockchain layer. CloudChain is based on a shared-memory model where nodes communicate synchronously by direct memory accesses. We realize the shared-memory model with the Remote Direct Memory Access technology, based on which we propose a shared-memory consensus algorithm to ensure presistence and liveness, the two crucial blockchain security properties countering Byzantine nodes. We also implement a CloudChain prototype based on a RoCEv2-based testbed to experimentally validate our design, and the results verify the feasibility and efficiency of CloudChain.
Bitcoin is one of popular cryptocurrencies widely used over the world, and its blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention. In Bitcoin system, it has been reported that transactions are prioritized according to transaction fees, and that transactions with high priorities are likely to be confirmed faster than those with low priorities. In this paper, we consider performance modeling of Bitcoin-blockchain system in order to characterize the transaction-confirmation time. We first introduce the Bitcoin system, focusing on proof-of-work, the consensus mechanism of Bitcoin blockchain. Then, we show some queueing models and its analytical results, discussing the implications and insights obtained from the queueing models.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sustainable smart agriculture with increase in signal to interference or signal to noise ratio (SIR/SNR) for selection of best relay is discussed in a wireless blockchain based network. The overall communication throughput (OCT), power splitting relaying (PSR), time switching relaying (TSR) and transmission success rate (TRS) are also derived during the selection of best relay performance with and without interference. The performance of OCT, PSR, TSR and TRS increases with the increase in the number of potential relay nodes as seen in the results of derivation. The accuracy of the theoretical values are validated by numerical simulations.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.
The increasing prevalence and sophistication of autonomous vehicles are intricately tied with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in refining their network architectures. This technical exposition unfolds the paramount role of AI in autonomous vehicles, spotlighting its capabilities in sensor data processing, decision - making, and fostering Vehicle - to - Everything (V2X) communications. Moreover, the article elucidates the evolution and enhancement of network architectures through AI - driven technologies such as edge computing, centralized data centers, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), and 5G communications. An additional layer of exploration is provided in network security, with AI safeguarding vehicular networks through anomaly detection and ensuring secure data transmission. This interplay between AI and network architecture elevates autonomous vehicles' operational efficiency and safety and acts as a linchpin in realizing a coherent and intelligent transportation ecosystem. The comprehensive integration of AI within the network forms the foundation for autonomous vehicles to navigate within an interconnected mobility infrastructure harmoniously and securely.
Healthcare blockchains provide an innovative way to store healthcare information, execute healthcare transactions, and build trust for healthcare data sharing and data integration in a decentralized open healthcare network environment. Although the healthcare blockchain technology has attracted broad interests and attention in industry, government and academia, the security and privacy concerns remain the focus of debate when deploying blockchains for information sharing in the healthcare sector from business operation to research collaboration. This article focuses on the security and privacy requirements for medical data sharing using blockchain, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the security and privacy risks and requirements, accompanied by technical solution techniques and strategies. First, we discuss the security and privacy requirements and attributes required for electronic medical data sharing by deploying the healthcare blockchain. Second, we categorize existing efforts into three reference blockchain usage scenarios for electronic medical data sharing, and discuss the technologies for implementing these security and privacy properties in the three categories of usage scenarios for healthcare blockchain, such as anonymous signatures, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, verification techniques for smart contract security. Finally, we discuss other potential blockchain application scenarios in healthcare sector. We conjecture that this survey will help healthcare professionals, decision makers, and healthcare service developers to gain technical and intuitive insights into the security and privacy of healthcare blockchains in terms of concepts, risks, requirements, development and deployment technologies and systems.
Abstract Aiming at the problems of the traditional centralized data sharing platform, such as poor data privacy protection ability, insufficient scalability of the system and poor interaction ability, this paper proposes a distributed data sharing system architecture based on the Internet of Things and blockchain technology. In this system, the distributed consensus mechanism of blockchain and the distributed storage technology are employed to manage the access and storage of Internet of Things data in a secure manner. Up to the physical topology of the network, a hierarchical blockchain network architecture is proposed for local network data storage and global network data sharing, which reduces networking complexity and improves the scalability of the system. In addition, smart contract and distributed machine learning are adopted to design automatic processing functions for different types of data (public or private) and supervise the data sharing process, improving both the security and interactive ability of the system.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Ming Ding, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Aruna Seneviratne · 6 authors
The combination of mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain is transforming the current computing services in Internet of Things networks, by offering task offloading solutions with security enhancement enabled by blockchain mining. Nevertheless, these important enabling technologies have been studied separately in most existing works. This article proposes a novel cooperative task offloading and block mining (TOBM) scheme to optimize the system utility in blockchain-empowered MEC. Herein, each edge device (ED) not only handles data tasks but also deals with block mining which makes the system design and optimization highly complex. Therefore, we develop a novel cooperative deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach which allows EDs to cooperatively offload their data tasks to the MEC server and perform block mining based on a Proof-of-Reputation consensus mechanism. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves offloading utility, reduces blockchain mining latency, and achieves better system utility, compared to other non-cooperative and cooperative schemes.
Internet of Things (IoT) technology such as intelligent devices, sensors, actuators and wearables have been integrated in the healthcare industry, thus contributing in the creation of smart hospitals and remote assistance environments. Ensuring the eHealth network adopts the appropriate security measures in order to effectively protect sensitive patient data against malicious attempts is a tough challenge. Devices composing eHealth infrastructure are considered to be easily exploitable. To that end, a solution monitoring the intelligent healthcare environment is of essence. In addition, by digitalising all health records, appropriate measures need to be implemented in order for patient records to be accessible by authorized personnel only. Furthermore, creating interoperable systems, capable of being integrated by multiple organizations such as hospitals and insurance companies, while maintaining a General Data Protection Regulation-friendly posture, providing access to health data is a great importance for optimal patient assistance. To address both concerns, we present a framework featuring a multi-layer tool for providing a highly effective security solution specifically designed to address the eHealth requirements, and a blockchain access control component, based on smart contracts to provide access control for authorized users to patient records and health data in a distributed way.
Laura Rodríguez de Lope, Johnny Choque, Andres Sanchez Sandaza, Jorge Fernandez Valdes · 8 authors
During the last decade Internet of Things has become one of the key technologies in supporting digital transformation of several ecosystems such urban or industry ones. The huge amount of data generated in such contexts as well as the imperative requirements in terms of trustworthiness, authenticity and integrity make compulsory the adoption of the proper solutions fitting those requirements. This paper presents the design, implementation and validation of a distributed ledger technology architecture emphasizing services linked to data valorization.
Developments in blockchain technology coupled with rapid developments in network technologies have disrupted traditional business and service models. One such application is in the domain of healthcare. However, the domain's sensitive nature and complexity require blockchain-enabled e-healthcare to ensure utilitarianism while suitably addressing the associated ethical challenges. In this milieu, the paper attempts to identify and evaluate the parameters of ethical challenges associated with blockchain adoption in e-healthcare. This paper contributes to the extant body of knowledge by presenting a critical review of the ethical considerations at the meso level of blockchains in e-healthcare. Based on findings from the literature, the study identified nine parameters of blockchain ethics. Of these, Accuracy and Right to be Forgotten were found to be most critical in terms of ethical dilemmas in healthcare applications. No evidence of ethical dilemma could be found with respect to Accountability and Data Ownership. As these services are deployed over networks, all these challenges are further evaluated in the context of 6G network-based models. This will not only provide the stakeholders with a holistic view of the ethical challenges in various blockchain-enabled healthcare applications but also enable a meticulous transition to the 6G network.
Fog computing is a new computing paradigm for meeting ubiquitous massive access and latency-critical applications by moving the processing capability closer to end users. The geographical distribution/floating features with potential autonomy requirements introduce new challenges to the traditional methodology of network access control. In this paper, a blockchain-enabled fog resource access and granting solution is proposed to tackle the unique requirements brought by fog computing. The smart contract concept is introduced to enable dynamic, and automatic credential generation and delivery for an independent offer of fog resources. A per-transaction negotiation mechanism supports the fog resource provider to dynamically publish an offer and facilitates the choice of the preferred resource by the end user. Decentralized authentication and authorization relieve the processing pressure brought by massive access and single-point failure. Our solution can be extended and used in multi-access and especially multi-carrier scenarios in which centralized authorities are absent.
Recently, blockchain has gained momentum as a novel technology that gives rise to a plethora of new decentralized applications (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT)). However, its integration with the IoT is still facing several problems (e.g., scalability, flexibility). Provisioning resources to enable a large number of connected IoT devices implies having a scalable and flexible blockchain. To address these issues, we propose a scalable and trustworthy blockchain (STB) architecture that is suitable for the IoT; which uses blockchain sharding and oracles to establish trust among unreliable IoT devices in a fully distributed and trustworthy manner. In particular, we design a Peer-To-Peer oracle network that ensures data reliability, scalability, flexibility, and trustworthiness. Furthermore, we introduce a new lightweight consensus algorithm that scales the blockchain dramatically while ensuring the interoperability among participants of the blockchain. The results show that our proposed STB architecture achieves flexibility, efficiency, and scalability making it a promising solution that is suitable for the IoT context.
Hong‐Ning Dai, Yulei Wu, Hao Wang, Muhammad Ali Imran · 5 authors
We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the perception of IoMT as well as the enhanced security and immutability of the blockchain. However, the synergy of IoMT and blockchain is also faced with challenges in privacy, latency, and context-absence. The emerging edge intelligence technologies bring opportunities to tackle these issues. In this article, we present a blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT in addressing the COVID-19 crisis. We first review IoMT, edge intelligence, and blockchain in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We then present an architecture of blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT after discussing the opportunities of integrating blockchain and edge intelligence. We next offer solutions to COVID-19 brought by blockchain-empowered edge intelligence from 1) monitoring and tracing COVID-19 pandemic origin, 2) traceable supply chain of injectable medicines and COVID-19 vaccines, and 3) telemedicine and remote healthcare services. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and open issues in blockchain-empowered edge intelligence.
Mohd Majid Akhtar, Mohammad Zubair Khan, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Abdulfattah Noorwali · 6 authors
BACKGROUND: Consumer electronics or daily use home appliances are the basic necessity of every household. With the adoption of IoT in consumer electronics, this industry is set to rise exponentially. In recent times, the demand for consumer electronics rises amidst the pandemic due to a paradigm shift from in-office culture to work from home. Despite intelligent IoT devices, smart home configuration, and appliances at our disposal, the rudimentary client-server architecture fails to provide facilities like full access control of data and devices, transparency, secured communication, and synchronization between multiple devices, etc. to the users. METHODS: To overcome these limitations, Blockchain technology has been adopted in recent years, however, it has its own set of limitations in its widespread implementation. Hence, we propose a methodology using the IOTA platform, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) for secured communication between consumer electronics devices and appliances. RESULTS: The implementation provides access control, interoperability, data storage, and management with an exploratory insight towards a decentralized micro-payment use-case between Electric cars and charging stations.
It is a modern type of technology that empowers virtual and physical artefacts to interact and provide digitized services for each other, and includes the Internet of Things (IoT). But it has some benefits, but raises problems of single point of failure, anonymity, accountability, and data integrity due to the new structured design. Challenges like these stands in the path of the introduction of all the most interesting Internet of Things technologies. Bringing the Internet of Things through the public ledger might fix these issues. Decentralized ledger systems are comprised of blockchain as well as distributed ledgers. The introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT) to the blockchain will offer tremendous advantages. Blockchain integration in this paper offers a detailed exploration of how to combine the IoT technology with the IoT scheme. It is followed by reviewing the basic framework and addressing the problems inherent in the system's integration, explaining the advantages of it, and describing ways in which the blockchain can help to overcome such problems. Blockchain as a Service for IoT can illustrate how different protocol concepts can be applied using different service types on blockchain. After this, there would be an important section about the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain. Finally, potential study avenues will focus on ways of applying the Internet of Things (IoT) with blockchain are suggested. The open issues and challenges of 5G-enabled IoT for blockchain-based Industrial automation are also analyzed in the text.
Vitor N. Coelho, Thays A. Oliveira, Wellington Tavares, Igor Machado Coelho
This paper introduces state-of-the-art possibilities for using smart contracts capabilities for governance. Assisted by blockchain, the use of these tools can provide a transition that society currently needs due the huge amount of information that reaches citizens. The core mechanism of this study lies within the scope of smart accounts and digital identities. These topics enclose smart cities trends that seek to increase citizens’ participation in the social decision making process, in a transparent way that is usually managed throughout decentralized systems. We define a set of available features that can automatically guide the flow of resources, after the conclusions of voting processes also conducted on trusted environments of distributed ledgers. By presenting innovative ideas and didactically describing the possibilities, we aim to promote awareness of blockchain capabilities among readers, students, decisions makers and, mainly, the younger generation.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology for shaping the next era of a healthcare system striving for efficient and effective patient care. This is thanks to its peer-to-peer, secure, and transparent characteristics. On the other hand, cloud computing made its way into the healthcare system thanks to its elasticity and cost-efficiency nature. However, cloud-based systems fail to provide a secured and private patient-centric cohesive view to multiple healthcare stakeholders. In this situation, blockchain provides solutions to address security and privacy concerns of the cloud because of its decentralization feature combined with data security and privacy, while cloud provides solutions to the blockchain scalability and efficiency challenges. Therefore a novel paradigm of blockchain-cloud integration (BcC) emerges for the domain of healthcare. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the BcC integration for the healthcare system to give the readers the motivations behind the emergence of this new paradigm, introduce a classification of existing architectures and their applications for better healthcare. We then review the development platforms and services and highlight the research challenges for the integrated BcC architecture, possible solutions, and future research directions. The results of this paper will be useful for the healthcare industry to design and develop a data management system for better patient care.
Juliana Bowles, Thais Webber, Euan Blackledge, Andreas François Vermeulen
To facilitate personalised healthcare provision across Europe, we envision solutions that enable the secure integration and sharing of medical health records. These solutions should address privacy concerns, such as granular access control to personal data, establishing what should be accessible when and by whom, whilst complying with collective regulatory frameworks such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and adhering to international standards on how to manage information security. The proposed healthcare system design integrates technologies such as blockchain and scalable data lakes with adequate system routines to guarantee the secure access of confidential data. In this paper, we present the essential architectural components for the secure integration of medical records in a blockchain-based platform. We present a patient-centric data retrieval approach which incorporates a structured format to compose access rules.
Mar Gimenez-Aguilar, José M. de Fuentes, Lorena González‐Manzano, David Arroyo
With the increase in connectivity, the popularization of cloud services, and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), decentralized approaches for trust management are gaining momentum. Since blockchain technologies provide a distributed ledger, they are receiving massive attention from the research community in different application fields. However, this technology does not provide with cybersecurity by itself. Thus, this survey aims to provide with a comprehensive review of techniques and elements that have been proposed to achieve cybersecurity in blockchain-based systems. The analysis is intended to target area researchers, cybersecurity specialists and blockchain developers. For this purpose, we analyze 272 papers from 2013 to 2020 and 128 industrial applications. We summarize the lessons learned and identify several matters to foster further research in this area.
Blockchain technology has taken on a leading role in today's industrial applications by providing salient features and showing significant performance since its beginning. Blockchain began its journey from the concept of cryptocurrency and is now part of a range of core applications to achieve resilience and automation between various tasks. With the integration of Blockchain technology into different industrial applications, many application designs, security and privacy challenges present themselves, posing serious threats to users and their data. Although several approaches have been proposed to address the specific security and privacy needs of targeted applications with functional parameters, there is still a need for a research study on the application, security and privacy challenges, and requirements of Blockchain-based industrial applications, along with possible security threats and countermeasures. This study presents a state-of-the-art survey of Blockchain-based Industry 4.0 applications, focusing on crucial application and security and privacy requirements, as well as corresponding attacks on Blockchain systems with potential countermeasures. We also analyse and provide the classification of different security and privacy techniques used in these applications to enhance the advancement of security features. Furthermore, we highlight some open issues in industrial applications that help to design secure Blockchain-based applications as future directions.