Blockchain Papers

Ali Raza, Lachlan Hardy, Erin Roehrer, Soonja Yeom · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Pranav Ratta, Amanpreet Kaur, Sparsh Sharma, Mohammad Shabaz · 5 authors

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the recent innovations in Information Technology, which intends to interconnect the physical and digital worlds. It introduces a vision of smartness by enabling communication between objects and humans through the Internet. IoT has diverse applications in almost all sectors like Smart Health, Smart Transportation, and Smart Cities, etc. In healthcare applications, IoT eases communication between doctors and patients as the latter can be diagnosed remotely in emergency scenarios through body sensor networks and wearable sensors. However, using IoT in healthcare systems can lead to violation of the privacy of patients. Thus, security should be taken into consideration. Blockchain is one of the trending research topics nowadays and can be applied to the majority of IoT scenarios. Few major reasons for using the Blockchain in healthcare systems are its prominent features, i.e., Decentralization, Immutability, Security and Privacy, and Transparency. This paper’s main objective was to enhance the functionality of healthcare systems using emerging and innovative computer technologies like IoT and Blockchain. So, initially, a brief introduction to the basic concepts of IoT and Blockchain is provided. After this, the applicability of IoT and Blockchain in the medical sector is explored in three major areas—drug traceability, remote patient-monitoring, and medical record management. At last, the challenges of deploying IoT and Blockchain in healthcare systems are discussed.

Faiza Hashim, Khaled Shuaib, Farag Sallabi

Electronic health records (EHRs) are important assets of the healthcare system and should be shared among medical practitioners to improve the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosis. Blockchain technology has been investigated and adopted in healthcare as a solution for EHR sharing while preserving privacy and security. Blockchain can revolutionize the healthcare system by providing a decentralized, distributed, immutable, and secure architecture. However, scalability has always been a bottleneck in blockchain networks due to the consensus mechanism and ledger replication to all network participants. Sharding helps address this issue by artificially partitioning the network into small groups termed shards and processing transactions parallelly while running consensus within each shard with a subset of blockchain nodes. Although this technique helps resolve issues related to scalability, cross-shard communication overhead can degrade network performance. This study proposes a transaction-based sharding technique wherein shards are formed on the basis of a patient’s previously visited health entities. Simulation results show that the proposed technique outperforms standard-based healthcare blockchain techniques in terms of the number of appointments processed, consensus latency, and throughput. The proposed technique eliminates cross-shard communication by forming complete shards based on “the need to participate” nodes per patient.

William Hughes, Alejandro Russo, Gerardo Schneider

Smart contracts are self-executing programs running in the blockchain allowing for decentralised storage and execution without a middleman. On-chain execution is expensive, with miners charging fees for distributed execution according to a cost model defined in the protocol. In particular, transactions have a high fixed cost. In this paper we present MultiCall, an interpreter that reduces the cost of smart contract execution by emulating sequences of transactions from multiple users in one transaction. We have implemented and integrated MultiCall into Ethereum. Our evaluation shows that using MultiCall provides a saving between 56.8% and 98.9% of the fixed per-transaction cost compared to the standard approach of sending transactions individually.

Divya Guru, Supraja Perumal, V. Vijayakumar

A blockchain is a decentralized peer to peer platform which provides security services based on some key concepts, namely authentication, confidentiality, integrity and authorization. It is the process of recording and keeping track of the resources without the intervention of a centralized authority. This paper provides an overview of blockchains, the structure of blockchains, consensus algorithms, etc., It compares the algorithms based on their utility and limitations. Though blockchains provide secure communication, there are some minimal data leaks which are discussed. Various security issues in blockchains are discussed such as denial of service attacks, etc., In addition to security, some other blockchain challenges are presented like scalability, reliability, interoperability, privacy and consensus mechanisms for integration with AI, IoT and edge computing. This paper also explains about the importance of blockchains in the fields of smart healthcare, smart grid, and smart financial systems. Overall, this paper gives the glimpse of various protocols, algorithms, applications, challenges and opportunities that are found in the blockchain domain.

Chao Liu, Xiaoshuai Zhang, Kok Koeng Chai, Jonathan Loo · 5 authors

Abstract Electric power grid infrastructure has revolutionized our world and changed the way of living. So has blockchain technology. The hierarchical electric power grid has been shifting from a centralized structure to a decentralized structure to achieve higher flexibility and stability, and blockchain technology has been widely adopted in the energy sector to deal with grid management, billing, metering, and so on, because of its nature of decentralization. Here, the aim is to provide a multi‐dimensional review on the technological advances of the blockchain in smart grids. Its corresponding applications based on these advances, including company projects and use cases, are summarized. Furthermore, the security threat issues in smart grids, Ethereum Virtual Machine (i.e. the operating environment of consensus mechanisms), and smart contracts are analysed, with a brief conclusion to manifest the prior tasks in building secure blockchain‐based infrastructures in smart grids. As such, the challenges and features of different protocols and their applicability in each use case are identified to provide an insightful guide for future research studies.

Tariq Alsboui, Yongrui Qin, Richard Hill, Hussain Al-Aqrabi

Abstract Widespread adoption of smart IoT devices is accelerating research for new techniques to make IoT applications secure, scalable, energy-efficient, and capable of working in mission-critical use cases, which require an ability to function offline. In this context, the novel combination of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and distributed intelligence (DI) is seen as a practical route towards the decentralisation of IoT architectures. This paper surveys DI techniques in IoT and commences by briefly explaining the need for DI, by proposing a comprehensive taxonomy of DI in IoT. This taxonomy is then used to review existing techniques and to investigate current challenges that require careful attention and consideration. Based on the taxonomy, IoT DI techniques can be classified into five categories based on the factors that support distributed functionality and data acquisition: cloud-computing, mist-computing, distributed-ledger-technology, service-oriented-computing and hybrid. Existing techniques are compared and categorized mainly based on related challenges, and the level of intelligence supported. We evaluate more than thirty current research efforts in this area. We define many significant functionalities that should be supported by DI frameworks and solutions. Our work assists system architects and developers to select the correct low-level communication techniques in an integrated IoT-to-DLT-to-cloud system architecture. The benefits and shortcomings of different DI approaches are presented, which will inspire future work into automatic hybridization and adaptation of DI mechanisms. Finally, open research issues for distributed intelligence in IoT are discussed.

Sung-Ho Sim, Yoon-Su Jeong

As the development of IoT technologies has progressed rapidly recently, most IoT data are focused on monitoring and control to process IoT data, but the cost of collecting and linking various IoT data increases, requiring the ability to proactively integrate and analyze collected IoT data so that cloud servers (data centers) can process smartly. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based IoT big data integrity verification technique to ensure the safety of the Third Party Auditor (TPA), which has a role in auditing the integrity of AIoT data. The proposed technique aims to minimize IoT information loss by multiple blockchain groupings of information and signature keys from IoT devices. The proposed technique allows IoT information to be effectively guaranteed the integrity of AIoT data by linking hash values designated as arbitrary, constant-size blocks with previous blocks in hierarchical chains. The proposed technique performs synchronization using location information between the central server and IoT devices to manage the cost of the integrity of IoT information at low cost. In order to easily control a large number of locations of IoT devices, we perform cross-distributed and blockchain linkage processing under constant rules to improve the load and throughput generated by IoT devices.

Et. al. Santosh Kumar Sharma

Big Data As A Service Is Used In Today’s Scenario To Handle And Process The Big Amount Of Data Which Are Generated From Different Source Every Day. Since Data Is Stored On The Cloud Platform, The System Could Suffer A Failure And Give Attackers The Opportunity To Launch Various Categories Of Attacks.Manyresearcheshave Been Done In This Domain To Provide Security And Protection To The Data On Cloud. The Blockchain Technology Is A Secure, Distributed And Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Ledger Where The Transactions Are Flexible, Secure,Verifiable And Permanent Way.Here, The Transaction Data Is Encrypted Andkept In A Wrapped Block (I.E., Record) Which Are Spreadthrough The N/W In A Provable And Unabashedmode Across The Entire Network To Enhance Information Security And Data Privacy. In This Paperwe Have Proposed A Framework For An Access Control With Privacy Protection In Bdaas Based On Blockchain Technology. Here Blockchain Technology Is Used Only For Storing The Transaction Log Information Whenever Any Kind Of Event Log Occurred In System.

Dong Wang, Huanjuan Wang, Yuchen Fu

Abstract This work investigates the unified coding and identification of smart grid IoT devices, as more and more IoT devices in smart grid need to be managed and controlled. We combine blockchain technology with 5G MEC to realize the connection of massive power IoT devices at the edge of 5G network. Due to blockchain’s distributed storage and credibility, it is used to identify and register IoT devices in smart grid, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of smart grid IoT devices management. In this paper, we propose a hybrid blockchain mechanism based on 5G MEC smart grid, where both public blockchain and private blockchain are deployed on the MEC gateway/server. To facilitate the data searching and extracting, we endeavor to build a blockchain explorer indexed by IoT device identifier. After that, we study the typical consensus algorithms in the blockchain such as PoW, PoS, DPoS, PDFT, and discuss their feasibility in the hybrid blockchain. Finally, we analyzed and compared the performance of different consensus algorithms from the perspective of average computing time and average time to agreement.

Víctor Garcia-Font

Nowadays, many urban areas are developing projects that are included within the area of smart cities. These systems tend to be highly heterogeneous and involve a large number of different technologies and participants. In general, cities deploy systems to integrate data and to provide protocols to ease interconnectivity between different subsystems. However, this is not enough to build a completely interoperable smart city, where control fully belongs to city administrators and citizens. Currently, in most cases, subsystems tend to be deployed and operated by providers creating silos. Furthermore, citizens, who should be the center of these systems, are often relegated to being just another participant. In this article, we study how smart cities can move towards decentralized and user-centric systems relying on distributed ledger technologies (DLT). For this, we define a conceptual framework that describes the interaction between smart city components, their participants, and the DLT ecosystem. We analyze the trust models that are created between the participants in the most relevant use cases, and we study the suitability of the different DLT types.

Andrei Vladyko, Anastasia Spirkina, Vasiliy Elagin

Like multiservice networks, blockchain technology is currently experiencing significant development because of its decentralization and ability to organize secure, seamless, reliable data exchange and storage. Due to the significant demand for the technology, there is a need to analyze the impact of these technology processes on network characteristics to predict traffic behavior and ensure required quality indicators, as well as on the stability of public communication network elements when blockchain technology operates. Conducting a full-scale experiment is a time-consuming task that cannot always be accomplished, so in this paper, the authors propose considering approaches to modeling these systems and, as an example, propose to use a simulation system to assess the performance of the network and its elements.

Ahmad Ali, Mansoor Ahmed, Abid Khan, Adeel Anjum · 6 authors

The information security domain focuses on security needs at all levels in a computing environment in either the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Cloud of Things, or any other implementation. Data, devices, services, or applications and communication are required to be protected and provided by information security shields at all levels and in all working states. Remote authentication is required to perform different administrative operations in an information system, and Administrators have full access to the system and may pose insider threats. Superusers and administrators are the most trusted persons in an organisation. "Trust but verify" is an approach to have an eye on the superusers and administrators. Distributed ledger technology (Blockchain-based data storage) is an immutable data storage scheme and provides a built-in facility to share statistics among peers. Distributed ledgers are proposed to provide visible security and non-repudiation, which securely records administrators' authentications requests. The presence of security, privacy, and accountability measures establish trust among its stakeholders. Securing information in an electronic data processing system is challenging, i.e., providing services and access control for the resources to only legitimate users. Authentication plays a vital role in systems' security; therefore, authentication and identity management are the key subjects to provide information security services. The leading cause of information security breaches is the failure of identity management/authentication systems and insider threats. In this regard, visible security measures have more deterrence than other schemes. In this paper, an authentication scheme, "VisTAS," has been introduced, which provides visible security and trusted authentication services to the tenants and keeps the records in the blockchain.

Jens Hunhevicz, Mahshid Motie, Daniel Hall

Performance contracts used for servitized business models enable consideration of overall life-cycle costs rather than just production costs. However, practical implementation of performance contracts has been limited due to challenges with performance evaluation, accountability, and financial concepts. As a solution, this paper proposes the connection of the digital building twin with blockchain-based smart contracts to execute performance-based digital payments. First, we conceptualize a technical architecture to connect blockchain to digital building twins. The digital building twin stores and evaluates performance data in real-time while the blockchain ensures transparency and trusted execution of automatic performance evaluation and rewards through smart contracts. Next, we demonstrate the feasibility of both the concept and technical architecture by integrating the Ethereum blockchain with digital building models and sensors via the Siemens building twin platform. The resulting prototype is the first full-stack implementation of a performance-based smart contract in the built environment.

Lu Hou, Xiaojun Xu, Kan Zheng, Xianbin Wang

The integration of multi-access edge computing (MEC) and RAFT consensus makes it feasible to deploy blockchain on trustful base stations and gateways to provide efficient and tamper-proof edge data services for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, reducing the latency of storing data on blockchain remains a challenge, especially when an anomaly-triggered data flow in a certain area exceeds the block generation speed. This letter proposes an intelligent transaction migration scheme for RAFT-based private blockchain in IoT applications to migrate transactions in busy areas to idle regions intelligently. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can apparently reduce the latency in high data flow circumstances.

Hyoeun Ye, Sejin Park

As the importance of vehicle data increases, it has become very important to safely store them. However, because onboard diagnostics scanners generally used to store vehicle data are IoT devices, security and capacity issues exist to store data safely and efficiently. To address this, we propose a system that stores vehicle data safely and efficiently using blockchain and IPFS. Users can access the system through DApp, an Ethereum-distributed application, and manage their vehicle data. Various experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of this system, and the experimental results show its advantages in terms of data-processing speed and cost.

Sung-Won Lee, Kwee-Bo Sim

Recently, to enhance the security of the Internet of Things (IoT), research on blockchain-based encryption algorithms has been actively conducted. However, because blockchains have complex structures and process large amounts of data, there are still many difficulties in using the conventional blockchain-based encryption algorithms in an IoT system that must have low power consumption and be ultra-lightweight. In this study, to address these problems (1) we simplified the conventional Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based blockchain structure, and (2) we proposed a new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) algorithm with enhanced security by periodically changing the secret key and initialization vector (IV) in the conventional AES-CBC encryption algorithm. Because the DAG, which is the conventional blockchain structure, randomly transmits data to multiple blocks, there may be overlapping blocks, and the quantity of transmitted data is not limited; thus, the time and power consumption for encryption and decryption increase. In this study, a simplified DAG was designed to address these problems so that packets can be transmitted only to three blocks, without overlapping. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm proposed in this paper, an IoT system consisting of 10 clients and one server was implemented in hardware, and an experiment was conducted. Through the experiment, it was confirmed that when the proposed AES-CBC algorithm was used, the time taken and the amount of power consumed for encryption and decryption were reduced by about 20% compared to the conventional AES-CBC algorithm.

Liangqin Gong, Daniyal Alghazzawi, Li Cheng

In Internet of Things (IoT) environments, privacy and security are among some of the significant challenges. Recently, several studies have attempted to apply blockchain technology to increase IoT network security. However, the lightweight feature of IoT devices commonly fails to meet computational intensive requirements for blockchain-based security models. In this work, we propose a mechanism to address this issue. We design an IoT blockchain architecture to store device identity information in a distributed ledger. We propose a Blockchain of Things (BCoT) Gateway to facilitate the recording of authentication transactions in a blockchain network without modifying existing device hardware or applications. Furthermore, we introduce a new device recognition model that is suitable for blockchain-based identity authentication, where we employ a novel feature selection method for device traffic flow. Finally, we develop the BCoT Sentry framework as a reference implementation of our proposed method. Experiment results verify the feasibility of our proposed framework.

Bin Cao, Zixin Wang, Long Zhang, Daquan Feng · 7 authors

In the past decade, blockchain has shown a promising vision to build trust without any powerful third party in a secure, decentralized and scalable manner. However, due to the wide application and future development from cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things, blockchain is an extremely complex system enabling integration with mathematics, computer science, communication and network engineering, etc. By revealing the intrinsic relationship between blockchain and communication, networking and computing from a methodological perspective, it provided a view to the challenge that engineers, experts and researchers hardly fully understand the blockchain process in a systematic view from top to bottom. In this article we first introduce how blockchain works, the research activities and challenges, and illustrate the roadmap involving the classic methodologies with typical blockchain use cases and topics. Second, in blockchain systems, how to adopt stochastic process, game theory, optimization theory, and machine learning to study the blockchain running processes and design the blockchain protocols/algorithms are discussed in details. Moreover, the advantages and limitations using these methods are also summarized as the guide of future work to be further considered. Finally, some remaining problems from technical, commercial and political views are discussed as the open issues. The main findings of this article will provide a survey from a methodological perspective to study theoretical model for blockchain fundamentals understanding, design network service for blockchain-based mechanisms and algorithms, as well as apply blockchain for the Internet of Things, etc.

Hajar Moudoud, Soumaya Cherkaoui, Lyes Khoukhi

The 5G wireless networks are potentially revolutionizing future technologies. The 5G technologies are expected to foresee demands of diverse vertical applications with diverse requirements including high traffic volume, massive connectivity, high quality of service, and low latency. To fulfill such requirements in 5G and beyond, new emerging technologies such as SDN, NFV, MEC, and CC are being deployed. However, these technologies raise several issues regarding transparency, decentralization, and reliability. Furthermore, 5G networks are expected to connect many heterogeneous devices and machines which will raise several security concerns regarding users' confidentiality, data privacy, and trustworthiness. To work seamlessly and securely in such scenarios, future 5G networks need to deploy smarter and more efficient security functions. Motivated by the aforementioned issues, blockchain was proposed by researchers to overcome 5G issues because of its capacities to ensure transparency, data reliability, trustworthiness, immutability in a distributed environment. Indeed, blockchain has gained momentum as a novel technology that gives rise to a plethora of new decentralized technologies. In this chapter, we discuss the integration of the blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. We then present how blockchain applications in 5G networks and beyond could facilitate enabling various services at the edge and the core.

Higinio Mora, Julio C. Mendoza-Tello, Erick Varela-Guzmán, Julian Szymański

No abstract is available for this record.

Mahdi Fahmideh, John Grundy, Aakash Ahmad, Jun Shen · 11 authors

Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain-based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from the perspective of the software engineering discipline. We characterize BBS engineering based on the key aspects of theoretical foundations, processes, models , and roles . Based on these aspects, we present a rich repertoire of development tasks, design principles, models, roles, challenges, and resolution techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only give software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpin a starting point for further research in this field.

Shameemul Haque

The Internet of Things (IoT) promoted a common operating picture (COP) through all modern applications. The COP is takes place only accomplished by the developments seen in wireless sensor network devices that have been able to connect through the network, sharing information, and conducting further analysis. In IoT, knowledge sharing and authentication of data through the central server and is hence vulnerable to security and privacy problems. System spoofing, false authentication, less data sharing reliability may take place. As part of IoT, Blockchain (BC) technology is integrated to solve these security and privacy issues by replacing the idea of the central server. This paper discusses the potential protection and privacy threats of IoT component activity and explores how it relates to distributed ledger-based blockchain (DL-BC) technologies. . Blockchain implementations have explicitly been studied here with regard to focused sectors and categories. This paper also discusses Blockchain technology, its contribution, and challenges specific to IoT.

Fulong Chen, Yuqing Tang, Xu Cheng, Dong Xie · 6 authors

As the background of application in the field of smart health care, the flexible interaction between patients and medical system is provided by medical cyber-physical systems (MCPSs) to realize all-round three-dimensional medical service. According to the controllable and credible requirements of MCPS, it needs a secure and reliable device identity authentication mechanism to build the security barrier. Based on the blockchain technology, a lightweight authentication scheme is designed for sensor/execution devices, users, and gateway nodes in MCPS. The security analysis and experimental results show that the scheme can resist the existing attacks with better efficiency; thus, our proposed scheme can be efficiently applied to the medical field.