Kotha Raj Kumar Reddy, Angappa Gunasekaran, P. Kalpana, V. Raja Sreedharan · 5 authors
As world is affected by demand volatility; process uncertainty; supply chain complexity and information ambiguity forming a VUCA world. To manage this scenario, industries are adopting emerging technologies for business excellence and one among them is Blockchain. Blockchain technology (BCT) is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that stores transactional records in a tamper-proof and immutable way; it is a promising solution for incorporating transparency and traceability in traditional ecosystem. As automotive industries are facing a Volatile environment, Uncertain schedules & information; Complex supply chain networks, and Ambiguous decisions that cripples the automotive supply chain (ASC). Therefore, BCT can be used to address issues related to ASC in VUCA world. Keeping this in mind, study reported a systematic literature review (SLR) of BCT applications in ASC. More than seventy research papers were reviewed based on different BCT characteristics and applications. Through content analysis, study explored how to link supply chain visibility, information transparency with BCT for an efficient ASC in VUCA world. Moreover, a BCT implementation framework is proposed for ASC, to provide a decision-making approach for practitioners in VUCA world.
A lot of hard work and years of research are still needed for developing successful Blockchain (BC) applications. Although it is not yet standardized, BC technology was proven as to be an enhancement factor for security, decentralization, and reliability, leading to be successfully implemented in cryptocurrency industries. Fog computing (FC) is one of the recently emerged paradigms that needs to be improved to serve Internet of Things (IoT) environments of the future. As hundreds of projects, ideas, and systems were proposed, one can find a great R&D potential for integrating BC and FC technologies. Examples of organizations contributing to the R&D of these two technologies, and their integration, include Linux, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and others. To validate an integrated Fog-Blockchain protocol or method implementation, before the deployment phase, a suitable and accurate simulation environment is needed. Such validation should save a great deal of costs and efforts on researchers and companies adopting this integration. Current available simulation environments facilitate Fog simulation, or BC simulation, but not both. In this paper, we introduce a Fog-Blockchain simulator, namely FoBSim, with the main goal to ease the experimentation and validation of integrated Fog-Blockchain approaches. According to our proposed workflow of simulation, we implement different Consensus Algorithms (CA), different deployment options of the BC in the FC architecture, and different functionalities of the BC in the simulation. Furthermore, technical details and algorithms on the simulated integration are provided. We validate FoBSim by describing the technologies used within FoBSim, highlighting FoBSim's novelty compared to the state-of-the-art, discussing the event validity in FoBSim, and providing a clear walk-through validation. Finally, we simulate case studies, then present and analyze the obtained results, where deploying the BC network in the fog layer shows enhanced efficiency in terms of total run time and total storage cost.
Presently modern technology makes a significant contribution to the transition from traditional healthcare to smart healthcare systems. Mobile health (mHealth) uses advances in wearable sensors, telecommunications and the Internet of Things (IoT) to propose a new healthcare concept centered on the patient. Patients' real-time remote continuous health monitoring, remote diagnosis, treatment, and therapy is possible in an mHealth system. However, major limitations include the transparency, security, and privacy of health data. One possible solution to this is the use of blockchain technologies, which have found numerous applications in the healthcare domain mainly due to theirs features such as decentralization (no central authority is needed), immutability, traceability, and transparency. We propose an mHealth system that uses a private blockchain based on the Ethereum platform, where wearable sensors can communicate with a smart device (a smartphone or smart tablet) that uses a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), for the distributed storage of health-related data. Smart contracts are used to create data queries, to access patient data by healthcare providers, to record diagnostic, treatment, and therapy, and to send alerts to patients and medical professionals.
Sheikh Mohammad Idrees, Mariusz Nowostawski, Roshan Jameel, Ashish Kumar Mourya
Blockchain technology plays a significant role in the industrial development. Many industries can potentially benefit from the innovations blockchain decentralization technology and privacy protocols offer with regard to securing, data access, auditing and managing transactions within digital platforms. Blockchain is based on distributed and secure decentralized protocols in which there is no single authority, and no single point of control; the data blocks are generated, added, and validated by the nodes of the network themselves. This article provides insights into the current developments within blockchain technology and explores its ability to revolutionize the multiple industrial application areas such as supply chain industry, Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, governance, finance and manufacturing. It investigates and provides insights into the security issues and threats related to the blockchain implementations by assessing the research through a systematic literature review. This article proposes possible solutions in detail for enhancing the security of the blockchain for industrial applications along with significant directions for future explorations. The study further suggests how in recent years the adoption of blockchain technology by multiple industrial sectors has gained momentum while in the finance sector it is touching new heights day by day.
Xinghuo Yu, Changbing Tang, Peter Pálenský, Armando Walter Colombo
Imagine you want to send money to a friend overseas. Wouldn’t it be good if you didn’t have to pay hefty fees to the intermediaries, and your friend received the funds very quickly? Now imagine ordering parts to make a product in your manufacturing plant. Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to verify where each part comes from and have access to a reliable certificate on its quality automatically? Also think about dealing with energy use or selling off your excess solar energy as a prosumer. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could purchase cheaper energy or sell it profitably at ease?
Senthilselvi Ayothi, Shiny Duela Johnson, Ramesh Sekaran, Senthil Pandi Sankareshwaran · 6 authors
Abstract Over the last decade, blockchain has been considered an encouraging solution to secure distributed ledgers. Moreover, with the introduction of a pseudonymous payment method without a centralized database or authoritative person, blockchain has also evolved as the future generation for online payment system. However, with the eruption of a large scale database, scalability has also become a demanding issue. In addition to the obstacle mentioned above, challenges like security and scalability stop accelerated adjustments for the development of smart cities. Without directing this essential scalability and privacy issue, such an encouraging method may not help develop smart cities. This paper bestows a measure to analyze both scalability and security aspects of existing blockchain methods with applications of smart city networks. The proposed method is known as Gradient Smart Load Balancer and Blockchain Dempster Shafer Reputation (GSLB-BDSR). Gradient Smart Load Balancer is designed so that even though with the increase in the number of participating sensors, the load is said to balance by applying gradient function, therefore ensuring scalability. Next, to cover the security aspect, with the aid of scalable blocks in the blockchain network, a Blockchain Dempster Shafer Reputation model is proposed. Evaluation outcomes of proposed security solutions outperform conventional solutions.
Aristidis G. Anagnostakis, Νικόλαος Γιαννακέας, Markos G. Tsipouras, Euripidis Glavas · 5 authors
In this paper we investigate the essential minimum functionality of the autonomous blockchain, and the minimum hardware and software required to support it in the micro-scale in the IoT world. The application of deep-blockchain operation in the lower-level activity of the IoT ecosystem, is expected to bring profound clarity and constitutes a unique challenge. Setting up and operating bit-level blockchain mechanisms on minimal IoT elements like smart switches and active sensors, mandates pushing blockchain engineering to the limits. “How deep can blockchain actually go?” “Which is the minimum Thing of the IoT world that can actually deliver autonomous blockchain functionality?” To answer, an experiment based on IoT micro-controllers was set. The “Witness Protocol” was defined to set the minimum essential micro-blockchain functionality. The protocol was developed and installed on a peer, ad-hoc, autonomous network of casual, real-life IoT micro-devices. The setup was tested, benchmarked, and evaluated in terms of computational needs, efficiency, and collective resistance against malicious attacks. The leading considerations are highlighted, and the results of the experiment are presented. Findings are intriguing and prove that fully autonomous, private micro-blockchain networks are absolutely feasible in the smart dust world, utilizing the capacities of the existing low-end IoT devices.
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding\nis one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The\nbasic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple\ncommittees, where each processing a separate set of transactions, rather than\nthe entire network processes all transactions. In this paper, we propose a\nprobabilistic approach to analyze the security of sharding-based blockchain\nprotocols. Based on this approach, we investigate the threat of Sybil attacks\nin these protocols. The key contribution of our paper is a tractable\nprobabilistic approach to accurately compute the failure probability that at\nleast one committee fails and ultimately compute the probability of a\nsuccessful attack. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a\nnumerical and comparative analysis of the proposed approach with existing\napproaches.\n
Roman Matzutt, Benedikt Kalde, Jan Pennekamp, Arthur Drichel · 6 authors
Popular cryptocurrencies continue to face serious scalability issues due to their ever-growing blockchains. Thus, modern blockchain designs began to prune old blocks and rely on recent snapshots for their bootstrapping processes instead. Unfortunately, established systems are often considered incapable of adopting these improvements. In this work, we present CoinPrune, our block-pruning scheme with full Bitcoin compatibility, to revise this popular belief. CoinPrune bootstraps joining nodes via snapshots that are periodically created from Bitcoin's set of unspent transaction outputs (UTXO set). Our scheme establishes trust in these snapshots by relying on CoinPrune-supporting miners to mutually reaffirm a snapshot's correctness on the blockchain. This way, snapshots remain trustworthy even if adversaries attempt to tamper with them. Our scheme maintains its retrospective deployability by relying on positive feedback only, i.e., blocks containing invalid reaffirmations are not rejected, but invalid reaffirmations are outpaced by the benign ones created by an honest majority among CoinPrune-supporting miners. Already today, CoinPrune reduces the storage requirements for Bitcoin nodes by two orders of magnitude, as joining nodes need to fetch and process only 6 GiB instead of 271 GiB of data in our evaluation, reducing the synchronization time of powerful devices from currently 7 h to 51 min, with even larger potential drops for less powerful devices. CoinPrune is further aware of higher-level application data, i.e., it conserves otherwise pruned application data and allows nodes to obfuscate objectionable and potentially illegal blockchain content from their UTXO set and the snapshots they distribute.
Norbert Bodziony, Paweł Jemioło, Krzysztof Kluza, Marek R. Ogiela
In recent years, blockchains systems have seen massive adoption in retail and enterprise environments. Cryptocurrencies become more widely adopted, and many online businesses have decided to add the most popular ones, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, next to Visa or Mastercard payments. Due to the decentralized nature of blockchain-based systems, there is no possible way to revert confirmed transactions. It may result in losses caused by human error or poor design of the user interface. We created a cryptocurrency wallet with a full on-chain solution for aliasing accounts and tokens to improve user experience and avoid unnecessary errors. The aliasing system consists of a number of smart contracts deployed on top of the blockchain network that give the ability to register aliases to accounts and tokens and use them instead of opaque addresses. Our solution shows how performant modern blockchains are and presents a way of building fully decentralized applications that can compete with centralized ones in terms of performance.
Data marketplaces (DMs) promote the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities. To facilitate the easy exchanges of real-time IoT data streams between device owners and third-party applications, it is required to provide scalable, interoperable, and secured services for large numbers of distributed IoT devices operated by different application vendors. Thanks to decentralization, immutability, and auditability, Blockchain is promising to enable a tamper-proof and trust-free framework to enhance performance and security issues in centralized DMs. However, directly integrating blockchains into large-scale IoT-based DMs still faces many limitations, such as high resource and energy demands, low transaction throughput, poor scalability, and challenges in privacy preservation. This paper introduces a novel Federated Ledgers-based Framework for Hierarchical Decentralized Data Marketplaces (Fed-DDM). In Fed-DDM, participants are divided into multiple permissioned domains given their registrations. Each domain leverages an efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol to commit transactions of a domain on a private intra-ledger. A public inter-ledger network adopts a scalable Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol to federate multiple private intra-ledger networks. We design a smart contract-enabled inter-ledger protocol to guarantee the security of the cross-domain operations on a public federated ledger without exposing sensitive privacy information from private ledgers. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented, and the experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed Fed-DDM solution with performance and security guarantees.
Jan Stodt, Daniel Schönle, Christoph Reich, Fatemeh Ghovanlooy Ghajar · 6 authors
In recent years, both the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies have been highly influential and revolutionary. IoT enables companies to embrace Industry 4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which benefits from communication and connectivity to reduce cost and to increase productivity through sensor-based autonomy. These automated systems can be further refined with smart contracts that are executed within a blockchain, thereby increasing transparency through continuous and indisputable logging. Ideally, the level of security for these IoT devices shall be very high, as they are specifically designed for this autonomous and networked environment. This paper discusses a use case of a company with legacy devices that wants to benefit from the features and functionality of blockchain technology. In particular, the implications of retrofit solutions are analyzed. The use of the BISS:4.0 platform is proposed as the underlying infrastructure. BISS:4.0 is intended to integrate the blockchain technologies into existing enterprise environments. Furthermore, a security analysis of IoT and blockchain present attacks and countermeasures are presented that are identified and applied to the mentioned use case.
lockchain stores a series of transactions in form of a sequence of linked blocks. Hence, the concept of ledger is easily maintained. Transactions and interactions that take place among participants accessing the distributed and decentralized blockchain network are holding through ledger. In a student management system (SMS), vital information can be highly shared and well protected at the same time. This paper proposes a model for using blockchains to implement fully functional SMS that maintains students’ records, course registrations record and student marks. The proposed model adds more security via the use of hashing and data readily available with decentralized data storage. In addition, the use of ledger-based system to maintain SMS data introduces reliable and highly trusted model.
Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used in many domains, predominantly for electronic-healthcare. Here, IoT devices has the ability to provide real-time sensor data from patients to get processed and analyzed. As a single point of failure, mistrust, data manipulation and tampering, and privacy avoidance may all occur as a result of such a method. Through offering shared computing and storage for IoT data, blockchain can help solve such issues.Maintaining and sharing Medical data is necessary here.If there occurs loss of confidence means it threatens the medical data and loss of integrity creates impact on the life of patient. So, the first objective is to protect the medical records. Also, a central server to the records will pretend the hackers to attack and continuous fetching is difficult.Therefore, combining Blockchain and IoT will be a threat breaker for computerized medical records.
Mohammed Amine Bouras, Boming Xia, Adnan Omer Abuassba, Huansheng Ning · 5 authors
Access control is a critical aspect for improving the privacy and security of IoT systems. A consortium is a public or private association or a group of two or more institutes, businesses, and companies that collaborate to achieve common goals or form a resource pool to enable the sharing economy aspect. However, most access control methods are based on centralized solutions, which may lead to problems like data leakage and single-point failure. Blockchain technology has its intrinsic feature of distribution, which can be used to tackle the centralized problem of traditional access control schemes. Nevertheless, blockchain itself comes with certain limitations like the lack of scalability and poor performance. To bridge the gap of these problems, here we present a decentralized capability-based access control architecture designed for IoT consortium networks named IoT-CCAC. A blockchain-based database is utilized in our solution for better performance since it exhibits favorable features of both blockchain and conventional databases. The performance of IoT-CCAC is evaluated to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed architecture. IoT-CCAC is a secure, salable, effective solution that meets the enterprise and business's needs and adaptable for different IoT interoperability scenarios.
We develop a new Lagrange coded blockchain model for Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems based on Lagrange coded computing (LCC). In the model, a mining task assigned to a blockchain node (BN) is encoded with a specific encoding function. Thus, the final result, i.e., newly generated block or block verification result, can be decoded even when only some mining outputs returned by BNs are correct, while other outputs are erroneous or discarded due to delays. To be decoded correctly, the number of mining outputs returned prior to decoding must be at least a given decoding threshold. Then, security against malicious BNs and resilience against stragglers can be guaranteed if the number of mining tasks allocated to BNs is not less than the sum of decoding threshold, number of stragglers, and double of the number of malicious BNs. Unlike other IoT blockchains and LCC-based methods showing enhanced throughput but yielding poor security, our model can improve throughput without compromising on security. This is achieved through optimized load allocations when the higher loads (two or more mining tasks) are allocated to the fastest BNs leading to: 1) increased number of mining outputs returned prior to decoding required to meet the decoding threshold and 2) increased number of allocated mining tasks to strengthen security and resilience. To overcome the limitation of our model related to higher loads and, hence, higher mining costs to BNs, we develop a contract-theoretic mechanism that incentivizes each BN to complete its mining task through joint load and transaction fee allocations.
Abstract Blockchain technology has completely changed the area of cryptocurrency with a Peer-to-Peer system named Bitcoin. It can provide a distributed, transparent and highly confidential database by recording immutable transactions. Currently, the technique has obtained great research interest on other areas, including the Internet of vehicles (IoVs). In order to solve some centralized problems and improve the architecture of the IoVs, the blockchain technology is utilized to build a decentralized and secure vehicular environment. In this survey, we aim to construct a comprehensive analysis on the applications of blockchain in the IoV. This paper starts with the introduction of the IoVs and the blockchain. Additionally, some existing surveys on the blockchain enabled IoVs are reviewed. Besides, the combination of the blockchain technology and the IoVs is analyzed from seven aspects to describe how the blockchain is implemented in the IoVs. Finally, the future research directions related to the integration are highlighted.
In this article, we discuss a data sharing and knowledge integration framework through autonomous agents with blockchain for implementing Electronic Health Records (EHR). This will enable us to augment existing blockchain-based EHR Systems. We discuss how major concerns in the health industry, i.e., trust, security and scalability, can be addressed by transitioning from existing models to convergence of the three technologies – blockchain, agent-based modeling, and knowledge graph in a decentralized ecosystem. Each autonomous agent is responsible for instantiating key processes, such as user authentication and authorization, smart contracts, and knowledge graph generation through data integration among the participating stakeholders in the network. We discuss a layered approach for the design of the proposed system leading to an enhanced, safer clinical decision-making system. This can pave the way toward more informed and engaged patients and citizens by delivering personalized healthcare.
The evolving agricultural technologies used mostly for remote access and modernization in farming connected via the Internet of Things (IoT) have been grown rapidly. However because of the wide size of all its broadcaster's propagandizing existence, it has some significant concerns with respect to security and privacy. We utilize blockchain to address such security breaches, allowing the development of a decentralized distributed blockchain system that's also exchanged between the IoT cluster heads. This article's major focus is provide smart greenhouse farmlands with a portable blockchain-based infrastructure which offers integrity and confidentiality. Where, green-house IoT sensor nodes are function as a blockchain centrally controlled to optimize the energy consumption by utilizing secure immutable ledgers. Furthermore, we present a significant solution that integrates blockchain technology via IoT devices to offer Smart Greenhouse cultivation with an enhanced secure communication.
Muneeb Ejaz, Tanesh Kumar, Ivana Kovacevic, Mika Ylianttila · 5 authors
The rapid evolution of technology allows the healthcare sector to adopt intelligent, context-aware, secure, and ubiquitous healthcare services. Together with the global trend of an aging population, it has become highly important to propose value-creating, yet cost-efficient digital solutions for healthcare systems. These solutions should provide effective means of healthcare services in both the hospital and home care scenarios. In this paper, we focused on the latter case, where the goal was to provide easy-to-use, reliable, and secure remote monitoring and aid for elderly persons at their home. We proposed a framework to integrate the capabilities of edge computing and blockchain technology to address some of the key requirements of smart remote healthcare systems, such as long operating times, low cost, resilience to network problems, security, and trust in highly dynamic network conditions. In order to assess the feasibility of our approach, we evaluated the performance of our framework in terms of latency, power consumption, network utilization, and computational load, compared to a scenario where no blockchain was used.
The cloud-fog-edge hybrid system is the evolution of the traditional centralized cloud computing model. Through the combination of different levels of resources, it is able to handle service requests from terminal users with a lower latency. However, it is accompanied by greater uncertainty, unreliability, and instability due to the decentralization and regionalization of service processing, as well as the unreasonable and unfairness in resource allocation, task scheduling, and coordination, caused by the autonomy of node distribution. Therefore, this paper introduces blockchain technology to construct a trust-enabled interaction framework in a cloud-fog-edge environment, and through a double-chain structure, it improves the reliability and verifiability of task processing without a big management overhead. Furthermore, in order to fully consider the reasonability and load balance in service coordination and task scheduling, Berger’s model and the conception of service justice are introduced to perform reasonable matching of tasks and resources. We have developed a trust-based cloud-fog-edge service simulation system based on iFogsim, and through a large number of experiments, the performance of the proposed model is verified in terms of makespan, scheduling success rate, latency, and user satisfaction with some classical scheduling models.
Alex Roehrs, Cristiano André da Costa, Rodrigo da Rosa Righi, André Henrique Mayer · 7 authors
Blockchain technologies have evolved in recent years, as have the use of personal health record (PHR) data. Initially, only the financial domain benefited from Blockchain technologies. Due to efficient distribution format and data integrity security, however, these technologies have demonstrated potential in other areas, such as PHR data in the healthcare domain. Applying Blockchain to PHR data faces different challenges than applying it to financial transactions via crypto-currency. To propose and discuss an architectural model of a Blockchain platform named "OmniPHR Multi-Blockchain" to address key challenges associated with geographical distribution of PHR data. We analyzed the current literature to identify critical barriers faced when applying Blockchain technologies to distribute PHR data. We propose an architecture model and describe a prototype developed to evaluate and address these challenges. The OmniPHR Multi-Blockchain architecture yielded promising results for scenarios involving distributed PHR data. The project demonstrated a viable and beneficial alternative for processing geographically distributed PHR data with performance comparable with conventional methods. Blockchain's implementation tools have evolved, but the domain of healthcare still faces many challenges concerning distribution and interoperability. This study empirically demonstrates an alternative architecture that enables the distributed processing of PHR data via Blockchain technologies.
With the rise in fog computing, users are no longer restricted to only accessing resources located in central and distant clouds and can request services from neighboring fog nodes distributed over networks. This can effectively reduce the network latency of service responses and the load of data centers. Furthermore, it can prevent the Internet’s bandwidth from being used up due to massive data flows from end users to clouds. However, fog-computing resources are distributed over multiple levels of networks and are managed by different owners. Consequently, the problem of service discovery becomes quite complicated. For resolving this problem, a decentralized service discovery method is required. Accordingly, this research proposes a service discovery framework based on the distributed ledger technology of IOTA. The proposed framework enables clients to directly search for service nodes through any node in the IOTA Mainnet to achieve the goals of public access and high availability and avoid network attacks to distributed hash tables that are popularly used for service discovery. Moreover, clients can obtain more comprehensive information by visiting known nodes and select a fog node able to provide services with the shortest latency. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed framework is cost-effective for distributed service discovery due to the advantages of IOTA. On the other hand, it can indeed enable clients to obtain higher service quality by automatic node selection.
Academic degrees are subject to corruptions, system flaws, forgeries, and imitations. In this paper we propose to develop a blockchain smart contract-based application using Ethereum Platform, to store, distribute and verify academic certificates. It constitutes a trusted, decentralized certificate’s management system that can offer a unified viewpoint for students, academic institutions, as well as for other potential stakeholders such as employers. The article describes the implementation of three main parts of our proposed solution that includes: verification application, university interface and accreditor interface. This application avoids administrative barriers, makes the process of deployment, verification, and validation of certificates faster, efficient, and more secure. Additionally, it offers confidentiality of the data by using AES encryption algorithm before creating transactions and allows bulk submission of multiple academic certificates.