5G and beyond (B5G) networks are leading a digital revolution in telecommunication in both academia and industry. It brings new paradigms in many aspects of people's daily lives due to its advantages. However, it still leaves some issues in terms of security and privacy as challenges. Blockchain, the public database, is an alternative to the traditional centralized systems, serving as the backbone technique in many systems, including manufacturing, economics, and industry. Blockchain is promising in solving the security issues in the sense that it provides desirable properties including decentralization, transparency, immutability, and so on. In this article, we investigate typical security and privacy issues in edge intelligence in B5G networks and devise a framework to integrate blockchain with such systems, which can provide guaranteed security as well as privacy. We also illustrate several possible solutions to these security and privacy issues in edge intelligence in B5G systems based on blockchain and Ethereum to show how blockchain contributes to the coming B5G networks.
Tahmid Hasan Pranto, Abdulla All Noman, Atik Mahmud, AKM Bahalul Haque
The agricultural sector is still lagging behind from all other sectors in terms of using the newest technologies. For production, the latest machines are being introduced and adopted. However, pre-harvest and post-harvest processing are still done by following traditional methodologies while tracing, storing, and publishing agricultural data. As a result, farmers are not getting deserved payment, consumers are not getting enough information before buying their product, and intermediate person/processors are increasing retail prices. Using blockchain, smart contracts, and IoT devices, we can fully automate the process while establishing absolute trust among all these parties. In this research, we explored the different aspects of using blockchain and smart contracts with the integration of IoT devices in pre-harvesting and post-harvesting segments of agriculture. We proposed a system that uses blockchain as the backbone while IoT devices collect data from the field level, and smart contracts regulate the interaction among all these contributing parties. The system implementation has been shown in diagrams and with proper explanations. Gas costs of every operation have also been attached for a better understanding of the costs. We also analyzed the system in terms of challenges and advantages. The overall impact of this research was to show the immutable, available, transparent, and robustly secure characteristics of blockchain in the field of agriculture while also emphasizing the vigorous mechanism that the collaboration of blockchain, smart contract, and IoT presents.
Marc Jayson Baucas, S. Andrew Gadsden, Petros Spachos
Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart home applications are rising in popularity. However, this trend attracts malicious activity, which causes cost-efficient security to be in high demand. This letter proposes a low-end design that reinforces the security of a home network. It uses private blockchain technology and localization via RSSI-based trilateration. We investigated the benefits of private blockchains over their public counterpart, and we improve the precision of the localization algorithm by testing it against different wireless technologies. The results conclude that using a private blockchain with a WiFi-based communication system produces the most efficient iteration of the proposed design.
Ge Chen, Jun Wu, Wu Yang, Ali Kashif Bashir · 6 authors
Nowadays, adopting blockchain technology to Internet of Things has become a trend and it is important to minimize energy consumption while providing a high quality of service (QoS) in Blockchain-based IoT networks. Pre-caching popular and fresh IoT content avoids activating sensors frequently, thus effectively reducing network energy consumption. However, the user equipment in regions covered by base stations will generate distributed and time-varying data requests, hence modeling the base station topology to capturing spatio-temporal request patterns is required for the data storage pre-allocation. Traditional solutions typically fail to pay attention to the topology, resulting in the sensor being activated redundantly. In this paper, we propose Request Graph Convolutional-LSTM to capture the spatio-temporal request patterns in Blockchain-based IoT networks and make predictions. Moreover, a heuristic algorithm based on the predictions is proposed to develop pre-caching strategy, which determines the data and location to be cached to minimize the mean data retrieval latency restricted by the cache space of IoT network entities and the freshness of IoT content. Experiments show that our proposed frame provides a low energy consumption.
Current developments in information technology and increased inclination towards smart cities have led to the initiation of a plethora of features by technology-oriented companies (i.e., car manufacturers) to improve users’ privacy and comfort. The invention of smart vehicle technology paved the way for the excessive use of machine-to-machine technologies. Moreover, third-party sharing of financial services are also introduced that support machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. These monetary systems’ prime focus is on improving reliability and security; however, they overlook aspects like behaviors and users’ need. For instance, people often hand over their bank cards or share their credentials with their colleagues to withdraw money on their behalf. Such behaviors may originate issues about privacy and security that can have severe losses for the card owner. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based strategy for payment of fueling of smart cars without any human interaction while maintaining transparency, privacy, and trust. The proposed system is capable of data sharing among the users of the system while securing sensitive information. Moreover, we also provide a blockchain-based secure privacy-preserving strategy for payment of fueling among the fuel seller and buyer without human intervention. Furthermore, we have also analytically evaluated several experiments to determine the proposed blockchain platform’s usability and efficiency. Lastly, we harness Hyperledger Caliper to assess the proposed system’s performance in terms of transaction latency, transactions per second, and resource consumption.
Hossam Saad Shady Yasser Hassan Gaber Aya Samy, Ashraf Tammam, Ahmed Fahmy, Bahaa Hasan
Blockchain is one of the most powerful and promising technologies nowadays in the IT industry, One of Blockchain’s main features is the presence of a Consensus Algorithm, which is responsible for maintaining the security and integrity of the entire blockchain network where all the nodes participating in the network reach a certain agreement. However, some algorithms like the Proof-of-Work require very high energy consumption to reach a single agreement by solving a puzzle and provides a low throughput (3-7 transactions/second), thus, it may not be very reliable in blockchain solutions. In this paper, we aim to provide a reliable choice for different business use-cases by proposing a modification in the Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance voting-based algorithm that provides a higher throughput (up to 1140 tx/s), which will be very important to be used in the use case called a letter of credit which is a part of trade finance (relation between exporter, importer and the bank institutions).
Sejong Lee, Jaehyeon Kim, Yongseok Kwon, Teasung Kim · 5 authors
BACKGROUND With the increasing sophistication of the medical industry, various advanced medical services such as medical artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and personalized health care services have emerged. The demand for medical data is also rapidly increasing today because advanced medical services use medical data such as user data and electronic medical records (EMRs) to provide services. As a result, health care institutions and medical practitioners are researching various mechanisms and tools to feed medical data into their systems seamlessly. However, medical data contain sensitive personal information of patients. Therefore, ensuring security while meeting the demand for medical data is a very important problem in the information age for which a solution is required. OBJECTIVE Our goal is to design a blockchain-based decentralized patient information exchange (PIE) system that can safely and efficiently share EMRs. The proposed system preserves patients’ privacy in the EMRs through a medical information exchange process that includes data encryption and access control. METHODS We propose a blockchain-based EMR-sharing system that allows patients to manage their EMRs scattered across multiple hospitals and share them with other users. Our PIE system protects the patient’s EMR from security threats such as counterfeiting and privacy attacks during data sharing. In addition, it provides scalability by using distributed data-sharing methods to quickly share an EMR, regardless of its size or type. We implemented simulation models using Hyperledger Fabric, an open source blockchain framework. RESULTS We performed a simulation of the EMR-sharing process and compared it with previous works on blockchain-based medical systems to check the proposed system’s performance. During the simulation, we found that it takes an average of 0.01014 (SD 0.0028) seconds to download 1 MB of EMR in our proposed PIE system. Moreover, it has been confirmed that data can be freely shared with other users regardless of the size or format of the data to be transmitted through the distributed data-sharing technique using the InterPlanetary File System. We conducted a security analysis to check whether the proposed security mechanism can effectively protect users of the EMR-sharing system from security threats such as data forgery or unauthorized access, and we found that the distributed ledger structure and re-encryption–based data encryption method can effectively protect users’ EMRs from forgery and privacy leak threats and provide data integrity. CONCLUSIONS Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that provides data integrity to enable patient-centered health information exchange and access control. PIE systems integrate and manage fragmented patient EMRs through blockchain and protect users from security threats during the data exchange process among users. To increase safety and efficiency in the EMR-sharing process, we used access control using security levels, data encryption based on re-encryption, and a distributed data-sharing scheme.
Blockchain technology, with its distributed ledger, decentralization, high security, no tampering and other features, helps to solve the problems of data source confirmation, traceability and authorized data sharing. The effective utilization of data to achieve automatic governance and trusted decision-making of the city is known as "City Brain". The city brain is the key in smart city development, while the key to build a city brain is data resources. Aiming at the challenges existing in the construction of big data platform, this paper proposes a new solution based on blockchain, establishes the entity model and data model, analyzes the business model, designs the blockchain data platform framework and the cloud-blockchain integrated operation mode, and at last discusses the issues concerned in the application.
With the development of smart city, the cooperation between government sectors is becoming more and more frequent, breaking the information island and big data sharing has become an inevitable trend. The traditional way of government data sharing is mainly based on one unified data center, which has high construction cost and maintenance cost, and fails to fully consider the sectoral interests, authority, security and traceability, so there are still many barriers in government data sharing. Taking advantage of the features of blockchain technology, such as distributed ledger, smart contract, data trust and traceability, this paper proposes an application model of government data sharing based on blockchain, which uses a unified data sharing model and autonomous authority management to provide efficient and safe bus service for distributed government big data sharing.
A decade on since Satoshi’s Bitcoin paper, Blockchain is now considered to be sliding into the trough of Gartner’s hype cycle. Claims in regards to Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies being dead are on the rise, whilst at the same time many claim the contrary. The vague statement encapsulates many different aspects and perspectives of a myriad of use cases, technology and platforms including both the technique as a whole as well as individual instantiations. In this paper, we unpack the statement, break it down, and investigate objectively concrete factors which provide indication in regards to whether Blockchain is dead. We examine metrics including budgets and investment; public company registries and data; community engagement, projects, and source code repositories; academic research and programmes; social media posts; and public interest. We demonstrate metrics individually that indicate the respective measures’ healthy activity and come to the conclusion that the collective statement “Blockchain is dead” does not hold. A clear message extracted from the work proposed herein is that success is achieved where the community comes together rather than works in isolation.
Yao Du, Shuxiao Miao, Zitian Tong, Victoria L. Lemieux · 5 authors
Driven by recent advancements in machine learning, mobile edge computing (MEC) and the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) has become an emerging technology. Traditional machine learning approaches require the training data to be collected and processed in centralized servers. With the advent of new decentralized machine learning approaches and mobile edge computing, the IoT on-device data training has now become possible. To realize AI at the edge of the network, IoT devices can offload training tasks to MEC servers. However, those distributed frameworks of edge intelligence also introduce some new challenges, such as user privacy and data security. To handle these problems, blockchain has been considered as a promising solution. As a distributed smart ledger, blockchain is renowned for high scalability, privacy-preserving, and decentralization. This technology is also featured with automated script execution and immutable data records in a trusted manner. In recent years, as quantum computers become more and more promising, blockchain is also facing potential threats from quantum algorithms. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art in these cutting-edge technologies by summarizing the available literature in the research field of blockchain-based MEC, machine learning, secure data sharing, and basic introduction of post-quantum blockchain. We also discuss the real-world use cases and outline the challenges of blockchain-empowered intelligence.
Jianbo Du, Wenjie Cheng, Guangyue Lu, Haotong Cao · 7 authors
When using blockchain in mobile systems, computation intensive mining tasks pose great challenges to the processing capabilities of mobile miner equipment. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an effective solution to alleviating the problem via task offloading. In the mining process, miners compete for rewards through puzzle solving, where only the miner that first completes the process will be rewarded. Thus, miners may wish to pay higher price and use more communication resources in task offloading and more computation resources in task processing for latency reduction. However, there are risks for the miners not profiting from consuming more resources or paying a higher price, so miners are rational in blockchain systems. In order to maximize the rational total profit of all miners, we use an asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) deep reinforcement learning algorithm to obtain the resource pricing and allocation, considering the stochastic properties of wireless channels, and the prospect theory is employed to strike a good balance between risks and rewards. Numerical results show that our proposed A3C based joint optimization algorithm converges fast and outperforms the baseline algorithms in terms of the total reward.
Sabah Suhail, Rasheed Hussain, Raja Jurdak, Alma Oracevic · 7 authors
Industrial processes rely on sensory data for decision-making processes, risk assessment, and performance evaluation. Extracting actionable insights from the collected data calls for an infrastructure that can ensure the dissemination of trustworthy data. For the physical data to be trustworthy, it needs to be cross validated through multiple sensor sources with overlapping fields of view. Cross-validated data can then be stored on the blockchain, to maintain its integrity and trustworthiness. Once trustworthy data is recorded on the blockchain, product lifecycle events can be fed into data-driven systems for process monitoring, diagnostics, and optimized control. In this regard, digital twins (DTs) can be leveraged to draw intelligent conclusions from data by identifying the faults and recommending precautionary measures ahead of critical events. Empowering DTs with blockchain in industrial use cases targets key challenges of disparate data repositories, untrustworthy data dissemination, and the need for predictive maintenance. In this survey, while highlighting the key benefits of using blockchain-based DTs, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research results for blockchain-based DTs. Based on the current research trends, we discuss a trustworthy blockchain-based DTs framework. We also highlight the role of artificial intelligence in blockchain-based DTs. Furthermore, we discuss the current and future research and deployment challenges of blockchain-supported DTs that require further investigation.
Somdip Dey, Suman Saha, Amit Kumar Singh, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier
Food safety is an important issue in today’s world. The traditional agri-food production system does not offer easy traceability of the produce at any point of the supply chain, and hence, during a food-borne outbreak, it is very difficult to sift through food production data to track produce and the origin of the outbreak. In recent years, the blockchain based food production system has resolved this challenge; however, none of the proposed methodologies makes the food production data easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by consumers or producers using mobile/edge devices. In this paper, we propose FoodSQRBlock (Food Safety Quick Response Block), a blockchain technology based framework that digitises the food production information and makes it easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by the consumers and producers by using QR codes. We also propose a large-scale integration of FoodSQRBlock in the cloud to show the feasibility and scalability of the framework, as well as give an experimental evaluation to prove this.
In the process of sharing data, the costless replication of electric energy data leads to the problem of uncontrolled data and the difficulty of third-party access verification. This paper proposes a controlled sharing mechanism of data based on the consortium blockchain. The data flow range is controlled by the data isolation mechanism between channels provided by the consortium blockchain by constructing a data storage consortium chain to achieve trusted data storage, combining attribute-based encryption to complete data access control and meet the demands for granular data accessibility control and secure sharing; the data flow transfer ledger is built to record the original data life cycle management and effectively record the data transfer process of each data controller. Taking the application scenario of electric energy data sharing as an example, the scheme is designed and simulated on the Linux system and Hyperledger Fabric. Experimental results have verified that the mechanism can effectively control the scope of access to electrical energy data and realize the control of the data by the data owner.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have received significant interest in various areas beyond the financial sector, with profound applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), providing the means for creating truly trustless and secure solutions for IoT applications. Taking into account the weak security defences that the majority of IoT devices have, it is critical that a blockchain-based solution targeting the IoT is not only capable of addressing the many challenges IoT is facing, but also does not introduce other defects, in terms of performance, making its adoption hard to achieve. This paper aims at addressing the above needs by providing a comprehensive and coherent review of the available blockchain solutions to determine their ability to meet the requirements and tackle the challenges of the IoT, using the smart home as the reference domain. Key architectural aspects of blockchain solutions are examined in terms of their ability to withstand various types of common IoT and blockchain attacks, deliver enhanced privacy features, and assure adequate performance levels while processing large amounts of transactions being generated in an IoT environment. The analysis carried out identified that the defences currently provided by blockchain platforms are not sufficient to thwart all the prominent attacks against blockchains, with blockchain 1.0 and 2.0 platforms being susceptible to the majority of them. On the other side, privacy related mechanisms are being supported, to varying degrees, by all platforms investigated; however, each of the them tackles specific only privacy aspects, thus rendering the overall privacy evaluation a challenging task which needs to be considered in an ad-hoc basis. If the underlying consensus protocols performance and fault tolerance is also considered, then only a small number of platforms meet the requirements of our reference IoT domain.
Aadhaar is a 12 digit unique identification number, provided to each citizen of India. This includes the biometric data and personal information such as full names, addresses and birthdates. As per the government rule nowadays Aadhaaris linked to the Bank account, PAN Card, Voter ID Card, LPG Connection Card, Ration Card, Mobile number of the citizen of India.
Jinnan Zhang, Changqi Lu, Gang Cheng, Teng Guo · 8 authors
Edge computing is a product of the evolution of IoT and the development of cloud computing technology, providing computing, storage, network, and other infrastructure close to users. Compared with the centralized deployment model of traditional cloud computing, edge computing solves the problems of extended communication time and high convergence traffic, providing better support for low latency and high bandwidth services. With the increasing amount of data generated by users and devices in IoT, security and privacy issues in the edge computing environment have become concerns. Blockchain, a security technology developed rapidly in recent years, has been adopted by many industries, such as finance and insurance. With the edge computing capability, deploying blockchain platforms/applications on edge computing platforms can provide security services for network edge environments. Although there are already solutions for integrating edge computing with blockchain in many IoT application scenarios, they slightly lack scalability, portability, and heterogeneous data processing. In this paper, we propose a trusted edge platform to integrate the edge computing framework and blockchain network for building an edge security environment. The proposed platform aims to preserve the data privacy of the edge computing client. The design based on the microservice architecture makes the platform lighter. To improve the portability of the platform, we introduce the Edgex Foundry framework and design an edge application module on the platform to improve the business capability of Edgex. Simultaneously, we designed a series of well-defined security authentication microservices. These microservices use the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network to build a reliable security mechanism in the edge environment. Finally, we build an edge computing network using different hardware devices and deploy the trusted edge platform on multiple network nodes. The usability of the proposed platform is demonstrated by testing the round-trip time (RTT) of several important workflows. The experimental results demonstrate that the platform can meet the availability requirements in real-world usage scenarios.
Abstract Currently, drones represent a promising technology for combating Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) due to the transport of goods, medical supplies to a given target location in the quarantine areas experiencing an epidemic outbreak. Drone missions will increasingly rely on drone collaboration, which requires the drones to reduce communication complexity and be controlled in a decentralized fashion. Blockchain technology becomes a must in industrial applications because it provides decentralized data, accessibility, immutability, and irreversibility. Therefore, Blockchain makes data public for all drones and enables drones to log information concerning world states, time, location, resources, delivery data, and drone relation to all neighbors drones. This paper introduces decentralized independent multi‐drones to accomplish the task collaboratively. Improving blockchain with a consensus algorithm can improve network partitioning and scalability in order to combat COVID‐19. The multi‐drones task is to combat COVID‐19 via monitoring and detecting, social distancing, sanitization, data analysis, delivering goods and medical supplies, and announcement while avoiding collisions with one another. We discuss End to End (E2E) delivery application of combination blockchain and multi‐drone in combating COVID‐19 and beyond future pandemics. Furthermore, the challenges and opportunities of our proposed framework are highlighted.
During the last decade, distributed ledger solutions such as blockchain have gained significant attention due to their decentralized, immutable, and verifiable features. However, the public availability of data stored on the blockchain and its link to users may raise privacy and security issues. In some cases, addressing these issues requires blockchain data to be secured with mechanisms that allow on-demand (as opposed to full) disclosure. In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of blockchain privacy and security requirements, and detail how existing mechanisms answer them. We provide a taxonomy of current attacks together with related countermeasures. We present a thorough comparative analysis based on various parameters of state-of the-art privacy and security mechanisms, we provide recommendations to design secure and privacy-aware blockchain, and we suggest guidelines for future research.
It had been predicted that by 2020, nearly 26 billion devices would be connected to the Internet, with a big percentage being vehicles. The Internet of Vehicles (IoVa) is a concept that refers to the connection and cooperation of smart vehicles and devices in a network through the generation, transmission, and processing of data that aims at improving traffic congestion, travel time, and comfort, all the while reducing pollution and accidents. However, this transmission of sensitive data (e.g., location) needs to occur with defined security properties to safeguard vehicles and their drivers since attackers could use this data. Blockchain is a fairly recent technology that guarantees trust between nodes through cryptography mechanisms and consensus protocols in distributed, untrustful environments, like IoV networks. Much research has been done in implementing the former in the latter to impressive results, as Blockchain can cover and offer solutions to many IoV problems. However, these implementations have to deal with the challenge of IoV node’s resource constraints since they do not suffice for the computational and energy requirements of traditional Blockchain systems, which is one of the biggest limitations of Blockchain implementations in IoV. Finally, these two technologies can be used to build the foundations for smart cities, enabling new application models and better results for end-users.
Abstract If blockchain networks are to become the building blocks of the infrastructure for the future digital economy, then several challenges related to the resiliency and survivability of blockchain networks need to be addressed. The survivability of a blockchain network is influenced by the diversity of its nodes. Trustworthy device-level attestations permits nodes in a blockchain network to provide truthful evidence regarding their current configuration, operational state, keying material and other system attributes. In the current work we review the recent developments towards a standard attestation architecture and evidence conveyance protocols. We explore the applicability and benefits of a standard attestation architecture to blockchain networks. Finally, we discuss a number of open challenges related to node attestations that has arisen due to changing model of blockchain network deployments, such as the use of virtualization and containerization technologies for nodes in cloud infrastructures.
Ikram Ullah, Gerard de Roode, Nirvana Meratnia, Paul Havinga
Internet of Things (IoT) has been deployed in a vast number of smart applications with the aim to bring ease and comfort into our lives. However, with the expansion of IoT applications, the number of security and privacy breaches has also increased, which brings into question the resilience of existing security and trust mechanisms. Furthermore, the contemporaneous centralized technology is posing significant challenges viz scalability, transparency and efficiency to wide range of IoT applications such as smart logistics, where millions of IoT devices need to be connected simultaneously. Alternatively, IOTA is a distributed ledger technology that offers resilient security and trust mechanisms and a decentralized architecture to overcome IoT impediments. IOTA has already been implemented in many applications and has clearly demonstrated its significance in real-world applications. Like any other technology, IOTA unfortunately also encounters security vulnerabilities. The purpose of this study is to explore and highlight security vulnerabilities of IOTA and simultaneously demonstrate the value of threat modeling in evaluating security vulnerabilities of distributed ledger technology. IOTA vulnerabilities are scrutinized in terms of feasibility and impact and we have also presented prevention techniques where applicable. To identify IOTA vulnerabilities, we have examined existing literature and online blogs. Literature available on this topic is very limited so far. As far as we know IOTA has barely been addressed in the traditional journals, conferences and books. In total we have identified six vulnerabilities. We used Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS v3.0) to further categorize these vulnerabilities on the basis of their feasibility and impact.