Unauthorized resource access represents a typical security threat in the Internet of Things (IoT), while distributed ledger technologies (e.g., blockchain and IOTA) hold great promise to address this threat. Although blockchain-based IoT access control schemes have been the most popular ones, they suffer from several significant limitations, such as high monetary cost and low throughput of processing access requests. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel IoT access control scheme by combining the fee-less IOTA technology and the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology. To control the access to a resource, a token, which records access permissions to this resource, is encrypted by the CP-ABE technology and uploaded to the IOTA Tangle (i.e., the underlying database of IOTA). Any user can fetch the encrypted token from the Tangle, while only those who can decrypt this token are authorized to access the resource. In this way, the proposed scheme enables not only distributed, fee-less and scalable access control thanks to the IOTA but also fine-grained attribute-based access control thanks to the CP-ABE. We show the feasibility of our scheme by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype system using smart phones (Google Pixel 3XL) and a commercial IoT gateway (NEC EGW001). We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of access request processing throughput. The experimental results show that our scheme enables object owners to authorize access rights to a large number of subjects in a much (about 5 times) shorter time than the existing access control scheme called Decentralized Capability-based Access Control framework using IOTA (DCACI), significantly improving the access request processing throughput.
Pest can be a serious topic in agricultural areas especially rice plantations. The pest destroys the plants before harvesting time. Because of the presence of the pest, the yield of agricultural products is decreasing. From a technical point of view, an agricultural professional should identify not only the type of pest that destroys rice plants but also overcome the pest. This research proposes a paper review on pest detection systems by using Blockchain technology and the Internet of Things involving all parties involved. The use of the review is to have a broad overview regarding the functional combination between IoT and Blockchain technologies to reduce the pest problems. Smart contract technology Blockchain may be held to determine automatic alert in the system and know how to resolve the problem accurately and all information is verified by blockchain system without a human interception. IoT devices can be attached to rice plantations to monitor, determine and send the information of the pests. Our paper explains the combination of IoT and Blockchain technologies in order to improve any possibility of success rate by getting the pests. Thus, IoT replaces human manual checking in pest identification to reduce human error. So that, the harvesting time can be increased and the agriculture yields are good. The search comparison results show that ScienceDirect has the highest search value
Since the introduction of the first Bitcoin blockchain in 2008, different\ndecentralized blockchain systems such as Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and\nCorda, have emerged with public and private accessibility. It has been widely\nacknowledged that no single blockchain network will fit all use cases. As a\nresult, we have observed the increasing popularity of multi-blockchain\necosystem in which customers will move toward different blockchains based on\ntheir particular requirements. Hence, the efficiency and security requirements\nof interactions among these heterogeneous blockchains become critical. In\nrealization of this multi-blockchain paradigm, initiatives in building\nInteroperability-Facilitating Platforms (IFPs) that aim at bridging different\nblockchains (a.k.a. blockchain interoperability) have come to the fore. Despite\ncurrent efforts, it is extremely difficult for blockchain customers\n(organizations, governments, companies) to understand the trade-offs between\ndifferent IFPs and their suitability for different application domains before\nadoption. A key reason is due to a lack of fundamental and systematic\napproaches to assess the variables among different IFPs. To fill this gap,\ndeveloping new IFP requirements specification and open-source benchmark tools\nto advance research in distributed, multi-blockchain interoperability, with\nemphasis on IFP performance and security challenges are required. In this\ndocument, we outline a research proposal study to the community to realize this\ngap.\n
It is said that blockchain will contribute to the digital transformation of society in a wide range of ways, from the management of public and private documents to the traceability in various industries, as well as digital currencies. A number of so-called blockchain platforms have been developed, and experiments and applications have been carried out on them. But are these platforms really conducive to practical use of the blockchain concept? To answer the question, we need to better understand what the technology called blockchain really is. We need to sort out the confusion we see in understanding what blockchain was invented for and what it means. We also need to clarify the structure of its applications. This document provides a generic model of understanding blockchain and its applications. We introduce design patterns to classify the platforms. We categorize possible use cases by identifying the structure among applications, and organize the functional, performance, operational and legal requirements for each such case. Based on the categorization and criteria, we evaluated and compared the following platforms: Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Iroha, Hyperledger Indy, Ethereum, Quorum/Hyperledger Besu, Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Corda and BBc-1. We have tried to be fair in our evaluations and comparisons, but we also expect to provoke discussion. The intended readers for this document is anyone involved in development of application systems who wants to understand blockchain and their platforms, including non-engineers and non-technologists. The assessments in this document will allow readers to understand the technological requirements for the blockchain platforms, to question existing technologies, and to choose the appropriate platforms for the applications they envision. The comparisons hopefully will also be useful as a guide for designing new technologies.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are widely known applications of blockchain technology, have drawn much attention and are largely recognized in recent years. Initially Bitcoin and Ethereum processed 7 and 15 Transactions Per Second (TPS) respectively, whereas VISA and Paypal process 1700 and 193 TPS respectively. The biggest challenge to blockchain adoption is scalability, defined as the capacity to change the block size to handle the growing amount of load. This paper attempts to present the existing scalability solutions which are broadly classified into three layers: Layer 0 solutions focus on optimization of propagation protocol for transactions and blocks, Layer 1 solutions are based on the consensus algorithms and data structure, and Layer 2 solutions aims to decrease the load of the primary chain by implementing solutions outside the chain. We present a classification and comparison of existing blockchain scalability solutions based on performance along with their pros and cons
Accurate data and strategic business processes are crucial to all parties in a supply chain system. However, the absence of mutual trust can create a barrier to implementation. Several studies have shown that supply chains face challenges arising from a lack of trust with respect to the sharing of data. How well each party trusts the data they receive can have a profound influence on management decisions. Blockchain technology has been widely used to process cryptocurrency transactions. Recently, it has also proved to be effective in creating trust in the Internet of things (IoT) domain. Blockchain technology can facilitate mutual trust between parties who would otherwise have been doubtful of each other's data, allowing for more effective and secure sharing of data. However, if the blockchain is not IoT-optimized, companies can experience significant delays and the need for extensive computational capacity. Moreover, there are still some limitations regarding the consensus between the nodes in the traditional consensus approaches. Here, we propose an alternative approach to creating trust in supply chains with diverse IoT elements. Our streamlined trust model simplifies data sharing and reduces computational, storage, and latency requirements while increasing the security of the IoT-based supply chain management. We evaluate the suggested model using simulations and highlight its viability.

 
 
 Storing student grades in universities is a sensitive issue when it comes to the security of campus computer networks. In this paper, we propose a blockchain model to ensure the secure storage of student grade data. Each record of recording student grades by a lecturer can be seen as a record in a journal or ledger. All records in one of the departments in a faculty can be seen as a student grade journal. Modeling this data by viewing data records as a journal allows us to model a database for all records in an encrypted and distributed manner. Namely, a model that resembles the blockchain model. In this perspective, a blockchain network can be made in which each node is stored in a different direction. So if there are three departments within the faculty, a blockchain with three vertices can be made. Each node keeps a copy of the overall student grade journal data. So that each node can mutually verify the validity of transaction records in each department. Student value journals are structured in such a way that they form a blockchain that builds hashes that lock together. This modeling of student value records answers the problem of being vulnerable to student scores hacked by irresponsible parties both from within the campus and from outside the campus. Security follows the protocols in the blockchain architecture.
 
 
Abstract Remote patient monitoring and data management have gained much popularity in recent years because of their enhanced access to lowâcost healthcare services. A cloudâbased healthcare system provides numerous solutions for collecting patient data and offers onâdemand wellâmanaged reports to patients and healthcare providers. However, it equally suffers from singleâpoint failure, security, privacy, and nonâtransparency issues with the data, impacting the continuity of the system. To resolve such concerns, this article proposes an artificial intelligence (AI)âenabled decentralized healthcare framework that accesses and authenticates Internet of Things (IoT) devices and create trust and transparency in patient healthcare records (PHR). The mechanism is based on the AIâenabled smart contracts and the conceptualization of the public blockchain network. Alongside this, the framework identifies the malicious IoT nodes in the system. The experimental analyses are performed on the realâtime test environment, and significant improvements are suggested in terms of device energy consumption, data request time, throughput, average latency, and transaction fee.
Security and privacy of patientsâ data is a major concern in the healthcare industry. In this paper, we propose a system that activates robust security and privacy of patientsâ medical records as well as enables interoperability and data exchange between the different healthcare providers. The work proposes the shift from patientâs electronic health records being managed and controlled by the healthcare industry to a patient-centric application where patients are in control of their data. The aim of this research is to build an Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) system that is layered on the Ethereum blockchain platform and smart contract in order to eliminate the need for third-party systems. With this system, the healthcare provider can search for patientâs data and request the patientsâ consent to access it. Patients manage their data which enables an expedited data exchange across EHR systems. Each patientâs data are stored on the peer-to-peer node ledger. The proposed patient-centric EHR platform is cross-platform compliant, as it can be accessed via personal computers and mobile devices and facilitates interoperability across healthcare providers as patientsâ medical records are gathered from different healthcare providers and stored in a unified format. The proposed framework is tested on a private Ethereum network using Ganache. The results show the effectiveness of the system with respect to security, privacy, performance and interoperability.
Rafael Belchior, AndrĂŠ Vasconcelos, Miguel Correia, Thomas Hardjono
The emergence of blockchain interoperability is reducing the risk of investing in blockchain by avoiding vendor lock-in, leveraging interoperation, and providing migration capabilities. However, to fully unlock the internet of blockchains, it is necessary to provide enterprise interoperability mechanisms that allow service providers to comply with different regulations, e.g., data privacy regulations. Each blockchain can be reached via a gateway, allowing to interconnect value, to provide different services, and to enable self-sovereignty. To realize this vision, we propose Hermes, a fault-tolerant middleware that connects blockchain networks and is based on the Open Digital Asset Protocol (ODAP). Hermes is crash fault-tolerant by allying a new protocol, ODAP-2PC, with a log storage API that can leverage blockchain to secure logs, providing them transparency, auditability, availability, and non-repudiation. We introduce a use case benefiting from Hermes, digital cross-jurisdiction promissory notes. We show that cross-chain transactions can be achieved securely with Hermes, given that gateways are complying with legal frameworks.
Abstract Blockchain is a collection of records and blocks that are integrated using cryptography. Every block consists of certain levels of cryptographic hash for the previous block in the form of a timestamp and the transaction data integral to the transaction record. The blockchain systems have currently used among the various set of industrial information networks. If effectively used, it shall help the system in having more secured levels of development. In this research review, the objective is to understand the gamut of blockchain implementation and to pursue the scope in the usage of the blockchain solutions in healthcare solutions. Review of the literature and data from the case scenario analysis throws light on a certain set of constraints and vulnerabilities of using the blockchain in healthcare which needs attention. Profoundly the constraints are about the quality of nodes verifying the blocks and the anomaly access of information from the blocks. By overcoming such constraints, there will be an improvement of effectiveness with which the system gets implemented.
Presently, blockchain technology has been widely applied in various application domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain management, healthcare, etc. So far, there has been much confusion about whether blockchain performs with scale, and admittedly, a lack of information about best practices that can improve the performance and scale. This paper proposes a novel blockchain network construction methodology to improve the performance of Hyperledger Fabric. As a highly scalable permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric supports a wide range of enterprise use cases from finance to governance. A comprehensive evaluation is performed by observing various configurable network components that can affect the blockchain performance. To demonstrate the significance of the proposed methodology, we set up the experiment environment for the baseline and the test network using optimized parameters, respectively. The experimental results indicate that the test network's performance is enhanced effectively compared to the baseline in transaction throughput and transaction latency.
Abstract Recent years have witnessed a widespread interest in healthcare issues and the search for faster and safer service for patients. Electronic health record was established to provide advanced health services. Researchers seek to provide permanent and simplified ways to monitor patients remotely using remote patient monitors. One of these methods is the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, where the healthcare provider can monitor the patient remotely. However, with the current centralized electronic patient record system and increase in number of IoT devices, security and privacy issues have arisen, as some patients may not want to disclose their data, in addition to particular concerns or risks that affect the patientâs life. To reduce these issues, several studies have presented the use of blockchain technology as a trustworthy network of solutions to ensure patient information security and secure the transfer of IoT devicesâ data. In this regard, this research is an attempt to present a new framework that facilitates the storage and transfer of patient data in the blockchain by merging the electronic health record and remote patient monitoring techniques into a single framework using Django. This framework allows the transfer of data from IoT devices to multiple peers, making use of the smart contract provided by the Ethereum platform.
The production and distribution of COVID-19 testing kits is an urgent and increasingly worldwide requirement, due to the ongoing pandemic. The accuracy of the kit is critically important and to save the world from the faulty kit becomes an issue. The kit before use has to be approved by an authorized medical research agency like US-FDA, ICMR, etc. In this paper, we proposed a framework that ensures that the testing kit is validated by various measures and gives the history of the supply chain of the testing kit. The parties that are used in the supply chain are Notary, Manufacturer, and Validating Party. A Consumer also plays an important role and can punch the batch number to check whether the kit is approved or not. The framework is developed using R3 Corda, a permissioned distributed ledger technology. A permissioned blockchain is used for data privacy and security so that only trusted parties can leave or join the system.
The healthcare industry deals with highly sensitive data which must be managed in a secure way. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) hold various kinds of personal and sensitive data which contain names, addresses, social security numbers, insurance numbers, and medical history. Such personal data is valuable to the patients, healthcare service providers, medical insurance companies, and research institutions. However, the public release of this highly sensitive personal data poses serious privacy and security threats to patients and healthcare service providers. Hence, we foresee the requirement of new technologies to address the privacy and security challenges for personal data in healthcare applications. Blockchain is one of the promising solutions, aimed to provide transparency, security, and privacy using consensus-driven decentralised data management on top of peer-to-peer distributed computing systems. Therefore, to solve the mentioned problems in healthcare applications, in this paper, we investigate the use of private blockchain technologies to assess their feasibility for healthcare applications. We create testing scenarios using HyperLedger Fabric to explore different criteria and use-cases for healthcare applications. Additionally, we thoroughly evaluate the representative test case scenarios to assess the blockchain-enabled security criteria in terms of data confidentiality, privacy and access control. The experimental evaluation reveals the promising benefits of private blockchain technologies in terms of security, regulation compliance, compatibility, flexibility, and scalability.
Shakila Zaman, Muhammad R. A. Khandaker, Risala Tasin Khan, Faisal Tariq ¡ 5 authors
The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that connects and integrates a massive number of smart physical devices with virtual objects operating in diverse platforms through the internet. Due to massive size and physical spread of many applications such as smart healthcare, IoT is increasingly implemented in distributed setting. This distributed nature of implementation of the entities connected to the IoT networks are exposed to an unprecedented level of privacy and security threats. This is particularly severe for IoT healthcare system as it involves huge volume of sensitive and personal data. Although blockchain has posed to be the solution in this scenario thanks to its inherent distributed ledger technology (DLT), it suffers from a major drawback of rapidly increasing storage and computation requirements with the increase in network size which makes its implementation impractical. This paper proposes a holochain-based security and privacy-preserving framework for IoT healthcare systems that overcomes the scalability challenge and is particularly suited for resource constrained IoT scenarios. Through thorough analysis and performance results, we have demonstrated that the holochain based IoT healthcare solution outperforms blockchain based solution in terms of resource requirements while ensuring appropriate level of privacy and security.
Supply chains (SC) present performance bottlenecks that contribute to a high level of costs, infiltration of product quality, and impact productivity. Examples of such inhibitors include the bullwhip effect, new product lines, high inventory, and restrictive data flows. These bottlenecks can force manufacturers to source more raw materials and increase production significantly. Also, restrictive data flow in a complex global SC network generally slows down the movement of goods and services. The use of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in SC management (SCM) demonstrates the potentials to reduce these bottlenecks through transparency, decentralization, and optimizations in data management. These technologies promise to enhance the trustworthiness of entities within the SC, ensure the accuracy of data-driven operations, and enable existing SCM processes to migrate from a linear to a fully circular economy. This article presents a comprehensive review of 111 articles published in the public domain in the use and efficacy of DLT in SC. It acts as a roadmap for current and future researchers who focus on SC security management to better understand the integration of digital technologies such as DLT. We clustered these articles using standard descriptors linked to trustworthiness, namely, immutability, transparency, traceability, and integrity.
Fei Gao, DeâLi Chen, MinâHang Weng, RuâYuan Yang
The fifth-generation (5G) network has special communication and security requirements including high reliability, low latency, precise automatic control, secure covert transmission, and evidence traceability. The 5G network combined with blockchain technology just meets this demand, so it is driving a rapidly growing volume of patent applications. This study proposes application scenarios, architecture diagrams, and patent analysis methods for blockchain-based 5G network technologies, beginning with a network architecture using mobile edge computing (MEC) and blockchain as independent platform components to solve MEC load pressure. In the patent analysis, a patent cluster map of blockchain-based 5G networks is proposed to analyze the intersection of technical application fields. The bottleneck period of technological development is presented for leading countries and enterprises in the technological development of blockchain-based 5G network, highlighting relative advantages and disadvantages. Specifically, to extract the core international patent classification (IPC) key technologies and their mutual interrelatedness, we use network topology analysis to establish an IPC network topology diagram through node global and local topology characteristics, thus revealing hotspots of IPC technology research and the characteristics of the technology relationship system. The findings provide a very useful reference for the formulation of government strategy to assist in the implementation and development of blockchain-based 5G network technologies for future smart cities.
With the advent of 5G verticals and the Internet of Things paradigm, Edge Computing has emerged as the most dominant service delivery architecture, placing augmented computing resources in the proximity of end users. The resource orchestration of edge clouds relies on the concept of network slicing, which provides logically isolated computing and network resources. However, though there is significant progress on the automation of the resource orchestration within a single cloud or edge cloud datacenter, the orchestration of multi-domain infrastructure or multi-administrative domain is still an open challenge. Towards exploiting the network service marketplace at its full capacity, while being aligned with ETSI Network Function Virtualization architecture, this article proposes a novel Blockchain-based service orchestrator that leverages the automation capabilities of smart contracts to establish cross-service communication between network slices of different tenants. In particular, we introduce a multi-tier architecture of a Blockchain-based network marketplace, and design the lifecycle of the cross-service orchestration. For the evaluation of the proposed approach, we set up cross-service communication in an edge cloud and we demonstrate that the orchestration overhead is less than other cross-service solutions.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been revolutionizing this world by introducing exciting applications almost in all walks of daily life, such as healthcare, smart cities, smart environments, safety, remote sensing, and many more. This paper proposes a new framework based on the blockchain and deep learning model to provide more security for Android IoT devices. Moreover, our framework is capable to find the malware activities in a real-time environment. The proposed deep learning model analyzes various static and dynamic features extracted from thousands of feature of malware and benign apps that are already stored in blockchain distributed ledger. The multi-layer deep learning model makes decisions by analyzing the previous data and follow some steps. Firstly, it divides the malware feature into multiple level clusters. Secondly, it chooses a unique deep learning model for each malware feature set or cluster. Finally, it produces the decision by combining the results generated from all cluster levels. Furthermore, the decisions and multiple-level clustering data are stored in a blockchain that can be further used to train every specialized cluster for unique data distribution. Also, a customized smart contract is designed to detect deceptive applications through the blockchain framework. The smart contract verifies the malicious application both during the uploading and downloading process of Android apps on the network. Consequently, the proposed framework provides flexibility to features for run-time security regarding malware detection on heterogeneous IoT devices. Finally, the smart contract helps to approve or deny to uploading and downloading harmful Android applications.
Faisal Jamil, Hyun Kook Kahng, Suyeon Kim, DoâHyeun Kim
Blockchain technology has recently inspired remarkable attention due to its unique features, such as privacy, accountability, immutability, and anonymity, to name of the few. In contrast, core functionalities of most Internet of Things (IoT) resources make them vulnerable to security threats. The IoT devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have limited capacity in terms of network, computing, and storage, which make them easier for vulnerable threats. Furthermore, a massive amount of data produced by the IoT devices, which is still an open challenge for the existing platforms to process, analyze, and unearth underlying patterns to provide convenience environment. Therefore, a new solution is required to ensure data accountability, improve data privacy and accessibility, and extract hidden patterns and useful knowledge to provide adequate services. In this paper, we present a secure fitness framework that is based on an IoT-enabled blockchain network integrated with machine learning approaches. The proposed framework consists of two modules: a blockchain-based IoT network to provide security and integrity to sensing data as well as an enhanced smart contract enabled relationship and inference engine to discover hidden insights and useful knowledge from IoT and user device network data. The enhanced smart contract aims to support users with a practical application that provides real-time monitoring, control, easy access, and immutable logs of multiple devices that are deployed in several domains. The inference engine module aims to unearth underlying patterns and useful knowledge from IoT environment data, which helps in effective decision making to provide convenient services. For experimental analysis, we implement an intelligent fitness service that is based on an enhanced smart contract enabled relationship and inference engine as a case study where several IoT fitness devices are used to securely acquire user personalized fitness data. Furthermore, a real-time inference engine investigates user personalized data to discover useful knowledge and hidden insights. Based on inference engine knowledge, a recommendation model is developed to recommend a daily and monthly diet, as well as a workout plan for better and improved body shape. The recommendation model aims to facilitate a trainer formulating effective future decisions of trainee's health in terms of a diet and workout plan. Lastly, for performance analysis, we have used Hyperledger Caliper to access the system performance in terms of latency, throughput, resource utilization, and varying orderer and peers nodes. The analysis results imply that the design architecture is applicable for resource-constrained IoT blockchain platform and it is extensible for different IoT scenarios.
Blockchain is the consensus-based technology used to resolve conflicts in Byzantine environments. Vehicles validate the messages received from neighboring vehicles using the gradient boosting technique (GBT). Based on the validation results, the message source vehicle generates the ratings that are to be uploaded to roadside units (RSUs), and through that, the trust offset value can be calculated. All RSUs maintain the trust blockchain, and each RSU tries to add their blocks to the trust blockchain. We proposed a blockchain-based trust management model for the vehicular adhoc network (VANET) based on Tendermint. It eliminates the problem of malicious nodes entering the network, and will also overcome the problem of power consumption. Simulation results also show that the proposed system is 7.8% and 15.6% effective and efficient in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay (EED), respectively, to collect the trusted data between the vehicles.
Identity is a crucial property of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Due to rapid growth and high numbers of similar devices, reliable identification of those devices is a problem. The origin and history of an IoT device is especially important in security relevant environments. Our research addresses this issue by proposing an approach based on blockchain and decentralized identifiers (DID). It is inspired by the concepts of self-sovereign identity (SSI) and bootstrapping of remote secure key infrastructures (BRSKI). Devices are equipped by the manufacturer with an identity stored in a trusted execution environment (TEE) and secured by a blockchain. This identity can be used to trace back the origin of the device. During the bootstrapping process on the customer side, the identity registration of the device is updated in the blockchain. This process is performed by a so-called registrar. Smart contracts prevent unsolicited transfer of ownership and track the history of the device. Besides proof of origin and device security our concept can be used for device inventory and firmware upgrade. A prototype implementation was realized to validate the concept. All six use cases have been implemented and tested using an Ethereum blockchain infrastructure. JSON Web Tokens (JWT) have been used as signed artefacts to transfer information between the stakeholders. This enables an asynchronous communication needed for example in an environment with no direct internet access. Such an infrastructure can be provided by an independent association and can be used by all manufacturers. Depending on the environment, a registration of devices can be optional or mandatory.