This paper presents$\mathit {wChain}$, a blockchain protocol specifically designed for multihop wireless networks that deeply integrates wireless communication properties and blockchain technologies under the realistic SINR model. We adopt a hierarchical spanner as the communication backbone to address medium contention and achieve fast data aggregation within$O(\log N\log \Gamma)$slots where$N$is the network size and$\Gamma $refers to the ratio of the maximum distance to the minimum distance between any two nodes. Besides,$\mathit {wChain}$employs data aggregation and reaggregation as well as node recovery mechanisms to ensure efficiency, fault tolerance, persistence, and liveness. The worst-case runtime of$\mathit {wChain}$is upper bounded by$O(f\log N\log \Gamma)$, where$f=\lfloor \frac {N}{2} \rfloor $is the upper bound of the number of faulty nodes. To validate our design, we conduct both theoretical analysis and simulation studies. The results not only demonstrate the nice properties of$\mathit {wChain}$, but also point to a large new space for the exploration of blockchain protocols in wireless networks.
Blockchain is a promising solution for Industry 4.0; however, it does not guarantee input data integrity. We propose a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based private blockchain system for the industrial Internet of Things, where the transaction generation is performed inside the FPGA in an isolated and enclaved manner.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
With the increase of smart factories and smart cities following the recent 4th industrial revolution, internal user authentication and authorization have become an important issue. The user authentication model using the server-client structure has a problem of forgery of the access history caused by the log manipulation of the administrator and unclearness of the responsibility. In addition, users must independently manage the authentication method for each service authentication. In this paper, to solve the above problem, the researchers propose an integrated ID model based on a hybrid blockchain. The proposed model is implemented as two layers of Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric: the former layer is responsible for integrated authentication, and the latter layer is responsible for access control. The physical pass or application for user authentication and authorization are integrated to one ID through the proposed model. In addition, the decentralized blockchain ensures the integrity and transparency of the stored access history, and it also provides non-repudiation of authority and access history.
P. Chinnasamy, B. Vinodhini, V. Praveena, C. Vinothini · 5 authors
Abstract Internet-of-Things and Blockchain technology are evolving all around today’s modern world to solve many problems such as security, communications, data collection and analysis, etc. However, we also have some issues, such as efficient data sharing, restriction of access, reliable authentication, etc. The proposed framework is designed to solve the problems related to security and authorization in IoT network access control. In addition, the system’s aim is to accomplish security, authorizing, and encryption for information exchange through IoT networks. In this article, a novel system is introducing to provide the data sharing system that integrates blockchain based access control system for IoT devices. Here, we are creating three different smart contracts to offers an efficient access control management like contract to provide access control, contract to provide authentication, and contract to provide a judgment. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is measured against the cost consumption of smart contracts and cryptographic functions. The cost utilization comparison is carried out against certain current approaches as well as the findings clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach is cost-effective.
Abstract In healthcare systems IoT device has to give sensitive and private information about the patients, it should be maintained extremely confidential and personal. Most of the IoT-healthcare devices based on existing centralized server data management technology don’t give any guarantee of authenticity and security. Blockchain is a public tamperproof ledger that is decentralized network system in which transaction of data is distributed among the nodes. Blockchain with its consensus algorithm can solve problems by providing decentralized computation for IoT data. The combination of IoT and blockchain technologies with consensus algorithm can become a best choice of designing the secured distributed e-healthcare systems. This paper reviews the blockchain technology and the basic principle and characteristics of a consensus algorithm for IoT- based e- healthcare system.
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.
Xi Li, Zehua Wang, Victor C. M. Leung, Hong Ji · 6 authors
The paths leading to future networks are pointing towards a data-driven paradigm to better cater to the explosive growth of mobile services as well as the increasing heterogeneity of mobile devices, many of which generate and consume large volumes and variety of data. These paths are also hampered by significant challenges in terms of security, privacy, services provisioning, and network management. Blockchain, which is a technology for building distributed ledgers that provide an immutable log of transactions recorded in a distributed network, has become prominent recently as the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies and is revolutionizing data storage and processing in computer network systems. For future data-driven networks (DDNs), blockchain is considered as a promising solution to enable the secure storage, sharing, and analytics of data, privacy protection for users, robust, trustworthy network control, and decentralized routing and resource managements. However, many important challenges and open issues remain to be addressed before blockchain can be deployed widely to enable future DDNs. In this article, we present a survey on the existing research works on the application of blockchain technologies in computer networks, and identify challenges and potential solutions in the applications of blockchains in future DDNs. We identify application scenarios in which future blockchain-empowered DDNs could improve the efficiency and security, and generally the effectiveness of network services.
Blockchain was mainly introduced for secure transactions in connection with the mining of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. This article discusses the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology and its components, such as block header, transaction, smart contracts, etc. Blockchain uses the distributed databases, so this article also explains the advantages of distributed Blockchain over a centrally located database. Depending on the application, Blockchain is broadly categorized into two categories; Permissionless and Permissioned. This article elaborates on these two categories as well. Further, it covers the consensus mechanism and its working along with an overview of the Ethereum platform. Blockchain technology has been proved to be one of the remarkable techniques to provide security to IoT devices. An illustration of how Blockchain will be useful for IoT devices has been given. A few applications are also illustrated to explain the working of Blockchain with IoT.
Nguyen B. Truong, Gyu Myoung Lee, Kai Sun, Florian Guitton · 5 authors
Blockchain technology has been envisaged to commence an era of decentralised applications and services (DApps) without the need for a trusted intermediary. Such DApps open a marketplace in which services are delivered to end-users by contributors which are then incentivised by cryptocurrencies in an automated, peer-to-peer, and trustless fashion. However, blockchain, consolidated by smart contracts, only ensures on-chain data security, autonomy and integrity of the business logic execution defined in smart contracts. It cannot guarantee the quality of service of DApps, which entirely depends on the services' performance. Thus, there is a critical need for a trust system to reduce the risk of dealing with fraudulent counterparts in a blockchain network. These reasons motivate us to develop a fully decentralised trust framework deployed on top of a blockchain platform, operating along with DApps in the marketplace to demoralise deceptive entities while encouraging trustworthy ones. The trust system works as an underlying decentralised service providing a feedback mechanism for end-users and maintaining trust relationships among them in the ecosystem accordingly. We believe this research fortifies the DApps ecosystem by introducing an universal trust middleware for DApps as well as shedding light on the implementation of a decentralised trust system.
Hao Xu, Zihan Zhou, Lei Zhang, Yunqing Sun · 5 authors
As 6G networks evolve towards a synergistic system of Communication, Sensing, and Computing, Radio Access Networks become more distributed, necessitating robust end-to-end authentication. We propose Blockchain-enabled Radio Access Networks, a novel decentralized RAN architecture enhancing security, privacy, and efficiency in authentication processes. BE-RAN leverages distributed ledger technology to establish trust, offering user-centric identity management, enabling mutual authentication, and facilitating on-demand point-to-point inter-network elements and UE-UE communication with accountable logging and billing service add-on for public network users, all without relying on centralized authorities. We envision a thoroughly decentralized RAN model and propose a privacy-preserving P2P communication approach that complements existing security measures while supporting the CSC paradigm. Results demonstrate BE-RAN significantly reduces communication and computation overheads, enhances privacy through decentralized identity management, and facilitates CSC integration, advancing towards more efficient and secure 6G networks.
Lei Zhang, Hao Xu, Oluwakayode Onireti, Muhammad Ali Imran · 5 authors
Blockchain is built on a peer-to-peer network that relies on frequent communications among distributively located nodes. In particular, the consensus mechanisms (CMs), which play a pivotal role in blockchain, are communication resource-demanding and largely determine blockchain security bounds (i.e., fault tolerances) and other key performance metrics such as transaction throughput, latency and scalability. Most blockchain systems are designed in a stable wired communication network running in advanced devices under the assumption of sufficient communication resource provision. However, it is envisioned that the majority of blockchain node peers will be connected through the wireless network in the future. Constrained by the highly dynamic wireless channel and scarce frequency spectrum, communication can significantly affect blockchain's key performance metrics. Hence, in this article, we present wireless blockchain networks (WBN) under various commonly used CMs and we answer the question of how much communication resource is needed to run such a network. We first present the role of communication in the four stages of the blockchain procedure. We then discuss the relationship between the communication resource provision and the WBNs performance, for three of the most used blockchain CMs, namely, Proof-of-Work (PoW), practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) and Raft. Finally, we provide analytical and simulated results to show the impact of the communication resource provision on block-chain performance.
Houshyar Honar Pajooh, Mohammad A. Rashid, Fakhrul Alam, Serge Demidenko
The proliferation of smart devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks creates significant security challenges for the communications between such devices. Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed technology that can potentially tackle the security problems within the 5G-enabled IoT networks. This paper proposes a Multi layer Blockchain Security model to protect IoT networks while simplifying the implementation. The concept of clustering is utilized in order to facilitate the multi-layer architecture. The K-unknown clusters are defined within the IoT network by applying techniques that utillize a hybrid Evolutionary Computation Algorithm while using Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. The chosen cluster heads are responsible for local authentication and authorization. Local private blockchain implementation facilitates communications between the cluster heads and relevant base stations. Such a blockchain enhances credibility assurance and security while also providing a network authentication mechanism. The open-source Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain platform is deployed for the proposed model development. Base stations adopt a global blockchain approach to communicate with each other securely. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed clustering algorithm performs well when compared to the earlier reported approaches. The proposed lightweight blockchain model is also shown to be better suited to balance network latency and throughput as compared to a traditional global blockchain.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since the last decade, Smart home systems achieved popularity due to their increase in comfort and improvement in quality life. Smart homes with the integration of Internet of Things devices by embedding intelligence into sensors and actuators, data, and services can be communicated efficiently and in a more secure manner. In a Smart home environment, there can be several users who will need to access services from various Smart home devices at any point in time either individually or concurrently. In an Internet of Things, it is possible to process and exchange data without human intervention. Therefore, because of this full autonomy, these entities need to recognize, authenticate entities and ensure the integrity of their exchanged data. In a conventional smart home system, every device has to authenticate separately using credentials. Such authentication is not required in a trusted environment. The same account can be shared across different devices and when shared, the authentication process can be reduced to a consent-based process. In this research, assuming that there are multiple smart devices connected to each other and to the cloud via the hub. Also, there can be multiple sets of users accessing the same set of smart devices and related services through different accounts. The problem with conventional authentication is no common authentication or authorization system to avoid redundant logins. In this regard, Blockchain has been considered for its potential to provide a framework for decentralized-based applications based on the concept of Smart Contracts. By combining the power of Blockchain technology and public-key cryptography it is possible to ensure secure authentication and identification of people and devices. This work avoids the duplicate authentication for accessing the same service and does the communication in a limited latency. Most of the important security goals such as authentication, authorization, confidentiality, and integrity are met.
Blockchain innovation with its property of immutable data isn't just limited to digital cryptographic forms of money yet in addition for various domains like healthcare, logistics, rentals, entertainment, social media and so on. Ventures are investigating this innovation to adopt in main line of business, which will give certainty on security ceasing data breach. This research paper has built up a hybrid blockchain framework which can be utilized on premise or over the cloud or a combination of both and can be utilized by various departments for protecting transactions in small and medium scale businesses with an uprightness of high security, transparency, remote devices, accessibility and cost adequacy. This created framework compares with the traditional approach model on some significant factors for statistical assessment. The analysis discovers how this hybrid blockchain framework is more productive and secured than the client server approach model and aims to be utilized as platform as a service both in local or hybrid cloud infrastructure
Mohammed Amine Bouras, Qinghua Lu, Sahraoui Dhelim, Huansheng Ning
Identity management is a fundamental feature of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, particularly for IoT data access control. However, most of the actual works adopt centralized approaches, which could lead to a single point of failure and privacy issues that are tied to the use of a trusted third parties. A consortium blockchain is an emerging technology that provides a neutral and trustable computation and storage platform that is suitable for building identity management solutions for IoT. This paper proposes a lightweight architecture and the associated protocols for consortium blockchain-based identity management to address privacy, security, and scalability issues in a centralized system for IoT. Besides, we implement a proof-of-concept prototype and evaluate our approach. We evaluate our work by measuring the latency and throughput of the transactions while using different query actions and payload sizes, and we compared it to other similar works. The results show that the approach is suitable for business adoption.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohammad Javad Amiri, Ziliang Lai, Liana Patel, Boon Thau Loo · 6 authors
We present Saguaro, a permissioned blockchain system designed specifically for edge computing networks. Saguaro leverages the hierarchical structure of edge computing networks to reduce the overhead of wide-area communication by presenting several techniques. First, Saguaro proposes coordinator-based and optimistic protocols to process cross-domain transactions with low latency where the lowest common ancestor of the involved domains coordinates the protocol or detects inconsistency. Second, data are collected over hierarchy enabling higher-level domains to aggregate their sub-domain data. Finally, transactions initiated by mobile edge devices are processed without relying on high-level fog and cloud servers. Our experimental results across a wide range of workloads demonstrate the scalability of Saguaro in supporting a range of cross-domain and mobile transactions.
Abstract Several applications can benefit from recording information about the places a mobile entity visits and the length of time it spends there (e.g., shoppers, employees, buses, portable equipment, autonomous robots). This paper presents our approach to recording spatio-temporal presence information in a secure and inviolable way using a Distributed Ledger Technology. We implemented this solution as a middleware service that uses Complex Event Processing on smartphones to record beacon-smartphone proximity data in a blockchain efficiently. We have built upon the previous version of our service to include access control to the stored information. We analyzed the impact of this addition on the service’s performance and observed that it introduced very little overhead while significantly increasing user privacy. Furthermore, we compared the effect of using different blockchain technologies on overall service performance and characterized scenarios where using either IoTeX or Ethereum can be suitable for this type of application.
Healthcare is changing fast with better and efficient services for patient care. Electronic health records are electronic saved information related to health in digitally format. With EHR the healthcare data can be easily shared across the different healthcare settings.EHR enhances the Patient care by providing the accuracy and precision of medical records where security and privacy preservation are challenging in the system. In recent years, Blockchain has become viable technology which has invaded different domains. Blockchain has enormous potentialin healthcare because of demand of patient centric system and to connect different systems together. Blockchain is a promising solution for security and preservation of privacy in a healthcare sector. In this paper we have provide a comprehensive review of healthcare systems which are based on blockchain. The main objective of this paper is to reveal about blockchain technology in privacy preservation, security of healthcare and its future research directions. We have recognized and analyze latest research papers and literature to present a challenges and comparison between various published work in the domain of blockchain for healthcare.
Blockchain is a decentralized network consisting of peer-to-peer nodes which perform all the operations within a network without the need of a central authority unlike IoT where information exchange, validation and authentication of data is done using a central authority. The trivial security and privacy protocols in place for IoT suffer due to the decentralization and limited resource capabilities of IoT devices. Blockchain in IoT with its cryptographic functions and decentralized nature could prove significantly useful. This paper discusses the motivation for IoT using Blockchain, the attacks and challenges in Blockchain, the challenges in the integration of Blockchain in IoT and the opportunities of such an integration. Some applications of Blockchain in IoT are also discussed to provide an insight into the future prospect of this integrated technology.
Internet of Things (IoT) networks are typically composed of many sensors and actuators. The operation controls for robots in smart factories or drones produce a massive volume of data that requires high reliability. A blockchain architecture can be used to build highly reliable IoT networks. The shared ledger and open data validation among users guarantee extremely high data security. However, current blockchain technology has limitations for its overall application across IoT networks. Because general permission-less blockchain networks typically target high-performance network nodes with sufficient computing power, a blockchain node with low computing power and memory, such as an IoT sensor/actuator, cannot operate in a blockchain as a fully functional node. A lightweight blockchain provides practical blockchain availability over IoT networks. We propose essential operational advances to develop a lightweight blockchain over IoT networks. A dynamic network configuration enforced by deep clustering provides ad-hoc flexibility for IoT network environments. The proposed graph neural network technique enhances the efficiency of dApp (distributed application) spreading across IoT networks. In addition, the proposed blockchain technology is highly implementable in software because it adopts the Hyperledger development environment. Directly embedding the proposed blockchain middleware platform in small computing devices proves the practicability of the proposed methods.
Rongjian Lan, Ganesha Upadhyaya, Stephen Tse, Mahdi Zamani
With the rise of digital currency systems that rely on blockchain to ensure ledger security, the ability to perform cross-chain transactions is becoming a crucial interoperability requirement. Such transactions allow not only funds to be transferred from one blockchain to another (as done in atomic swaps), but also a blockchain to verify the inclusion of any event on another blockchain. Cross-chain bridges are protocols that allow on-chain exchange of cryptocurrencies, on-chain transfer of assets to sidechains, and cross-shard verification of events in sharded blockchains, many of which rely on Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) for scalability. Unfortunately, existing bridge protocols that can transfer funds from a BFT blockchain incur significant computation overhead on the destination blockchain, resulting in a high gas cost for smart contract verification of events. In this paper, we propose Horizon, a gas-efficient, cross-chain bridge protocol to transfer assets from a BFT blockchain to another blockchain (e.g., Ethereum) that supports basic smart contract execution.
Blockchain is a jointly distributed and decentralized ledger, in which nodes are aiming to record transaction history with very different networks. This technology is quite practical if used in the field of higher education to carry out digital certification, record keeping, etc. From several papers published on this, no single paper covering educational projects based on the blockchain can find it. So there are the latest opportunities for higher education trends. Projects in the field of higher education that are blockchain-based are aimed at solving problems that occur in educators today. On that basis, we conclude that there is a need for a systematic literature review. Therefore, based on the education project, this study will review the artistic gap between the two. This paper will focus on the protocol used in this project and explore several blockchain-based higher education projects that will be the aim of this paper. As well as analyzing the blockchain features currently in use today and the services that will be offered by existing educational projects, to improve the implementation of technology in the field of education by using the blockchain feature.