The industrial healthcaresystem has enabled the possibility of realizing advanced real-time monitoring of patients and enriched the quality of medical services through data sharing among intelligent wearable devices and sensors. However, this connectivity brings the intrinsic vulnerabilities related to security and privacy due to the need of continuous communication and monitoring over public network (insecure channel). Motivated from the aforementioned discussions, we integrate permissioned blockchain and smart contract with deep learning (DL) techniques to design a novel secure and efficient data sharing framework named PBDL. Specifically, PBDL first has a blockchain scheme to register, verify (using zero-knowledge proof), and validate the communicating entities using the smart contract-based consensus mechanism. Second, the authenticated data are used to propose a novel DL scheme that combines stacked sparse variational autoencoder (SSVAE) with self-attention-based bidirectional long short term memory (SA-BiLSTM). In this scheme, SSVAE encodes or transforms the healthcare data into new format, and SA-BiLSTM identifies and improves the attack detection process. The security analysis and experimental results using IoT-Botnet and ToN-IoT datasets confirm the superiority of the PBDL framework over existing state-of-the-art techniques.
Yangxu Song, Frank Jiang, Syed Wajid Ali Shah, Robin Doss
With the development of 5G networking technology on the Internet of Vehicle (IoV), there are new opportunities for numerous cyber-attacks, such as in-vehicle attacks like hijacking occurrences and data theft. While numerous attempts have been made to protect against the potential attacks, there are still many unsolved problems such as developing a fine-grained access control system. This is reflected by the granularity of security as well as the related data that are hosted on these platforms. Among the most notable trends is the increased usage of smart devices, IoV, cloud services, emerging technologies aim at accessing, storing and processing data. Most popular authentication protocols rely on knowledge-factor for authentication that is infamously known to be vulnerable to subversions. Recently, the zero-trust framework has drawn huge attention; there is an urgent need to develop further the existing Continuous Authentication (CA) technique to achieve the zero-trustiness framework. In this paper, firstly, we develop the static authentication process and propose a secured protocol to generate the smart key for user to unlock the vehicle. Then, we proposed a novel and secure continuous authentication system for IoVs. We present the proof-of-concept of our CA scheme by building a prototype that leverages the commodity fingerprint sensors, NFC, and smartphone. Our evaluations in real-world settings demonstrate the appropriateness of CA scheme and security analysis of our proposed protocol for digital key suggests its enhanced security against the known attack-vector.
A secure electronic learning platform has been created to enable teachers and students to log into their accounts to learn efficiently and safely at any place and time. This platform has been proposed due to the urgent need to develop the education system and move it from traditional to interactive e-learning. In this paper, an application implemented that access remotely using a web browser interface and saved on a server depends on a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) system with an RSA algorithm was employed to solve registration and login challenges and securely transfer passwords. Using adapted AES to encrypt each user's personal information, Exams, and save it in in encrypted form in the database. The simulated results in this paper indicate the existence of a secure e-learning system, where security was achieved by performing the registration and login process without sending the password in its explicit form over an insecure network such as the Internet, in addition to encrypting the necessary information to be stored in an incomprehensible manner in the database, in the case of presence of an attack on the database.
Blockchain technology is essentially a decentralized database maintained by relevant parties and has been widely used in various scenarios such as logistics and finance. In terms of applications in the medical field, it is becoming more and more important because the patient's symptoms may be related to a certain vaccine. Whether the patient has been vaccinated with this vaccine will lead to different diagnostic results by the doctor. However, in the current vaccination environment of many regions, the vaccination record (VR) can only be kept in the patient's vaccination booklet, which is easy to lose or destroy. Therefore, the doctor needs to retrieve the patient's VR through a centralized database maintained by the government, which is time-consuming and will increase the medical risk. This study proposes a traceable blockchain-based vaccination record storage and sharing system. In the proposed system, the patient gets the vaccination at any legal clinic and the VR can be saved accompanied by the signature into the blockchain center, which ensures traceability. When the patient visits the hospital for treatment, the doctor can obtain the detail of the VR from the blockchain center and then make a diagnosis. The security of the proposed system will be protected by the programmed smart contracts. Through mutual authentication, our system can also provide and guarantee data integrity and nonrepudiation. Moreover, the proposed system has resistance to replay and man-in-the-middle attacks, and the performance is good.
Salma Salimi, Jorge Peña Queralta, Tomi Westerlund
Trust is increasingly becoming a key consideration in the design of autonomous robotic systems. In industrial applications, security and trust in the system are requirements for widespread adoption. Blockchain technologies have emerged as a potential solution to address identity management and secure data aggregation and control. However, the vast majority of works to date utilize Ethereum and smart contracts that are not scalable or well suited for industrial applications. This paper presents what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first integration of ROS 2 with the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. With a framework that leverages Fabric smart contracts and ROS 2 through a Go application, we delve into the potential of using blockchain for controlling robots, and gathering and processing their data. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework to an inventory management use-case where different robots are used to detect objects of interest in a given area. Designed to meet the requirements of distributed robotic systems, we show that the performance of the robots is not impacted significantly by the blockchain layer. At the same time, we provide examples for developing other applications that integrate Fabric smart contracts with ROS 2. Our results pave the way for further adoption of blockchain technologies in autonomous robotic systems for building trustable data sharing.
Abstract The recent years have garnered huge attention towards the Internet of Things (IoT) because it enables its consumers to improve their lifestyles and professionally keep up with the technological advancements in the cyber-physical world. The IoT edge devices are heterogeneous in terms of the technology they are built on and the storage file formats used. These devices require highly secure modes of mutual authentication to authenticate each other before actually sending the data. Mutual authentication is a very important aspect of peer-to-peer communication. Secure session keys enable these resource-constrained devices to authenticate each other. After successful authentication, a device can be authorized and can be granted access to shared resources. The need for validating a device requesting data transfer to avoid data privacy breaches that may compromise confidentiality and integrity. Blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) both are extensively being used as an integrated part of IoT networks for security enhancements. Blockchain provides a decentralized mechanism to store validated session keys that can be allotted to the network devices. Blockchain is also used to load balance the stressing edge devices during low battery levels. AI on the other hand provides better learning and adaptiveness towards IoT attacks. The integration of newer technologies in IoT key management yields enhanced security features. In this article, we systematically survey recent trending technologies from an IoT security point of view and discuss traditional key security mechanisms. This article delivers a comprehensive quality study for researchers on authentication and session keys, integrating IoT with blockchain and AI-based authentication in cybersecurity.
Abstract Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are characterized by high mobility of nodes and volatility, which make privacy, trust management, and security challenging issues in VANETs' design. In such networks, data can be exposed to a variety of attacks, the most dangerous is false information dissemination, which threatens the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. False emergency messages can be injected by inside attackers to announce fake incidents such as traffic accidents, resulting in a false information attack. As the data in VANET is based on events, any trust mechanism must first identify the true events. To address these security challenges, a blockchain‐based authentication scheme and trust management model are proposed for VANETs. Using the authentication scheme, vehicles are enabled to send messages anonymously to the roadside units (RSUs) and the identity privacy of vehicles is protected. Besides, the proposed trust management model is designed to detect and deal with false information by evaluating the trustworthiness of vehicles and data. Using the trust model, when vehicles report an incident to the nearest RSU, the RSU is able to verify whether or not the incident took place. This mechanism ensures that RSUs send only verified event notifications. Finally, RSUs participate in updating the trust values of vehicles and store these values in the blockchain. The efficiency of the proposed authentication scheme is validated through analysis while the trust model is validated through simulations. The results obtained show that the proposed authentication scheme and the trust model provide better performance than other state‐of‐the‐art models where malicious vehicles can be identified efficiently and RSUs are enabled to broadcast only legitimate events.
Nowadays, continuous monitoring of a patient’s healthcare data has become a critical factor in human well-being. However, with the rapid advancement of wireless technology, doctors and healthcare professionals can monitor the patient’s healthcare data in real time. But to access the confidential patient’s data which is transferred through the open wireless medium, the secure transmission plays an important role. In this work, the privacy and the anonymity of the end-users (patient/doctor) are preserved using an anonymous blockchain-based authentication scheme. Moreover, in this work initially, mutual authentication is performed between the end-users, followed by encryption and decryption of confidential data. In addition, to avoid reauthentication of the patient again during the movement of a patient from one doctor to another, a transfer authentication protocol is performed between the doctors which enhances performance analysis. The security analysis section illustrates the withstanding capability of the proposed work against various vulnerable attacks. Finally, performance investigation of the proposed work reveals a reduction in computational and communication costs when compared to existing related works.
In current single sign-on authentication schemes on the web, users are required to interact with identity providers securely to set up authentication data during a registration phase and receive a token (credential) for future access to services and applications. This type of interaction can make authentication schemes challenging in terms of security and availability. From a security perspective, a main threat is theft of authentication reference data stored with identity providers. An adversary could easily abuse such data to mount an offline dictionary attack for obtaining the underlying password or biometric. From a privacy perspective, identity providers are able to track user activity and control sensitive user data. In terms of availability, users rely on trusted third-party servers that need to be available during authentication. We propose a novel decentralized privacy-preserving single sign-on scheme through the Decentralized Anonymous Multi-Factor Authentication (DAMFA), a new authentication scheme where identity providers no longer require sensitive user data and can no longer track individual user activity. Moreover, our protocol eliminates dependence on an always-on identity provider during user authentication, allowing service providers to authenticate users at any time without interacting with the identity provider. Our approach builds on threshold oblivious pseudorandom functions (TOPRF) to improve resistance against offline attacks and uses a distributed transaction ledger to improve availability. We prove the security of DAMFA in the universal composibility (UC) model by defining a UC definition (ideal functionality) for DAMFA and formally proving the security of our scheme via ideal-real simulation. Finally, we demonstrate the practicability of our proposed scheme through a prototype implementation.
Sidrah Abdullah, Junaid Arshad, Muhammad Mubashir Khan, Mamoun Alazab · 5 authors
Abstract Healthcare has evolved significantly in recent years primarily due to the advancements in and increasing adoption of technology in healthcare processes such as data collection, storage, diagnostics, and treatment. The emergence of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) has further evolved e-Health by facilitating the development of connected healthcare systems which can significantly improve data connectivity, visibility, and interoperability leading to improved quality of service delivered to patients. However, such technological advancements come with their perils—there are growing concerns with regards to the security and privacy of healthcare data especially when collected, shared, and processed using cutting-edge connected sensor devices affecting the adoption of next-generation e-healthcare systems. In particular, during the front-end and back-end data transfer in health information exchange (HIE) there exist a security risk in term of confidentiality, integrity, authentication and access control of the data due to the limited capabilities of IoT devices involved. In this paper, we investigate the use of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to address such security concerns for emerging healthcare systems. In particular, we use masked authenticated messaging (MAM) over the Tangle to achieve secure data sharing within a healthcare system and provide a proof-of-concept of applying the proposed approach for securing healthcare data in a connected IIoT environment. Further, we have performed the evaluation and analysis of data communication against the metrics of encryption and efficiency in transaction time.
Authentication is essential for the prevention of various types of attacks in fog/edge computing. Therefore, a novel mode-based hash chain for secure mutual authentication is necessary to address the Internet of Things (IoT) devices' vulnerability, as there have been several years of growing concerns regarding their security. Therefore, a novel model is designed that is stronger and effective against any kind of unauthorized attack, as IoT devices' vulnerability is on the rise due to the mass production of IoT devices (embedded processors, camera, sensors, etc.), which ignore the basic security requirements (passwords, secure communication), making them vulnerable and easily accessible. Furthermore, crackable passwords indicate that the security measures taken are insufficient. As per the recent studies, several applications regarding its requirements are the IoT distributed denial of service attack (IDDOS), micro-cloud, secure university, Secure Industry 4.0, secure government, secure country, etc. The problem statement is formulated as the "design and implementation of dynamically interconnecting fog servers and edge devices using the mode-based hash chain for secure mutual authentication protocol", which is stated to be an NP-complete problem. The hash-chain fog/edge implementation using timestamps, mode-based hash chaining, the zero-knowledge proof property, a distributed database/blockchain, and cryptography techniques can be utilized to establish the connection of smart devices in large numbers securely. The hash-chain fog/edge uses blockchain for identity management only, which is used to store the public keys in distributed ledger form, and all these keys are immutable. In addition, it has no overhead and is highly secure as it performs fewer calculations and requires minimum infrastructure. Therefore, we designed the hash-chain fog/edge (HCFE) protocol, which provides a novel mutual authentication scheme for effective session key agreement (using ZKP properties) with secure protocol communications. The experiment outcomes proved that the hash-chain fog/edge is more efficient at interconnecting various devices and competed favorably in the benchmark comparison.
Internet of Things (IoT) has been ubiquitous in both industrial and living areas, but also known for its weak security. Being as the first defense line against various cyberattacks, authentication is even more critical to IoT applications. Moreover, there has been a growing demand for cross-domain collaboration, leading to an increasing need for cross-domain authentication. Recently, certificate-based authentication schemes have been extensively studied. However, many of these schemes are not efficient in computation, storage, and communication, which are highly required in IoT. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication scheme based on consortium blockchain and design a cryptocurrency-like digital token to build trust. Furthermore, trust lifecycle management is performed by manipulating the amount of tokens. The comprehensive analysis and evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme is resistant to various common attacks and more efficient than competitor schemes in terms of storage, communication, and authentication cost.
Bangyao Du, Debiao He, Min Luo, Cong Peng · 5 authors
Covert communication is designed for hiding the subliminal communication which takes place between both of the speakers and their relationship. The traditional covert communication utilizes the centralized channel and the third‐party central node or authority to distribute messages which leads to a lack of undetectability, antitraceability, and robustness. In recent years, there have been attempts to apply the blockchain to covert communication solutions, for the characteristics of blockchain such as decentralization, openness, and trustworthiness. In this paper, based on the analysis of the literature and the classification according to the hiding position, we identify four kinds of covert communication: Address Channel, Value Channel, DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm) Channel, and Script Channel, which will help inform future research agenda.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is current demanding technology in the field of data and information security. In this paper, we present a model of the data integrity assurance by the use of blockchain. Our proposed method, the message authentication code is stored under the block of blockchain with hash value, timestamp, and nonce. The existing message authentication code, SHA-256 is used to generate the hash value to store into the blockchain after encrypting by asymmetric key cryptography with recipient public key. We also compared the strength of our blockchain based data integrity assurance method with others existing method of integrity assurance and management. We have applied penetration testing by using five different tools to test the strength and robustness of proposed method of integrity assurance. It is found that blockchain based integrity assurance method is more robust than other methods of integrity assurance.
Samiulla Itoo, Akber Ali Khan, Vinod Kumar, Ahmed Alkhayyat · 6 authors
In the traditional medical healthcare system, each medical facility is responsible for preserving its own records. Sharing such records with another medical establishment is difficult for them. To tackle this challenge, the traditional medical system leverages internet technology to transform into a modern electronic system. In electronic healthcare systems, managing the security and privacy of patient data becomes a major issue. As an alternative, the healthcare sector might use blockchain technology to exchange digitised healthcare data. Blockchain technology is characterised by anonymity, decentralisation, and immutability. It is hard to keep all electronic healthcare data on blockchain due to the expense and volume. Cloud computing is the best solution for storing this type of data and resolving problems like these. To address these concerns, we offer a blockchain-based key agreement protocol for cloud medical network systems that enhances privacy and security. We demonstrate a formal and informal security analysis of the proposed protocol that shows that the proposed protocol is both secure and communicative. We provide security verification of the proposed protocol by using the AVISPA software tool against man in the middle attack and replay attack. Finally, we compute the computation and communication costs of the proposed protocol and other existing protocols, the proposed protocol has less computation and communication costs than other existing protocols in the electronic healthcare system.
Talha Ahsan, Farrukh Zeeshan Khan, Zeshan Iqbal, Muneer Ahmed · 8 authors
Advancement in technology has led to innovation in equipment, and the number of devices is increasing every day. Industries are introducing new devices every day and predicting 50 billion connected devices by 2022. These devices are deployed through the Internet, called the Internet of Things (IoT). Applications of IoT devices are weather prediction, monitoring surgery in hospitals, identification of animals using biochips, providing tracking connectivity in automobiles, smart home appliances, etc. IoT devices have limitations related to security at both the software and hardware ends. Secure user interfaces can overcome software‐level limitations like front‐end‐user interfaces are accessed easily through public and private networks. The front‐end interfaces are connected to the localized storage to contain data produced by the IoT devices. Localized storage deployed in a closed environment connected to IoT devices is more efficient than online servers from a security perspective. Blockchain has emerged as a technology or technique with capabilities to achieve secure administrational authentication and accessibility to IoT devices and their computationally produced data in a decentralized way with high reliability, interrogation, and resilience. In this paper, we propose device, end‐user, and transactional authentication techniques using blockchain‐embedded algorithms. The localized server interacts with the user interface to authenticate IoT devices, end‐users, and their access to IoT devices. The localized server provides efficiency by reducing the load on the IoT devices by carrying out end‐user heavy computational data, including end‐user, IoT device authentication, and communicational transactions. Authentication data are placed on the public ledger in block form, distributed over the system nodes through blockchain algorithms.
Paras Jain, Sunita Dwivedi, Adel R. Alharbi, R. Sureshbabu · 7 authors
Through the use of blockchain technology, sensitive information may be securely communicated without the need to replicate it, which can assist in decreasing medical record mistakes and saving time by eliminating the need to duplicate information. Furthermore, the information is timestamped, which further enhances the security of the data even further. The deployment of blockchain technology in a range of healthcare situations may enhance the security and efficiency of payment transactions. In this way, only those who have been allowed access to patient medical information can see or modify such information. It is proposed in this study that blockchain technology be used to provide an accessible data storage and retrieval mechanism for patients and healthcare professionals in a healthcare system that is both safe and efficient. As of 1970, a variety of traditional knowledge‐based approaches such as Personal Identification Recognition Number (PIRN), passwords, and other similar methods have been made available; however, many token‐based approaches such as drivers’ licenses, passports, credit cards, bank accounts, ID cards, and keys have also been made available; however, they have all failed to establish a secure and reliable transaction channel. Because they are easily misplaced, stolen, or lost, they are usually unable to protect secrecy or authenticate the identity of a legitimate claimant. Aside from that, personally identifiable information such as passwords and PINs is very prone to fraud since they are easily forgotten or guessed by an imposter. Biometric identification and authentication (commonly known as biometrics) are attracting a great deal of attention these days, particularly in the realm of information security systems, due to its inherent potential and advantages over other conventional ways for identifying and authenticating. As a result of the device’s unique biological characteristics, which include features such as fingerprints, facepalms, hand geometry (including the iris), and the device’s iris, it can be used in a variety of contexts, such as consumer banking kiosks, airport security systems, international ports of entry, universities, office buildings, and forensics, to name a few. It is also used in several other contexts, including forensics and law enforcement. Consequently, every layer of the system—sensed data, computation, and processing of data, as well as the storage and administration of data—is susceptible to a broad variety of threats and weaknesses (cloud). There does not seem to be any suitable methods for dealing with the large volumes of data created by the fog computing architecture when normal data storage and security technologies are used. Because of this, the major objective of this research is to design security countermeasures against medical data mining vulnerabilities that originate from the sensing layer and data storage in the Internet of Things’ cloud database, both of which are discussed in more depth further down. A key allows for the creation of a distributed ledger database and provides an immutable security solution, transaction transparency, and the prohibition of tampering with patient information. This mechanism is particularly useful in healthcare settings, where patient information must be kept confidential. When used in a hospital environment, this method is extremely beneficial. As a result of incorporating blockchain technology into the fog paradigm, it is possible to alleviate some of the current concerns associated with latency, centralization, and scalability.
In the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT), users and sensor-equipped entities send multiple messages to the Command Control Center (CCC) over the network. The authentication and integrity of these messages are crucial because if an adversary or malicious node transmits, alters, or replays these messages, the consequences will be disasters. Current centralized authentication systems are not suitable for the distributed environment because such schemes are prone to a single point of failure, privacy, and scalability issues. Moreover, the high communication overhead caused by centralization increases energy consumption. In this work, we propose a technique called Blockchain-based Autonomous Authentication and Integrity for the Internet of Battlefield Things (BIoBT) for the C3I system. The proposed technique does not require an explicit authentication channel for the authentication of entities because it is performed on the blockchain side when receiving the data. In addition, it provides data integrity and non-repudiation. BIoBT prototype is created, deployed, and tested on the Ethereum test network. The results prove that BIoBT is efficient, cost-effective, and satisfies the security requirements of a distributed environment for IoBT. BIoBT also outperforms contemporary mechanisms in terms of the number of messages required to establish a secure channel, thereby reducing communication overhead and resource consumption.
We constructed a cryptographic interaction method museum art exchange protocol (MAXP) for museum digital collections on the basis of blockchain technology. Using our method, we build a digital collection exchange system on Ethereum to realize the digital collection’s online exchange between two museums. Compared with the traditional centralized collection digital resource database method, MAXP can avoid the security risks caused by subjective factors and force majeure factors in the exchange process of digital collections, such as hackers and network viruses. In our exchange system we have built, the expression of content covered by digital collections is more convenient, and copyright disputes can be quickly resolved. Concurrently, given the decentralization and anonymity of the blockchain, a regulatory mechanism has been added to MAXP to avoid fraud, illegal fundraising, money laundering and smuggling. The regulatory mechanism we constructed is a dual receiver public key encryption scheme based on the Diffie-Hellman algorithm and the SM2 elliptic curve public key encryption algorithm. The sender encrypts the collection data, and both receivers can decrypt the messages using their respective private keys. One of the receivers is the museum that obtained the collection information, and the other receiver is the regulator. These two receivers can decrypt simultaneously, and the regulator can regulate the information exchange on the blockchain. The Beijing Planetarium and the Beijing Museum of Natural History have completed the exchange of collections through the system we have built. The analysis results show that the regulatory scheme based on the exchange blockchain system of the museum’s digital collections proves to be feasible, with security and expansibility. Our new encrypted exchange management method of digital collections in museums can effectively promote the exchange of collections between museums, and is of great significance to the promotion of cultural heritage and the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Akhtar Badshah, Muhammad Waqas, Fazal Muhammad, Ghulam Abbas · 7 authors
The next-generation Internet of vehicles (IoVs) seamlessly connects humans, vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and service platforms, to improve road safety, enhance transit efficiency, and deliver comfort while conserving the environment. Currently, numerous entities communicate in the IoVs environment via insecure public channels that are susceptible to a variety of security assaults and threats. To address these security challenges, we design an anonymous authenticated key exchange mechanism for the IoVs in smart transportation supported by blockchain, referred to as AAKE-BIVT. AAKE-BIVT securely transmits traffic information to a cluster head, before heading to a nearby RSU utilizing the established secret session keys via mutual authentication and key agreement. A cloud server (CS) then securely aggregates data from related RSUs and generates transactions. The CS combines the transactions into blocks in a peer-to-peer network of CSs, and the blocks are confirmed and added to the blockchain via a voting-based consensus method. By means of rigorous informal security studies and formal security analysis through the random oracle model, we reveal that the proposed AAKE-BIVT is resistant to a broad range of potential security assaults in the IoVs environment. Furthermore, a comparative study reveals that AAKE-BIVT outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of security and functionality while being more efficient in terms of communication and computation. Additionally, the blockchain simulation validates the implementation viability of our proposed AAKE-BIVT.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems are crucial for any information system, such as healthcare information systems. Health IoT (HIoT) applications are targeted by attackers due to the high-volume and sensitivity of health data. Thus, IAM systems for HIoT need to be built with high standards and based on reliable frameworks. Blockchain (BC) is an emerging technology widely used for developing decentralized IAM solutions. Although, the integration of BC in HIoT for proposing IAM solutions has gained recent attention, BC is an evolving technology and needs to be studied carefully before using it for IAM solutions in HIoT applications. A systematic literature review was conducted on the BC-based IAM systems in HIoT applications to investigate the security aspect. Twenty-four studies that satisfied the inclusion criteria and passed the quality assessment were included in this review. We studied BC-based solutions in HIoT applications to explore the IAM system architecture, security requirements and threats. We summarized the main components and technologies in typical BC-based IAM systems and the layered architecture of the BC-based IAM system in HIoT. Accordingly, the security threats and requirements were summarized. Our systematic review shows that there is a lack of a comprehensive security framework, risk assessments, and security and functional performance evaluation metrics in BC-based IAM in HIoT applications.
With the continuous innovative development and popularization of mobile smart devices , the application of Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) continues to be studied extensively. However, existing centralized MCS applications that use servers for task publishing and data collection exhibit common problems, such as single points of failure and security vulnerabilities . Accordingly, we proposed a hybrid blockchain-based identity authentication scheme for MCS called HBIA, which uses blockchain technology to resolve the single-point failure problem. HBIA builds a cluster structure based on factors such as geographical location and balance, and uses it to construct a hybrid blockchain , with the cluster head node and internal cluster node authenticating on the public and private chains, respectively. We also implemented zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to ensure the privacy of participants’ identities, thus balancing the contradiction between blockchain transparency and security. In addition, HBIA uses the zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) technology to enable off-chain computing and on-chain verification, further reducing the blockchain’s workload. Finally, HBIA was evaluated based on the pavement crack detection task and tested on the Ethereum public test network known as Ropsten. The test results indicate that the identity authentication scheme proposed in this paper is superior to existing schemes in terms of authentication time.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interconnected devices that have the ability to monitor and transfer data to peers without human intervention. Authentication, Authorization and Audit Logs (AAA) are prime features of Network Security and easily attained in legacy systems, however, remains unachieved in IoT. The IoTs require due security considerations as the conventional security mechanisms are not optimized for such devices due to various aspects such as heterogeneity, resource constrained processing, storage and multiple factors. Additionally, the legacy systems are mostly centralized and thus introduce a single point of failure. In this research, a novel framework, FBASHI is presented that is based on fuzzy logic and blockchain technology to achieve AAA services. The proposed system is developed using Hyperledger that is a blockchain platform providing privacy and fast response capability, therefore, it is best suited for the healthcare IoT environments. This work proposes behavior driven adaptive security mechanism for healthcare IoTs and networks based on blockchain by utilizing fuzzy logic and presents a heuristic approach towards behavior driven adaptive security providing AAA services. FBASHI is implemented to analyze its security and practicality. Furthermore, a comparison is drawn with other blockchain-based solutions.