As the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm gets more attention from academia and industry, implementation tools of IoT will be explored more and more. One example is the applicability of blockchain systems to provide security and privacy of IoT networks, which is the topic of this article. Blockchain systems are on the rise, as crypto-currency payment systems (such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc.) boomed in the last few years due to their attractive de-centralized and anonymous features. As in every transaction, access of the users to IoT systems needs to be controlled. However, these systems are peer-to-peer systems and do not have centralized control, which means that traditional access control techniques will not be optimal. As a result, distributed access control schemes are needed and this paper aims at providing the state of the art in the literature. Thereby, we introduce and discuss the details and applicability of centralized (role-based) and distributed (threshold-signature, reputation, trusted-computing, identity, capability, ACL, group-signature, and hybrid) access control schemes to blockchain systems under the IoT ecosystems. Moreover, permissioned vs. permissionless blockchain systems are also discussed. Finally, challenges and research directions related to the application of all those presented blockchain systems to IoT are discussed.
Abstract Information security has become the focus problem in the Internet of Things, and the traditional centralized access control model is faced with threats such as single point failure, internal attack, and central leak. In this paper, we proposed a model to improve the access control security of the Internet of Things, which is based on zero-knowledge proof and smart contract technology in the blockchain. Firstly, we deployed the attribute information of access control in the blockchain, which relieves the pressure and credibility problem brought by the third-party information concentration; Secondly, the encrypted access control token is used to gain the access permission of the resources, which makes the user's identity invisible and effectively avoids the attribute ownership exposure problem; Besides, the use of smart contracts solves the problem of low computing efficiency of Internet of Things devices and the waste of blockchain computing power resources; Finally, a prototype of Internet of Things access control system based on blockchain and zero-knowledge proof technology is implemented. The test analysis results show that the model achieves effective attribute privacy protection, compared with the Attribute-Based Access Control model of the same security level, the access efficiency increases linearly with the increase of access scale.
The Internet of Things (IoT) providers serve better IoT services each year while producing more IoT gateways and devices to expand their services. However, the security of the IoT ecosystem remains an afterthought for most IoT providers. This action results in many cybersecurity breaches in the field, most likely due to the lack of access control mechanisms. In this paper, we propose BorderChain, an access control framework based on blockchain for IoT endpoints. The security protocol guarantees two properties. First, our proposal assures IoT users and services that they communicate with approved IoT gateways as endpoints, holding verified IoT devices that they need. Second, BorderChain also generates access tokens that the IoT service and users can use to query IoT resources legitimately inside the IoT domains. As a result, the protocol can convince IoT domain owners that the system will only authorize IoT requests that they approve. We realize our protocol in the form of a smart contract to allow many IoT entities such as IoT domain owners, IoT devices, IoT gateways, IoT vendors, IoT services, IoT users, and Internet Service Provider (ISP) to collaborate in a unified environment. We then implement entities in BorderChain as Node JS applications connecting to the Ethereum blockchain as our peer-to-peer platform. Based on our performance evaluation using several Raspberry Pi hardware and our private server, we show that BorderChain can process entities' authentication and authorization requests efficiently using all hardware resources. Finally, we release BorderChain for public use.
The application of Blockchain technology has begun to be widely accommodated in industrial and business practitioner environments as a safeguard of transaction security so that now including the education sector, non-business institutions enjoy the use of this technology to support the learning process. Information on the protected Blockchain can be in the form of transactions, assets, identities, and other information packaged in digital form. Information is collected in the form of blocks that are interrelated by using the hash function as cryptographic encryption. This research uses Blockchain for online pocket money top-up transactions for students. The use of a centralized Blockchain is centralized to reduce server procurement costs, but to increase the security of transaction information, modification of each block series is carried out using the AES cryptographic approach. The results showed that the attack by inserting a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) script if you want to know the value of the top-up transaction amount, you must be able to hack the cryptographic process. This is supported by chain validation testing to determine how many block changes have been changed.
Noshina Tariq, Muhammad Asim, Farrukh Aslam Khan, Thar Baker · 6 authors
A multitude of smart things and wirelessly connected Sensor Nodes (SNs) have pervasively facilitated the use of smart applications in every domain of life. Along with the bounties of smart things and applications, there are hazards of external and internal attacks. Unfortunately, mitigating internal attacks is quite challenging, where network lifespan (w.r.t. energy consumption at node level), latency, and scalability are the three main factors that influence the efficacy of security measures. Furthermore, most of the security measures provide centralized solutions, ignoring the decentralized nature of SN-powered Internet of Things (IoT) deployments. This paper presents an energy-efficient decentralized trust mechanism using a blockchain-based multi-mobile code-driven solution for detecting internal attacks in sensor node-powered IoT. The results validate the better performance of the proposed solution over existing solutions with 43.94% and 2.67% less message overhead in blackhole and greyhole attack scenarios, respectively. Similarly, the malicious node detection time is reduced by 20.35% and 11.35% in both blackhole and greyhole attacks. Both of these factors play a vital role in improving network lifetime.
Xudong Jia, Ning Hu, Shi Yin, Yan Zhao · 6 authors
The fifth-generation mobile communication technology (5G) provides high-bandwidth and low-latency data channels for massive IoT terminals to access the core business network. At the same time, it also brings higher security threats and challenges. Terminal identity authentication is an important security mechanism to ensure the core business network; however, most of the existing solutions adopt a centralized authentication model. Once the number of authentication requests exceeds the processing capacity of the authentication center service, it will cause authentication request congestion or deadlock. The decentralized authentication model can effectively solve the above problems. This article proposes a decentralized IoT authentication scheme called A2 Chain. First, A2 Chain uses edge computing to decentralize the processing of authentication requests and eliminate the burden on authentication services and the network. Second, to implement cross-domain identity verification of IoT devices, A2 Chain uses blockchain, and sidechain technologies are used to securely share the identity verification information of IoT devices. Additionally, A2 Chain replaces public key infrastructure (PKI) algorithm with identity-based cryptography (IBC) algorithm to eliminate the management overhead caused by centralized authentication model.
Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain have recently gained prominence as one of the latest technological revolutions. Therefore, many studies are currently exploring blockchain adoption in various fields, including the higher education sector. Recently, the education sector has emerged as one of the fields in which investments for blockchain-based systems and services are desirable. However, the extant literature lacks a guiding framework for the integration of blockchain and other relevant technologies in the use of certificating systems that issue authentic and sharable student credentials. Existing credentialing systems use analogue operations to manage certificate generation. These systems are slow and unreliable and, in some cases, may raise other cultural and social issues depending on the context of the education system. Consequently, this paper presents an analysis of blockchain adoption in this field, specifically with regard to the process of generating and sharing higher education student certificates. The paper outlines the first phase of an ongoing research project by proposing a validating and sharing framework for certificates that will guarantee the authenticity of shared higher education certificates by providing high privacy and security aspects in a blockchain network. It includes the design of a blockchain-based certificating system architecture to address issues and solutions in higher education systems. Thus, deploying blockchain in the higher education sector is expected to be beneficial as it solves some existing issues with the certification process.
Lightning Network (LN) addresses the scalability problem of Bitcoin by leveraging off-chain transactions. Nevertheless, it is not possible to run LN on resource-constrained IoT devices due to its storage, memory, and processing requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient and secure protocol that enables an IoT device to use LN's functions through a gateway LN node. The idea is to involve the IoT device in LN operations with its digital signature by replacing original 2-of-2 multisignature channels with 3-of-3 multisignature channels. Our protocol enforces the LN gateway to request the IoT device's cryptographic signature for all operations on the channel. We evaluated the proposed protocol by implementing it on a Raspberry Pi for a toll payment scenario and demonstrated its feasibility and security.
Qilie Liu, Yinyi Xu, Bin Cao, Lei Zhang · 5 authors
The forking problem plays a key role in the security issue, which is a major concern in the blockchain system. Although many works studied the attack strategy, consensus mechanism, privacy-protecting and security performance analysis, most of them only address the intentional forking caused by a malicious attacker. In fact, without any attacker, unintentional forking still remains due to transmission delay and failure, especially in wireless network scenarios. To this end, this paper investigates the reason for generating unintentional forking and derives the forking probability expression in Wireless Blockchain Networks (WBN). Furthermore, in order to illustrate the unintentional forking on the blockchain system, the performances in terms of resource utilization rate, block generation time, and Transaction Per Second (TPS) are investigated. The numerical results show that the target difficulty of hash algorithm in generating a new block, the delay time of broadcasting, the network scale, and the transmission failure probability would affect the unintentional forking probability significantly, which can provide a reliable basis for avoiding forking to save resource consumption and improving system performance.
The development of Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has led to close cooperation between electronic devices. It requires strong reliability and trustworthiness of the devices involved in the communication. However, current trust mechanisms have the following issues: (1) heavily relying on a trusted third party, which may incur severe security issues if it is corrupted, and (2) malicious evaluations on the involved devices which may bias the trustrank of the devices. By introducing the concepts of risk management and blockchain into the trust mechanism, we here propose a blockchain-based trust mechanism for distributed IoT devices in this paper. In the proposed trust mechanism, trustrank is quantified by normative trust and risk measures, and a new storage structure is designed for the domain administration manager to identify and delete the malicious evaluations of the devices. Evidence shows that the proposed trust mechanism can ensure data sharing and integrity, in addition to its resistance against malicious attacks to the IoT devices.
As the commercial use of 5G technologies has grown more prevalent, smart vehicles have become an efficient platform for delivering a wide array of services directly to customers. The vehicular crowdsourcing service (VCS), for example, can provide immediate and timely feedback to the user regarding real-time transportation information. However, different sources can generate spurious information towards a specific service request in the pursuit of profit. Distinguishing trusted information from numerous sources is the key to a reliable VCS platform. This paper proposes a solution to this problem called "RC-chain", a reputation-based crowdsourcing framework built on a blockchain platform (Hyperledger Fabric). We first establish the blockchain-based platform to support the management of crowdsourcing trading and user-reputation evaluating activities. A reputation model, the Trust Propagation \& Feedback Similarity (TPFS), then calculates the reputation values of participants and reveals any malicious behavior accordingly. Finally, queueing theory is used to evaluate the blockchain-based platform and optimize the system performance. The proposed framework was deployed on the IBM Hyperledger Fabric platform to observe its real-world running time, effectiveness, and overall performance.
This article aims at presenting Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies from business perspective (although providing adequate technology context) and, especially, highlighting concrete implementations in Agri-Food Supply Chain, bringing security, transparency and robustness to solutions, and enabling the creation of added value through the provisioning of information to consumers which allow them to understand the origin, the transformation and the transportation of agri-food goods. It also brings some examples of European Programmes and Projects that are supporting innovative solutions to reach the market.
Blockchain is a technology for storing an immutable history of transactions in a decentralized platform by using cryptographic principles. Many industries have become interested in adopting blockchain within their IT systems. However, the accessibility, privacy, performance, and scalability aspects of different blockchain-based platforms are still legitimate concerns when designing an enterprise solution. Permissioned blockchain frameworks facilitate a way to immutably store confidential records. Numerous research studies have been carried out on the opportunities, challenges, application areas, and performance analysis of different public and permissioned blockchain-based platforms. However, the implication of blockchain in recent private enterprise solution requires detailed comparative analysis. This paper conducts a performance and scalability analysis of popular private blockchain platforms, including Ethereum (private deployment), Quorum, Corda, and Hyperledger Fabric. Each of these platforms is assessed by varying the workloads (no. of transactions and nodes) and determining the performance evaluation metrics such as throughput and network latency.
We have entered an era where the importance of decentralized solutions has become more obvious. Blockchain technology and its derivatives are distributed ledger technologies that keep the registry of data between peers of a network. This ledger is secured within a successive over looping cryptographic chain. The accomplishment of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency proved that blockchain technology and its derivatives could be used to eliminate intermediaries and provide security for cyberspace. However, there are some challenges in the implementation of blockchain technology. This chapter first explains the concept of blockchain technology and the data that we can store therein. The main advantage of blockchain is the security services that it provides. This section continues by describing these services.. The challenges of blockchain; blockchain anomalies, energy consumption, speed, scalability, interoperability, privacy and cryptology in the age of quantum computing are described. Selected solutions for these challenges are given. Remarkable derivatives of blockchain, which use different solutions (directed acyclic graph, distributed hash table, gossip consensus protocol) to solve some of these challenges are described. Then the data storage in blockchain and evolving data solutions are explained. The comparison of decentralized solutions with the lcentralized database systems is given. A multi-platform interoperable scalable architecture (MPISA) is proposed. In the conclusion we include the evolution assumptions of data storage in a decentralized world.
The blockchain technology is quickly becoming the most disruptive technology of recent times. This technology has generated a lot of buzz and optimism, and it has gained a lot of attention from both the public and private sectors. Information can be transferred using blockchain technology in a manner that is confidential, safe, reliable, and open to scrutiny. This analysis focuses on the ways in which blockchain technology can be used to solve problems related to scalability and give solutions in the context of the healthcare industry. In light of this, the proposed solutions can be categorized into two primary categories: storage optimization and blockchain redesign. However, there are still several restrictions, such as the block size, the enormous volume of data and transactions, the number of nodes, and the obstacles posed by the protocol. It has seen widespread application in decentralized crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example. An example of a public blockchain application that was successful, Bitcoin, was the impetus for a significant increase in research and development into blockchain technology. Nevertheless, scalability continues to be a significant obstacle. According to the facts that we've compiled, the primary causes of scalability issues appear to be bottlenecks in the transaction throughput, the network latency, and the consensus methods. On the other side, the potential for scalability includes the application of techniques like as sharding, hybrid systems, and off-chain computations. We also examine the consequences of these findings as well as prospective paths for future study to help solve the scalability problems that blockchain-based systems provide.
Since a smart dust Internet of Things (IoT) system includes a very large number of devices sometimes deployed in hard-access areas, it is very difficult to prevent security attacks and to alleviate bottleneck phenomena. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain scheme that helps device authentication and data security in a secure smart dust IoT environment. To achieve our goals, (1) we propose the structure of the lightweight blockchain and the algorithm of processing the blockchain. In addition, (2) we reorganize the linear block structure of the conventional blockchain into the binary tree structure in such a way that the proposed blockchain is more efficient in a secure smart dust IoT environment. Experiments show that the proposed binary tree-structured lightweight blockchain scheme can greatly reduce the time required for smart dust device authentication, even taking into account the tree transformation overhead. Compared with the conventional linear-structured blockchain scheme, the proposed binary tree-structured lightweight blockchain scheme achieves performance improvement by up to 40% (10% in average) with respect to the authentication time.
Background: As public health strategists and policymakers explore different approaches to lessen the devastating effects of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), blockchain technology has emerged as a resource that can be utilized in numerous ways. Many blockchain technologies have been proposed or implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, to the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive reviews have been conducted to uncover and summarise the main feature of these technologies. Objective: This study aims to explore proposed or implemented blockchain technologies used to mitigate the COVID-19 challenges as reported in the literature. Methods: We conducted a scoping review in line with guidelines of PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). To identify relevant studies, we searched 11 bibliographic databases (e.g., EMBASE and MEDLINE) and conducted backward and forward reference list checking of the included studies and relevant reviews. The study selection and data extraction were conducted by 2 reviewers independently. Data extracted from the included studies was narratively summarised and described. Results: 19 of 225 retrieved studies met eligibility criteria in this review. The included studies reported 10 used cases of blockchain to mitigate COVID-19 challenges; the most prominent use cases were contact tracing and immunity passports. While the blockchain technology was developed in 10 studies, its use was proposed in the remaining 9 studies. The public blockchain technology was the most commonly utilized type in the included studies. All together, 8 different consensus mechanisms were used in the included studies. Out of 10 studies that identified the used platform, 9 studies used Ethereum to run the blockchain. Solidity was the most prominent programming language used in developing blockchain technology in the included studies. The transaction cost was reported in only 4 of the included studies and varied between USD 10−10 and USD 5. The expected latency and expected scalability were not identified in the included studies. Conclusion: Blockchain technologies are expected to play an integral role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Many possible applications of blockchain were found in this review; however, most of them are not mature enough to reveal their expected impact in the fight against COVID-19. We encourage governments, health authorities, and policymakers to consider all blockchain applications suggested in the current review to combat COVID-19 challenges. There is a pressing need to empirically examine how effective blockchain technologies are in mitigating COVID-19 challenges. Further studies are required to assess the performance of blockchain technologies’ fight against COVID-19 in terms of transaction cost, scalability, and/or latency when using different consensus algorithms, platforms, and access types.
Chaoxia Qin, Bing Guo, Yan Shen, Tao Li · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has emerged as a novel distributed ledger technology, facilitating data sharing and system management securely and efficiently without interventions from a central authority. However, blockchain technology alone is not suitable for enterprise-class applications, mainly due to the limitations in capacity expansion and verification speed of blockchain systems. This paper proposes a secure and effective construction scheme for blockchain networks to improve performance and address the effective management concerns of blockchain data based on transaction categories. We designed a network link protocol to construct a directed acyclic graph (DAG) blockchain network and used a sharding protocol to divide the DAG blockchain into multiple category shards to process transactions in parallel. We then extensively evaluated our proposed design on local clusters. The experimental results show that our link and shard protocols achieved high throughput and the category-based sharded DAG blockchain demonstrated high scalability.
Ahsan Manzoor, An Braeken, Salil S. Kanhere, Mika Ylianttila · 5 authors
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. With billions of devices connected, most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. The involvement of such a third-party service provider requires also trust from both the sensor owner and sensor data user. Moreover, fees need to be paid for their services. To tackle both the scalability and trust issues and to automatize the payments, this paper presents a blockchain-based marketplace for sharing of the IoT data. We also use a proxy re-encryption scheme for transferring the data securely and anonymously, from data producer to the consumer. The system stores the IoT data in cloud storage after encryption. To share the collected IoT data, the system establishes runtime dynamic smart contracts between the sensor and data consumer without the involvement of a trusted third-party. It also uses a very efficient proxy re-encryption scheme which allows that the data is only visible by the owner and the person present in the smart contract. This novel combination of smart contracts with proxy re-encryption provides an efficient, fast and secure platform for storing, trading and managing sensor data. The proposed system is implemented using off-the-shelf IoT sensors and computer devices. We also analyze the performance of our hybrid system by using the permission-less Ethereum blockchain and compare it to the IBM Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain.
Blockchain technology will bring a disruption in plenty of industries and businesses. Recently it proved the robustness, immutability, auditability, in many crucial practical applications. The blockchain structure offers traceability of actions, alterations, alerts, which is an important property of a system needed for development of sustainable technologies. A crucial part of the blockchain technology regarding the optimization of the processes is the smart contract. It is a self-executable computer code, open and transparent, encoding the terms of a regular contract. It is able to automate the processes, thus decreasing the human-factor mistakes or counterfeits. In this paper, we are presenting the feasibility of the blockchain technology in the certification processes, with an application developed for university diploma certification. The example is easily transferable in other areas and business models such as logistics, supply chain management, or other segments where certification is essential.
The privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is facing a major hurdle with outsourcing private health data in the cloud as there exists danger of leaking health information to unauthorized parties. In fact, EHRs are stored on centralized databases that increases the security risk footprint and requires trust in a single authority which cannot effectively protect data from internal attacks. This research focuses on ensuring the patient privacy and data security while sharing the sensitive data across same or different organisations as well as healthcare providers in a distributed environment. This research develops a privacy-preserving framework viz Healthchain based on Blockchain technology that maintains security, privacy, scalability and integrity of the e-health data. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger solutions by using Hyperledger composer and stores EHRs by utilizing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to build this healthchain framework. Moreover, the data stored in the IPFS is encrypted by using a unique cryptographic public key encryption algorithm to create a robust blockchain solution for electronic health data. The objective of the research is to provide a foundation for developing security solutions against cyber-attacks by exploiting the inherent features of the blockchain, and thus contribute to the robustness of healthcare information sharing environments. Through the results, the proposed model shows that the healthcare records are not traceable to unauthorized access as the model stores only the encrypted hash of the records that proves effectiveness in terms of data security, enhanced data privacy, improved data scalability, interoperability and data integrity while sharing and accessing medical records among stakeholders across the healthchain network.
Blockchain is a promising new technology, generating widespread interest, and receiving considerable attention in the research community, such as academia and industry. This interest started with the success of Bitcoin but took speed with the promise of smart contracts and a vast number of applications. While there is a broad interest in developing blockchain systems for specific use cases, there is a lack of tools to perform their evaluation and implementation decisions may hamper fast progress. This report provides the review of security and performance of public and private blockchain framework, where each of which is represented by the two well-known papers, the first is titled “On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains” and the second paper is titled “BLOCKBENCH: A Framework for Analyzing Private Blockchains”. The first paper introduces a novel quantitative framework to analyze the security and performance implications of various consensus and network parameters of PoW blockchains. The framework allows for capture existing PoW-based deployments as well as PoW blockchain variants that are instantiated with different parameters, and to objectively compare the tradeoffs between their performance and security provisions. In the second paper, the authors describe BlockBench, the first evaluation framework for analyzing private blockchains. BlockBench measures overall and componentwise performance in terms of throughput, latency, scalability, and fault-tolerance. Next, BlockBench is used to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of three major private blockchains: Ethereum, Parity, and Hyperledger Fabric. Furthermore, there are gaps in performance among the three systems which are attributed to the design choices at different layers of the blockchain’s software stack.
Abstract Embedded systems and wireless sensor networks (WSN) are found today in increasingly critical areas of applications. They have become integrated and embedded in nearly all aspects of everyday life, including manufacturing, healthcare, education, critical infrastructure, and entertainment. The number of connected devices continues to grow, and due to the insecure nature of these devices, the amount of risk continues to grow as well. These risks, however, can be mitigated with the creation and adoption of WSN security standards developed to create an environment of safety, security, and confidence in the technology. Designing the security policy for WSNs requires asking some preliminary questions. These questions are particularly important in the case of WSNs because their use is highly decentralized. Blockchain's ability on governing decentralized networks makes it especially suitable for designing a self‐managing system on WSN devices. This article proposes a routing protocol that uses Blockchain technology to offer a shared memory between the network's nodes. The simulation results have shown that this solution could be applicable and could resolve the issues cited above.