Jun-Mo Lee, Seong‐Jun Kim, Sang-Hyeon Park, Soo‐Mook Moon
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have made payment transactions possible without a trusted third party, but they have a scalability issue due to their consensus mechanisms. Payment networks have emerged to overcome this limitation by executing transactions outside of the blockchain, which is why these are referred to as off-chain transactions. In order to establish a payment channel between two users, the users lock their deposits in the blockchain, and then they can pay each other through the channel. Furthermore, payment networks support multi-hop payments that allow users to transfer their balances to other users who are connected to them via multiple channels. However, multi-hop payments are hard to be accomplished, as they are heavily dependent on routing users on a payment path from a sender to a receiver. Although routing hubs can make multi-hop payments more practical and efficient, they need a lot of collateral locked for a long period and have privacy issues in terms of payment history. We propose RouTEE, a secure payment routing hub that is fully feasible without the hub's deposit. Unlike existing payment networks, RouTEE provides high balance liquidity, and details about payments are concealed from hosts by leveraging trusted execution environments (TEEs). RouTEE is designed to make rational hosts behave honestly, by introducing a new routing fee scheme and a secure settlement method. Moreover, users do not need to monitor the blockchain in real-time or run full nodes. They can participate in RouTEE by simply verifying block headers through light clients; furthermore, having only one channel with RouTEE is sufficient to interact with other users. Our implementation demonstrates that RouTEE is highly efficient and outperforms Lightning Network that is the state-of-the-art payment network.
Michael G. Xevgenis, Dimitrios G. Kogias, Panagiotis Karkazis, Helen C. Leligou · 5 authors
With the advent of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies, the networking infrastructures are becoming increasingly agile in their attempts to offer the quality of services needed by the users, maximizing the efficiency of infrastructure utilization. This in essence mandates the statistical multiplexing of demands across the infrastructures of different Network Providers (NPs), which would allow them to cope with the increasing demand, upgrading their infrastructures at a slower pace. However, to enjoy the benefits of statistical multiplexing, a trusted authority to govern it would be required. At the same time, blockchain technology aspires to offer a solid advantage in such untrusted environments, enabling the development of decentralized solutions that ensure the integrity and immutability of the information stored in the digital ledger. To this end, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution that allows NPs to trade their (processing and networking) resources. We implemented the solution in a test-bed deployed on the cloud and we present the gathered performance results, showing that a blockchain-based solution is feasible and appropriate. We also discuss further improvements and challenges.
K. Suresh Kumar, R Rajeswari, Ch. Vidyadhari, B. Santhosh Kumar
These days blockchain innovation has become a significant issue as of late and greatly affected the business. Even though blockchain innovations was reliable for security issues, advantageous administrations, and difficulties for procedure assumes a significant key job that we have to break down. To have a superior observation about this square chain innovation, we will find out about the essential security highlights like-expanded limit, better security, unchanging nature, quicker settlement, and decentralized framework. The range of blockchain applications limits from budgetary, human services, vehicle, chance administration, Internet of things to open and social administrations. In this paper, by examining its structure to various agreement calculations just as difficulties and openings, we endeavor to lead an expansive going review on blockchain innovation and also the few mathematical models behind this blockchain technology.
Blockchain is one of the most growing technologies that is playing a vital role in the professional world today. Blockchain is the technology that is going to revolutionize many industries in the future including healthcare. It is simply defined as a decentralized, distributed ledger that records the provenance of a digital asset. Blockchain is used as a backbone for many industries such as cryptocurrencies, bitcoin, and many more. Although its capability and application have to be extended far beyond. The objective of blockchain is to allow digital information to be recorded and distributed, but not edited. In the last couple of years many industries finding new ways to implement blockchain technology with a wide range of domains. And this sudden increase in technology also provided many new application opportunities, including financial services, smart contracts, energy trading, supply chain, healthcare, etc. In this paper, we know briefly about blockchain technologies and some of their applications. We also show how blockchain is going to revolutionize the healthcare industry in the future.
Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies with the potential to disrupt many application domains. Cloud is an on-demand service paradigm facilitating the availability of shared resources for data storage and computation. In recent years, the integration of blockchain and cloud has received significant attention for ensuring efficiency, transparency, security and even for offering better cloud services in the form of novel service models. In order to exploit the full potential of blockchain-cloud integration, it is essential to have a clear understanding on the existing works within this domain. To facilitate this, there have been several survey papers, however, none of them covers the aspect of blockchain-cloud integration from a service-oriented perspective. This paper aims to fulfil this gap by providing a service oriented review of blockchain-cloud integration. Indeed, in this survey, we explore different service models into which blockchain has been integrated. For each service model, we review the existing works and present a comparative analysis so as to offer a clear and concise view in each category.
Hyeong Joon Kim, Hye Hyeon Kim, Hosuk Ku, Kyung Don Yoo · 11 authors
BACKGROUND The Health Avatar Platform provides a mobile health environment with interconnected patient Avatars, physician apps, and intelligent agents (termed IoA 3 ) for data privacy and participatory medicine; however, its fully decentralized architecture has come at the expense of decentralized data management and data provenance. OBJECTIVE The introduction of blockchain and smart contract technologies to the legacy Health Avatar Platform with a clinical metadata registry remarkably strengthens decentralized health data integrity and immutable transaction traceability at the corresponding data-element level in a privacy-preserving fashion. A crypto-economy ecosystem was built to facilitate secure and traceable exchanges of sensitive health data. METHODS The Health Avatar Platform decentralizes patient data in appropriate locations (ie, on patients’ smartphones and on physicians’ smart devices). We implemented an Ethereum-based hash chain for all transactions and smart contract–based processes to guarantee decentralized data integrity and to generate block data containing transaction metadata on-chain. Parameters of all types of data communications were enumerated and incorporated into 3 smart contracts, in this case, a health data transaction manager, a transaction status manager, and an application programming interface transaction manager. The actual decentralized health data are managed in an off-chain manner on appropriate smart devices and authenticated by hashed metadata on-chain. RESULTS Metadata of each data transaction are captured in a Health Avatar Platform blockchain node by the smart contracts. We provide workflow diagrams each of the 3 use cases of data push (from a physician app or an intelligent agents to a patient Avatar), data pull (request to a patient Avatar by other entities), and data backup transactions. Each transaction can be finely managed at the corresponding data-element level rather than at the resource or document levels. Hash-chained metadata support data element–level verification of data integrity in subsequent transactions. Smart contracts can incentivize transactions for data sharing and intelligent digital health care services. CONCLUSIONS Health Avatar Platform and interconnected patient Avatars, physician apps, and intelligent agents provide a decentralized blockchain ecosystem for health data that enables trusted and finely tuned data sharing and facilitates health value-creating transactions with smart contracts.
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus mechanism shows a great potential to break the performance bottleneck of the Proof-of-Work (PoW)-based blockchain systems, which typically support only dozens of transactions per second and require minutes to hours for transaction confirmation. However, due to frequent inter-node communications, PBFT mechanism has a poor node scalability and thus it is typically adopted in small networks. To enable PBFT in large systems such as massive Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems and blockchain, in this article, a scalable multi-layer PBFT-based consensus mechanism is proposed by hierarchically grouping nodes into different layers and limiting the communication within the group. We first propose an optimal double-layer PBFT and show that the communication complexity is significantly reduced. Specifically, we prove that when the nodes are evenly distributed within the sub-groups in the second layer, the communication complexity is minimized. The security threshold is analyzed based on faulty probability determined (FPD) and faulty number determined (FND) models, respectively. We also provide a practical protocol for the proposed double-layer PBFT system. Finally, the results are extended to arbitrary-layer PBFT systems with communication complexity and security analysis. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the analytical results.
Antonyo Douglas, R. H. Holloway, Jonathan Lohr, Elijah Morgan · 5 authors
Today’s networks are seeing a large influx of Internet connected devices that reside primarily on the edge of the network. Many of these devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are resource constrained both by storage capacity and power requirements that limit a device’s Internet availability. Several interesting architectures have been proposed to address security, device management, configuration, and multi-party interaction concerns using blockchain technology. These architectures require a trusted intermediary to interact with the blockchain on behalf of the edge device. This introduces a single point of failure in trust and security. This paper proposes a novel adaptation of blockchain technology to enable these edge devices to interact and participate with a blockchain without requiring a trusted intermediary. The proposed architecture provides a flexible and extensible framework that enables multi party interactions to take place at the edge of the network. The efficacy of the proposed design is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and by an application to a network of resource constrained IoT devices.
Abstract Blockchain is a way of passing data (such as records, events, or transactions) from one party to another in a very secure way. It is an electronic record of information that requires digital security. All data stored in the blockchain is immutable; once a piece of data enters into a blockchain, it is practically impossible to alter its value. The Blockchain has changed the model from a centralized way of traditional business to the decentralized model of the blockchain, that means there it can run without any central authority. It works on Peer to Peer Model rather than Peer-Mediator-Peer. The Blockchains makes the process easier, fastest, and trustworthy to deal with businesses as it follows Peer to Peer nature Blockchain. It has become the most used business model in different industries, such as construction industries, as it is the safest, fastest, transparent, and it also is more comfortable to implement. The critical feature of the blockchain that makes it today’s most potential technologies are: decentralized, self-control, peer- to- peer relationship, fixed record and time stamping. Thus, this chapter focuses on the pivotal role and application of BlockChain technology on the digitization of land records of the Indian Scenario.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
Blockchain and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are newly emerging technologies with great potential to revolutionize healthcare. This paper proposes a new decentralized healthcare architecture for distributed Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) sharing among federated hospitals based on blockchain and MEC. Unlike the existing schemes that often rely on a third-party for healthcare management, we focus on a fully decentralized access control solution by using smart contracts that enable EMRs access verification at the edge of the network without requiring any central authority. Moreover, a decentralized interplanetary file system (IPFS) platform is also integrated with smart contracts over the MEC network, which significantly reduces data retrieval latency and enhances security for EMRs sharing. The experimental results and analysis show the superior performance of the proposed scheme over the existing ones in terms of reduced data retrieval latency, enhanced blockchain performance, and security guarantees.
Tharaka Hewa, An Braeken, Mika Ylianttila, Madhusanka Liyanage
There is a global hype in the development of digital healthcare infrastructure to cater the massive elderly population and infectious diseases. The digital facilitation is expected to ensure the patient privacy, scalability, and data integrity on the sensitive life critical healthcare data, while aligning to the global healthcare data protection standards. The patient data sharing to third parties such as research institutions and universities is also concerned as a significant contribution to the society to sharpen the research and investigations. The emergence of 5G communication technologies eradicates the borders between patients, hospital and other institutions with high end service standards. In patients' perspective, healthcare service delivery through the digital medium is beneficial in terms of time, costs, and risks. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-access Edge Computing(MEC) and blockchain based service architecture utilizing the lightweight ECQV (Elliptic Curve Qu-Vanstone) certificates for the realtime data privacy, integrity, and authentication between IoT, MEC, and cloud. We further attached storage offloading capability to the blockchain to ensure scalability with a massive number of connected medical devices to the cloud. We introduced a rewarding scheme to the patients and hospitals through the blockchain to encourage data sharing. The access control is handled through the smart contracts. We evaluated the proposed system in a near realistic implementation using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform with Raspberry Pi devices to simulate the activity of the medical sensors.
Malka N. Halgamuge, Samurdika C. Hettikankanamge, Azeem Mohammad
A sharding mechanism could potentially be the solution to enhance the scalability of blockchain networks and makes the distributed ledger technology more feasible. Despite the scalability improvement, it increases the influence of malicious attacks on blockchain networks. We develop a comprehensive trust model by enhancing the trust score of nodes to minimize the adversary influences of malicious attacks in sharding based blockchain networks. Firstly, a penalty factor is incorporated into this trust model to decrease the probability of malicious nodes becoming leaders in the shards. Then, we examine the leader selection probability for varying penalty factors. We also observe the influence of the global reputation on the trust score for a varying number of nodes. Secondly, we increase the trustworthiness of nodes by including penalty factors and reputation scores to nodes that could then identify the malicious influence. The fair node distribution among shards is achieved by distributing the nodes with the same aggregated trustworthiness scores. Finally, we develop a probability distribution model to identify the probabilities of clustering corrupted nodes into single shards and the existence of such corrupted shards in the entire network. Uncorrupted or honest shard probability is shown to be higher in the RapidChain than the Elastico and OmniLedger sharding protocols. This could be as a result of the shard resiliency of the RapidChain (υ/2) protocol being more significant than that of the Elastico (υ/3) and in OmniLedger (υ/3) protocols. Low message complexity of single intra-shard consensus of the RapidChain protocol O(υ) may contribute to perform security algorithms more efficiently than that of the Elastico O(υ2) and OmniLedger O(υ) sharding protocols. The probabilities of clustering corrupted nodes into single shards can be estimated, and the existence of such corrupted shards in entire networks can be identified using the proposed model.
There has been wide range of applications involving smart home systems for user comfort and accessibility to essential commodities. Users enjoy featured home services supported by the IoT smart devices. These IoT devices are resource-constrained, incapable of securing themselves and can be easily hacked. Edge computing can provide localized computations and storage which can augment such capacity limitations for IoT devices. Furthermore, blockchain has emerged as technology with capabilities to provide secure access and authentication for IoT devices in decentralized manner. In this paper, we propose an authentication scheme which integrate attribute based access control using smart contracts with ERC-20 Token (Ethereum Request For Comments) and edge computing to construct a secure framework for IoT devices in Smart home system. The edge server provide scalability to the system by offloading heavier computation tasks to edge servers. We present system architecture and design and discuss various aspects related to testing and implementation of the smart contracts. We show that our proposed scheme is secure by thoroughly analysing its security goals with respect to confidentiality, integrity and availability. Finally, we conduct a performance evaluation to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed scheme.
Abstract This system is designed by using Lolin D32 as the processor dan MPL3115A2 for the sensors. This system is designed to show that devices that based on Internet of Things (IoT) could be secured by using blockchain technology. The blockchain technology is based on Ethereum which will be tested in Ropsten Testnet network. Processor module connects to Internet through WiFi module which is one of the Lolin D32 features. This WiFi module connects to router which is used for designing and testing the system. This system wants to prove that the data which are acquired from sensor module MPL3115A2 (altitude, temperature and pressure) and positioning data could be sign and verify within the processor Lolin D32. Before sending the data, the data will be formatted. Data will be stored in smart contract. The smart contract is an Ethereum program which is written using Solidity language. This smart contract is delployed into Ropsten network. The numbers of testing that have been carried out are 516 times. These testings proved as success. The data which were sent to Ropsten network could be proved that they were recorded successfully. These are done by checking through etherscan.io.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is believed to play a significant role in our future society governed in a decentralized way. In this article, we first explain the definitions and preliminaries of DAO. Then, we conduct a literature review of the existing studies of DAO published in the recent few years. Through the literature review, we find out that a comprehensive survey towards the state-of-the-art studies of DAO is still missing. To fill this gap, we perform such an overview by identifying and classifying the most valuable proposals and perspectives closely related to the combination of DAO and blockchain technologies. We anticipate that this survey can help researchers, engineers, and educators acknowledge the cutting-edge development of blockchain-related DAO technologies.
Mbarek Marwan, Abdelkarim Ait Temghart, Fatima Sifou, Feda AlShahwan
The integration of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) offers a promising, rich platform for data collection and analysis in smart healthcare. In such a model, IoT devices collect data about patient health status through multiple intelligent sensors, whereas cloud offers scalable resources to quickly meet workload demands. Despite these remarkable improvements, the current architectures do not sufficiently address the security needs for patient medical records. In this perspective, and bearing in mind the specific characteristics of each technology, we propose a distributed security mechanism in a way that fits with IoT and cloud constraints. Our contribution to secure cloud-enabled IoT is twofold. First, we rely on OM-AM (Objective, Model, Architecture and Mechanism) for modeling and analysing the security and privacy requirements of smart healthcare. Second, we use blockchain architecture along with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) model as a decentralized flexible system to support access control decisions. In particular, we rely on XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) to easily build and implement robust policies required for maintaining a secure IoT-based environment. The novelty of the proposed framework lies at smartly leveraging the recent technologies to keep health information confidential. In fact, putting blockchain and IoT together would undoubtedly create a totally new solution for remote patient monitoring. The simulation results show that the proposal is an efficient way of implementing ubiquitous and cognitive tools for smart healthcare systems.
In the cryptocurrency era, Blockchain is one of the expeditiously growing information technologies that help in providing security to the data. Data tampering and authentication problems generally occur in centralized servers while sharing and storing the data. Blockchain provides the platform for big data and cloud storage in enhancing the security by evading from pernicious users. In this paper, we have discussed the exhaustive description of blockchain and its need, features and applications. Analysis of blockchain is done for different domains such as big data, cloud, internet of things and mobile cloud where the differences V’s are compared with big data and blockchain. SWOT (Strength Weakness Opportunities Threats) analysis is performed to address the merits and limitations in blockchain technology. The survey in aspects of data security, data storage, data sharing and data authentication through blockchain technology is done and the challenges are discussed to overcome the problem that leads in big data and cloud storage. The detailed comparative analysis proves that the blockchain technology overcomes the problems in big data storage and data security in cloud.
Blockchain technology is being popular day by day and also serving in many applications and areas such as Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Big data, Healthcare and many more because of its security strengths and benefits. It has been proven that blockchain applications are being utilized in healthcare to deliver secure data and to manage the medical data safely. Moreover, blockchain is transforming the traditional medical practices in effective ways such as diagnosing the problems effectively and treating through secure information sharing. There is no doubt to say that in future, blockchain will be performing in personalized, valid and secure healthcare by combining the medical information of patient and providing in a secure and updated setup. In this research paper, securities of healthcare applications and traditional and recent security developments are discussed. Due to Covid-19, it has become challenging for healthcare officials and government to protect and record individuals sensitive data safely. Also, spread of misleading information has been also increased during the pandemic and inability of existing platform for information validation leads to public panic.Implementation of blockchain-based tracking systems is essential for accurate and valid information sharing among people and Government. This paper focus on information security issues raised by Covid-19 pandemic as well as implementation of blockchain-based platform in healthcare to record and protect covid-19 related information and contact tracing.
Nowadays, there are a lot of new mobile devices that have the potential to assist healthcare professionals when working and help to increase the well-being of the people. These devices comprise the Internet of Medical Things, but it is generally difficult for healthcare institutions to meet compliance of their systems with new medical solutions efficiently. A technology that promises the sharing of data in a trust-less scenario is the Distributed Ledger Technology through its properties of decentralization, immutability, and transparency. The Blockchain and the Internet of Medical Things can be considered as at an early stage, and the implementations successfully applying the technology are not so many. Some aspects covered by these implementations are data sharing, interoperability of systems, security of devices, the opportunity of data monetization and data ownership that will be the focus of this review. This work aims at giving an overview of the current state-of-the-art of the Blockchain-based systems for the Internet of Medical Things, specifically addressing the challenges of reaching user-centricity for these combined systems, and thus highlighting the potential future directions to follow for full ownership of data by users.
Nov 23, 2020·The international archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences/International archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences
Kazım Onur TOKA, Yılmaz Dikilitaş, Talha Oktay, Ahmet Sayar
Abstract. IoT is becoming ubiquitous in industry, homes, cities, literally in every aspect of our daily lives. Securing IoT-based systems is difficult because of deficiencies in the very nature of IoT devices such as limited battery power, processing, and storage, etc. Blockchain is a new approach used to securely record transactions and offers potential solutions to computer and internet security issues such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, authorization, and accountability. Blockchain, as a decentralized ledger consisting of interconnected blocks, can remedy most of the security deficiencies of heavily IoT based systems. The Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network used in this study provides confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and data security for data obtained from IoT devices. Widely used IoT data transfer MQTT protocol is included in the proposed approach. The approach is demonstrated in a simple demo Hyperledger network with simulated IoT devices. The proposed approach is discussed in terms of network security dimensions. Based on the features of the Hyperledger Blockchain network, it is displayed that the IoT security deficiencies can largely be remedied with the proposed approach.
On a daily basis we deal with documents like educational records, health records, certificates etc. Medical records are still being stored on legacy systems which carries the risk of losing important documents. There are security and privacy concerns regarding the safety of documents on centralized server. To overcome these difficulties, we made a blockchain based record storage web app through which anyone upload their medical records on the blockchain and can access them with a private key. The patient or the user can download and access reports from anywhere and can also manage to share them with his doctor etc. Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, peer to peer ledger on the internet. Blockchain technology helps to maintain security and reliability without placing any trust in a third party. The use of smart contracts in blockchain helps in making things much easier. This paper examines the record storage system including the technologies involved and the methodologies. The approach used for making an electronic health record storage web app through which we can implement a more broader record storage system that can store and manage numerous types of records.
Abstract: Insecure and portable devices in the smart city’s Internet of Things (IoT) network are increasing at an incredible rate. Various distributed and centralized platforms against cyber-attacks have been implemented in recent years, but these platforms are inefficient due to their constrained levels of storage, high energy consumption, the central point of failure, underutilized resources, high latency, and etc. In addition, the current architecture confronts the problems of scalability, flexibility, complexity, monitoring, managing & collecting of IoT data, and defend against cyber-threats. To address these issues, the author presents distributed and decentralized Blockchain-Software Defined Networking (SDN) based energy-optimized architecture for IoT in smart cities. Thus, SDN continuous observing, controlling, managing IoT devices activities and detect possible attacks in the network; Blockchain provides adequate security & privacy against cyber-attacks, reduces the central point of failure issues; Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are used to saving energy, load balancing, as well as increasing the lifetime of the entire network. Also, we introduce a Cluster Head Selection (CHS) algorithm to reduce the energy consumption in the presented model. Finally, we analyze the performance using various parameters (e.g. throughput, response time, gas consumption, communication overhead) and demonstrating the result that provides higher throughput, lower response time, lower gas consumption than existing works for smart cities.