Abstract Managing the integrity of products and processes in a multi-stakeholder supply chain environment is a significant challenge. Many current solutions suffer from data fragmentation, lack of reliable provenance, and diverse protocol regulations across multiple distributions and processes. Amongst other solutions, Blockchain has emerged as a leading technology, since it provides secure traceability and control, immutability, and trust creation among stakeholders in a low cost IT solution. Although Blockchain is making a significant impact in many areas, there are many impediments to its widespread adoption in supply chains. This article is the first survey of its kind, with detailed analysis of the challenges and future directions in Blockchain-enabled supply chains. We review the existing digitalization of the supply chain including the role of GS1 standards and technologies. Current use cases and startups in the field of Blockchain-enabled supply chains are reviewed and presented in tabulated form. Technical and non-technical challenges in the adoption of Blockchain for supply chain applications are critically analyzed, along with the suitability of various consensus algorithms for applications in the supply chain. The tools and technologies in the Blockchain ecosystem are depicted and analyzed. Some key areas as future research directions are also identified which must be addressed to realize mass adoption of Blockchain-based in supply chain traceability. Finally, we propose MOHBSChain, a novel framework for Blockchain-enabled supply chains.
Raising incidents of security threats among active sessions is an increasing concern in IoT environment. Continuous authentication was introducing to be superior to traditional authentication schemes by constantly verify usersā identities on an ongoing basis and spot the moment at which an illicit attacker seizes control of the session. However, several challenges remain unsolved. This research aims to investigate the power of Blockchain technology to provide real-time and non-intrusive continuous authentication for the IoT environment. Accordingly, a distributed and scalable continuous authentication solution based on Blockchain technology called CAB-IoT was proposed. It enabled fog nodes layer that tackles the limitations of IoT resources by providing localized processing of heavy continuous authentication-related tasks for a group of IoT devices. Besides, CAB-IoT introduced a trust module that depends on the face recognition machine learning model to detect outliers and abnormal access. Moreover, mutual authentication between end-users and fog nodes is also designed, as well as secure communication between the authenticated nodes. The results demonstrate a lightweight continuous authentication solution that achieved the desired balance between security and performance requirements where it was observed in a real-world environment for truly performance results. Security analysis and attack analysis are also considered during the evaluation.
Eryk Schiller, Elfat Esati, Sina Rafati Niya, Burkhard Stiller
This work develops an integration of Blockchains (BC) with the Internet-of-Things (IoT) using a highly constrained TelosB IoT platform based on the MSP430 processor family and CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio interfaces. The system is evaluated in an indoor office environment focusing on overhead and energy efficiency of BC transaction (TX) transmissions.
Alexandra Cernian, Bogdan ČigÄnoaia, Ioan Åtefan SacalÄ, Adrian Pavel Ā· 5 authors
Currently there is not a single trusted infrastructure used for the exchange and storage of medical data along the healthcare value chain and, thus, there is no platform used for monitoring patients' traceability within the entire healthcare chain. This situation leads to difficult communication and increased procedural costs, and thus it limits healthcare players from developing a better understanding and know-how of patients' traceability that could further boost innovation and development of the best-fitted health services. PatientDataChain blockchain-based technology is a novel approach, based on a decentralized healthcare infrastructure that incorporates a trust layer in the healthcare value chain. Our aim was to provide an integrated vision based on interoperability principles, that relies on the usage of specific sensors from various wearable devices, allowing us to collect specific data from patients' medical records. Interconnecting different healthcare providers, the collected data is integrated into a unitary personal health records (PHR) system, where the patient is the owner of his/her data. The decentralized nature of PatientDataChain, based on blockchain technology, leveraged the proper context to create a novel and improved data-sharing and exchange system, which is secure, flexible, and reliable. This approach brings increased benefits to data confidentiality and privacy, while providing secure access to patient medical records. This paper presents the design, implementation, and experimental validation of our proposed system, called PatientDataChain. The original contributions of our paper include the definition of the concept of unifying the entire healthcare value chain, the design of the architectural model of the system, the development of the system components, as well as the validation through a proof of concept (PoC) conducted with a medical clinic from Bucharest, using a dataset of 100 patients and over 1000 transactions. The proof of concept demonstrated the feasibility of the model in integrating the personal health records from heterogeneous sources (healthcare systems and sensors) in a unified, decentralized PHR system, with enhanced data exchange among healthcare players.
The combination of blockchain technology and Internet of Things (IoT) technology has brought many significant advantages and new development directions. With the development of embedded technology and 5G communication technology, the performance limitations and network limitations that are traditionally believed to restrict the application of blockchain technology to IoT devices have been broken. The development of "blockchain + 5G + IoT" provides reliable data from the source for the blockchain, linking the credible mapping of physical assets and digital assets. However, at the beginning of the blockchain design, the application of the IoT was not fully considered, so there have been some obvious defects in applying the blockchain technology in the IoT. In the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithm of traditional blockchain, the entire blockchain network will become paralyzed when more than 1/3 of the nodes in the network are offline. However, in IoT applications, this situation is likely to occur and greatly limits the security and stability of the application of blockchain technology in the IoT. In order to solve this problem, we proposed an IoT adaptive dynamic blockchain networking method based on discrete heartbeat signals. The feature of the method is to set a different monitoring time for each group of nodes, that is, discrete heartbeat signals monitoring. When the number of nodes gradually decreases, the IoT adaptive dynamic blockchain network can dynamically adapt to this process. Even when more than 1/3 of the IoT are offline, the adaptive dynamic IoT blockchain network can maintain stable running. This method also has the advantages of a short network expectation recovery time and avoids instantaneous system paralysis caused by the thundering herd effect. This research improves the security and stability of the application of blockchain technology in the IoT, and provides the necessary technical foundation for the better combination of blockchain technology and IoT technology.
The adoption of blockchain for Transactive Energy has gained significant\nmomentum as it allows mutually non-trusting agents to trade energy services in\na trustless energy market. Research to date has assumed that the built-in\nByzantine Fault Tolerance in recording transactions in a ledger is sufficient\nto ensure integrity. Such work must be extended to address security gaps\nincluding random bilateral transactions that do not guarantee reliable and\nefficient market operation, and market participants having incentives to cheat\nwhen reporting actual production/consumption figures. Work herein introduces\nthe Electron Volt Exchange framework with the following characteristics: 1) a\ndistributed protocol for pricing and scheduling prosumers'\nproduction/consumption while keeping constraints and bids private, and 2) a\ndistributed algorithm to prevent theft that verifies prosumers' compliance to\nscheduled transactions using information from grid sensors (such as smart\nmeters) and mitigates the impact of false data injection attacks. Flexibility\nand robustness of the approach are demonstrated through simulation and\nimplementation using Hyperledger Fabric.\n
Blockchain, also known as a distributed ledger technology, stores different transactions/operations in a chain of blocks in a distributed manner without needing a trusted third-party. Blockchain is proven to be immutable, which helps with integrity and accountability, and, to some extent, confidentiality through a pair of public and private keys. Blockchain has been in the spotlight after successful boom of the Bitcoin. There have been efforts to leverage salient features of Blockchain for different applications and use cases. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of applications and use cases of Blockchain technology for making smart systems secure and trustworthy. Specifically, readers of this paper can have thorough understanding of applications and use cases of Blockchain technology.
Supply chain 4.0 denotes the fourth revolution of supply chain management systems, integrating manufacturing operations with telecommunication and Information Technology processes. Although the overarching aim of supply chain 4.0 is the enhancement of production systems within supply chains, making use of global reach, increasing agility and emerging technology, with the ultimate goal of increasing efficiency, timeliness and profitability, Supply chain 4.0 suffers from unique and emerging operational and cyber risks. Supply chain 4.0 has a lack of semantic standards, poor interoperability, and a dearth of security in the operation of its manufacturing and Information Technology processes. The technologies that underpin supply chain 4.0 include blockchain, smart contracts, applications of Artificial Intelligence, cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things. Each of these technologies, individually and combined, create cyber security issues that should be addressed. This paper explains the nature of the military supply chains 4.0 and how it uniquely differs from the commercial supply chain, revealing their strengths, weaknesses, dependencies and the fundamental technologies upon which they are built. This encompasses an assessment of the cyber risks and opportunities for research in the field, including consideration of connectivity, sensing and convergence of systems. Current and emerging semantic models related to the standardization, development and safety assurance considerations for implementing new technologies into military supply chains 4.0 are also discussed. This is examined from a holistic standpoint and through technology-specific lenses to determine current states and implications for future research directions.
Summary The ālast mileā problem in logistics is challenging due to its low efficiency and high cost. To address this problem, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) delivery such as drone delivery has been proposed and widely accepted as a promising solution. However, currently most of the existing UAV delivery systems are based on Cloud Computing which cannot efficiently meet the requirements of many realātime services in UAV delivery systems. Meanwhile, the security issues in UAV delivery systems also raise critical concerns due to the existence of multiple participants (such as the sender, middler, and receiver) who may not maintain a mutual trust relationship among them. How to secure the UAV delivery process in such an untrusted environment is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and blockchainābased UAV delivery system to resolve the ālast mileā problem in logistics. Specifically, based on the MEC architecture, the blockchain nodes are deployed on the edge nodes to facilitate and secure the UAV delivery process. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed solution, a MECābased UAV delivery system prototype with a private blockchain on the Ethereum platform is implemented. Through the security analysis and performance evaluation, it is proven that our proposed solution can effectively solve the ālast mileā problem and address the security issues in UAV delivery systems.
A systematic review of the literature is presented related to the usage of blockchain technology (BCT) for cyber-threats in the context of Industry 4.0. BCT plays a crucial role in creating smart factories and it is recognized as a core technology that triggers a disruptive revolution in Industry 4.0. Beyond security, authentication, asset tracking and the exchange of smart contracts, BCTs allow terminals to exchange information according to mutually agreed rules within a secured manner. Consequently, BCT can play a crucial role in industrial sustainability by preserving the assets and the environment and by enhancing the quality of life of citizens. In this work, a classification of the most important cyber-attacks that occurred in the last decade in Industry 4.0 is proposed based on four classes. The latter classes cover scanning, local to remote, power of root and denial of service (DoS). BCT is also defined and various types belong to BCT are introduced and highlighted. Likewise, BCT protocols and implementations are discussed as well. BCT implementation includes linear structure and directed acyclic graph (DAG) technology. Then, a comparative study of the most relevant works based on BCT in Industry 4.0 is conducted in terms of confidentiality, integrity, availability, privacy and multifactor authentication features. Our review shows that the integration of BCT in industry can ensure data confidentiality and integrity and should be enforced to preserve data availability and privacy. Future research directions towards enforcing BCT in the industrial field by considering machine learning, 5G/6G mobile systems and new emergent technologies are presented.
COVID-19 is a major global public health challenge and difficult to control in a short time completely. To prevent the COVID-19 epidemic from continuing to worsen, global scientific research institutions have actively carried out studies on COVID-19, thereby effectively improving the prevention, monitoring, tracking, control, and treatment of the epidemic. However, the COVID-19 electronic medical records (CEMRs) among hospitals worldwide are managed independently. With privacy consideration, CEMRs cannot be made public or shared, which is not conducive to in-depth and extensive research on COVID-19 by medical research institutions. In addition, even if new research results are developed, the disclosure and sharing process is slow. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain-based medical research support platform, which can provide efficient and privacy-preserving data sharing against COVID-19. First, hospitals and medical research institutions are treated as nodes on the alliance chain, so consensus and data sharing among the nodes is achieved. Then, COVID-19 patients, doctors, and researchers need to be authenticated in various institutes. Moreover, doctors and researchers need to be registered with the Fabric certificate authority. The CEMRs for COVID-19 patients uses the blockchain's pseudonym mechanism to protect privacy. After that, doctors upload CEMRs on the alliance chain, and researchers can obtain CEMRs from the alliance chain for research. Finally, the research results will be published on the blockchain for doctors to use. The experimental results show that the read and write performance and security performance on the alliance chain meet the requirements, which can promote the wide application of scientific research results against COVID-19.
Blockchain has made an impact on today's technology by revolutionizing the financial industry through utilization of cryptocurrencies using decentralized control. This has been followed by extending Blockchain to span several other industries and applications for its capabilities in verification. With the current trend of pursuing the decentralized Internet, many methods have been proposed to achieve decentralization considering different aspects of the current Internet model ranging from infrastructure and protocols to services and applications. This paper investigates Blockchain's capacities to provide a robust and secure decentralized model for Internet. The paper conducts a critical review on recent Blockchain-based methods capable for the decentralization of the future Internet. We identify and investigate two research aspects of Blockchain that provides high impact in realizing the decentralized Internet with respect to current Internet and Blockchain challenges while keeping various design in considerations. The first aspect is the consensus algorithms that are vital components for decentralization of the Blockchain. We identify three key consensus algorithms including PoP, Paxos, and PoAH that are more adequate for reaching consensus for such tremendous scale Blockchain-enabled architecture for Internet. The second aspect that we investigated is the compliance of Blockchain with various emerging Internet technologies and the impact of Blockchain on those technologies. Such emerging Internet technologies in combinations with Blockchain would help to overcome Blockchain's established flaws in a way to be more optimized, efficient and applicable for Internet decentralization.
Samen Anjum Arani, Md. Rashed Ibn Nawab, Md. Tanvir Rahman, Moniruz Zaman
The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 has become a grave concern worldwide because of its highly infectious nature. Besides extensive research on developing vaccine or medicine to prevent this virus attack, many technology-based solutions are also getting more importance as no one knows till date how to put a full stop on it. Being first conceptualized in 2008, blockchain technology gained enormous popularity in the cryptocurrency domain. However, nowadays, blockchain has also become popular in the healthcare domain as a privacy-preserving and data authenticity technique. The primary goal of our experiment is to develop a framework which can utilize the features of permissioned blockchain and maintain the fully controlled sharing of confidential health record to exhibit the health status and COVID-19 history of a patient using a mobile QR code based solution. So, the administrative team of any public place can be aware of the health condition of any people who are using this platform to prevent the unaware and hidden contagion of COVID-19. This article is the first of its kind to propose such a method to aid in solving this crisis. In our experiment, we have shown that Hyperledger Fabric as a base technology along with a robust user registration algorithm and data accessibility can solve the problem under consideration with a minimal health record of the patient. The proposed architecture also offers the patient more control over the health record, where the healthcare service provider assures the authenticity of the data, and the intrinsic feature of the blockchain technology makes it immutable.
Sina Rafati Niya, Raphael Beckmann, Burkhard Stiller
The integration of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Blockchain (BC) for strong trust and decentralization shows potentials in use cases, such as supply chain tracing, smart cities, and health care. As a great number of IoT devices interacting in such cases, it is crucial to provide scalable and secure mechanisms for IoT data persistence within BCs. In this regard, sharding mechanisms have been employed to enhance the scalability of BCs. However, disconnections and delays of a BC's distributed network can cause concerns for inter-shard and inter-miner synchronizations, eventually preventing the BC from reaching a high throughput. Thus, this work develops an IoT-oriented permissioned BC, which covers via a scalable Distributed Ledger (DL) a novel sharding mechanism for unstable distributed networks. Therefore, DLIT (Distributed Ledger for IoT Data) offers a novel two-layered transaction distribution, validation, and inter-shard synchronization, combined with authentication and verification mechanisms in support of a viable security level.
Abstract Background Blockchain technology has gained a great public interest due to the appearance of cryptocurrencies, a digital asset used for exchanging funds. Although blockchain calculations offer the benefits of security and reduced costs, blockchain is still strongly criticised for its lack of usefulness and resource-heavy consumption. Objectives The aim of this research is to provide different insights into blockchain technology and to propose NP-complete problems as a suitable alternative to the current consensus algorithm. Methods/approach This research discusses the current state of proposed alternatives, projects such as distributed volunteering for scientific purposes and different consensus algorithms within cryptocurrencies but focusing on incorporating NP-complete problems as a secondary, more useful option. Results Using the properties of NP-complete problems, it is possible to solve various problems in different areas, such as science, biology, medicine and finance, but also to improve business processes, optimize markets, payments and supply chains while decreasing environmental costs. Conclusions This paper shows that the alternative mechanisms are being developed and used to substitute an existing Blockchain algorithm with a more efficient one. It also suggests further investigation in this area because the alternatives greatly improve blockchainās usability and efficiency.
The lack of accessibility to medical records for both patients and clinicians has long been recognised as a barrier to transparent and efficient healthcare.[1][1] While electronic health record (EHR) systems help address this issue somewhat, many of these systems are heterogeneous, demonstrate
Roben Castagna Lunardi, Maher Alharby, Henry C. Nunes, Avelino F. Zorzo Ā· 6 authors
Blockchain technology has been applied to various applications (e.g., smart buildings and smart cities) that typically run in an environment of smart devices, known as Internet-of-Things (IoT). To support these applications, different blockchain architectures, data structures and consensus algorithms have been proposed, tailored to IoT. One such proposal, appendable-block blockchain, is a promising blockchain framework for use in IoT environments. It provides a scalable data structure that allows parallel insertions between independent nodes. However, it has some limitations, in particular related to the possible eclipse attack by malicious gateways and the lack of consensus for transactions insertion. To solve these issues, we propose a new consensus mechanism for appendable-block blockchains, called context-based consensus. Using context-based consensus, information can be inserted in parallel across devices (called context) while ensuring that light-weight consensus is performed to guarantee that a transaction is well-formed and it is placed in the correct order. We implemented context-based consensus and show that using multiple contexts reduces latency and increases the throughput of transaction insertions when compared to consensus without contexts or using single transaction consensus.
Abstract Fog robotics is an entirely new direction in the robotic field, inspired by the fogcomputing concept. Some fog architectures have been developed for robots groups and robot swarms, yet, to the best of our knowledge, there are no developed mechanisms of data sharing and replication in such structures. So, they are in the focus of this paper. The distributed ledger-based architecture for the fog robot servers is considered and described, as well as some models have been developed to estimate the time needed for data sharing. Simulation results show the expediency of consensus methods usage for distributed ledger-based.
Konstantinos M. Giannoutakis, ĪĪµĻĻĪ³Ī¹ĪæĻ Ī£ĻĪ±ĪøĪæĻĪ»Ī±Ļ, Christos K. FilelisāPapadopoulos, Anastasija Collen Ā· 7 authors
The growth of IoT devices during the last decade has led to the development of smart ecosystems, such as smart homes, prone to cyberattacks. Traditional security methodologies support to some extend the requirement for preserving privacy and security of such deployments, but their centralized nature in conjunction with low computational capabilities of smart home gateways make such approaches not efficient. Last achievements on blockchain technologies allowed the use of such decentralized architectures to support cybersecurity defence mechanisms. In this work, a blockchain framework is presented to support the cybersecurity mechanisms of smart homes installations, focusing on the immutability of users and devices that constitute such environments. The proposed methodology provides also the appropriate smart contracts support for ensuring the integrity of the smart home gateway and IoT devices, as well as the dynamic and immutable management of blocked malicious IPs. The framework has been deployed on a real smart home environment demonstrating its applicability and efficiency.
Christos Profentzas, Magnus Almgren, Olaf Landsiedel
With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of devices ranging from simple sensors to smart-phones will participate in billions of micropayments. However, current centralized solutions are unable to handle a massive number of micropayments from untrusted devices. Blockchains are promising technologies suitable for solving some of these challenges. Particularly, permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin have drawn the attention of the research community. However, the increasingly large-scale deployments of blockchain reveal some of their scalability limitations. Prominent proposals to scale the payment system include off-chain protocols such as payment channels. However, the leading proposals assume powerful nodes with an always-on connection and frequent synchronization. These assumptions require in practice significant communication, memory, and computation capacity, whereas IoT devices face substantial constraints in these areas. Existing approaches also do not capture the logic and process of IoT, where applications need to process locally collected sensor data to allow for full use of IoT micro-payments. In this paper, we present TinyEVM, a novel system to generate and execute off-chain smart contracts based on sensor data. TinyEVM's goal is to enable IoT devices to perform micro-payments and, at the same time, address the device constraints. We investigate the trade-offs of executing smart contracts on low-power IoT devices using TinyEVM. We test our system with 7,000 publicly verified smart contracts, where TinyEVM achieves to deploy 93% of them without any modification. Finally, we evaluate the execution of off-chain smart contracts in terms of run-time performance, energy, and memory requirements on IoT devices. Notably, we find that low-power devices can deploy a smart contract in 215 ms on average, and they can complete an off-chain payment in 584 ms on average.
Guendalina Capece, Nathan Levialdi Ghiron, Francesco Pasquale
University certificates can have a significant impact on peopleās lives: they can help people get the job they want or allow companies to decide whether a candidate for a job has the appropriate skills. Despite their important social role, current systems for certifying academic achievements are slow, complicated, expensive, and vulnerable to forgery. In the education field, the Blockcerts project, an open source project launched by MIT and Learning Machine in 2016, seems to have the potential to become a new standard for issuing certificates using the Blockchain technology as a platform. It enables students to quickly and easily get a verifiable, tamper-proof version of their diploma. Additionally, the infrastructure provides permanence, convenience, and a level of security appropriate to the importance of the record, guaranteeing the legitimacy of the diploma. The University of Rome āTor Vergataā started a pilot program in 2018 adopting the Blockcerts framework to issue digital diplomas. In this paper, we describe the whole process from a technical perspective and analyze the impact that a broad adoption of the Blockcerts standard might have, as compared to the current way of issuing diplomas at the University of āTor Vergataā. Our aim is that our work might contribute to building momentum for the application of the Blockchain technology to digital certificates and stimulate further discussion with other institutions to fully exploit the potential of the technology.
This conceptual paper overviews how blockchain technology is involving the operation of multi-robot collaboration for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics. Robots are a promising technology for providing many tasks such as spraying, disinfection, cleaning, treating, detecting high body temperature/mask absence, and delivering goods and medical supplies experiencing an epidemic COVID-19. For combating COVID-19, many heterogeneous and homogenous robots are required to perform different tasks for supporting different purposes in the quarantine area. Managmnt and decentralizing multi-robot play a vital role in combating COVID-19 by reducing human interaction, monitoring, delivering goods. Blockchain technology can manage multi-robot collaboration in a decentralized fashion, improve the interaction among them to exchange information, share representation, share goals, and trust. We highlight the challenges and provide the tactical solutions enabled by integrating blockchain and multi-robot collaboration to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed conceptual framework can increase the intelligence, decentralization, and autonomous operations of connected multi-robot collaboration in the blockchain network. We overview blockchain potential benefits to defining a framework of multi-robot collaboration applications to combat COVID-19 epidemics such as monitoring and outdoor and hospital End to End (E2E) delivery systems. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of integrated blockchain, multi-robot collaboration, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for combating COVID-19 and future pandemics.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices facilitate intelligent service delivery in a broad range of settings, such as smart offices, homes and cities. However, the existing IoT access control solutions are mainly based on conventional identity management schemes and use centralized architectures. There are known security and privacy limitations with such schemes and architectures, such as the single-point failure or surveillance (e.g., device tracking). Hence, in this paper, we present an architecture for capability-based IoT access control utilizing the blockchain and decentralized identifiers to manage the identity and access control for IoT devices. Then, we propose a protocol to provide a systematic view of system interactions, to improve security. We also implement a proof-of-concept prototype of the proposed approach and evaluate the prototype using a real-world use case. Our evaluation results show that the proposed solution is feasible, secure, and scalable.