The outbreak of the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused the world to face an existential health crisis. To contain the infectious disease, many countries have quarantined their citizens for several weeks to months and even suspended most economic activities. To track the movements of residents, the governments of many states have adopted various novel technologies. Connecting billions of sensors and devices over the Internet, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), has been used for outbreak control. However, these technologies also pose serious privacy risks and security concerns with regards to data transmission and storage. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based system to provide the secure management of home quarantine. The privacy and security attributes for various events are based on advanced cryptographic primitives. To demonstrate the application of the system, we provide a case study in an IoT system with a desktop computer, laptop, Raspberry Pi single-board computer, and the Ethereum smart contract platform. The obtained results prove its ability to satisfy security, efficiency, and low-cost requirements.
Befekadu G. Gebraselase, Bjarne E. Helvik, Yuming Jiang
Blockchain has been considered as an important technique to enable secure management of virtual network functions and network slices. To understand such capabilities of a blockchain, e.g. transaction confirmation time, demands a thorough study on the transaction characteristics of the blockchain. This paper presents a comprehensive study on the transaction characteristics of Bitcoin -- the first blockchain application, focusing on the underlying fundamental processes. A set of results and findings are obtained, which provide new insight into understanding the transaction and traffic characteristics of Bitcoin. As a highlight, the validity of several hypotheses/assumptions used in the literature is examined with measurement for the first time.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The availability-finality dilemma says that blockchain protocols cannot be both available under dynamic participation and safe under network partition. Snap-and-chat protocols have recently been proposed as a resolution to this dilemma. A snap-and-chat protocol produces an always available ledger containing a finalized prefix ledger which is always safe and catches up with the available ledger whenever network conditions permit. In contrast to existing handcrafted finality gadget based designs like Ethereum 2.0's consensus protocol Gasper, snap-and-chat protocols are constructed as a black-box composition of off-the-shelf BFT and longest chain protocols. In this paper, we consider system aspects of snap-and-chat protocols and show how they can provide two important features: 1) accountability, 2) support of light clients. Through this investigation, a deeper understanding of the strengths and challenges of snap-and-chat protocols is gained.
Xiangjun Zhang, Weiguo Wu, Shiyuan Yang, Xiong Wang
Driven by advanced 5G cellular systems, mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a promising technology that can meet the energy efficiency and latency requirements of IoT applications. Edge service migration in the MEC environment plays an important role in ensuring user service quality and enhancing terminal computing capabilities. Application services on the edge side should be migrated from different edge servers to edge nodes closer to users, so that services follow users and ensure high-quality services. In addition, during the migration process, edge services face security challenges in an edge network environment without centralized management. To tackle this challenge, this paper innovatively proposes a blockchain-based security edge service migration framework, Falcon, which uses mobile agents different from VM and container as edge service carriers, making migration more flexible. Furthermore, we considered the dependencies between agents and designed a service migration algorithm to maximize the migration benefits and obtain better service quality. In order to ensure the migration of edge services in a safe and reliable environment, Falcon maintains an immutable alliance chain among multiple edge clouds. Finally, the experimental results show that “Falcon” has lower energy consumption and higher service quality.
Kazi Masudul Alam, J.M. Ashfiqur Rahman, Anisha Tasnim, Aysha Akther
Bangladesh is a small country with a large population. Its increasingly developing economy further makes land a lucrative source of fixed capital. On the other hand, land titling is a cumbersome and lengthy process, where different government bodies process different sets of documents, and bureaucratic loopholes encourage fraudulent activities by organized people. As a result, the current model suffers from good governance. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based solution that offers data synchronization and transparency, ease of access, immutable records management, a faster and cheaper solution. Considering the technological knowledge and capacity of the people and the government, we introduced a phase by phase Blockchain adoption model that starts with a public Blockchain ledger and later gradually incorporates two levels of Hybrid Blockchain. We provide detailed smart contracts design of the public Blockchain and implement a prototype system using Ethereum. Our experimental setup uses local and live Ethereum test networks to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system. Our analysis shows that the proposed model reduces the number of required travels, the overall cost of information processing as well as provide easy access to vital information. As a result, Blockchain adoption can improve the land title digitization effort of Bangladesh.
To mitigate the scalability problem of decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the payment channel, which allows two parties to perform secure coin transfers without involving the blockchain, has been proposed. The payment channel increases the transaction throughput of two parties to a level that is only limited by their network bandwidth. Recent proposals focus on extending the two-party payment channel to the N-party payment hub. Unfortunately, none of them can achieve efficiency, flexibility in the absence of a trusted third-party. In this paper, we propose Garou, a secure N-party payment hub that allows multiple parties to perform secure off-chain coin transfers. Except in the case of disputes, participants within the payment hub can make concurrent and direct coin transfers with each other without the involvement of the blockchain or any third-party intermediaries. This allows Garou to achieve both high-performance and flexibility. If all participants keep online, Garou guarantees all honest users’ balance security against strong adversarial capabilities. To demonstrate the feasibility of the Garou protocol, we develop a proof of concept prototype for the Ethereum network. Experimental evaluations show that, with 300 participants and without disputes, that the maximum transaction throughput of Garou is$20{ \times }$higher than that of state-of-the-art payment hubs.
Increased adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in multiple domain areas continuously increases the volume of data and transactions from the IoT devices. The IoT systems are vulnerable to more attacks because of increased adoptions and technology adoptions. Protecting the data and providing security to the data and transactions is one of the critical issues for the effective quality of service (QoS) in the IoT environments. An adaptable IoT framework is proposed based on the research approach of 'ADOPT' that leverages the blockchain technology and features considering security as one of the QoS parameters. In the proposed model of a three-layer IoT architecture with an application layer, network layer, and perception layer, the blockchain features are adopted for the resource-constrained IoT environment. In the perception layer, the model uses a local and temporary memory to maintain the local chain, which is managed based on the memory size and time constraints. The application layer nodes manage the synchronization of the data from the corresponding local chain at the edge node. The implementation of the proposed model uses Ethereum, an open-source public blockchain, and using mobile devices as an edge node. The results are verified for security factors like access, authorizations, confidentiality, and computing resources.
Abstract With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) field, more and more data are generated by IoT devices and transferred over the network. However, a large amount of IoT data is sensitive, and the leakage of such data is a privacy breach. The security of sensitive IoT data is a big issue, as the data is shared over an insecure network channel. Current solutions include symmetric encryption and access controls to secure the data transfer, but they have some drawbacks such as a single point of failure. Blockchain is a promising distributed ledger technology that can prevent the malicious tampering of data, offering reliable data storage. This paper proposes a distributed access control system based on blockchain technology to secure IoT data. The proposed mechanism is based on fog computing and the concept of the alliance chain. This method uses mixed linear and nonlinear spatiotemporal chaotic systems (MLNCML) and the least significant bit (LSB) to encrypt the IoT data on an edge node and then upload the encrypted data to the cloud. The proposed mechanism can solve the problem of a single point of failure of access control by providing the dynamic and fine-grained access control for IoT data. The experimental results of this method demonstrated that it can protect the privacy of IoT data efficiently.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is an emerging technology that has shaken the financial sector, and which is already perceived as having an impact. A blockchain is a network of many interconnected nodes, both trustworthy and malicious, which can reach a consensus and generate valid data. The resulting information is packed into a block and permanently saved on the network in a tamper-proof way. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of blockchain for securely storing data in a vehicular-based network. Our approach can work for storing data such as traffic events and user reputation. The proposed solution has two interconnected components: the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) blockchain and the reputation system. The paper presents synthetic tests which validate the use cases of the solution: users reporting speeds and alerts behind which we see a fair reputation system penalising the (wrong/false) users.
Hany F. Atlam, Muhammad Ajmal Azad, Ahmed G. Alzahrani, Gary Wills
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new technology that enables both virtual and physical objects to be connected and communicate with each other, and produce new digitized services that improve our quality of life. The IoT system provides several advantages, however, the current centralized architecture introduces numerous issues involving a single point of failure, security, privacy, transparency, and data integrity. These challenges are an obstacle in the way of the future developments of IoT applications. Moving the IoT into one of the distributed ledger technologies may be the correct choice to resolve these issues. Among the common and popular types of distributed ledger technologies is the blockchain. Integrating the IoT with blockchain technology can bring countless benefits. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive discussion of integrating the IoT system with blockchain technology. After providing the basics of the IoT system and blockchain technology, a thorough review of integrating the blockchain with the IoT system is presented by highlighting benefits of the integration and how the blockchain can resolve the issues of the IoT system. Then, the blockchain as a service for the IoT is presented to show how various features of blockchain technology can be implemented as a service for various IoT applications. This is followed by discussing the impact of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) on both IoT and blockchain. In the end, future research directions of IoT with blockchain are presented.
Lam Duc Nguyen, Israel Leyva‐Mayorga, Amari N. Lewis, Petar Popovski
Mobile devices with embedded sensors for data collection and environmental sensing create a basis for a cost-effective approach for data trading. For example, these data can be related to pollution and gas emissions, which can be used to check the compliance with national and international regulations. The current approach for IoT data trading relies on a centralized third-party entity to negotiate between data consumers and data providers, which is inefficient and insecure on a large scale. In comparison, a decentralized approach based on distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enables data trading while ensuring trust, security, and privacy. However, due to the lack of understanding of the communication efficiency between sellers and buyers, there is still a significant gap in benchmarking the data trading protocols in IoT environments. Motivated by this knowledge gap, we introduce a model for DLT-based IoT data trading over the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system, intended to support massive environmental sensing. We characterize the communication efficiency of three basic DLT-based IoT data trading protocols via NB-IoT connectivity in terms of latency and energy consumption. The model and analyses of these protocols provide a benchmark for IoT data trading applications.
Blockchain technology has triggered a new round of technological innovation and industrial change. Promoting the deep integration of blockchain technology and smart water conservancy has become an essential part of the digital transformation of the Chinese smart water conservancy industry. On the basis of the analysis of the framework of the smart water conservancy system and the technology infrastructure model of the blockchain, a conceptual model of a smart water conservancy information sharing platform is established. The platform has four-in-one and multicentralized participants including government departments, water conservancy enterprises, the public, and third-party maintenance, and the design of “alliance chain + private chain” dual chain smart contract. Moreover, the multidimensional scenarios of smart water conservancy innovation applications incorporating blockchain platform technology are addressed. Then, the water rights trading market is taken as an example to propose an innovative development path with consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, asymmetric encryption, and information source tracing. Although there may be some questions and challenges related to smart water conservancy and blockchain technology, this paper can provide a reference for the sustainable development of the smart water conservancy industry due to its fundamental societal contributions.
Yue Wu, Liangtu Song, Lei Liu, Jincheng Li · 6 authors
Applying blockchain technology to the Internet of Things (IoT) remains a huge challenge. To meet the actual needs of IoT, a lightweight and high-throughput consensus mechanism, combined with blockchain technology, is proposed in this study. Blockchain nodes use the Diffie–Hellman algorithm for key negotiation. Sensors and blockchain nodes can use the shared key to generate HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Code) signatures for sensor-aware transactions and use the Verifiable Random Function to implement block nodes. Offline fast election, which is the node that wins the election, becomes the block node. Machine learning methods are also introduced to identify or remove outliers in the sensor data before such data are uploaded to the chain. Experimental results show that the system throughput synchronously increases as the test load increases. Moreover, when the test load is 800 tps, the system throughput reaches the maximum, close to 600 tps. When the test load exceeds 800 tps, the actual system throughput starts to drop, and approximately 90% of transactions have a delay time within 5000 ms. This method can be used in a lightweight IoT system.
In the shipping industry, a significant part of the documents exchanges still have the traditional paper form, mainly due to security concerns, despite the size and modernization efforts of this market. We explore the adoption of the blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies to address document exchange in a fast and secure way.
Blockchain is a digital ledger in which each record known as blocks and that are combined in a single list known as a chain. It is regarded as Bitcoin's backbone technology. It is also regarded as cohesive collections of digital wallets. Blockchains are primarily used by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and other applications to record these transactions. A blockchain is commonly referred to as a collection of distributed databases that consists of all public transactions, records and digital events then that information is shared among the participants. Every transaction is verified and it cannot be removed. The main features of this technology are reliable, efficient operation, fault tolerance and scalability. Some of the applications are manufacturing, government and finance when the three properties met together (i.e., Efficiency, Scalability and Security). By using several computers, each transaction that is applied to a blockchain is validated. A peer-to-peer network is developed by these systems that are used to validate these forms of blockchain transactions. They work together to ensure that any transaction is legitimate until it is added to the blockchain, and invalid blocks cannot be added to the chain by these systems. When a new block is added, it can be connected to a previous block using a cryptographic hash and the chain cannot be broken and each block is recorded permanently. Blockchain can be used for an exchanging the transaction securely without an intermediate. It enables customer relationship and agile chain values and thereby integrating with IoT and Cloud technology. The functionality of distributed ledger is combined with blockchain security to solve the financial and non-financial industry problems. This paper proposes the blockchain technology with devices and creates a common platform and secure data communication.
Kiril Antevski, Milan Groshev, Gabriele Baldoni, Carlos J. Bernardos
The concept of federation in 5G and NFV networks aims to provide orchestration of services across multiple administrative domains. Edge robotics, as a field of robotics, implements the robot control on the network edge by relying on low-latency and reliable access connectivity. In this paper, we propose a solution that enables Edge robotics service to expand its service footprint or access coverage over multiple administrative domains. We propose application of Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) for the federation procedures to enable private, secure and trusty interactions between undisclosed administrative domains. The solution is applied on a real-case Edge robotics experimental scenario. The results show that it takes around 19 seconds to deploy & federate a Edge robotics service in an external/anonymous domain without any service down-time.
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. Controlling 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 COVID-19 pandemic. The framework of our conceptual proposed 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.
Dixon Vimalajeewa, Subhasis Thakur, John G. Breslin, D.P. Berry · 5 authors
The use of Internet of Things (IoT) with the Internet of Nano Things (IoNT) can further expand decision making systems (DMS) to improve reliability as it provides a new spectrum of more granular level data to make decisions. However, growing concerns such as data security, transparency and processing capability challenge their use in real-world applications. DMS integrated with Block Chain (BC) technology can contribute immensely to overcome such challenges. The use of IoNT and IoT along with BC for making DMS has not yet been investigated. This study proposes a BC-powered IoNT (BC-IoNT) system for sensing chemicals level in the context of farm management. This is a critical application for smart farming, which aims to improve sustainable farm practices through controlled delivery of chemicals. BC-IoNT system includes a novel machine learning model formed by using the Langmuir molecular binding model and the Bayesian theory, and is used as a smart contract for sensing the level of the chemicals. A credit model is used to quantify the traceability and credibility of farms to determine if they are compliant with the chemical standards. The accuracy of detecting the chemicals of the distributed BC-IoNT approach was >90% and the centralized approach was <80%. Also, the efficiency of sensing the level of chemicals depends on the sampling frequency and variability in chemical level among farms.
Aamir Iqbal, Mohammad Amir, Vinod Kumar, Aftab Alam · 5 authors
In modern era, a wide range of smart industries is being focus on automation-based applications. Various technologies are rapidly implementing in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for manufacturing sectors that helping to achieve advanced schedule production framework and on time delivery of products. The integration of IIoT platforms with the blockchain are challenging service in manufacturing system. The primary objective of this article is to characterize various issues and challenges that are implementing IIoT and blockchain in industries. The proposed work is an integration of IIoT and blockchain in industrial processes for solving the security issues in real-time. Also, identifying various enablers of blockchain and issues of IIoT from smart industries manufacturing using a survey tool is formed in the form of questionnaire. Based on these responses Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique has been implemented for categorizing these challenges into cause and effect. In this paper, we introduce the general layout with their key issues and challenges of IIoT and blockchain that signifies the safety requirements to design the IIoT and blockchain. Further, we describe how IIoT can be integrated to the blockchain for smart Industrial applications. Finally, various recommendations are the proposed to upcoming IIoT and blockchain developments. The proposed work will be highly beneficial for the smart industries to develop a next generation IIoT and blockchain based framework.
Subhi Alrubei, Edward A. Ball, Jonathan Rigelsford
The increased implementation of Edge Computing technology has provided The Internet of Things (IoT) with the ability of real-time data processing and tasks execution requested by smart devices. To support this processing the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into IoT is considered one of the most promising approach. While AI helps in the analyses of the data, blockchain technology provides a robust environment within which to create a secure, distributed way to share and store data. This paper proposes an architecture that combines the strengths provided by edge computing, AI, and blockchain technologies to provide robust, secure, and intelligent solutions for secure and faster data processing and sharing. The pandemic created by the rapid spread of the novel Coronavirus COVID-19, as well as the tracking of viruses in water sewage to help control the spread of such viruses, were used as our case study for exploring this architecture. To secure the proposed architecture a new concept for consensus mechanism based on Honesty-Based Distributed Proof of Work (DPOW) were devised and tested.
Xintong Ling, Zheng Gao, Yuwei Le, Li You · 7 authors
In this work, we propose a satellite-aided permissionless consensus protocol for scalable space-terrestrial blockchains. We design its working principle and workflow by taking full advantage of satellites for extensive coverage and ubiquitous connectivity. Based on the proposed protocol, we demonstrate how such a space-terrestrial blockchain grows and evolves through several typical cases in the presence of adversarial nodes, user misbehavior, and transmission outage. Taking proof of work (PoW) as a benchmark, we assess the system security by considering both adversarial miners and possible colluding satellites. Then, we analyze the maximum blockchain throughput under network capacity limits and evaluate the impact of information propagation delay via a Markov model. Simulation results support that the proposed satellite-aided consensus protocol achieves higher throughput and exhibits greater scalability than PoW.
Achmad Teguh Wibowo, MY Teguh Sulistyono, Mochamad Hariadi
This research was aimed to enhance the cryptospatial with geospatial blockchain based on a point in polygon test. Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA) was used for developing a blockchain. The steps taken include: (1) Data from the surveyors were entered using application connected to the transaction set; (2) The transaction set sent data to the transaction proposal; (3) The transaction proposal will distribute to every connected validating of nodes for executing the smart contract with the point in a polygon test method; (4) If the process succeeded with the maximum fault tolerance of 20%, then the node records a new chain to the ledger. This method is faster than Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) blockchain for approximately 26% to add a new chain in the ledger and for 52% to decrypt the blockchain with a mobile device. The result of this process is a cryptospatial coordinate for the cultural heritage tourism.