Blockchain (BC), a by-product of Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has gained immense and wide scale popularity for its applicability in various diverse domains - especially in multifaceted non-monetary systems. By adopting cryptographic techniques such as hashing and asymmetric encryption - along with distributed consensus approach, a Blockchain based distributed ledger not only becomes highly secure but also immutable and thus eliminates the need for any third-party intermediators. On the contrary, innumerable IoT (Internet of Things) devices are increasingly being added to the network. This phenomenon poses higher risk in terms of security and privacy. It is thus extremely important to address the security aspects of the growing IoT ecosystem. This paper explores the applicability of BC for ensuring enhanced security and privacy in the IoT ecosystem. Recent research articles and projects or applications were surveyed to assess the implementation of BC for IoT Security and identify associated challenges and propose solutions for BC enabled enhanced security for the IoT ecosystem.
Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) brings forth many opportunities to contribute to the wellbeing of individuals and the advancement of economies and societies, but also a variety of novel ethical, legal, social, and technological challenges. Trustworthy AI (TAI) bases on the idea that trust builds the foundation of societies, economies, and sustainable development, and that individuals, organizations, and societies will therefore only ever be able to realize the full potential of AI, if trust can be established in its development, deployment, and use. With this article we aim to introduce the concept of TAI and its five foundational principles (1) beneficence, (2) non-maleficence, (3) autonomy, (4) justice, and (5) explicability. We further draw on these five principles to develop a data-driven research framework for TAI and demonstrate its utility by delineating fruitful avenues for future research, particularly with regard to the distributed ledger technology-based realization of TAI.
Node identity authentication is an essential means to ensure the security of the Internet of Things. Existing blockchain-based IoT node authentication schemes have many problems. A heterogeneous IoT node authentication scheme based on an improved hybrid blockchain is proposed. Firstly, the hybrid blockchain model is designed to make the blockchain and IoT environment more compatible. Then the proxy node selection mechanism is intended to establish a bridge between the ordinary IoT node and the blockchain, building by calculating the trust value between nodes. Finally, based on the improved hybrid blockchain, the node authentication scheme of the model and proxy node selection mechanism establishes a secure connection for communication between nodes. Safety and performance analysis shows proper safety and performance.
Datu Mohammed, Nur Aisha, Arzo Himki, Arusyi Dithi · 5 authors
This research aims to learn why Blockchain Technology can be the most demanding hard skills in companies in 2020 as quoted from LinkedIn and the positive impact that Blockchain Technology has on a company. If we see, at this time usually requires at least a third party to make a transaction, and a company usually only stores data / information on a centralized server which makes the data easy to hack. From this case, Blockchain technology can be used as a way out for a company to make data / information not easy to be hacked. Because, Blockchain uses a distributed server system that is validated, which makes Blockchain safer from evil parties who want to hack information, and Blockchain has other advantages such as more cost-effective, better transparency and traceability. Therefore Blockchain Technology is a particular attraction for a company and is the hard skill most demanded by the company in 2020.
Omar Gutiérrez, Giordy Romero, Luis J. Dominguez Perez, Augusto Salazar · 6 authors
The current information systems for the registration and control of electronic medical records (EMR) present a series of problems in terms of the fragmentation, security, and privacy of medical information, since each health institution, laboratory, doctor, etc. has its own database and manages its own information, without the intervention of patients. This situation does not favor effective treatment and prevention of diseases for the population, due to potential information loss, misinformation, or data leaks related to a patient, which in turn may imply a direct risk for the individual and high public health costs for governments. One of the proposed solutions to this problem has been the creation of electronic medical record (EMR) systems using blockchain networks; however, most of them do not take into account the occurrence of connectivity failures, such as those found in various developing countries, which can lead to failures in the integrity of the system data. To address these problems, HealthyBlock is presented in this paper as an architecture based on blockchain networks, which proposes a unified electronic medical record system that considers different clinical providers, with resilience in data integrity during connectivity failure and with usability, security, and privacy characteristics. On the basis of the HealthyBlock architecture, a prototype was implemented for the care of patients in a network of hospitals. The results of the evaluation showed high efficiency in keeping the EMRs of patients unified, updated, and secure, regardless of the network clinical provider they consult.
In the era of big data, modern data marketplaces have received much attention as they allow not only large enterprises but also individuals to trade their data. This new paradigm makes the data prone to various threats, including piracy, illegal reselling, tampering, illegal redistribution, ownership claiming, forgery, theft, misappropriation, etc. Although digital watermarking is a promising technique to address the above-mentioned challenges, the existing solutions in the literature are deemed to be incompetent in big data scenarios due to the following factors: V's of big data, involvement of multiple owners, incremental watermarking, large cover-size and limited watermark-capacity, non-interference, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel big data watermarking technique that leverages the power of blockchain technology and provides a transparent immutable audit trail for data movement in big data monetizing scenarios. In this context, we address all the crucial challenges mentioned above. We present a prototype implementation of the system as a proof of concept using Solidity on Ethereum platform, and we perform experimental evaluation to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness in terms of execution gas costs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal which deals with watermarking issues in the context of big data.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Lu Hou, Kan Zheng, Zhiming Liu, Xiaojun Xu · 5 authors
Efficiency and security have become critical issues during the development of the long-range (LoRa) system for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. The centralized work method in the LoRa system, where all packages are processed and kept in the central cloud, cannot well exploit the resources in LoRa gateways and also makes it vulnerable to security risks, such as data falsification or data loss. On the other hand, the blockchain has the potential to provide a decentralized and secure infrastructure for the LoRa system. However, there are significant challenges in deploying blockchain at LoRa gateways with limited edge computing abilities. This article proposes a design and implementation of the blockchain-enabled LoRa system with edge computing by using the open-source Hyperledger Fabric, which is called as HyperLoRa. According to different features of LoRa data, a blockchain network with multiple ledgers is designed, each of which stores a specific kind of LoRa data. LoRa gateways can participate in the operations of the blockchain and share the ledger that keep the time-critical network data with small size. Then, the edge computing abilities of LoRa gateways are utilized to handle the join procedure and application packages processing. Furthermore, a HyperLoRa prototype is implemented on embedded hardware, which demonstrates the feasibility of deploying the blockchain into LoRa gateways with limited computing and storage resources. Finally, various experiments are conducted to evaluate the performances of the proposed LoRa system.
In recent years, the deployment of Cloud Computing (CC) has become more popular both in research and industry applications, arising form various fields including e-health, manufacturing, logistics and social networking. This is due to the easiness of service deployment and data management, and the unlimited provision of virtual resources (VR). In simple scenarios, users/applications send computational or storage tasks to be executed in the cloud, by manually assigning those tasks to the available computational resources. In complex scenarios, such as a smart city applications, where there is a large number of tasks, VRs, or both, task scheduling is exposed as an NP-Hard problem. Consequently, it is preferred and more efficient in terms of time and effort, to use a task scheduling automation technique. As there are many automated scheduling solutions proposed, new possibilities arise with the advent of Fog Computing (FC) and Blockchain (BC) technologies. Accordingly, such automation techniques may help the quick, secure and efficient assignment of tasks to the available VRs. In this paper, we propose an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm in a Fog-enabled Blockchain-assisted scheduling model, namely PF-BTS. The protocol and algorithms of PF-BTS exploit BC miners for generating efficient assignment of tasks to be performed in the cloud’s VRs using ACO, and award miner nodes for their contribution in generating the best schedule. In our proposal, PF-BTS further allows the fog to process, manage, and perform the tasks to enhance latency measures. While this processing and managing is taking place, the fog is enforced to respect the privacy of system components, and assure that data, location, identity, and usage information are not exposed. We evaluate and compare PF-BTS performance, with a recently proposed Blockchain-based task scheduling protocol, in a simulated environment. Our evaluation and experiments show high privacy awareness of PF-BTS, along with noticeable enhancement in execution time and network load.
Elizabeth Nathania Witanto, Yustus Eko Oktian, Sang-Gon Lee, Jin-Heung Lee
As the usage growth rate of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is increasing, various issues related to these devices need attention. One of them is the distribution of the IoT firmware update. The IoT devices’ software development does not end when the manufacturer sells the devices to the market. It still needs to be kept updated to prevent cyber-attacks. The commonly used firmware update process, over-the-air (OTA), mostly happens in a centralized way, in which the IoT devices directly download the firmware update from the manufacturer’s server. This central architecture makes the manufacturer’s server vulnerable to single-point-of-failure and latency issues that can delay critical patches from being applied to vulnerable devices. The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) is one organization contributing to providing interoperability services for IoT devices. In one of their subject areas, they provide a firmware update protocol for IoT devices. However, their firmware update process does not ensure the integrity and security of the patches. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based OCF firmware update for IoT devices. Specifically, we introduce two types of firmware update protocol, direct and peer-to-peer updates, integrated into OCF firmware update specifications. In the direct scenario, the device, through the IoT gateway, can download the new firmware update from the manufacturer’s server. Meanwhile, in the peer-to-peer scheme, the device can query the update from the nearby gateways. We implemented our protocol using Raspberry Pi hardware and Ethereum-based blockchain with the smart contracts to record metadata of the manufacturer’s firmware updates. We evaluated the proposed system’s performance by measuring the average throughput, the latency, and the firmware update distribution’s duration. The analysis results indicate that our proposal can deliver firmware updates in a reasonable duration, with the peer-to-peer version having a faster completion time than the direct one.
With the features of decentralization and trustlessness and through distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission, and encryption algorithms, blockchain has shed new light on the security and protection of medical data, and it can resolve the contradiction between data sharing and privacy protection with proper security strategies. In this paper, we integrate the strengths of both blockchain and cloud computing and build the privacy protection scheme for medical data based on blockchain and cloud computing. This scheme introduces cloud computing and provides services to blockchain nodes with cloud server computing; meanwhile, it collects, analyzes, processes, and maintains medical data in the identity authentication interface and solves the insufficient computing abilities of some nodes in blockchain so as to verify the authenticity and reliability of data. The simulation experiment proves that the proposed scheme is effective. It can achieve the secure protection and integrity verification of medical data and address the problems of high computing complexity, data sharing, and privacy protection.
Nikola Todorović, Marko Vještica, Vladimir Dimitrieski, Miroslav Zarić · 6 authors
In recent years, Industry 4.0 has promoted the enhanced horizontal integration of value chain participants, aiming to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Cross-Organizational Business Processes. In this paper, we discuss transparency and data privacy challenges that occur with the introduction of a high level of horizontal integration. Private, permissioned Distributed Ledger Technology systems and smart contracts can be used to address these challenges and enhance the integration of business processes across the entire value chain. To make this possible, we propose a creation of a Model-Driven Software Development approach based on a Domain-Specific Modeling Language that would enable automatic generation of smart contracts. Generated smart contracts could then be used by collaborating parties to supervise the state of production and contract fulfillment in a trustworthy and secure way.
The Internet of Things (IoT) as a concept is fascinating and exciting, with an exponential growth just beginning. The IoT global market is expected to grow from 170 billion USD in 2017 to 560 billion USD by 2022. Though many experts have pegged IoT as the next industrial revolution, two of the major challenging aspects of IoT since the early days are having a secure privacy-safe ecosystem encompassing all building blocks of IoT architecture and solve the scalability problem as the number of devices increases. In recent years, Distributed Ledgers have often been referred to as the solution for both privacy and security problems. One form of distributed ledger is the Blockchain system. The aim of this paper consists of reviewing the most recent Blockchain architectures, comparing the most interesting and popular consensus algorithms, and evaluating the convergence between Blockchain and IoT by illustrating some of the main interesting projects in this research field. Furthermore, the paper provides a vision of a disruptive research topic that the authors are investigating: the use of AI algorithms to be applied to IoT devices belonging to a Blockchain architecture. This obviously requires that the devices be provided with adequate computational capacity and that can efficiently optimize their energy consumption.
Blockchain applications in vehicular networks can offer many advantages, including decentralization and improved security. However, most of the consensus algorithms in blockchain are difficult to be implemented in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) without the help of edge computing services. For example, the connectivity in VANET only remains for a short period of time, which is not sufficient for highly time-consuming consensus algorithms, e.g., Proof of Work, running on mobile-edge nodes (vehicles). Other consensus algorithms also have some drawbacks, e.g., Proof of Stake (PoS) is biased toward nodes with a higher amount of stakes and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) is not highly secure against malicious nodes. For these reasons, we propose a voting blockchain based on the Proof-of-Quality-Factor (PoQF) consensus algorithm, where the threshold number of votes is controlled by edge computing servers. Specifically, PoQF includes voting for message validation and a competitive relay selection process based on the probabilistic prediction of channel quality between the transmitter and receiver. The performance bounds of failure and latency in message validation are obtained. This article also analyzes the throughput of block generation, as well as the asymptotic latency, security, and communication complexity of PoQF. An incentive distribution mechanism to reward honest nodes and punish malicious nodes is further presented and its effectiveness against the collusion of nodes is proved using the game theory. Simulation results show that PoQF reduces failure in validation by 11% and 15% as compared to PoS and PoET, respectively, and is 68 ms faster than PoET.
Riccardo Bonazzi, Francesco Cimmino, Jean-Luc Beuchat, Fanny Vérolet
In this paper, we describe an ongoing project to assess the liquidity risk of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in a network. In doing so we try to mimic the tracing applications that have been done to Covid-19. We built a simple artefact under the shape of a method called LUC (Liquidity for Unstructured Collaborations) to (1) collect data that has been encrypted by using multiple keys, (2) store the data in a shared ledger and (3) extract the required information concerning the credit risk of each user while respecting the conditions for the zero-knowledge proof. We see this solution as well-adapted for firms performing unstructured collaboration and we see our service as complementary concerning a trusted company, in the same way, the Covid-19 tracing application collects weak signals and then send patients to doctors for official testing.
Critical infrastructure systems are vital to underpin the functioning of a society and economy. Due to the ever-increasing number of Internet-connected Internet-of-Things (IoT)/Industrial IoT (IIoT), and the high volume of data generated and collected, security and scalability are becoming burning concerns for critical infrastructures in industry 4.0. The blockchain technology is essentially a distributed and secure ledger that records all the transactions into a hierarchically expanding chain of blocks. Edge computing brings the cloud capabilities closer to the computation tasks. The convergence of blockchain and edge computing paradigms can overcome the existing security and scalability issues. In this article, we first introduce the IoT/IIoT critical infrastructure in industry 4.0, and then we briefly present the blockchain and edge computing paradigms. After that, we show how the convergence of these two paradigms can enable secure and scalable critical infrastructures. Then, we provide a survey on the state of the art for security and privacy and scalability of IoT/IIoT critical infrastructures. A list of potential research challenges and open issues in this area is also provided, which can be used as useful resources to guide future research.
The development of eHealth systems has brought great convenience to people's life. Researchers have been combining new technologies to make eHealth systems work better for patients. The Blockchain-based eHealth system becomes popular because of its unique distributed tamper-resistant and privacy-preserving features. However, due to the security issues of the blockchain system, there are many security risks in eHealth systems utilizing the blockchain technology. i.e. 51% attacks can destroy blockchain-based systems. Besides, trivial transactions and frequent calls of smart contracts in the blockchain system bring additional costs and security risks to blockchain-based eHealth systems. Worse still, electronic medical records (EMRs) are controlled by medical institutions rather than patients, which causes privacy leakage issues. In this paper, we propose a medical data Sharing and Privacy-preserving eHealth system based on blockChain technology (SPChain). We combine RepuCoin with the SNARKs-based chameleon hash function to resist underlying blockchain attacks, and design a new chain structure to make microblocks contribute to the weight of blockchain. The system allows patients to share their EMRs among different medical institutions in a privacy-preserving way. Besides, authorized medical institutions can label wrong EMRs with the patients' permissions in the case of misdiagnosis. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed system can provide a strong security guarantee with a high efficiency.
Raja Wasim Ahmad, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Ibrar Yaqoob · 6 authors
The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that has rapidly spread and adversely affected the global economy, health, and human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of existing healthcare systems regarding its inadequacy to timely and efficiently handle public health emergencies. A large portion of today’s healthcare systems are centralized and fall short in providing necessary information security and privacy, data immutability, transparency, and traceability features to detect frauds related to COVID-19 vaccination certification, anti-body testing, and medical supplies. Blockchain technology can assist to combat the COVID-19 pandemic by assuring safe and reliable medical supplies, accurate identification of virus hot spots, and establishing data provenance to verify the genuine personal protective equipment that is decentralized, trustworthy, traceable, and transparent. In this paper, we discuss the potential blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic. We present the high-level design of three blockchain-based systems to enable the governments and medical professionals to efficiently handle health emergencies caused by COVID-19. We discuss the important ongoing blockchain-based research projects to demonstrate the adoption of blockchain technology for the COVID-19. Finally, we identify and discuss future research challenges along with their key causes and guidelines.
Trust is a crucial component for successful transactions regardless of whether they are executed in physical or virtual spaces. Blockchain technology is often discussed in the context of trust and referred to as a trust-free, trustless, or trustworthy technology. However, the question of how the trustworthiness of blockchain platforms should be demonstrated and proven to end users still remains open. While there may be some genuine trust in the blockchain technology itself, on an application level trust in an IT artifact needs to be established. In this article, we examine how trust-supporting design elements may be implemented to foster an end user's trust in a blockchain platform. We follow the design science paradigm and suggest a practically useful set of design elements that can help designers of blockchain platforms to build more trustworthy systems.
Xi Lin, Jun Wu, Ali Kashif Bashir, Jianhua Li · 6 authors
Recently, edge artificial intelligence techniques (e.g., federated edge learning) are emerged to unleash the potential of big data from Internet of Things (IoT). By learning knowledge on local devices, data privacy preserving and Quality of Service (QoS) are guaranteed. Nevertheless, the dilemma between the limited on-device battery capacities and the high energy demands in learning is not resolved. When the on-device battery is exhausted, the edge learning process will have to be interrupted. In this article, we propose a novel wirelessly powered edge intelligence (WPEG) framework, which aims to achieve a stable, robust, and sustainable edge intelligence by energy harvesting (EH) methods. First, we build a permissioned edge blockchain to secure the peer-to-peer (P2P) energy and knowledge sharing in our framework. To maximize edge intelligence efficiency, we then investigate the wirelessly powered multiagent edge learning model and design the optimal edge learning strategy. Moreover, by constructing a two-stage Stackelberg game, the underlying energy-knowledge trading incentive mechanisms are also proposed with the optimal economic incentives and power transmission strategies. Finally, simulation results show that our incentive strategies could optimize the utilities of both parties compared with classic schemes, and our optimal learning design could realize the optimal learning efficiency.
Blockchain is widely used in encrypted currency, Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain finance, data sharing, and other fields. However, there are security problems in blockchains to varying degrees. As an important component of blockchain, hash function has relatively low computational efficiency. Therefore, this paper proposes a new scheme to optimize the blockchain hashing algorithm based on PRCA (Proactive Reconfigurable Computing Architecture). In order to improve the calculation performance of hashing function, the paper realizes the pipeline hashing algorithm and optimizes the efficiency of communication facilities and network data transmission by combining blockchains with mimic computers. Meanwhile, to ensure the security of data information, this paper chooses lightweight hashing algorithm to do multiple hashing and transforms the hash algorithm structure as well. The experimental results show that the scheme given in the paper not only improves the security of blockchains but also improves the efficiency of data processing.
Saqib Hakak, Wazir Zada Khan, Gulshan Amin Gilkar, Basem Assiri · 7 authors
The rise of blockchain technology within a few years has attracted researchers across the world. The prime reason for worldwide attention is undoubtedly due to its feature of immutability along with the decentralized approach of data protection. As this technology is progressing, lots of developments in terms of identifying new applications, blockchain-based platforms, consensus mechanisms, etc are taking place. Hence, in this article, an attempt has been made to review the recent advancements in blockchain technology. Furthermore, we have also explored the available blockchain platforms, highlighted and explored future research directions and challenges.
Permissioned and private blockchain platforms are increasingly used in today’s industry. This paper provides a comprehensive and comparative study of the 5 major frameworks (Fabric, Ethereum, Quorum, MultiChain and R3 Corda) with regard to the community activities, performance, scalability, privacy and adoption criteria. Based on a literature review, this study shows that even if Fabric is promising, the final selection of a framework for a specific case-study is always a trade-off. Finally, lessons learnt are given for industrial practitioners and researchers.