Angel Hsu, Willie Khoo, Nihit Goyal, Martin Wainstein
Climate change has been called "the defining challenge of our age" and yet the global community lacks adequate information to understand whether actions to address it are succeeding or failing to mitigate it. The emergence of technologies such as earth observation (EO) and Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to provide new advances in data collection for monitoring climate change mitigation, particularly where traditional means of data exploration and analysis, such as government-led statistical census efforts, are costly and time consuming. In this review article, we examine the extent to which digital data technologies, such as EO (e.g., remote sensing satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs, generally from space) and IoT (e.g., smart meters, sensors, and actuators, generally from the ground) can address existing gaps that impede efforts to evaluate progress toward global climate change mitigation. We argue that there is underexplored potential for EO and IoT to advance large-scale data generation that can be translated to improve climate change data collection. Finally, we discuss how a system employing digital data collection technologies could leverage advances in distributed ledger technologies to address concerns of transparency, privacy, and data governance.
With the development of wireless local area networks and intelligent transportation technologies, the Internet of Vehicles is considered to be an effective method to alleviate the severe situation of the current transportation system. The vehicles in the Internet of Vehicles system build the Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks through wireless communication technology and dynamically provide different services through the real-time driving information broadcast by the vehicles. Vehicle drivers can control the distance, planning the driving route, between vehicles according to the current traffic environment, which improves the overall safety and efficiency of the traffic system. Due to the particularity of the Internet of Vehicles system service, vehicles need to broadcast their location information frequently. Attackers can collect and analyze vehicle broadcast information to steal privacy and even directionally track the owner through the driving trajectory, bringing serious security risks. This paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy protection system for the Internet of Vehicles. The system combines the blockchain with the Internet of Vehicles system to design a safe and efficient two-way authentication and key agreement algorithm through encryption and signature algorithm, which also solves the central dependency problem of the traditional Internet of Vehicles system.
The vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) comprises enabling technologies for a large number of important applications including collaborative autonomous driving and advanced transportation systems. Due to the mobility of vehicles, strict application requirements, and limited communication resources, the conventional centralized control fails to provide sufficient quality of service for connected vehicles, so a decentralized approach is required in the vicinity to satisfy the requirements of delay-sensitive and mission-critical applications. A decentralized system is also more resistant to the single point of failure problem and malicious attacks. Blockchain technology has been attracting great interest due to its capability of achieving a decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant system. There are many studies focusing on the use of blockchain in managing data and transactions in vehicular environments. However, the application of blockchain in vehicular environments also faces some technical challenges. In this paper, we first explain the fundamentals of blockchain and vehicular IoT. Then, we conduct a literature review on the existing research efforts of the blockchain for vehicular IoT by discussing the research problems and technical issues. After that, we point out some future research issues considering the characteristics of both blockchain and vehicular IoT.
Efficient and reliable access control in smart cities is critical for the protection of various resources for decision making and task execution. Existing centralized access control schemes suffer from the limitations of single point of failure, low reliability, and poor scalability. This article, therefore, proposes a distributed and reliable access control framework for smart cities by combining the blockchain smart contract technology and the attribute-based access control (ABAC) model. The framework consists of one policy management contract (PMC) for managing the ABAC policies, one subject attribute management contract (SAMC) for managing the attributes of subjects (i.e., entities accessing resources), one object attribute management contract (OAMC) for managing the attributes of objects (i.e., resources being accessed), and one access control contract (ACC) for performing the access control. To show the feasibility of the proposed framework, we construct a local private Ethereum blockchain system to implement the four smart contracts and also conduct experiments to evaluate the monetary cost as well as to compare the proposed framework with an existing access control list (ACL)-based scheme. The experimental results show that although the proposed scheme consumes more money than the ACL-based scheme at the deployment stage, it introduces less monetary cost during the system running especially for large-scale smart cities.
The state-of-the-art centralized Internet of Things (IoT) data flow pipeline has started aging since it cannot cope with the vast number of newly connected IoT devices. As a result, the community begins the transition to a decentralized pipeline to encourage data and resource sharing. However, the move is not trivial. With many instances allocating data or service arbitrarily, how can we guarantee the correctness of IoT data or processes that other parties offer. Furthermore, in case of dispute, how can the IoT data assist in determining which party is guilty of faulty behavior. Finally, the number of Service Level Agreement (SLA) increases as the number of sharing grows. The problem then becomes how we can provide a natural SLA generation and verification that we can automate instead of going through a manual and tedious legalization process through a trusted third party. In this paper, we explore blockchain solutions to answer those issues and propose continued data integrity services for IoT big data management. Specifically, we design five integrity protocols across three phases of IoT operations—during the transmission of IoT data (data in transit), when we physically store the data in the database (data at rest), and at the time of data processing (data in process). In each phase, we first lay out our motivations and survey the related blockchain solutions from the literature. We then use curated papers from our surveys as building blocks in designing the protocol. Using our proposal, we augment the overall value of IoT data and commands, generated in the IoT system, as they are now tamper-proof, verifiable, non-repudiable, and more robust.
With the advent of the Internet of things (IoT) era, more and more devices are connected to the IoT. Under the traditional cloud-thing centralized management mode, the transmission of massive data is facing many difficulties, and the reliability of data is difficult to be guaranteed. As emerging technologies, blockchain technology and edge computing (EC) technology have attracted the attention of academia in improving the reliability, privacy and invariability of IoT technology. In this paper, we combine the characteristics of the EC and blockchain to ensure the reliability of data transmission in the IoT. First of all, we propose a data transmission mechanism based on blockchain, which uses the distributed architecture of blockchain to ensure that the data is not tampered with; secondly, we introduce the three-tier structure in the architecture in turn; finally, we introduce the four working steps of the mechanism, which are similar to the working mechanism of blockchain. In the end, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can ensure the reliability of data transmission in the Internet of things to a great extent.
The in-house health monitoring sensors form a large network of Internet of things (IoT) that continuously monitors and sends the data to the nearby devices or server. However, the connectivity of these IoT-based sensors with different entities leads to security loopholes wherein the adversary can exploit the vulnerabilities due to the openness of the data. This is a major concern especially in the healthcare sector where the change in data values from sensors can change the course of diagnosis which can cause severe health issues. Therefore, in order to prevent the data tempering and preserve the privacy of patients, we present a decoupled blockchain-based approach in the edge-envisioned ecosystem. This approach leverages the nearby edge devices to create the decoupled blocks in blockchain so as to securely transmit the healthcare data from sensors to the edge nodes. The edge nodes then transmit and store the data at the cloud using the incremental tensor-based scheme. This helps to reduce the data duplication of the huge amount of data transmitted in the large IoT healthcare network. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the block preparation time, header generation time, tensor reduction ratio, and approximation error.
N. Deepa, Quoc‐Viet Pham, Dinh C. Nguyen, Sweta Bhattacharya · 9 authors
Big data has generated strong interest in various scientific and engineering domains over the last few years. Despite many advantages and applications, there are many challenges in big data to be tackled for better quality of service, e.g., big data analytics, big data management, and big data privacy and security. Blockchain with its decentralization and security nature has the great potential to improve big data services and applications. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on blockchain for big data, focusing on up-to-date approaches, opportunities, and future directions. First, we present a brief overview of blockchain and big data as well as the motivation behind their integration. Next, we survey various blockchain services for big data, including blockchain for secure big data acquisition, data storage, data analytics, and data privacy preservation. Then, we review the state-of-the-art studies on the use of blockchain for big data applications in different vertical domains such as smart city, smart healthcare, smart transportation, and smart grid. For a better understanding, some representative blockchain-big data projects are also presented and analyzed. Finally, challenges and future directions are discussed to further drive research in this promising area.
Smart Grids and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) are neither a dream nor a near-future thing anymore, rather it is happening now. The integration of more and more embedded systems and IoT devices is pushing smart grids and I4.0 forward at a breakneck speed. To cope up with this, the modification of age-old SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in terms of decentralization, near-real-time operation, security, and privacy is necessary. In this context, blockchain technology has the potential of providing not only these essential features of the data acquisition process of future SCADA systems but also many other useful add-ons. On the other side, it is evident that various type of security breach tends to take place more during any economic turmoil. These can cause even more serious devastation to the global economy and human life. Thus, it is necessary to make our industries robust, automated, and resilient with secured and immutable data acquiring systems. This paper deals with the implementation scopes of blockchain in the data acquisition part of SCADA systems in the area of the smart grid and I4.0. There are several consensus mechanisms to support blockchain integration in the field of cryptocurrencies, vehicular networks, healthcare systems, e-commerce, etc. But little attention has been paid to developing efficient and easy-to-implement consensus mechanisms in the field of blockchain-enabled SCADA systems. From this perspective, a novel consensus mechanism, which we call PoRCH (Proof of Random Count in Hashes), with a customized mining node selection scheme has been proposed in this paper. Also, a small-scale prototype of a blockchain-enabled data acquisition system has been developed. The performance evaluation of the implemented prototype shows the benefits of blockchain technology.
Due to the recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing technologies, the Smart Public Safety (SPS) system has become a more realistic solution for seamless public safety services that are enabled by integrating machine learning (ML) into heterogeneous edge computing networks. While SPS facilitates convenient exchanges of surveillance data streams among device owners and third-party applications, the existing monolithic service-oriented architecture (SOA) is unable to provide scalable and extensible services in a large-scale heterogeneous network environment. Moreover, traditional security solutions rely on a centralized trusted third-party authority, which not only can be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure, but it also incurs privacy concerns on improperly use of private information. Inspired by blockchain and microservices technologies, this paper proposed a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Smart Public Safety (BlendSPS) system. Leveraging the hybrid blockchain fabric, a microservices based security mechanism is implemented to enable decentralized security architecture, and it supports immutability, auditability, and traceability for secure data sharing and operations among participants of the SPS system. An extensive experimental study verified the feasibility of the proposed BlendSPS that possesses security and privacy proprieties with limited overhead on IoT based edge networks.
Minho Jo, Kai Hu, F. Richard Yu, Li Sun · 6 authors
The three articles in this special section focus are devoted to sharing state-of-the-art research on private blockchain in industrial IoT (Internet of Things). A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger with a chain network of blocks recording historical transactions. A transaction is a record of action. A transaction inside the block will be of: sensing/saving data, assembling parts, depositing money, processing a business deal, ordering/ delivering a product part, notarizing a paperwork, and so on. Blockchains are categorized into two types, public blockchain and private blockchain. Private blockchains have been more in the spotlight in industry recently because they are much faster, cheaper, and privacy-oriented compared to the public blockchain. We expect that private blockchains will be much more widely implemented soon.
Ethereum is the largest blockchain platform that supports smart contracts. Users deploy smart contracts by publishing the smart contract's bytecode to the blockchain. Since the data in the blockchain cannot be modified, even if these contracts contain bugs, it is not possible to patch deployed smart contracts with code updates. Moreover, there is currently neither a comprehensive classification framework for Ethereum smart contract bugs, nor detailed criteria for detecting bugs in smart contracts, making it difficult for developers to fully understand the negative effects of bugs and design new approaches to detect bugs. In this paper, to fill the gap, we first collect as many smart contract bugs as possible from multiple sources and divide these bugs into 9 categories by extending the IEEE Standard Classification for Software Anomalies. Then, we design the criteria for detecting each kind of bugs, and construct a dataset of smart contracts covering all kinds of bugs. With our framework and dataset, developers can learn smart contract bugs and develop new tools to detect and locate bugs in smart contracts. Moreover, we evaluate the state-of-the-art tools for smart contract analysis with our dataset and obtain some interesting findings: 1) Mythril, Slither and Remix are the most worthwhile combination of analysis tools. 2) There are still 10 kinds of bugs that cannot be detected by any analysis tool.
Seung Chul Lee, Jaehyun Lee, Seng-Phil Hong, Jae‐Hoon Kim
Internet of Things (IoT) networks composed of a large number of sensors and actuators generate a huge volume of data and control commands, which should be enforced by strong data reliability. The end-to-end data reliability of IoT networks is an essential industrial enabler. Blockchain technology can provide strong data reliability and integrity within IoT networks. We designed a lightweight end-to-end blockchain network that applies to common IoT applications. Its enhanced modular architecture and lightweight consensus mechanism guarantee its practical applicability for general IoT applications. In addition, the proposed blockchain network is highly software compatible because it adopts the Hyperledger development environment. Directly embedding the proposed blockchain middleware platform in small computing devices proves its practicability.
Recent years have shown a great interest of public in buying and selling of crypto/digital currency. With hundreds of digital currencies in financial market, bitcoin remains the most widely used, adapted, and accepted currency around the world. However, the critics of bitcoin still consider it a threat to modern day power usage. This paper discusses the important pitfalls, pros, and cons related to bitcoin's energy consumption. The paper begins by highlighting the flexibilities cryptocurrency can bring to online money transfers compared to traditional 'fiat' architecture. Then, the focus of the paper entirely remains on listing various facts related to bitcoin's energy utilization including a brief description of several emerging approaches for energy optimization. This paper is concluded by revealing key current challenges associated to bitcoin's energy usage.
There is a growing interest from both the academia and industry to employ distributed ledger technology in the Internet-of-Things domain for addressing security-related and performance challenges. Distributed ledger technology enables non-trusted entities to communicate and reach consensus in a fully distributed manner through a cryptographically secure and immutable ledger. However, significant challenges arise mainly related to transaction processing speed and user privacy. This work explores the interplay between Internet-of-Things and distributed ledger technology, analysing the fundamental characteristics of this technology and discussing the related benefits and challenges.
Muhammad Tahir, Muhammad Sardaraz, Shakoor Muhammad, Muhammad Saud Khan
Blockchain and IoT are being deployed at a large scale in various fields including healthcare for applications such as secure storage, transactions, and process automation. IoT devices are resource-constrained, have no capability of security and self-protection, and can easily be hacked or compromised. Furthermore, Blockchain is an emerging technology with immutability features which provide secure management, authentication, and guaranteed access control to IoT devices. IoT is a cloud-based internet service in which processing and collection of user’s data are accomplished remotely. Smart healthcare also requires the facility to provide the diagnosis of patients located remotely. The smart health framework faces critical issues such as data security, costs, memory, scalability, trust, and transparency between different platforms. Therefore, it is important to handle data integrity and privacy as the user’s authenticity is in question due to an open internet environment. Several techniques are available that primarily focus on resolving security issues i.e., forgery, timing, denial of service and stolen smartcard attacks, etc. Blockchain technology follows the rules of absolute privacy to identify the users associated with transactions. The motivation behind the use of Blockchain in health informatics is the removal of the centralized third party, immutability, improved data sharing, enhanced security, and reduced overhead costs in distributed applications. Healthcare informatics has some specific requirements associated with the security and privacy along with the additional legal requirements. This paper presents a novel authentication and authorization framework for Blockchain-enabled IoT networks using a probabilistic model. The proposed framework makes use of random numbers in the authentication process which is further connected through joint conditional probability. Hence, it establishes a secure connection among IoT devices for further data acquisition. The proposed model is validated and evaluated through extensive simulations using the AVISPA tool and the Cooja simulator, respectively. Experimental results analyses show that the proposed framework provides robust mutual authenticity, enhanced access control, and lowers both the communication and computational overhead cost as compared to others.
We are experiencing an unprecedented healthcare crisis caused by newly discovered coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The outbreaks of COVID-19 reveal the frailties of existing healthcare systems. Therefore, the digital transformation of healthcare systems becomes an inevitable trend. During this process, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays a crucial role, while intrinsic vulnerabilities of security and privacy deter the wide adoption of IoMT. In this article, we present a blockchain-enabled IoMT to address the security and privacy concerns of IoMT systems. We also discuss the solutions brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT to COVID-19 from five different perspectives. Moreover, we outline the open challenges and future directions of blockchain-enabled IoMT.
Attracted by the inherent security and privacy protection of the blockchain, incorporating blockchain into Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely studied in these years. However, the mining process requires high computational power, which prevents IoT devices from directly participating in blockchain construction. For this reason, edge computing service is introduced to help build the IoT blockchain, where IoT devices could purchase computational resources from the edge servers. In this paper, we consider the case that IoT devices also have other tasks that need the help of edge servers, such as data analysis and data storage. The profits they can get from these tasks is closely related to the amounts of resources they purchased from the edge servers. In this scenario, IoT devices will allocate their limited budgets to purchase different resources from different edge servers, such that their profits can be maximized. Moreover, edge servers will set "best" prices such that they can get the biggest benefits. Accordingly, there raise a pricing and budget allocation problem between edge servers and IoT devices. We model the interaction between edge servers and IoT devices as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game, whose objective is to reach the Stackelberg Equilibrium (SE). We prove the existence and uniqueness of the SE point, and design efficient algorithms to reach the SE point. In the end, we verify our model and algorithms by performing extensive simulations, and the results show the correctness and effectiveness of our designs.
Blockchains help to build trust among a decentralized network of unknown and untrusted peers who need to agree on a common protocol and trust the correctness and compatibility of the corresponding software implementations. The software engineering discipline cannot ignore this trend, as it fundamentally affects the way software is designed, developed, deployed, and delivered.1 As with the emergence of the Internet, software smart contracts for solving new classes of real-world problems, as opposed to introducing blockchains everywhere, where they may be unnecessary, or provide an inefficient and environmentally unsound solution.4
Maya Dotan, Yvonne-Anne Pignolet, Stefan Schmid, Saar Tochner · 5 authors
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ significantly from traditional communication networks, with implications on all layers of the protocol stack. This paper is motivated by these differences, and in particular by the observation that many fundamental design aspects of these networks are not well-understood today. In order to support the networking community to contribute to this emerging application domain, we present a structured overview of the field, from topology and neighbor discovery to block and transaction propagation. In particular, we provide the context, highlighting differences and commonalities with traditional networks, review the state-of-the-art, and identify open research challenges. Our paper can hence also be seen as a call-to-arms to improve the foundation on top of which cryptocurrencies are built.
Rakesh Shrestha, Seung Yeob Nam, Rojeena Bajracharya, Shiho Kim
With the rapid evolution in wireless communications and autonomous vehicles, intelligent and autonomous vehicles will be launched soon. Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communications provides driving safety, traffic efficiency, and road information in real-time in vehicular networks. V2X has evolved by integrating cellular 5G and New Radio (NR) access technology in V2X communications (i.e., 5G NR V2X); it can fulfill the ever-evolving vehicular application, communication, and service demands of connected vehicles, such as ultra-low latency, ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-high reliability, and security. However, with the increasing number of intelligent and autonomous vehicles and their safety requirements, there is a backlash in deployment and management because of scalability, poor security and less flexibility. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) plays a significant role in bringing cloud services closer to vehicular nodes, which reduces the scalability and flexibility issues. In addition, blockchain has evolved as an effective technology enabler to solve several security, privacy, and networking issues faced by the current 5G-based MEC systems in vehicular networks. Blockchain can be integrated as a strong security mechanism for securing and managing 5G V2X along with MEC. In this survey, we discuss, in detail, state-of-the-art V2X, its evolution based on cellular 5G technology and non-cellular 802.11bd. We investigate the integration of blockchain in 5G-based MEC vehicular networks for security, privacy protection, and content caching. We present the issues and challenges in existing edge computing and 5G V2X and, then, we shed some light on future research directions in these integrated and emerging technologies.
Juan Velandia Botello, Andrés Pardo Mesa, Fabián Ardila Rodríguez, Daniel Díaz López · 6 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has revolutionized several industries (e.g., manufacturing, health, transport, education, among others) by allowing objects to connect to the Internet and, thus, enabling a variety of novel applications. In this sense, IoT devices have become an essential component of smart cities, allowing many novel and useful services, but, at the same time, bringing numerous cybersecurity threats. The paper at hand proposes BlockSIEM, a blockchain-based and distributed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution framework for the protection of the aforementioned smart city services. The proposed SIEM relies on blockchain technology to securely store and access security events. Such security events are generated by IoT sentinels that are in charge of shielding groups of IoT devices. The IoT sentinels may be deployed in smart city scenarios, such as smart hospitals, smart transport systems, smart airports, among others, ensuring a satisfactory level of protection. The blockchain guarantees the non-repudiation and traceability of the registry of security events due to its features. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, our proposal is implemented using Ethereum and validated through different use cases and experiments.