D.M. Sheeba, S. Jayalakshmi, Dept of Computer Applications, VISTAS, Chennai, India.
Internet of Things (IoT) growing at a rate of exponential numbers in recent years has received extensive attention with BlockChain (BC) technology which provide trust to IoT with its immutable nature, decentralization in computing, resource constraints, security and privacy. The distributed ledger of transactions in BC is path leading technology for addressing Cyber Threats in the form of data theft; it provides secure application architecture which has proven track of record for securing data. IoT devices using BC enabled to communicate between objects, share data, decide based on business criteria and act as a medium to securely transmit information. This work provides lightweight BlockChain with two prominent consensus mechanism PoW – Proof of Work and PoS – Proof of Stake for smart IoT devices. Next, Smart Home Device (SMD) is ensures providing best-in-class Security and Privacy for smart home Appliances. Further provides future advances in the Approach.
Hao Xu, Paulo Valente Klaine, Oluwakayode Onireti, Bin Cao · 6 authors
The sixth-generation (6G) network must provide better performance than previous generations to meet the requirements of emerging services and applications, such as multi-gigabit transmission rate, higher reliability, and sub-1 ms latency and ubiquitous connection for the Internet of Everything (IoE). However, with the scarcity of spectrum resources, efficient resource management and sharing are crucial to achieving all these ambitious requirements. One possible technology to achieve all this is the blockchain. Because of its inherent properties, the blockchain has recently gained an important position, which is of great significance to the 6G network and other networks. In particular, the integration of the blockchain in 6G will enable the network to monitor and manage resource utilization and sharing efficiently. Hence, in this paper, we discuss the potentials of the blockchain for resource management and sharing in 6G using multiple application scenarios, namely, Internet of things, device-to-device communications, network slicing, and inter-domain blockchain ecosystems.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are extremely important for patients’ treatment, doctors’ diagnoses, and medical technology development. In recent years, the distributed healthcare blockchain system has been researched for solving the information isolated island problem in centralized healthcare service systems. However, there still exists a series of important problems such as the patients’ sensitive information security, cross-institutional data sharing, medical quality, and efficiency. In this paper, we establish a lightweight privacy-preserving mechanism for a healthcare blockchain system. First, we apply an interleaving encoder to encrypt the original EMRs. This can hide the sensitive information of EMRs to protect the patient’s privacy security. Second, a ( t , n )-threshold lightweight message sharing scheme is presented. The EMRs are mapped to n different short shares, and it can be reconstructed by at least t shares. The EMR shares rather than the original EMRs are stored in the blockchain nodes. This can guarantee high security for EMR sharing and improve the data reconstruction efficiency. Third, the indexes of the stored EMR shares are employed to generate blocks that are chained together and finally form a blockchain. The authorized data users or institutions can recover an EMR by requesting at least t shares of the EMR from the blockchain nodes. In this way, the healthcare blockchain system can not only facilitate the cross-institution sharing process, but also provide proper protections for the EMRs. The security proof and analysis indicate that the proposed scheme can protect the privacy and security of patients’ medical information. The simulation results show that our proposed scheme is more efficient than similar literature in terms of energy consumption and storage space, and the healthcare blockchain system is more stable with the proposed message sharing scheme.
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and applications have flourished in blockchain research community. Massive data generated from diverse blockchain systems bring not only huge business values but also technological challenges in data analytics of heterogeneous blockchain data. Different from Bitcoin and Ethereum, EOSIO has richer diversity and a higher volume of blockchain data due to its unique architectural design in resource management, consensus scheme and high throughput. Despite its popularity (e.g., 89,800,000 blocks generated till November 14, 2019 since its launch on June 8, 2018), few studies have been made on data analysis of EOSIO. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from EOSIO. We name these well-processed EOSIO datasets as XBlock-EOS, which consists of 7 well-processed datasets: 1) Block, Transaction and Action, 2) Internal and External EOS Transfer Action, 3) Contract Information, 4) Contract Invocation, 5) Token Action, 6) Account Creation, 7) Resource Management. It is challenging to process and analyze a high volume of raw EOSIO data and establish the mapping from original raw data to the well-grained datasets since it requires substantial efforts in extracting various types of data as well as sophisticated knowledge on software engineering and data analytics. Meanwhile, we present statistics and exploration on these datasets. Moreover, we also outline the possible research opportunities based on XBlock-EOS.
Fog computing (FC) is used to reduce the energy consumption and latency for the heterogeneous communication approaches in the smart cities’ applications of the Internet of Everything (IoE). Fog computing nodes are connected through wired or wireless medium. The goal of smart city applications is to develop the transaction relationship of real-time response applications. There are various frameworks in real-world to support the IoE in smart-cities but they face the issues like security, platform Independence, multi-application assistance, and resource management. This article is motivated from the Blockchain and Fog computing technologies and presents a secured architecture Blockchain and Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN) for IoE applications in the smart cities. The proposed architecture secures sensitive data with encryption, authentication, and Blockchain. It assists the System-developers and Architects to deploy the applications in smart city paradigm. The goal of the proposed architecture is to reduce the latency and energy, and ensure improved security features through Blockchain technology. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed architecture performs better than the existing frameworks for smart-cities.
Background/Objectives: Tremendous growth of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have positively affected the field of E-Learning (EL). However, recently the education mode is shifted from the traditional classroom towards EL due to widespread COVID-19. The selection of suitable EL tool and security of EL data and environment are still the key challenges that need to be addressed. The objective of this paper is to guide the EL Practitioners in the selection of suitable EL tool and to provide a detailed framework for maintaining privacy and security of EL data and environment. Purpose: This study aims to help EL practitioners in the selection of suitable EL tool and to provide a secure framework for the security of EL data and environment. Method: Realtime statistics are gathered and analyzed to visualize the impact of COVID-19 on education around the world. The increasing demand for EL during COVID-19 is analyzed, and a detailed taxonomy is provided to make the EL practitioners aware of existing distance learning solutions. A comparison of commonly used EL tools is provided that will help in the selection of EL tools according to institutional requirements. A Blockchain-based EL framework is proposed that will help EL designer in managing the security of EL data and environment. Conclusion: The proposed framework is expected to provide a promising solution for developing a fair and open learning online education environment and will overcome the deficiencies caused by school closures during COVID-19. Keywords: COVID-19; Blockchain; Security; Privacy; E-Learning; Digital Curriculum
The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining process in blockchain requires miners to solve a proof-of-work puzzle, which requires high computational power. However, the lightweight IIoT devices cannot directly participate in the mining process due to the limitation of power and computational resources. The edge computing service makes it possible for IIoT applications to build a blockchain network, in which IIoT devices purchase computational resources from edge servers and thus can offload their computational tasks. The amount of computational resource purchased by IIoT devices depends on how many profits they can get in the mining process, and will directly affect the security of the blockchain network. In this paper, we investigate the incentive mechanism for the blockchain platform to attract IIoT devices to purchase more computational power from edge servers to participate in the mining process, thereby building a more secure blockchain network. We model the interaction between the blockchain platform and IIoT devices as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the blockchain platform act as the leader, and IIoT devices act as followers. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium, and propose an efficient algorithm to compute the Stackelberg equilibrium point. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of our algorithm through extensive simulations, and analyze the strategies of blockchain platform and IIoT devices under different situations.
Abstract Objective: In order to cope with a sudden outbreak of new coronavirus infection, a large number of potential infected persons need to be isolated. A new smart monitoring system which integrates Internet of things and blockchain technology to monitor isolated people in real time was design and studied.Methods: A internet of things devices will collects the location and physical data of isolated people, the data will be sent to master devices which will integrate and format those data and transfer to a smart contract. A smart contract compares and analyses the data with the threshold which is predefined. When the data exceed the threshold, the smart contract will alert the master device, which will notify the isolated person and center for disease control and prevention, the event will be stored in the consortium blockchain. The blockchain does not store the isolated people's details, which are stored in electronic health records linked to the blockchain to guarantee the data safety.Results: This system realizes the effective real-time monitoring of isolators including their physical condition and geographical position on the premise of protecting their privacy and security.Conclusion: By the system, the center for disease control and prevention can respond quickly according to their alerts. It has the advantages of good integrity, tamper-proof, and transparency to isolators.
Tianrui Chen, Amjad Saeed Khan, Gan Zheng, Sangarapillai Lambotharan
This letter presents a secure user offloading mechanism in heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs), where a macrocell base station (MBS) offloads its users to small cell access points (SCAs) using Vickrey auction. Additionally, a user-in-the-loop (UIL) strategy is exploited to encourage the unserved users to move to desired locations for connections. As the participants in the conventional auction-based trading may collude or take selfish actions, we employ Ethereum framework for trustless, secure and distributed auctioning. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed user offloading methodology. The security aspects of the blockchain framework are also discussed.
The last decade has experienced a vast interest in Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies with a specific focus on the applications of this technology. However, slow confirmation times of transactions and unforeseeable high fees hamper their wide adoption for micro-payments. The idea of establishing payment channel networks is one of the many proposed solutions to address this scalability issue where nodes, by utilizing smart contracting, establish payment channels between each other and perform off-chain transactions. However, due to the way these channels are created, both sides have a certain one-way capacity for making transactions. Consequently, if one sides exceeds this one-way capacity, the channel becomes useless in that particular direction, which causes failures of payments and eventually creates an imbalance in the overall network. To keep the payment channel network sustainable, in this paper, we aim to increase the overall success rate of payments by effectively exploiting the fact that end-users are usually connected to the network at multiple points (i.e., gateways) any of which can be used to initiate the payment. We propose an efficient method for selection of the gateway for a user by considering the gateway's inbound and outbound payment traffic ratio. We then augment this proposed method with split payment capability to further increase success rate especially for large transactions. The evaluation of the proposed method shows that compared to greedy and maxflow-based approaches, we can achieve much higher success rates, which are further improved with split payments.
In recent years, many researchers have focused on developing a feasible solution for storing and exchanging medical images in the field of health care. Current practices are deployed on cloud-based centralized data centers, which increase maintenance costs, require massive storage space, and raise privacy concerns about sharing information over a network. Therefore, it is important to design a framework to enable sharing and storing of big medical data efficiently within a trustless environment. In the present paper, we propose a novel proof-of-concept design for a distributed patient-centric image management (PCIM) system that is aimed to ensure safety and control of patient private data without using a centralized infrastructure. In this system, we employed an emerging Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system technology called Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). Then, we implemented an Ethereum smart contract called the patient-centric access control protocol to enable a distributed and trustworthy access control policy. IPFS provides the means for decentralized storage of medical images with global accessibility. We describe how the PCIM system architecture facilitates the distributed and secured patient-centric data access across multiple entities such as hospitals, patients, and image requestors. Finally, we deployed a smart contract prototype on an Ethereum testnet blockchain and evaluated the proposed framework within the Windows environment. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is efficient and feasible.
Younghun Lee, Shailendra Rathore, Jin Ho Park, Jong Hyuk Park · 6 authors
Abstract With the advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the proliferation of sensor technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) is now being widely used in smart home for the purposes of efficient resource management and pervasive sensing. In smart homes, various IoT devices are connected to each other, and these connections are centered on gateways. The role of gateways in the smart homes is significant, however, its centralized structure presents multiple security vulnerabilities such as integrity, certification, and availability. To address these security vulnerabilities, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based smart home gateway network that counters possible attacks on the gateway of smart homes. The network consists of three layers including device, gateway, and cloud layers. The blockchain technology is employed at the gateway layer wherein data is stored and exchanged in the form blocks of blockchain to support decentralization and overcome the problem from traditional centralized architecture. The blockchain ensures the integrity of the data inside and outside of the smart home and provides availability through authentication and efficient communication between network members. We implemented the proposed network on the Ethereum blockchain technology and evaluated in terms of standard security measures including security response time and accuracy. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed security solutions outperforms over the existing solutions.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Guntur Dharma Putra, Salil S. Kanhere · 5 authors
Within the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain research, there is a growing interest in decentralizing health monitoring systems, to provide improved privacy to patients, without relying on trusted third parties for handling patients' sensitive health data. With public blockchain deployments being severely limited in their scalability, and inherently having latency in transaction processing, there is room for researching and developing new techniques to leverage the security features of blockchains within healthcare applications. This paper presents a solution for patients to share their biomedical data with their doctors without their data being handled by trusted third party entities. The solution is built on the Ethereum blockchain as a medium for negotiating and record-keeping, along with Tor for delivering data from patients to doctors. To highlight the applicability of the solution in various health monitoring scenarios, we have considered three use-cases, namely cardiac monitoring, sleep apnoea testing, and EEG following epileptic seizures. Following the discussion about the use cases, the paper outlines a security analysis performed on the proposed solution, based on multiple attack scenarios. Finally, the paper presents and discusses a performance evaluation in terms of data delivery time in comparison to existing centralized and decentralized solutions.
Onno W. Purbo, Sriyanto Sriyanto, Suhendro Suhendro, RZ Abdul Aziz · 5 authors
In this paper, we report the benchmarking results of Hyperledger, a Distributed Ledger, which is the derivation Blockchain Technology. Method to evaluate Hyperledger in a limited infrastructure is developed. Themeasured infrastructure consists of 8 nodes with a load of up to 20000 transactions/second. Hyperledger consistently runs all evaluation, namely, for 20,000 transactions, the run time 74.30s, latency 73.40ms latency, and 257 tps. The benchmarking of Hyperledger shows better than a database system in a high workload scenario. We found that the maximum size data volume in one transaction on the Hyperledger network is around ten (10) times of MySQL. Also, the time spent on processing a single transaction in the blockchain network is 80-200 times faster than MySQL. This initial analysis can provide an overview for practitioners in making decisions about the adoption of blockchain technology in their IT systems.
Bo Zhao, Yifan Liu, Xiang Li, Jiayue Li · 5 authors
The data layer devices in the Software Defined Network (SDN) play an important role in packet forwarding. However, whether the forwarding task can be efficiently completed by the node has not attracted enough attention. A method called TrustBlock is proposed in this paper, which introduces trust as a security attribute in SDN routing planning. Besides, in order to enhance the integrity and controllability of trust evaluation, the double-layer blockchain architecture is established. In the first layer, the behavior data of the node is recorded, and then the trust calculation is performed in the second layer. In the evaluation model, nodes' trust is calculated from three aspects: direct trust, indirect trust and historical trust. Firstly, from the perspective of security, blockchain is used to achieve identity authentication of nodes, after that, from the perspective of reliability, the forwarding status is used to calculate the trust value. Secondly, consensus algorithm is used to filter malicious recommendation trust value and prevent colluding attacks. Finally, the adaptive historical trust weight is designed to prevent the periodic attack. In this paper, the entropy method is used to determine the weight of each evaluation attribute, which can avoid the problem that the subjective judgment method is not adaptable to the weight setting. Simulation results show that the detection rate of the TrustBlock is up to 98.89%, which means this model can effectively identify the abnormal nodes in SDN. Moreover, it is attractive in terms of integrity and controllability.
Different from the traditional healthcare field, Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS) rely more on wireless wearable devices and medical applications to provide better medical services. The secure storage and sharing of medical data are facing great challenges. Blockchain technology with decentralization, security, credibility and tamper-proof is an effective way to solve this problem. However, capacity limitation is one of the main reasons affecting the improvement of blockchain performance. Certificateless aggregation signature schemes can greatly tackle the difficulty of blockchain expansion. In this paper, we describe a two-layer system model in which medical records are stored off-blockchain and shared on-blockchain. Furthermore, a multi-trapdoor hash function is proposed. Based on the proposed multi-trapdoor hash function, we present a certificateless aggregate signature scheme for blockchain-based MCPS. The purpose is to realize the authentication of related medical staffs, medical equipment, and medical apps, ensure the integrity of medical records, and support the secure storage and sharing of medical information. The proposed scheme is highly computationally efficient because it does not use bilinear maps and exponential operations. Many certificateless aggregate signature schemes without bilinear maps in Internet of things (IoT) have been proposed in recent years, but they are not applied to the medical field, and they do not consider the security requirements of medical data. The proposed scheme in this paper has high computing and storage efficiency, while meeting the security requirements in MCPS.
Ethereum, the largest blockchain for running smart contracts, charges the people who send transactions to deploy or invoke smart contracts for thwarting resource abuse. The amount of transaction fee depends on the size of that contract and the operations executed by that contract. Consequently, smart contracts with inefficient code will waste money. In this article, we propose and develop the first tool, namedGasChecker, for automatically identifying gas-inefficient code in smart contracts, and conduct the first empirical study on the prevalence of gas-inefficient code in the deployed smart contracts. More precisely, we first summarize ten gas-inefficient programming patterns and propose a new approach based on symbolic execution (SE) to detect them in the bytecode of smart contracts. To make our approach scalable to analyze millions of smart contracts, we parallelize SE by tailoring it to the MapReduce programming model, and propose a new feedback-based load balancing strategy to effectively utilize cloud resources. Extensive experiments show thatGasCheckerscales well with the increase of workers. The empirical study demonstrates that lots of real smart contracts contain various inefficient code. Manual investigation demonstrates that only 2.5 percent of discovered gas-inefficient instances are false positives.
The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) brought innovation along with unprecedented benefits of convenience and efficacy in many operations that were otherwise very cumbersome. This innovation explosion has surfaced a new dimension of vulnerability and physical threat to the data integrity of IoT networks. Implementing conventional cryptographic algorithms on IoT devices is not future-proof as these devices are constrained in terms of computational power, performance, and memory. In this paper, we are proposing a novel framework, a unique model that integrates IoT networks with a blockchain to address potential privacy and security threats for data integrity. Smart contracts are instrumental in this integration process and they are used to handle device authentication, authorization and access-control, and data management. We further share a new design model for interfaces to integrate both platforms while highlighting its performance results over the existing models. With the incorporation of off-chain data storage into the framework, overall scalability of the system can be increased. Finally, our research concludes how the proposed framework can be fused virtually into any existing IoT applications with minimal modifications.
Invoice financing has been a steadily growing component of the financing market as a whole for the last few years, and, in 2016, it became the third largest financing market. Nonetheless, the risk of frauds is still very high, and most solutions proposed so far are based on private, proprietary platforms that cannot match the global nature of such a market. Even the most recent proposals based on blockchain are mainly adopting a private, permissioned blockchain due to the lack of confidentiality in public blockchain. In this article, we propose an Invoice financing platform based on a public blockchain supporting both fully open and group-restricted auctioning of invoices. We addressed the confidentiality issue by storing the confidential data encrypted in IPFS and the corresponding hash in the smart contract hosted on Ethereum blockchain. Our blockchain-based solution ensures data confidentiality and benefits from the main properties of the public blockchain required in Invoice financing systems, such as transparency, immutability, trustworthiness, and security. Furthermore, our platform introduces a reputation system based on the past behavior of entities, computed using the blockchain global ledger. Such a reputation system allows insurance companies to modulate the cost of the insurance contracts they offer. This combination guarantees the complete transparency and tamperproofness of a public blockchain, while it allows reducing insurance costs and fraud possibilities.
Astrid Novita Putri, Mochamad Hariadi, Adhi Dharma Wibawa
Abstract Indonesia is an agricultural country, and one of the regions is Semarang Regency which well known as chili producers. Unfortunately, common issues occurred such as the fluctuation of the stock price and chili, the low exchange values of farmers in prices because of the complicated flow distribution chain. Furthermore, chili is quickly decomposed, but the demand is high enough. The solutions are to predict the demand for supply chain management, to make payment transactions of agricultural needs of farmers by analyzing stocks, raw materials, price to the chain of distribution, also to build trade links among farmers, consumers and Semarang District Agriculture Service. This journal discussed the flow of supply chain and logistics. We recommend to use the latest technology called Hyperledger Blockchain and IOT so that they can make it easier to carry out the transaction process because it is simple, low cost, transparent, faster. It also has high data security, and simplify ecosystems can be easy to exchange information quickly through Hyperledger Blockchain transactions so that the potential of this technology can bring benefits to farmers and consumers by creating the construction of a trusted distribution network that will bring a data transparency solution so that it can become a suggestion for the Semarang District Agriculture Service.
Abstract The rise of global urbanisation has led to massive pressures on resources such as food, water, infrastructure, and energy demand to support growing populations. It brings adverse impacts on the liveable condition and economic growth of a country if this problem remains unsolved. Smart city is a potential solution to address the challenges of urbanisation by leveraging the technological breakthrough such as internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, big data, and cloud computing to facilitate scarce resources planning and management. With numerous connected devices and vast communication networks, it poses a challenges of security threat which cannot be addressed by the conventional cybersecurity solutions. Blockchain offers a solution in securing the huge numbers of connected devices in smart city network. The application of blockchain technology is leading in the banking and financial industry. However, the uses and implementations in smart city have emerged in recent years. The combination of blockchain technology and smart city has offered a great potential for sustainable development. Thus, it is imperative to discuss the potential of these two elements in making the city safer and sustainable. This paper explores how the blockchain technology application can help in managing smart city and achieve sustainability. The findings revealed that there are five key areas of blockchain application in smart city which are smart governance, smart mobility, smart asset, smart utility and smart logistic. A framework for smart sustainable city with blockchain technology is presented as an outcome of this study. It gives a clear overview for the policy makers and regulators of how blockchain supports within smart city framework. It facilitates the transition towards smart and sustainable cities through the use of blockchain.