Md. Selim Hossain, Sajjad Waheed, Ziaur Rahman, Sk. A. Shezan · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) that has been developed owing toward the merging of various technologies such as instantaneous analytics, machine learning, artificial neural network, product sensors and implanted systems, etc. It also stages a significant part in multiple applications which are a smart city, smart home, agricultural, health monitoring, tourism, transportation, communication, business, education, etc. The security concern associating IoT has to be situated in the direction to attract the research community due to its immensely growing application in our daily life. Since it is light-weight nature, the security mechanism needs changes apart from comprehensive web security. PKI based certificate driven techniques, which in some instances seem not appropriate on the way toward encounter IoT challenges, e.g., as real-time effectiveness, costs, and performance from the security perspective. However, Blockchain has mind-blowing potentials to peer with the IoT aiming to build trust, transparency, and security. Its distinct properties, such as distributed behavior, immutability, and consensus mechanism, can stimulate and improve the rapidly growing IoT system through meaningful integration. We propose to address a practical smart home use case scenario using Ethereum Blockchain to improve IoT security. Public type and smart contract oriented Ethereum Blockchain are adaptable to enhance IoT security remains individual of the contributions that we claim throughout this research work.
Konstantin D. Pandl, Scott Thiebes, Manuel Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ali Sunyaev
Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger\nTechnology (DLT) currently lead to lively debates in academia and practice. AI\nprocesses data to perform tasks that were previously thought possible only for\nhumans. DLT has the potential to create consensus over data among a group of\nparticipants in uncertain environments. In recent research, both technologies\nare used in similar and even the same systems. Examples include the design of\nsecure distributed ledgers or the creation of allied learning systems\ndistributed across multiple nodes. This can lead to technological convergence,\nwhich in the past, has paved the way for major innovations in information\ntechnology. Previous work highlights several potential benefits of the\nconvergence of AI and DLT but only provides a limited theoretical framework to\ndescribe upcoming real-world integration cases of both technologies. We aim to\ncontribute by conducting a systematic literature review on previous work and\nproviding rigorously derived future research opportunities. This work helps\nresearchers active in AI or DLT to overcome current limitations in their field,\nand practitioners to develop systems along with the convergence of both\ntechnologies.\n
Blockchain technology, as a bedrock for distributed ledgers, offers a platform for innovation for a new decentralized and transparent transaction machinery in industries and businesses, and the port is not an exception. The inbuilt features of this technology enrich trust through transparency and traceability within any transaction of data, goods, services, and financial resources. Notwithstanding initial doubts about this technology, lately government and large corporations have offered to adopt and enhance this technology in various fields of applications, from social and legal industries, and finance to design, maritime and port networks. In this paper, the authors review the current status of the Blockchain technology and some of its applications. The potential benefit of such a technology in port and maritime supply chain is then discussed, and a vision for the future Blockchain ready port and maritime supply chain are proposed. The importation of containerized vehicles is used as an example to demonstrate how such technology can be deployed in a global port industry. Finally, the requirements and challenges to adopt this technology in the future in relation to, port and maritime systems are discussed.
Christopher Klinkmüller, Ingo Weber, Alexander Ponomarev, An Binh Tran · 5 authors
Second generation blockchain platforms, like Ethereum, can store arbitrary data and execute user-defined smart contracts. Due to the shared nature of blockchains, understanding the usage of blockchain-based applications and the underlying network is crucial. Although log analysis is a well-established means, data extraction from blockchain platforms can be highly inconvenient and slow, not least due to the absence of logging libraries. To close the gap, we here introduce the Ethereum Logging Framework (ELF) which is highly configurable and available as open source. ELF supports users (i) in generating cost-efficient logging code readily embeddable into smart contracts and (ii) in extracting log analysis data into common formats regardless of whether the code generation has been used during development. We provide an overview of and rationale for the framework's features, outline implementation details, and demonstrate ELF's versatility based on three case studies from the public Ethereum blockchain.
Traditional centralized data storage and processing solutions manifest limitations with regards to overall operational cost and the security and auditability of data. One of the biggest issues with existing solutions is the difficulty of keeping track of who has had access to the data and how the data may have changed over its lifetime; while providing a secure and easy-to-use mechanism to share the data between different users. The ability to electronically regulate data sharing within and across different organizational entities in the supply chain (SC) is an open issue that is only addressed partially by existing legal and regulatory compliance frameworks. In this article, we present Cydon, a decentralized data management platform that executes bespoke distributed applications utilizing a novel search and retrieve algorithm leveraging metadata attributes. Cydon utilizes a smart distributed ledger to offer an immutable audit trail and transaction history for all different levels of data access and modification within a SC and for all data flows within the environment. Results suggest that Cydon provides authorized and fast access to secure distributed data, avoids single points of failure by securely distributing encrypted data across different nodes while maintains an “always-on” chain of custody.
Abstract Blockchain and cryptocurrency are a hot topic in today’s digital world. In this paper, we create a game theoretic model in continuous time. We consider a dynamic game model of the bitcoin market, where miners or players use mining systems to mine bitcoin by investing electricity into the mining system. Although this work is motivated by BTC, the work presented can be applicable to other mining systems similar to BTC. We propose three concepts of dynamic game theoretic solutions to the model: Social optimum , Nash equilibrium and myopic Nash equilibrium . Using the model that a player represents a single “miner” or a “mining pool”, we develop novel and interesting results for the cryptocurrency world.
Deepak Puthal, Saraju P. Mohanty, Venkata P. Yanambaka, Elias Kougianos
In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time distributed networks popularly known as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing and edge computing. The blockchain is gaining a lot of interest in these domains to secure the system by ignoring centralized dependencies, where proof-of-work (PoW) plays a vital role to make the whole security solution decentralized. Due to the resource limitations of the devices, PoW is not suitable for blockchain-based security solutions. This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh), which introduces a cryptographic authentication mechanism to replace PoW for resource constrained devices, and to make the blockchain application-specific. PoAh is thus suitable for private as well as permissioned blockchains. Further, PoAh not only secures the systems, but also maintains system sustainability and scalability. The proposed consensus algorithm is evaluated theoretically in simulation scenarios, and in real-time hardware testbeds to validate its performance. Finally, PoAh and its integration with the blockchain in the IoT and edge computing scenarios is discussed. The proposed PoAh, while running in limited computer resources (e.g. single-board computing devices like the Raspberry Pi) has a latency in the order of 3 secs.
In recent years, blockchain technology has received unparalleled attention from academia, industry, and governments all around the world. It is considered a technological breakthrough anticipated to disrupt several application domains. This has resulted in a plethora of blockchain systems for various purposes. However, many of these blockchain systems suffer from serious shortcomings related to their performance and security, which need to be addressed before any wide-scale adoption can be achieved. A crucial component of any blockchain system is its underlying consensus algorithm, which in many ways, determines its performance and security. Therefore, to address the limitations of different blockchain systems, several existing as well novel consensus algorithms have been introduced. A systematic analysis of these algorithms will help to understand how and why any particular blockchain performs the way it functions. However, the existing studies of consensus algorithms are not comprehensive. Those studies have incomplete discussions on the properties of the algorithms and fail to analyse several major blockchain consensus algorithms in terms of their scopes. This article fills this gap by analysing a wide range of consensus algorithms using a comprehensive taxonomy of properties and by examining the implications of different issues still prevalent in consensus algorithms in detail. The result of the analysis is presented in tabular formats, which provides a visual illustration of these algorithms in a meaningful way. We have also analysed more than hundred top crypto-currencies belonging to different categories of consensus algorithms to understand their properties and to implicate different trends in these crypto-currencies. Finally, we have presented a decision tree of algorithms to be used as a tool to test the suitability of consensus algorithms under different criteria.
Julio Moreno, Manuel Serrano, Eduardo B. Fernández, Eduardo Fernández‐Medina
Big data ecosystems are increasingly important for the daily activities of any type of company. They are decisive elements in the organization, so any malfunction of this environment can have a great impact on the normal functioning of the company; security is therefore a crucial aspect of this type of ecosystem. When approaching security in big data as an issue, it must be considered not only during the creation and implementation of the big data ecosystem, but also throughout its entire lifecycle, including operation, and especially when managing and responding to incidents that occur. To this end, this paper proposes an incident response process supported by a private blockchain network that allows the recording of the different events and incidents that occur in the big data ecosystem. The use of blockchain enables the security of the stored data to be improved, increasing its immutability and traceability. In addition, the stored records can help manage incidents and anticipate them, thereby minimizing the costs of investigating their causes; that facilitates forensic readiness. This proposal integrates with previous research work, seeking to improve the security of big data by creating a process of secure analysis, design, and implementation, supported by a security reference architecture that serves as a guide in defining the different elements of this type of ecosystem. Moreover, this paper presents a case study in which the proposal is being implemented by using big data and blockchain technologies, such as Apache Spark or Hyperledger Fabric.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have improved many aspects of healthcare and allowed for easier patient management for medical providers. Blockchains have been proposed as a promising solution for supporting Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but have also been linked to scalability concerns about supporting real-world healthcare systems. This paper quantifies the scalability issues and bottlenecks related to current blockchains and puts into perspective the limitations blockchains have with supporting healthcare systems. Particularly we show that well known blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and IOTA cannot support transactions of a large scale hospital system such as the University of Kentucky HealthCare system and leave over 7.5M unsealed transactions per day. We then discuss how bottlenecks of blockchains can be relieved with sidechains, enabling well-known blockchains to support even larger hospital systems of over 30M transactions per day. We then introduce the Patient-Healthchain architecture to provide future direction on how scaling blockchains for EHR systems with sidechains can be achieved.
Insurance is one of the fundamental services offered to the citizens to reduce their costs and assist them in case of an emergency. One of the most important challenges in the insurance industry is to address liability challenge and the forging of documents by the involved parties, i.e., insurance company or the users, in order to increase financial gain. Conventional methods to address this challenge is significantly time consuming and costly and also suffers from lock of transparency. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution for the insurance industry in smart cities (BIS). BIS creates a big umbrella that consists of the smart city managers, insurance companies, users, and sensors and devices. The users are known by changeable Public Keys (PKs) that introduces a level of anonymity. The data collected by the sensors is stored in cloud or local storage and is shared with insurance company on demand to find the liable party that in turn increases the privacy of the users. BIS enables the users to prove and share the history of their insurances with other users or insurances. Using Proof of Concept (POC) implementation we demonstrated the applicability of blockchain in insurance industry. The implementation results prove that BIS significantly reduces delay involved in insurance industry as compared with conventional insurance methods.
Mohammed Amine Bouras, Qinghua Lu, Zhang Fan, Yueliang Wan · 6 authors
Electronic healthcare (eHealth) identity management (IdM) is a pivotal feature in the eHealth system. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is an emerging technology that can achieve agreements of transactional data states in a decentralized way. Building identity management systems using Blockchain can enable patients to fully control their own identity and provide increased confidence in data immutability and availability. This paper presents the state of the art of decentralized identity management using Blockchain and highlights the possible opportunities for adopting the decentralized identity management approaches for future health identity systems. First, we summarize eHealth identity management scenarios. Furthermore, we investigate the existing decentralized identity management solutions and present decentralized identity models. In addition, we discuss the current decentralized identity projects and identify new challenges based on the existing solutions and the limitations when applying it to healthcare as a particular use case.
Bitcoin-NG is among the first blockchain protocols to approach the \emph{near-optimal} throughput by decoupling blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization. Its decoupling idea has inspired a new generation of high-performance blockchain protocols. However, the existing incentive analysis of Bitcoin-NG has several limitations. First, the impact of network capacity is ignored. Second, an integrated incentive analysis that jointly considers both key blocks and microblocks is still missing. In this paper, we aim to address these two limitations. First, we propose a new incentive analysis that takes the network capacity into account, showing that Bitcoin-NG can still maintain incentive compatibility against the microblock mining attack even under limited network capacity. Second, we leverage a Markov decision process (MDP) to jointly analyze the incentive of both key blocks and microblocks, showing that the selfish mining revenue of Bitcoin-NG is a little higher than that in Bitcoin only when the selfish miner controls more than 35\% of the mining power. We hope that our in-depth incentive analysis for Bitcoin-NG can shed some light on the mechanism design and incentive analysis of next-generation blockchain protocols.
The demand for electricity increases rapidly along with the advancement of the industrial age. To ensure efficient distribution of the electricity, maintain low losses and high level of quality, and the security of electricity supply, the smart grid concept was proposed. The concept enables a small, individual scale to generate electricity and sell it to the grid. However, the concept adds complexity to the existing system, such as how a transaction between these generators and consumers are conducted, verified and recorded. This paper proposes the blockchain as a tool to manage transactions in the smart grid. Transactions are performed with smart contracts, and the network acts as a transaction verifier. The blockchain provides immutability of the transactions, which ensure every transaction between generators and consumers will always be executed. It also provides immutability to transaction history, which can be used for audit or solving a transaction dispute.
Md. Ashraf Uddin, Andrew Stranieri, Iqbal Gondal, Venki Balasubramanian
Blockchain technologies recently emerging for eHealth, can facilitate a secure, decentralized and patient-driven, record management system. However, Blockchain technologies cannot accommodate the storage of data generated from IoT devices in remote patient management (RPM) settings as this application requires a fast consensus mechanism, careful management of keys and enhanced protocols for privacy. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain leveraged decentralized eHealth architecture which comprises three layers: (1) The Sensing layer – Body Area Sensor Networks include medical sensors typically on or in a patient body transmitting data to a smartphone. (2) The NEAR processing layer – Edge Networks consist of devices at one hop from data sensing IoT devices. (3) The FAR processing layer – Core Networks comprise Cloud or other high computing servers). A Patient Agent (PA) software replicated on the three layers processes medical data to ensure reliable, secure and private communication. The PA executes a lightweight Blockchain consensus mechanism and utilizes a Blockchain leveraged task-offloading algorithm to ensure patient’s privacy while outsourcing tasks. Performance analysis of the decentralized eHealth architecture has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the system in the processing and storage of RPM data.
In this paper, a blockchain-based data sharing and access control system is proposed, for communication between the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The proposed system is intended to overcome the issues related to trust and authentication for access control in IoT networks. Moreover, the objectives of the system are to achieve trustfulness, authorization, and authentication for data sharing in IoT networks. Multiple smart contracts such as Access Control Contract (ACC), Register Contract (RC), and Judge Contract (JC) are used to provide efficient access control management. Where ACC manages overall access control of the system, and RC is used to authenticate users in the system, JC implements the behavior judging method for detecting misbehavior of a subject (i.e., user). After the misbehavior detection, a penalty is defined for that subject. Several permission levels are set for IoT devices’ users to share services with others. In the end, performance of the proposed system is analyzed by calculating cost consumption rate of smart contracts and their functions. A comparison is made between existing and proposed systems. Results show that the proposed system is efficient in terms of cost. The overall execution cost of the system is 6,900,000 gas units and the transaction cost is 5,200,000 gas units.
Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology that can guarantee data consistency and integrity among distributed participants. It has been used in many applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, since IoT applications often introduce a massive number of devices into blockchain systems, the efficiency of the blockchain becomes a serious problem. In this article, we analyze the key factors affecting the efficiency of blockchain. Unlike most existing solutions that handle this from the computing perspective, we consider the problem from the communication perspective. In particular, we propose a coordinated satellite-terrestrial network to create efficient blockchains. We also derive a network scheduling strategy for the proposed architecture. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system can support blockchains for higher efficiency. Moreover, several open research issues and design challenges will be discussed.
Anuraag A Vazirani, Odhran O’Donoghue, David Brindley, Edward Meinert
The lack of interoperability in Britain's medical records systems precludes the realisation of benefits generated by increased spending elsewhere in healthcare. Growing concerns regarding the security of online medical data following breaches, and regarding regulations governing data ownership, mandate strict parameters in the development of efficient methods to administrate medical records. Furthermore, consideration must be placed on the rise of connected devices, which vastly increase the amount of data that can be collected in order to improve a patient's long-term health outcomes. Increasing numbers of healthcare systems are developing Blockchain-based systems to manage medical data. A Blockchain is a decentralised, continuously growing online ledger of records, validated by members of the network. Traditionally used to manage cryptocurrency records, distributed ledger technology can be applied to various aspects of healthcare. In this manuscript, we focus on how Electronic Medical Records in particular can be managed by Blockchain, and how the introduction of this novel technology can create a more efficient and interoperable infrastructure to manage records that leads to improved healthcare outcomes, while maintaining patient data ownership and without compromising privacy or security of sensitive data.
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) is a setup that controls and monitors the physical world around us. The advancement of these systems needs to incorporate an unequivocal spotlight on making these systems efficient. Blockchains and their inherent combination of consensus algorithms, distributed data storage, and secure protocols can be utilized to build robustness and reliability in these systems. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind bitcoins and it provides a decentralized framework to validate transactions and ensure that they cannot be modified. By distributing the role of information validation across the network peers, blockchain eliminates the risks associated with a centralized architecture. It is the most secure validation mechanism that is efficient and enables the provision of financial services, thereby giving users more freedom and power. This upcoming technology provides internet users with the capability to create value and authenticate digital information. It has the capability to revolutionize a diverse set of business applications, ranging from sharing economy to data management and prediction markets. In this paper, we present a holistic survey of various applications of CPS where blockchain has been utilized. Smart grids, health-care systems, and industrial production processes are some of the many applications that can benefit from the blockchain technology and will be discussed in the paper.
Blockchain is evolving to be a secure and reliable platform for secure data sharing in application areas such as the financial sector, supply chain management, food industry, energy sector, internet of things and healthcare. In this paper, we review existing literature and applications available for the healthcare system using blockchain technology. Besides, this work also proposes multiple workflows involved in the healthcare ecosystem using blockchain technology for better data management. Different medical workflows have been designed and implemented using the ethereum blockchain platform which involves complex medical procedures like surgery and clinical trials. This also includes accessing and managing a large amount of medical data. Within the implementation of the workflows of the medical smart contract system for healthcare management, the associated cost has been estimated for this system in terms of a feasibility study which has been comprehensively presented in this paper. This work would facilitate multiple stakeholders who are involved within the medical system to deliver better healthcare services and optimize cost.
To overcome the fast-changing block withholding attacks among multiple mining pools composed of miners in the blockchain system, this paper proposes a mining pool computing power allocation (MPPA) algorithm, which significantly improves the revenues of mining pools with block withholding attacks. MPPA first establishes the revenue optimization model of mining pools, which includes current adequate total computing power, the revenues of honest mining, and the revenues of block withholding attacks. Then MPPA calculates the revenue gain generated by block withholding attacks on other mining pools. To adjust the fixed computing power in each iteration, we have the mining pool computing power allocation algorithm with a fixed change of computing power (MPPA_F). To adjust the optimal recovery and attack computing power, we have the mining pool computing power allocation algorithm with an optimal change of computing power (MPPA_O). The simulation results demonstrate that MPPA_F and MPPA_O can find the optimized solutions of power computing allocation for each mining pool and outperform the state-of-arts such as WSFS, ALLC, and ALLD.