Jan 1, 2020·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Blockchain is an emerging exponential technology that disrupts the existing way of doing business. During the last 10 years its importance has been highlighted and many organizations worldwide have embraced it and developed innovative applications. Even though Blockchain has been adopted by many sectors, Universities are reluctant to propose new academic programs on this field at bachelor and postgraduate level and fail to efficiently educate students on Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Consequently, universities have failed to investigate the business, technical, legal and other aspects of this technology. As a result, we have the paradox where industry and economy would like to experiment and adopt Blockchain solutions but there is a lack of people with appropriate and adequate skills to work on these solutions. Obviously, this holds back the adoption and the widespread of this technology and currently there are problems in scaling up Blockchain technology. The goal of this paper is to explore the area of Blockchain education and training and propose the structure of a master program that can be used as a model. In doing so, we expand the body of knowledge and we shed light to an important area with limited available information and use cases.
Blockchain emerges as a novel distributed digital ledger with consensus of a majority scheme for economic transaction. Recently, major implementations across different sectors that includes the education projects, technology projects, smart contracts, and supply chain management systems. In addition, any other digital data that needs to executed, stored, verified and continually update among participating parties with security, privacy, trust, and transparency without a central authority having control can be relying on Blockchain technology. Blockchain could be new revolution in information technology. This research aimed to conduct an overview of Blockchain attributes and its applications and challenges that encounter during the implementation. Our objective is exploring number of common Blockchain technology applications to highlight of how transparency, anonymity, tamper resistant, and secure decentrality helps to get rid security breaches compromising the current model, in which third parties collect and control massive amounts of critical data. In contrast, number of factor observed as issues that affect deploying Blockchain technology such as majority attack, fork problems, scale, and others issues. The future works must be concerned the proposed solutions in many real world verity environments and explore the characteristics, benefits, and evaluation their effectiveness.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the development of blockchain technology, participants need to have huge storage volumes to deal with the growing blockchain ledger size over time. This requirement leads to the conditional participation and verification of participants, thus weakening the decentralization of a blockchain system. Several compression schemes have been proposed to mitigate this storage problem by compressing a blockchain ledger based on redundancy, modular functions, and hash functions. However, these schemes have the limitation of accumulating the compression results to validate the retained blocks. The accumulation gradually reduces the storage volume for the blockchain ledger within the storage volume of nodes with limited resources, thus reducing the verification capability of the nodes. In this paper, a selective compression scheme using a checkpoint-chain is proposed to prevent the accumulation of compression results. The checkpoint-chain is a second blockchain that stores the checkpoints compressing existing blocks through a block Merkle tree. An update process is also proposed to prevent the accumulation of checkpoints by combining them. As numerous blocks can be verified with only a few updated checkpoints, blockchain nodes with limited resources can reduce the storage volume for the blockchain ledger and achieve high verification capabilities. Finally, compared with the existing compression schemes, the proposed scheme can achieve an average reduction in the storage overhead and an average increase in the verification capability of 76.02% and 13.90%, respectively. Moreover, the corresponding performance improvements are 86.14% and 15.44% when the update process is performed, respectively.
An edge server acts as a data gateway in an IoT network between IoT devices and backend servers. If the edge server is under the ransomware attack, the server’s operation would be interfered by locking its critical files, leading to a single point of failure in the IoT network. This paper proposes a blockchain solution, called Blockchain-enabled Recovery Service (BRS), to tackle the malware injection attack in edge servers. In BRS, edge servers are implemented by nodes in a blockchain network which allows IoT data distributed in edge servers over multiple data connections. It ensures data availability and consistency while improving the network throughput. A simulation test has been conducted to evaluate the performance of edge servers in the blockchain network. The result showed that the size of data record in a ledger is crucial when maximizing the efficiency of a ledger and minimizing data loss in ransomware attack are considered. Moreover, even though the blockchain network is under the attack, data availability and data recovery can be achieved.
The emergence of e-commerce has changed the way people trade. However, merchants are charged high fees for their use of the platform and for payment services. These costs are passed on to customers in the form of higher prices. Blockchain technology can provide lower transaction fees with high security and privacy level but is incapable of delivering the number of transactions per second demanded by real e-commerce. Establishing a layer above the blockchain to manage transactions which we called Blockchain Layer2 technology, has the potential to solve these issues. In this article, we focus on the effect that layer2 technology can provide in reducing fee costs and improving transaction volumes. We introduce the problems that the e-commerce industry is facing currently and how blockchain layer2 technology can help to address these issues. We list and describe the main layer2 mechanisms based on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. We discuss issues that arise when applying layer 2 technology to e-commerce. We analyse the costs associated with difference e-commerce payment network topologies and investigate the funds-capacity needed to support high levels of value transfer.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
WHO was informed on 31 December 2019 of cases of unknown cause pneumonia in Wuhan City, China. On 7 January 2020 Chinese authorities reported a novel coronavirus as the cause and was temporarily labeled "2019-nCoV." Coronaviruses (CoV) are a wide family of viruses which cause diseases ranging from common cold to more serious illnesses. A novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a new strain not previously found in humans. Countries around the globe have stepped up their surveillance to quickly detect any new 2019-nCoV cases. Blockchain is developing into a safe and efficient network for secure data sharing in applications such as the financial industry, operations management, food industry, energy market, the Internet of Things and healthcare. In this paper, we are using blockchain technology as a mean to share authentic data, tracking of relevant information and help speed up the treatment process. At the same time it will preserve person’s identity. Timely deployment and suitable implementation of the proposed model have the opportunity to curb COVID-19 transmissions and associated mortality, especially in environments with inadequate access to testing facilities. This work will also facilitate in the treatment of other infectious diseases. Smart contract have been designed and implemented using the ethereum blockchain platform which has been presented in this paper. This work would facilitate multiple stakeholders who are involved within the medical system to curb the transmission of this disease.
Water has always been considered as a physically scarce resource, particularly in North Africa, Central Asia, West Asia, among others. On the other hand, the current water management system is facing substantial difficulties due to the depletion of resources, the complexity of regulation, as well as the increasing demand of water in society. This article attempts to show the possibility of using blockchain technologies in managing scarce resources, such as water, to address environmental sustainability. Those applications could consolidate the seamless integration of the existing water management system through keen agreements which dwell on the blockchain and take into account automated work processes. It is expected that the implementation of blockchain technology will ensure trust, transparency, and accountability among individuals and other economic actors.
Abstract The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently emerged as an innovative technology capable of empowering various areas such as healthcare, agriculture, smart cities, smart homes and supply chain with real-time and state-of-the-art sensing capabilities. Due to the underlying potential of this technology, it already saw exponential growth in a wide variety of use-cases in multiple application domains. As researchers around the globe continue to investigate its aptitudes, a collective agreement is that to get the best out of this technology and to harness its full potential, IoT needs to sit upon a flexible network architecture with strong support for security, privacy and trust. On the other hand, blockchain (BC) technology has recently come into prominence as a breakthrough technology with the potential to deliver some valuable properties such as resiliency, support for integrity, anonymity, decentralization and autonomous control. Several BC platforms are proposed that may be suitable for different use-cases, including IoT applications. In such, the possibility to integrate the IoT and BC technology is seen as a potential solution to address some crucial issues. However, to achieve this, there must be a clear understanding of the requirements of different IoT applications and the suitability of a BC platform for a particular application satisfying its underlying requirements. This paper aims to achieve this goal by describing an evaluation framework which can be utilized to select a suitable BC platform for a given IoT application.
The mHealth is a term that is used for mobile health supported by smart devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and wearable smart devices, etc. The smart devices strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of interaction with patients, physicians, and specialists. Patients nowadays would like to be intimately involved in their diagnosis as well as to make more informed decisions concerning their care. It has begun to measure the success of the quality of treatment. This was a reason that patients trust mHealth to provide them with consistency in their communications with the physicians. Most wireless strategies do not measure up to this standard so that patient engagement ultimately ended up decreasing. The block-chain can boost mHealth through storing and sharing electronic data securely and transparently. It can enhance the accessibility of patient information in real-time. The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a unique identification number to every connected device such as mobile devices, medical devices, and wearable devices. This framework uses the block-chain and IoT technologies together to provide quick help to the patients, monitor remotely, reduce the cost and unnecessarily hospitalization physically and find the real diagnosis. In order to increase patient involvement, mHealth framework with block-chain and IoT technologies has built with the key objective of providing patients with full information on their treatment and diagnosis.
Due to the rapid increase in the total amount of data generated in the world, the need for more computational resources is also increasing dramatically. This trend results in huge data centers and massive server farms being built around the world, which have a negative impact on global carbon emissions. On the other hand, there are many underutilized personal computers around the world that can be used towards distributed computing. To better understand the capacity of personal computers, we have conducted a survey that aims to find their unused computational power. The results indicate that the typical CPU utilization of a personal computer is only 24.5% and, on average, a personal computer is only used 4.5 hours per day. This shows a significant computational potential that can be used towards distributed computing. In this paper, we introduce ChainFaaS with the motivation to use the computational capacity of personal computers as well as to improve developers' experience of internet-based computing services by reducing their costs, enabling transparency, and providing reliability. ChainFaaS is an open, public, blockchain-based serverless platform that takes advantage of personal computers' computational capacity to run serverless tasks. If a substantial number of personal computers were connected to this platform, some tasks could be offloaded from data centers. As a result, the need for building new data centers would be reduced with a positive impact on the environment. We have proposed the design of ChainFaaS, and then implemented and evaluated a prototype of this platform to show its feasibility.
Jan 1, 2020·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
As unforeseen situations, emergencies threaten the environment, property, and people’s lives. Large emergencies are characterized by the demand for coordination of a variety of actors, such as civil defense or disaster relief. Communication and information exchange are crucial for coordination. Therefore, a solid, stable communication infrastructure is among the crucial factors for emergency response. New technologies that seem to ensure trustworthy communication must be evaluated constantly. Blockchain technology is widely applied in a broad variety of contexts and is commonly known for its decentralized and distributed governance. This is the motivation for the design and evaluation of a framework for the adoption of blockchain technology in the case of emergency response following a design science approach. Evaluation of the artifact using a specific evaluation framework clearly indicates the suitability of the case for application of blockchain technology.
With the development of sensor devices, wireless sensor networks have been widely used, and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are relatively common application scenarios in wireless sensor networks. The wearable device is used to collect physiological data of the human body, and the server device is adopted to store physiological data of the human body. The openness of the network environment and network devices’ dynamic nature make WBANs vulnerable to security threats from attackers. The centralized two-hop architecture contains only one hub node, and the data stored in the hub node may be tampered with by attackers. Once attackers occupy the node, the entire network will be paralyzed. To tackle such an issue, it is proposed in this article a model in WBANs architecture based on Blockchain technology, where the authentication protocol and blind signature protocol between nodes are designed in the new WBANs model, making the Blockchain data transmission system in a wireless network environment secure and reliable. Experimental results show that the proposed method is promising and shows higher levels of safety and stability than other methods.
Security, data privacy and decentralization are significant challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. These challenges are inherited attribute of another emerging technology, Blockchain. This enforced convergence of IoT and Blockchain, attracting researchers to study on the effective use of Blockchain's strength to solve the challenges of IoT. Rapid IoT adoption requires standardization and mature solution on security, data protection for compliance and performance for commercialization. These demands made a surge in variant blockchain flavours and combinations catering to different problems, and one such is Lightweight Scalable Blockchain (LSB). LSB had considerable caveats that require improvement for better adoption in the IoT domain. This paper focuses on encrypting transaction transmission, improving transaction flow, block validation, hash quality, hash rate and storage cost to improvise security and performance. The experimental evaluation is demonstrated on data from the temperature sensor to showcase superior applicability of the proposed work in the IoT domain. Implementation and result comparison with conventional LSB proves, the following achievements 1) An additional layer of transaction encryption using hybrid Elliptic Curve ElGamal (EC-ElGamal) method increases the security of the transmitted transaction for security enhancement. 2) Obtained 20% reduction in transaction processing time, 22% reduction on block validation processing time, 53% improvement on the hash operation and quality with an overall 7% saving on the storage cost thereby increased the overall performance.
Blockchain is a publicly distributed ledger system that provides access to all records for everyone participating in the network. All the additions to the block are permanent and unchangeable. All major or minor changes are reported in a new block and cannot be reversed. Since the ledger is being distributed, there is no centralized authority. By eliminating the need for intermediaries, blockchain enables parties to trace transactions quickly and easily. The transactions occurring on a blockchain are transparent, reliable, authenticated and secured with the help of cryptography. The biggest advantage of the distributed ledger of blockchain is reduced operating costs. Blockchain is already being used by companies like IBM, Barclays, and Kodak etc. Blockchain can contain details of transactions for resources other than money such as land, automobiles, agricultural products etc. Any adjustment must be accepted by most people in the network, and this is achieved using Consensus algorithms. This paper discusses some of the core algorithms for consensus used in blockchain systems.
Jin Wang, Wencheng Chen, Lei Wang, Yongjun Ren · 5 authors
With the development of the Industrial Internet of Things and the continuous expansion of application scenarios, many development bottlenecks have followed. Its data security issue has become an obstacle to its widespread application. It has attracted substantial attention from both academia and industry. Blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization, openness and transparency and non-tampering. It has natural advantages in solving the security of the Industrial Internet of Things. Accordingly, this paper first analyzes the security risks associated with data storage in the Industrial Internet of Things and proposes the use of blockchain technology to ensure the secure storage of data in the Industrial Internet of Things. In traditional blockchains, the data layer uses Merkle hash trees to store data; however, the Merkle hash tree not able to provide non-member proof, which makes it unable to resist attacks from malicious nodes in the network. To solve this problem, this paper replaces the Merkle hash tree with a password accumulator to provide member proof and non-member proof. Moreover, the existing accumulators have trapdoors and cannot be updated in batches, and unable to meet the blockchain’s expansion requirements. This paper presents an improved RSA accumulator and gives the definition of the accumulator. Finally, this paper uses RSA to construct a batch update accumulator scheme without trapdoor, and shows that the scheme is feasible through correctness and security
This research paper focuses on the interconnections between traditional and cutting-edge technological features of virtual currencies and the EU legal framework to prevent the misuse of the financial system for money laundering and terrorist financing purposes. It highlights a set of Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing (AML/CFT) challenges brought about in the Internet of Money (IoM) landscape by the double-edged nature of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) as both transparency and privacy ori- ented. Special attention is paid to inferences from concepts such as pseudonymity and traceability; this contribution explores these notions by relating them to privacy enhanc- ing mechanisms and blockchain intelligence strategies, while heeding both core elements of the present AML/CFT obliged entities’ framework and possible new conceptualizations. Finally, it identifies key controversies and open questions as to the actual feasibility of ef- fectively applying the “active cooperation” AML/CFT approach to the crypto ecosystems.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) represents a network of implantable or wearable medical devices that continuously collect medical data about the patient’s health status. These data are heavy, sensitive and require high level of security. With the emergence of blockchain technology, researchers are focusing on using blockchain strategies to bring security to healthcare applications. However, such integration is very difficult and challenging due to the different requirements in these two technologies. We present in this paper a technical review of existing solutions applying blockchain technology on IoMT. We analyze these studies, discuss the proposed architectures and how they managed the integration challenges. The open issues regarding the application of blockchain over IoMT are also specified.
With the greater availability and reduced dimensions of complex electronics, an Internet of Things (IoT) will emerge in the future, in which machines use sensors to collect and evaluate information about the physical world and share it with other machines without having to rely on human interaction. Blockchain technology encompasses features such as trustworthiness and decentralization and these features can be advantageous in the IoT context, as they can help to ensure data integrity in an Internet of Things unmonitored by humans. In the course of this paper, we investigate to what extent the use of blockchain technology is feasible for autonomous devices in IoT. For this purpose, a prototypical client blockchain component is built using the single-board computer Raspberry Pi and a simulated Ethereum blockchain. This prototype will be examined for aspects like proper functionality, response times and performance.
Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, Hu Xia, Christian Nii Aflah Cobblah, Qi Xia · 6 authors
In recent years, the use of blockchain has gained attention in industrial interventions and research. Blockchain technologies can be particularly utilized in the domain of Smart Governance, which is a critical component of Smart Cities. Smart Governance aims to ensure smarter decision making, openness and collaborative participation of all entities involved as well as help minimize resource usage, reduce consumption and save cost. Smart Governance involves putting in place systems for monitoring and evaluating the performance of government workers. However, government workers lack trust in these systems because they are mostly centralized systems which are prone to single-point of failure problems and also data fed into these systems can be tampered with by the higher-ups or employers to favour individual workers. With these problems, there is a need for a decentralized system that can ensure trust, tamper-resistance, accountability, reliability, transparency and security. In this paper, we propose a decentralized employee evaluation system based on blockchain. We utilized a 3-chain model, namely; ID-Chain, Behavior Chain and Credit Chain fused to make a single unified chain. Our system also makes use of an automated game-based employee evaluation approach. Our system is based on Hyperledger Fabric as the blockchain platform and operating mechanism. Our Proof of Concept (PoC) results shows that in utilizing the Blockchain system, security concerns such as trust, privacy, accountability, among others, that are present in current employee performance evaluation systems are tackled and also in the adoption of the game-based automated system, our system can make an effective decision regarding employee performance. Our system achieves trust, transparency, security and accountability among government workers under a Smart City governing environment.
The Internet of Things (IoT) which creates a hyper-connected society is playing a major role in the 4th industrial revolution. The IoT is being leveraged across various fields of business globally and the number of IoT devices is causing serious security concerns. Since the firmware update of an IoT device is necessary for its lifecycle, secure firmware update of the IoT device is being brought as the first step in IoT security. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Software Updates for Internet of Things (SUIT) working group has started to specify a software update architecture for IoT devices. However, the current SUIT working group adopts a traditional client-server model to distribute firmware images, which potentially causes security risks. The current approach of the SUIT working group is unable to solve a targeting issue and an author-disappearing issue, which is suggested in this paper. Therefore, in this work, we introduce a distributed firmware update architecture based on the SUIT firmware update architecture applying blockchain. Our update architecture can prevent the issues we concern through the characteristics of blockchain, such as decentralization, transparency, and irreversibility. The blockchain network has registration nodes that process registration of manifest and firmware image files from authors, and retrieval nodes that process downloading manifest and firmware image files. The firmware image files are stored in a distributed file system and the hash values of firmware image chunks are stored on the blockchain with manifest files. The proposed architecture in this paper enables the irreversible downloads even in the author-disappearing state and tolerant to a single point of failure.