There has been a massive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications recently for both personal and organization use cases. But an IoT network is vulnerable to many privacy and security concerns. While some researchers have tried to define different access control models for IoT and tried to use blockchain in some cases, the solutions presented to date lacks a flexible and robust access control model that can be used for complex organization and cross-organization resource access scenarios and lacks the scalability and performance needed for IoT. This paper introduces a novel entitlement-based access control model that provides an efficient and secure way to delegate resource access rights to any entity. The solution uses service-oriented approach and a combination of public blockchain (with smart contracts) and local off-chain data for entitlements management and control. To analyze the proposed architecture, a large-scale cross-organization IoT scenario is taken into consideration and some qualitative evaluations are presented while implementation with Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts are currently in progress.
Anum Nawaz, Tuan Nguyen Gia, Jorge Peña Queralta, Tomi Westerlund
The edge and fog computing paradigms enable more responsive and smarter systems without relying on cloud servers for data processing and storage. This reduces network load as well as latency. Nonetheless, the addition of new layers in the network architecture increases the number of security vulnerabilities. In privacy-critical systems, the appearance of new vulnerabilities is more significant. To cope with this issue, we propose and implement an Ethereum Blockchain based architecture with edge artificial intelligence to analyze data at the edge of the network and keep track of the parties that access the results of the analysis, which are stored in distributed databases.
With the introduction of the term blockchain in 2008, it's interest has been increasing in the community since the idea was coined. The reason for this interest is because it provides anonymity, security and integrity without any central third party organisation in control of data and transaction. It has attracted huge interest in research areas due to its advances in various platforms, limitations and challenges. There are various Distributed Ledger Technologies that demonstrates their special features which overcome limitations of other platforms. However, implementations of various distributed ledger technologies differ substantially based on their data structures, consensus protocol and fault tolerant among others. Due to these variations, they have a quite different cost, performance, latency and security. In this paper, working and in-depth comparison of major distributed ledger technologies including their special features, strengths and weaknesses is presented and discussed by identifying various criteria.
Abstract Blockchain and blockchain‐based decentralised applications have been attracting increasing attention recently. In public blockchain systems, users usually connect to third‐party peers or run a peer to join the P2P blockchain network. However, connecting to unreliable blockchain peers will lead to resource waste and even loss of cryptocurrencies by repeated transactions. In order to select reliable blockchain peers, it is urgently needed to evaluate and predict their reliability of them. Faced with this problem, we propose hybrid blockchain reliability prediction (H‐BRP), a Hybrid Blockchain Reliability Prediction model, to extract the blockchain reliability factors and then make the personalised prediction for each user. Comprehensive experiments conducted on 100 blockchain requesters and 200 blockchain peers demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed H‐BRP model. Further, the implementation and dataset of 2,000,000 test cases are released.
The number of IoT devices is growing at an exponential rate.It is expected that by 2020, there will be approximately 30 billion internet-connected devices and 500 billion by 2030.Not only, does it increase security concerns but will give rise to interoperability issues.In this paper, the recently introduced Ethereum network will be utilised with respect to Internet of Things to create an infrastructure compatible with IoT devices.With an addition of an automated, immutable smart contract that will aid the interoperability of various devices through the heterogenousfriendly Ethereum network.The true potential of Ethereum, when combined with IoT, will be explored and demonstrated.Demonstrated through an implementation in which power will be provided to a room embedded with various IoT devices upon payment (in the form of rent) into a landlord's smart contract [1].
Gabriel Hogan, Sigma Dolins, Izzet F. Senturk, Ioannis Fyrogenis · 8 authors
In this paper two contemporary technological novelties are combined to introduce the concept of a blockchain-based MaaS, with the aim of pinpointing where and how business value can be created through data-based services of such a system. Towards this purpose, an integrated version of the Business Model Canvas is deployed, combining the advantages of the Lean Canvas and the Ethics Canvas. The overview of data flows among the versatile system stakeholders are outlined to highlight the potential benefits for diverse industries through sharing and collaboration.
As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices increases, services expand and illegal hacking and infringement methods become more sophisticated, an effective solution for blockchain technology is required as a fundamental solution to security threats. In this paper, we develop the security module of an IoT device based on blockchain technology that blocks hacking and information infringement and forms a multi-security blockchain system between the IoT device and the user device and we develop a user application. We contribute to addressing the security threats faced by IoT application services by developing a new method. In particular, we present some schemes for the development of a multi-security certification system based on blockchain for IoT security.
Iago Sestrem Ochôa, Luís Augusto Silva, Gabriel de Mello, Bruno Alves da Silva · 8 authors
With the popularization of the Internet-of-Things, various applications have emerged to make life easier. These applications generate a large amount of user data. Analyzing the data obtained from these applications, one can infer personal information about each user. Considering this, it is clear that ensuring privacy in this type of application is essential. To guarantee privacy various solutions exist, one of them is UbiPri middleware. This paper presents a decentralized implementation of UbiPri middleware using the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts were used in conjunction with a communication gateway and a distributed storage service to ensure users privacy. The results obtained show that the implementation of this work ensures privacy at different levels, data storage security, and performance regarding scalability in the Internet of Things environments.
The biggest advantage of introducing blockchain is that it can deliver data to members while maintaining the security of medical data sensitive to personal privacy. That is, by using a blockchain in the ecosystem of medical information, it is possible to connect the insurer, the health care organization, and the patient. The blockchain provides health data efficiently and increases accuracy and efficiency when changing patient data through the health system. In addition, it improves the efficiency and control of patients' personal health data and increases the price transparency of pharmaceuticals and health services. So far, the healthcare industry has had strict regulations and policies to limit data security and personal privacy. Therefore, this paper has suggested the framework with functions to support clinical decision making more efficiently using blockchain technology and FHIR data standards. Basically, this framework is built on the FHIR, which is designed to be provided to patients. In addition, it complements and uses open key encryption technology and meets the key requirements required in interoperability functions, such as user identification/authentication, secure data exchange, and authorized data. In particular, it provides further secure data exchange method aiming access guarantee, consistent data format and system modularity. These instructions give you guidelines for preparing papers for
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.
The extreme automation of our factories is necessary in order to face the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This new industrial paradigm will force our industries to manufacture much shorter and customized series at increasingly competitive prices, even tackling the manufacture of thousands of different configurations of a single base product. In order to achieve this, our production processes must have a flexibility in their configuration that has never been imagined before. This flexibility and ability to adapt automatically to demand are the essence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and are part of the Western strategy to recover an industrial sector increasingly threatened by the Eastern production of large series at really competitive prices. Based on our participation in more than a dozen proofs of concept in the automotive, aeronautics, agri-food, or energy sectors, we describe the scenarios in which blockchain technology brings the greatest benefits to Industry 4.0. After finishing different experimentations, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the true added value of blockchain in the industry and contrasted our conclusions through interviews with more than 20 people in charge of innovation from different industries. As a result, we have obtained the principal four values of blockchain technology applied to Industry 4.0.
Mirko Koscina, David Manset, Claudia Negri-Ribalta, Octavio Pérez Kempner
We propose a new healthcare data exchange platform for research centers, hospitals and healthcare institutions. Our model is based on a federated blockchain network that interconnect the healthcare institutions and orchestrate the data life cycle from the data publication to the data consumption. The blockchain is responsabible to keep the traceability of the whole process and we use a specially designed smart contract to control the data sharing process. Moreover, we provide the means to enforce GDPR and thus achieve a GDPR compliant model.
Michail Bampatsikos, Christoforos Ntantogian, Christos Xenakis, Stelios C. A. Thomopoulos
Today, an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare devices, crucial to a person's wellbeing and life, connects to the internet and consequently is exposed to a variety of threats. These devices possess low computational resources, and as a result they cannot use security tools such as antivirus or firewalls. Consequently, they become easy targets for cyber-attacks and malware infection, thus putting a person's life at risk. One way to protect these devices from malware infection is Remote Attestation (RA), a process by which a device with low computational power (prover) verifies its internal state to a party with higher computational resources (verifier) upon the latter's request. However, in case the verifier is malicious, it may constantly send numerous requests for RA to a prover to prevent it from performing the functions it was designed for. Thus, keeping it busy and rendering it unusable to its legit users as well as services. In short, the verifier performs a Computational Denial of Service (CDoS) attack against the prover. This paper proposes the BARRETT architecture which uses a Public Ethereum Network (PEN) in conjunction with an RA protocol to protect the prover from CDoS attacks. In particular, the PEN in BARRETT deters CDoS by forcing the verifier to pay a fee in Ether cryptocurrency every time they wish to send an Attestation Request (AR) to a prover. The verifier pays the fee since in BARRETT it can send the AR only via Ethereum transactions. Consequently, any attempt to perform a CDoS becomes prohibitively expensive.
In 2016, India launched the smart cities mission. The objective of this mission is to developed cities by using ‘Smart’ solutions that provide core infrastructure and give citizens a decent quality of life, a clean and sustainable environment. The focus is on sustainable and inclusive development. To achieve this it uses the technology to integrate and manage the infrastructures to provide better services and ensure efficient and optimal utilisation of available resources. Incorporation of new technologies for the development of smart cities gives the new ways of rethinking different services. In this paper, we are going study the applications of blockchain technology in smart city development
Spyros Voulgaris, Nikos Fotiou, Vasilios A. Siris, George C. Polyzos · 6 authors
In the last few years, we have been witnessing the convergence of the physical with the digital world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is progressing at a fast pace, and IoT devices are becoming pervasive in our physical environments, bringing the vision of Intelligent Environments closer to reality. At the same time, the newly-introduced blockchain technology is offering for the first time ever cryptographically proven trust based on a set of mutually untrusted nodes. Blockchain technology thus has the potential to become a key component of many IoT systems, offering them an unprecedented level of accountability, transparency, and reliability. This paper first lays out the principles on which blockchain systems are operating, along with descriptions of the most noteworthy blockchain implementations. It then presents a number of systems through which blockchains may interact with external systems and third-party data sources. Finally, it provides a survey of the state-of-the-art blockchain-based systems targeting IoT applications.
With the interest and attention that the Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have recently demanded, the technology is advancing at a very high rate. With investors and applications in a wide variety of fields, a lot of funding and efforts are being driven into bringing the technology to everyday use. The community and companies are coming up with new ways to collaborate, which makes the blockchain ecosystem evolve at full tilt. Consequently, this paper’s aim is to review the academic and grey literature and to provide readers with information about the evolution, benefits and challenges of the Public Distributed Ledger Technologies and to discuss the latest solutions, which are being developed for bringing decentralization closer to the mainstream. The paper reviews the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structured distributed ledgers with focus on the Hedera Hashgraph, a novelty DLT bringing a unique consensus algorithm with new use-cases enabled by new cryptoeconomic mechanisms, as well as vital services, such as Solidity smart contracts and distributed file storage. Then, we are going to explore second-layer network protocols, a major topic for solving scalability issues and for decentralizing cryptocurrency exchanges. The article tries also to identify the particularities of these technologies and how they bring specific answers to the blockchain trilemma, consisting in three themes - scalability, interoperability and sustainability.
Yao Sun, Lei Zhang, Gang Feng, Bowen Yang · 6 authors
Blockchain has shown a great potential for Internet of Things (IoT) systems to establish trust and consensus mechanisms with no involvement of any third party. It has been not clear how the low complexity devices and the wireless communications among them can pose constraints on the blockchain enabled IoT systems. In this paper, we establish a fundamental analysis model to underpin the blockchain enabled IoT system. By considering spatio-temporal domain Poisson distribution, i.e., node geographical distribution and transaction arrival rate in time domain are both modeled as Poisson point process (PPP), we first derive the distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), blockchain transaction successful rate as well as overall throughput. Then, based on the analytical model, we design an optimal full function node deployment for blockchain system to achieve the maximum transaction throughput with the minimum full function node density. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis and evaluate the relationship between blockchain full function node deployment and the density of IoT nodes.
Stefano Loss, Nélio Cacho, João Marcos do Valle, Frederico Lopes
Currently, blockchain has been widely used to store decentralised and secure transactions involving cryptocurrency (for instance, Bitcoin solution). On the other hand, smart city applications are concerned about how data and services can be safely stored and shared. In this regard, this article investigates the use of blockchain and pinpoints a set of essential requirements to meet the needs of blockchain for the context of smart cities. Base on that, we propose a platform, named Orthus, to support the use of blockchain in smart city initiatives. We have demonstrated how to use the proposed platform in the context of the Natal Smart City Initiative, in Brazil, to handle land registration. Finally, we compare this platform with other implementations that use blockchain in different domains.
In any registration process, it is a hassle to always bring physical documents. Not only that, the process is elongated if they are lost, and will contribute to identity theft if unauthorized persons have access to those documents. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to generate a decentralized system, similar to the concept of blockchain, to allow registered persons to access user’s personal records. To further elaborate, this system is designed to be used by three consumers, which are: user, authority, and third-party (requester). Nowadays, majority of systems are susceptible to massive data breaches. However, some researches have theorized that blockchain technology may solve this problem, such as one that uses a real-world example, Aadhaar. In conclusion, this project enhances that the area of blockchain identity is vital in helping society gain control of their personal details. Since most of researches are focused on storage system of businesses using blockchain, personal identities of the people should be digitized on the blockchain as well. An identity verification system that is entirely owned by the individual will increase trust that the data is genuine and reliable.
Christos Profentzas, Magnus Almgren, Olaf Landsiedel
For any distributed system, and especially for the Internet of Things, recording interactions between devices is essential. At first glance, blockchains seem to be suitable for storing these interactions, as they allow multiple parties to share a distributed ledger. However, at a closer look, blockchains require heavy computations, large memory capacity, and always-on communication to the cloud; these are three properties that are challenging for IoT devices with limited resources. In this paper, we present IoTLogBlock to address these challenges. IoTLogBlock connects resource-constrained IoT devices to the blockchain, and it consists of three building blocks jointly enabling recording transactions: a lightweight contract signing protocol, a blockchain network, and a smart contract. The contract signing protocol allows devices to interact locally to perform transactions, even if no communication to the cloud and the blockchain exists at that moment. At a later time, devices forward the stored transactions to the blockchain, where a smart contract ultimately verifies the transactions. We evaluate our design on low-power devices and quantify the performance in terms of memory, computation, and energy consumption. Our results show that a constrained device can create and sign a transaction within 3 s on average. Finally, we expose the devices to network scenarios with edge connections ranging from 10 s to over 2 h.
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.
Internet of things (IoT), mobile edge computing (MEC), and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) have attracted significant attention in both industry and academic research. By consolidating these technologies, IoT can be facilitated with improved connectivity, better data transmission, energy saving, and other advantages. However, the communication between these entities is subject to potential cyber threats. In addition, the integrity of the data must be maintained after storing into local storage. Blockchain is a data structure that supports features like pseudonymity, data integrity etc. This paper represents a blockchain based data acquisition process in which information is gathered from IoTs using UAV as a relay and is securely kept in blockchain at MEC server. In the proposed scheme, data are encrypted prior to transfer to MEC server with the assistance of a UAV. Upon receiving the data, MEC server validates the data and the identity of the sender. Successful validation is followed by stocking of the data into blockchain, subsequent to obtaining consent from the validators. Security analysis is conducted in order to show the feasibility of the proposed secure scheme. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed via simulation and implementation.
Block chain being a foundational technology impacting and attracting a wide range of applications has become predominant in solving the problem of privacy preserving and security in multitude sectors that is under the control of the government and the private. The paper also presents the security and the privacy mechanism using the block chain to prevent the misuse and the corruption in the sharing of huge set of data generated from the judiciary, security, legislature, commercial code registries etc. The proposed system enables reliability and the trust in the data sharing in the communication channels utilizing the block chain with the RSA digital signature. The proposed system is simulated as a java programming version to evince the enhancement in the latency in the sharing of the information's along with the privacy and the security
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
André Henrique Mayer, Cristiano André da Costa, Rodrigo da Rosa Righi
Blockchain could reinvent the way patient's electronic health records are shared and stored by providing safer mechanisms for health information exchange of medical data in the healthcare industry, by securing it over a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Intending to support and ease the understanding of this distributed ledger technology, a solid Systematic Literature Review was conducted, aiming to explore the recent literature on Blockchain and healthcare domain and identify existing challenges and open questions, guided by the raise of research questions regarding EHR in a Blockchain. More than 300 scientific studies published in the last ten years were surveyed, resulting in an up-to-date taxonomy creation, challenges and open questions identified, and the most significant approaches, data types, standards and architectures regarding the use of Blockchain for EHR were assessed and discussed.