Abderahman Rejeb, John G. Keogh, Horst Treiblmaier
Modern supply chains have evolved into highly complex value networks and turned into a vital source of competitive advantage. However, it has become increasingly challenging to verify the source of raw materials and maintain visibility of products and merchandise while they are moving through the value chain network. The application of the Internet of Things (IoT) can help companies to observe, track, and monitor products, activities, and processes within their respective value chain networks. Other applications of IoT include product monitoring to optimize operations in warehousing‚ manufacturing, and transportation. In combination with IoT, Blockchain technology can enable a broad range of different application scenarios to enhance value chain transparency and to increase B2B trust. When combined, IoT and Blockchain technology have the potential to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of modern supply chains. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we illustrate how the deployment of Blockchain technology in combination with IoT infrastructure can streamline and benefit modern supply chains and enhance value chain networks. Second, we derive six research propositions outlining how Blockchain technology can impact key features of the IoT (i.e., scalability, security, immutability and auditing, information flows, traceability and interoperability, quality) and thus lay the foundation for future research projects.
Petar Kochovski, Sandi Gec, Vlado Stankovski, Marko Bajec · 5 authors
Trust is a crucial aspect when cyber-physical systems have to rely on resources and services under ownership of various entities, such as in the case of Edge, Fog and Cloud computing. The DECENTER’s Fog Computing Platform is developed to support Big Data pipelines, which start from the Internet of Things (IoT), such as cameras that provide video-streams for subsequent analysis. It is used to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms across the Edge-Fog-Cloud computing continuum which provide benefits to applications, including high Quality of Service (QoS), improved privacy and security, lower operational costs and similar. In this article, we present a trust management architecture for DECENTER that relies on the use of blockchain-based Smart Contracts (SCs) and specifically designed trustless Smart Oracles. The architecture is implemented on Ethereum ledger (testnet) and three trust management scenarios are used for illustration. The scenarios (trust management for cameras, trusted data flow and QoS based computing node selection) are used to present the benefits of establishing trust relationships among entities, services and stakeholders of the platform.
Seonghyeon Gong, Erzhena Tcydenova, Jeong Hoon Jo, Younghun Lee · 5 authors
The broadly configured smart city network requires a variety of security considerations for a heterogeneous device environment. Because a network of heterogeneous devices facilitates an attacker’s intrusion through a specific device or node, a device management framework is required to manage each node comprehensively. This paper proposes a blockchain-based device management framework for efficient device management, scalable firmware update and resiliences on attacks against smart city network. This framework offers four device management and firmware update mechanisms based on the performance and requirements of each device: bidirectional mechanism of general end node and a unidirectional mechanism of the lightweight end node. This difference optimizes the resource of network and devices in terms of management and security. All management history of each device is stored in the blockchain and transmitting firmware between vendor and management node is conducted through a smart contract of blockchain for security and resilience on the attack. Through the framework proposed in this paper, the confidentiality and availability of device management on smart city network as well as integrity, auditability, adaptability and authentication for each node are ensured and the effectiveness of the proposed framework is presented through the security analysis.
Ilya Afanasyev, Alexander Kolotov, Ruslan Rezin, Konstantin Danilov · 13 authors
Decentralization, immutability and transparency make of Blockchain one of the most innovative technology of recent years. This paper presents an overview of solutions based on Blockchain technology for multi-agent robotic systems, and provide an analysis and classification of this emerging field. The reasons for implementing Blockchain in a multi-robot network may be to increase the interaction efficiency between agents by providing more trusted information exchange, reaching a consensus in trustless conditions, assessing robot productivity or detecting performance problems, identifying intruders, allocating plans and tasks, deploying distributed solutions and joint missions. Blockchain-based applications are discussed to demonstrate how distributed ledger can be used to extend the number of research platforms and libraries for multi-agent robotic systems.
Khaled Shuaib, Heba Saleous, Karim Shuaib, Nazar Zaki
Blockchain as an emerging technology has been gaining in popularity, with more possible applications to utilize the technology in the near future. With the offer of a decentralized, distributed environment without the need for a third trusted party (TTP), blockchains are being used to solve issues in systems that are susceptible to cyberattacks. One possible field that could benefit from blockchains that researchers have been focusing on is healthcare. Current healthcare information systems face several challenges, such as fragmented patient data, centralized systems which are viewed as single points of attacks, and the lack of patient-oriented services. In this paper, we investigate and analyze recent literature related to the use of blockchains to tackle issues found in modern healthcare information systems. This is done to understand issues that researchers commonly focus on, to discover remaining areas of concern in any proposed solution, and to understand the possible directions of the integration of blockchains in healthcare and personalized medicine. Background information regarding blockchains and existing healthcare information systems is reviewed, followed by the methodology used in the preparation of this review, where the research questions to consider are stated. Afterwards, an analysis of the results is provided, concluding with a discussion of the remaining issues that need to be focused on, and how blockchains could benefit the healthcare sector and empower personalized medicine.
The Internet of things (IoT) presents new opportunities and challenges due to its scale and dynamic nature. One significant challenge for the IoT is the need for security, in particular access control solutions, that are designed to meet the characteristics of these systems. Delegation of rights, from one entity to another, is a crucial component of an access control system. The IoT requires a secure, flexible, and fine-grained delegation model. While there has been considerable work in the area of delegation, much of it assumes a centralized, well-resourced system and these solutions have limited capacity in the context of the IoT. Where delegation models for the IoT have been proposed they typically provide only coarse-grained control over the delegation of rights. Moreover, many of them require a centralized trusted authority, which can suffer from a single-point failure and is not an ideal base for a large and dynamic system like the IoT. In this paper, we propose an identity-less, asynchronous, and decentralized delegation model for the IoT based on blockchain technology. We describe system components, architecture, and key aspects related to the security of the system. We use attributes to validate an entity rather than depending upon unique identities. We demonstrate the feasibility of our model through use-case examples and analyze the performance with a proof of concept testbed implementation using Ethereum private blockchain.
Internet of Things (IoT) has gradually become one of the most important platforms across different disciplines, by enabling dedicated physical objects to communicate with other Internet-enabled things. With this trend, more devices in medical environments are capable of connecting with each other, named Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). It aims for improving efficiency and reducing communication delay, e.g., monitoring the status of patients and notifying abnormal events. However, due to the distributed nature, insider attacks are still one of the major threats to such IoT environment. How to improve the trust management in IoMT remains a challenge. Motivated by the popularity of blockchain technology, in this paper, our general goal is to investigate the performance of blockchain-based trust management. In particular, we focus on a particular type of IoMT, named medical smartphone networks (MSNs), because of the wide adoption of smartphones in the medical domain. Then, we apply blockchains for enhancing the effectiveness of Bayesian inference-based trust management to detect malicious nodes in MSNs. In the evaluation, we explore the performance of our approach in two different healthcare environments, and experimental results demonstrate that blockchain technology can help improve the detection efficiency of detecting malicious nodes with reasonable workload.
The signing of electronic contracts and the certification of important documents are realized by utilizing blockchain, identity-based cryptography and electronic signature technology. Blockchain technology can realize the data distributed ledgers through the entire system nodes, the whole processes, and the entire transactions. Identity-based cryptography and electronic signature technology can achieve data integrity, privacy, and nonrepudiation. All data is shared by all participating nodes, the information in the cyberspace is more transparent, and the behavior is more traceable. A complete and compliant contract signing process and data certification is achieved.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The emerging blockchain technology shows promising potential to enhance industrial systems and the Internet of things (IoT) by providing applications with redundancy, immutable storage, and encryption. In the past few years, many more applications in industrial IoT (IIoT) have emerged and the blockchain technologies have attracted huge amounts of attention from both industrial and academic researchers. In this paper, we address the integration of blockchain and IIoT from the industrial prospective. A blockchain-enabled IIoT framework is introduced and involved fundamental techniques are presented. Moreover, the main applications and key challenges are addressed. A comprehensive analysis for the most recent research trends and open issues is provided associated with the blockchain-enabled IIoT.
Aleksandr Zavodovski, Nitinder Mohan, Walter Wong, Jussi Kangasharju
High demand for low latency services and local data processing has given rise for edge computing. As opposed to cloud computing, in this new paradigm computational facilities are located close to the end-users and data producers, on the edge of the network, hence the name. The critical issue for the proliferation of edge computing is the availability of local computational resources. Major cloud providers are already addressing the problem by establishing facilities in the proximity of end-users. However, there is an alternative trend, namely, developing open infrastructure as a set of standards, technologies, and practices to enable any motivated parties to offer their computational capacity for the needs of edge computing. Open infrastructure can give an additional boost to this new promising paradigm and, moreover, help to avoid problems for which cloud computing has been long criticized for, such as vendor lock-in or privacy. In this paper, we discuss the challenges related to creating such an open infrastructure, in particular focusing on the applicability of distributed ledgers for contractual agreement and payment. Solving the challenge of contracting is central to realizing an open infrastructure for edge computing, and in this paper, we highlight the potential and shortcomings of distributed ledger technologies in the context of our use case.
Recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled the collection, processing, and analysis of various forms of data including the personal data from billions of objects to generate valuable knowledge, making more innovative services for its stakeholders. Yet, this paradigm continuously suffers from numerous security and privacy concerns mainly due to its massive scale, distributed nature, and scarcity of resources towards the edge of IoT networks. Interestingly, blockchain based techniques offer strong countermeasures to protect data from tampering while supporting the distributed nature of the IoT. However, the enormous amount of energy consumption required to verify each block of data make it difficult to use with resource-constrained IoT devices and with real-time IoT applications. Nevertheless, it can expose the privacy of the stakeholders due to its public ledger system even though it secures data from alterations. Edge computing approaches suggest a potential alternative to centralized processing in order to populate real-time applications at the edge and to reduce privacy concerns associated with cloud computing. Hence, this paper suggests the novel privacy preserving blockchain called TrustChain which combines the power of blockchains with trust concepts to eliminate issues associated with traditional blockchain architectures. This work investigates how TrustChain can be deployed in the edge computing environment with different levels of absorptions to eliminate delays and privacy concerns associated with centralized processing and to preserve the resources in IoT networks.
Christian Rondanini, Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari
Selection criteria regulating IoT device discovery involve confidentiality issue on the information the constraints convey. A promising approach to cope with this issue is leveraging on blockchain technology and smart contracts to implement the overall discovery process deployment. However, due to the blockchain design, data within the blockchain is public and smart contracts cannot access data outside the blockchain, unless through the exploitation of Oracles. On the one hand, this brings benefits of trust decentralization, transparency, and accountability of the discovery process. On the other hand, it carries serious consequences on confidentiality and privacy as well as on Oracles trustworthiness. For these reasons, in this paper, we investigate how to ensure data confidentiality during the discovery process of IoT devices on blockchain even in the presence of an untrusted Oracle.
Abstract In the traditional medical system, individual medical data is managed by hospitals rather than individual patients. It is difficult to exchange effectively with fragmented storage, and large amounts of data are difficult to realize their potential value. With the rapid development of medical informatization, centralized storage of fragmented medical data has been unable to meet the relevant needs of the medical industry. To solve the difficulty of sharing and the complexity of confirming rights in the medical system, this paper proposes a medical data sharing model based on blockchain. The model provides reliable storage with IPFS file system, uses Proxy re-encryption to realize data sharing and ensure data proprietary rights, and uses Token economic system to measure the contribution in the sharing process, which stimulates the enthusiasm of sharing. At last, based on the existing sharing problem of medical data, the paper shows the potential solution.
Farhan Ahmad, Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache, Fatih Kurugöllü, Rasheed Hussain
The revolution of Internet-of-vehicles (IoV) has stimulated a substantial response from academia, research, and industry due to its massive potential to improve overall transportation. Current IoV faces huge challenges due to its reliance on IP-based network architecture. Therefore, named data networking (NDN) is proposed as a promising architecture to solve issues posed by IP-based systems. Recently, blockchains (BCs) have been utilized within IoV to increase network security. However, the integration of BC within NDN-enabled IoV is still an open research problem. In this study, we proposed a novel tier-based architecture known as “Blockchain in NDN-enabled Internet-of-vehicles (BINDN),” which can support BC within NDN-enabled IoV. BINDN can be used as reference architecture to design security solutions in NDN-enabled IoV using BC. Furthermore, it provides an extensive set of applications including IoV security, trust management, and privacy enhancements. Moreover, we highlighted major challenges and issues when integrating BC within NDN-enabled IoV.
Suisheng Li, Hong Xiao, Hao Wang, Tao Wang · 6 authors
The blockchain technology becomes a key facilitator for Intelligent Manufacturing as it enables intelligent nodes to participate in global manufacturing networks with secure ledgers and smart contracts features. However, Traditional centralized storage cannot meet performance and security requirements and fully distributed storage consumes a large amount of computing, storage and network resources, which is inefficient and difficult to implement. In this paper, we propose a clustering strategy on node community clustering by constructing a trust model based on the decentralization of blockchain technology. We introduce a multi-chain storage structure. Our experiments show that the proposed strategy reduces data synchronization time and storage space, improves system performance by enabling efficient parallel processing.
Pekka Nikander, Juuso Autiosalo, Santeri Paavolainen
The upsurge of Industrial Internet of Things is forcing industrial information systems to enable less hierarchical information flow. The connections between humans, devices, and their digital twins are growing in numbers, creating a need for new kind of security and trust solutions. To address these needs, industries are applying distributed ledger technologies, aka blockchains. A significant number of use cases have been studied in the sectors of logistics, energy markets, smart grid security, and food safety, with frequently reported benefits in transparency, reduced costs, and disintermediation. However, distributed ledger technologies have challenges with transaction throughput, latency, and resource requirements, which render the technology unusable in many cases, particularly with constrained Internet of Things devices.To overcome these challenges within the Industrial Internet of Things, we suggest a set of interledger approaches that enable trusted information exchange across different ledgers and constrained devices. With these approaches, the technically most suitable ledger technology can be selected for each use case while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of the most widespread ledger implementations. We present state of the art for distributed ledger technologies to support the use of interledger approaches in industrial settings.
The fast developing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies provide a promising opportunity to build large-scale systems to connect numerous heterogeneous devices into the Internet. Most existing IIoT infrastructures are based on a centralized architecture, which is easier for management but cannot effectively support immutable and verifiable services among multiple parties. Blockchain technology provides many desired features for large-scale IIoT infrastructures, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, trackability, and immutability. This paper presents a blockchain-based IIoT architecture to support immutable and verifiable services. However, when applying blockchain technology to the IIoT infrastructure, the required storage space posts a grant challenge to resource-constrained IIoT infrastructures. To address the storage issue, this paper proposes a hierarchical blockchain storage structure, \textit{ChainSplitter}. Specially, the proposed architecture features a hierarchical storage structure where the majority of the blockchain is stored in the clouds, while the most recent blocks are stored in the overlay network of the individual IIoT networks. The proposed architecture seamlessly binds local IIoT networks, the blockchain overlay network, and the cloud infrastructure together through two connectors, the \textit{blockchain connector} and the \textit{cloud connector}, to construct the hierarchical blockchain storage. The blockchain connector in the overlay network builds blocks in blockchain from data generated in IIoT networks, and the cloud connector resolves the blockchain synchronization issues between the overlay network and the clouds. We also provide a case study to show the efficiency of the proposed hierarchical blockchain storage in a practical Industrial IoT case.
Land is an immovable unique property, its value depends on its location and to prove the ownership of the land, one must provide various legal documents that should conclusively prove it. Due to this reason a land administration and ownership title registration system should be highly secure to avoid any document forgery. The current real estate registration process take a long time to update in the centralized databases maintained in the government registration department, other departments related to the properties which creates numerous property ownership title disputes. The process of storing the land transaction records on centralized storage servers is vulnerable for the hackers to tamper the records to make duplicate, modify and forge the original transactions and also maintaining the ownership title i.e sale deed in the paper documents may lead to missing, damage of documents and also due to human errors it may contain improper, incomplete details related to the property. This paper proposes a system called the Blockchain based Secure Smart Property Registration Management System (SSPRMS) which provides a solution of tamper free, permanent storage of real estate transaction information records on the decentralized distributed public digital ledgers called hyper ledgers. The SSPRMS provides secure, instant the transfer of ownership title without the help of third party, with zero transaction cost using Smart Contracts, implemented based on PoW consensus algorithms, also providing the self-notarization mechanism, and availability of evidence for the land title from distributed databases and a Smart Property Cards (SPC) provides a mechanism for storing updated owner ship title and other details of the property in the digitized form on the digital smart cards instead of storing these information in the paper documents which eradicate the property related disputes, the fraudulent, illegal registrations of property ownership titles.
Data integration and fast effective data processing are the primary challenges in today’s high-performance computing systems used for Big Data processing and analysis in practical scenarios. Blockchain (BC) is a hot, modern technology that ensures high security of data processes stored in highly distributed networks and ICT infrastructures. BC enables secure data transfers in distributed systems without the need for all operations and processes in the network to be initiated and monitored by any central authority (system manager). This paper presents the background of a generic architectural model of a BC system and explains the concept behind the consensus models used in BC transactions. Security is the main aspect of all defined operations and BC nodes. The paper presents also specific BC use cases to illustrate the performance of the system in practical scenarios..
Security of IoT devices and applications can be improved by using the emerging Blockchain Technology which uses decentralised interaction and scalable architectures with security and distributed trust. In this work a review of Lightweight scalable Blockchain is proposed for security and privacy of IoT devices. An IoT scenario of smart home is used for illustrative purposes but this proposed architecture is wellsuited for diverse IoT applications. Effectiveness of this architecture is analysed using common threat models which provides an appropriate assessment for security and privacy implementation for smart home.
The premise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to interconnect not only sensors, mobile devices, and computers but also individuals, homes, smart buildings, and cities, as well as electrical grids, automobiles, and airplanes, to mention a few. However, realizing the extensive connectivity of IoT while ensuring user security and privacy still remains a challenge. There are many unconventional characteristics in IoT systems such as scalability, heterogeneity, mobility, and limited resources, which render existing Internet security solutions inadequate to IoT-based systems. Besides, the IoT advocates for peer-to-peer networks where users as owners intend to set security policies to control their devices or services instead of relying on some centralized third parties. By focusing on scientific challenges related to the IoT unconventional characteristics and user-centric security, we propose an IoT secure infrastructure enabled by the blockchain technology and driven by trustless peer-to-peer networks. Our IoT secure infrastructure allows not only the identification of individuals and collectives but also the trusted identification of IoT things through their owners by referring to the blockchain in trustless peer-to-peer networks. The blockchain provides our IoT secure infrastructure with a trustless, immutable and public ledger that records individuals and collectives identities, which facilitates the design of the simplified authentication protocol for IoT without relying on third-party identity providers. Besides, our IoT secure infrastructure adopts socialized IoT paradigm which allows all IoT entities (namely, individuals, collectives, things) to establish relationships and makes the IoT extensible and ubiquitous networks where owners can take advantage of relationships to set access policies for their devices or services. Furthermore, in order to protect operations of our IoT secure infrastructure against security threats, we also introduce an autonomic threat detection mechanism as the complementary of our access control framework, which can continuously monitor anomaly behavior of device or service operations.