Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), of which Blockchain is a popular example, are increasingly becoming an integral feature of many modern systems.While cryptocurrencies are a common motivating example, and they drive systems such as Bitcoin, DLT has many other uses across industries including Health Care, Supply Chain, IoT, and Finance among others.One of the key concepts that make DLT appealing is the ability for large-scale systems that do not trust each other to reach consensus and share a commonly verifi able ledger, in order to track resources, changes to system-wide data, and other artifacts.Cryptocurrencies are one type of resource that can be tracked, but DLT has been used for energy, pharmaceuticals, and many other domains.
Current swarm robotics systems are not utilized as frequently in surveillance missions due to the limitations of the existing distributed systems' designs. The main limitation of swarm robotics is the absence of a framework for robots to be self-governing, secure, and scalable. As of today, a swarm of robots is not able to communicate and perform tasks in transparent and autonomous ways. Many believe blockchain is the imminent future of distributed autonomous systems. A blockchain is a system of computers that stores and distributes data among all participants. Every single participant is a validator and protector of the data in the blockchain system. The data cannot be modified since all participants are storing and watching the same records. In this thesis, we will focus on blockchain applications in swarm robotics using Ethereum smart contracts because blockchain can make a swarm globally connected and secure. A decentralized application (DApp) is used to deploy surveillance missions. After mission deployment, the swarm uses blockchain to communicate and make decisions on appropriate tasks within Ethereum private networks. We set a test swarm robotics system and evaluate the blockchain for its performance, scalability, recoverability, and responsiveness. We conclude that, although blockchain enables a swarm to be globally connected and secure, there are performance limitations that can become a critical issue.
Blockchains - with their inherent properties of transaction transparency, distributed consensus, immutability and cryptographic verifiability - are increasingly seen as a means to underpin innovative products and services in a range of sectors from finance through to energy and healthcare. Discussions, too often, make assertions that the trustless nature of blockchain technologies enables and actively promotes their suitability - there being no need to trust third parties or centralised control. Yet humans need to be able to trust systems, and others with whom the system enables transactions. In this paper, we highlight that understanding this need for trust is critical for the development of blockchain-based systems. Through an online study with 125 users of the most well-known of blockchain based systems - the cryptocurrency Bitcoin - we uncover that human and institutional aspects of trust are pervasive. Our analysis highlights that, when designing future blockchain-based technologies, we ought to not only consider computational trust but also the wider eco-system, how trust plays a part in users engaging/disengaging with such eco-systems and where design choices impact upon trust. From this, we distill a set of guidelines for software engineers developing blockchain-based systems for societal applications.
With the spread of pragmatic approaches to blockchains and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), the need to operate securely across multiple DLTs has become apparent. The class of operations that span two or more DLTs is generally referred to as interledger. Various interledger approaches have been proposed, researched and taken into use, including for example, atomic cross-chain transactions, sidechains, bridging approaches, ledger-of-ledger structures, and layered value transfer protocols, such as the W3C Interledger Protocol (ILP).In this demonstration, we exemplify ongoing work in our research group at Aalto University. We demonstrate how a resource-constrained IoT device may be made able to interact with an “IoT-friendly” ledger, with an interledger gateway service bridging to a public permissionless ledger. The demo use case reflects a scenario where an IoT device advertizes a service that is available for anyone on the Internet, pending a successful and validated payment has been made on the Ethereum ledger. This demonstration shows how this can be accomplished in an auditable and secure manner across ledgers using hashed timelock agreements (HTLAs) to provide payment escrow.
Circular Economy is a novel economic model, where every 'asset' is not wasted but reused and upscaled. The Internet of Things-IoT paradigm can underpin the transition to a Circular Economy by enabling fine-grained and continuous asset tracking. However, there are issues related to security and privacy of IoT devices that generate and handle sensitive and personal data. The use of Blockchain technology provides an answer to this issue, however, its application raises issues related to the highly-constrained nature of these networks. In this paper, Edge Computing is presented as a solution to this issue, providing a way in which Blockchain and Edge Computing can be used together to address the constrained nature of IoT. Furthermore, we present the challenges that this combination poses and the opportunities that it brings. We propose an architecture that decreases the IoT devices requirements for memory capacity and increases the overall performance. We also discuss the architecture design and the challenges that it has, comparing it to the traditional Blockchain architecture as well as an Edge Computing architecture for Mobile Blockchain. The paper closes with a discussion and future extensions of our work are presented, as well.
Blockchain technology has found a great number of applications, from banking to the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it has not yet been envisioned whether and which problems in Software Engineering (SE) Blockchain technology could solve. In this paper, we coin this field "Blockchain-based Software Engineering" and exemplify how Blockchain technology could solve two core SE problems: Continuous Integration (CI) Services such as Travis CI and Package Managers such as apt-get. We believe that Blockchain technology could help (1) democratize and professionalize Software Engineering infrastructure that currently relies on free work done by few volunteers, (2) improve the quality of artifacts and services, and (3) increase trust in ubiquitously used systems like GitHub or Travis CI.
Smart grid (SG) provides a peer-to-peer energy trading mechanism wherein the electric vehicles (EVs) can trade for energy with their peers using the information and communication technologies. However, the dependence on third party for coordinating the energy trading decisions leads to a bottleneck for any distributed environment. Therefore, blockchain technology can provide a privacy-preserving and effective consensus mechanism without the control of trusted third party. Although blockchain provides inherent secure framework for transactional process, but the this security is because of computational complexity enforced. In SG environment, the conventional blockchain process could not be employed due to limited computational resources with EVs, which makes it difficult to solve the tough computational puzzles to validate the transactions. On the other hand, any compromise on the computation difficulty makes it more vulnerable to various types of attacks. Therefore, in this paper, SmartChain: a blockchain inspired smart and scalable ledger framework which does not require much computational complexity is designed for secure peer-to-peer energy trading in SG ecosystem. The proposed framework is evaluated using the parameters such as execution and validation time. The results obtained depict the superiority of SmartChain in contrast to the conventional blockchain process.
Mohamad Kassab, Joanna F. DeFranco, Tarek Malas, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto · 5 authors
Healthcare systems have been supported by technology to help improve the user experience with the entire health system. However, many operational challenges still remain, in particular those related to a unified management of electronic health records (EHR) that could enable multiple doctors to have access to the complete health history of their patient. Blockchain could support unified records, data security and privacy improvement and insurance decisions/transactions making it an effective solution for the above mentioned healthcare technology challenges. The main contribution of this paper is providing preliminary results of a literature review on the adoption of blockchain to support the management of EHR in health systems - along with the benefits and challenges.
Wazen M. Shbair, Mathis Steichen, Jérôme François, Radu State
Future blockchain applications are anticipated to serve millions of users. Thus the evaluation of new blockchain applications have to consider large-scale assessment of the technologies behind the scene. Most of current testing approaches have been done either on simulators or via local small blockchain networks. Hence, the performance in real world conditions is unpredictable. This demonstration introduces BlockZoom, a large-scale blockchain testbed that runs on top of a highly reconfigurable and controllable HPC platform. BlockZoom presents a reproducible environment for experimenting distributed ledgers technologies and smart contract applications. Through different configuration scenarios developers can evaluate the applications performance and the blockchain behavior at a scale comparable to the production environment. The target audience of this demonstration includes researchers and developers in blockchain technology.
With the rapid development of the internet of things (IoT), traditional industries are setting off a massive wave of digitization. In the era of the Internet of Everything, millions of devices and links in IoT pose more significant challenges to data management. Most existing solutions employ centralized systems to control IoT devices, which brings about the privacy and security issues in IoT data management. Recently, blockchain has attracted much attention in the field of IoT due to its decentralization, traceability, and non-tamperability. However, it is non-trivial to apply the current blockchain techniques to IoT due to the lack of scalability and high resource costs. Different blockchain platforms have their particular advantages in the scenario of IoT data management. In this paper, we propose a cross-chain framework to integrate multiple blockchains for efficient and secure IoT data management. Our solution builds an interactive decentralized access model which employs a consortium blockchain as the control station. Other blockchain platforms customized for specific IoT scenarios run as the backbone of all IoT devices. It is equivalent to opening the off-chain channels on the consortium blockchain. Our model merges transactions in these channels for confirmation based on the notary mechanism. Finally, we implement a prototype of the proposed model based on hyperledge Fabric and IOTA Tangle. We evaluate the performance of our method through extensive experiments. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.
Sina Rafati Niya, Eryk Schiller, Ile Cepilov, Fabio Maddaloni · 8 authors
Proof-of-Work (PoW) in Blockchains (BC), which is a widely used consensus algorithm, suffers from high power consumption of miners and low transaction rates. This work demonstrates a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based BC called Bazo, which is specially designed and adapted for Internet of Things (IoT) data streams. Bazo displays enhanced performance in terms of energy consumption and transactions processing in comparison to PoW-based BC. To further improve performance of Bazo, sharding and transaction aggregation methods are employed. Moreover, IoT-BC adaptation helpers of a modular and layered architecture are provided to allow wireless devices to submit data into the BC. The designed architecture can support multiple hardware and software platforms as well as network technologies.
Blockchain since its inception in 2008 is being gaining a wide publicity. It is in early phase and its adoption is a general concern. There is a need of more interdisciplinary research to understand the barriers, enablers and diffusion of this technology. This paper reviews on the key applications of blockchain technology along with its benefits. Smart Vehicle Management, Agriculture, Healthcare, Cryptocurrency and Waste Management are the potential Areas for research in this technology. The research would be further carried out to build a prototype model for waste management using this technology.
Apr 29, 2019·The 3rd International Workshop on Integrating Edge Computing, Caching, and Offloading in Next Generation Networks (INFOCOM workshop IECCO 2019), At Paris, France
Edge computing is a novel paradigm designed to improve the quality of service for latency sensitive cloud applications. However, the state-of-the-art edge services are designed for specific applications, which are isolated from each other. To better improve the utilization level of edge nodes, public resource sharing among edges from distinct service providers should be encouraged economically. In this work, we employ the payment channel techniques to design and implement EdgeToll, a blockchain-based toll collection system for heterogeneous public edge sharing. Test-bed has been developed to validate the proposal and preliminary experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the time and cost efficiency of the system.
Blockchain also known as a distributed ledger technology stores different transactions/operations in a chain of blocks in a distributed manner without needing a trusted third-party. Blockchain is proven to be immutable which helps for integrity and accountability, and, to some extent, confidentiality through a pair of public and private keys. Blockchain has been in the spotlight after successful boom of the Bitcoin. There have been efforts to leverage salient features of Blockchain for different applications and use cases. This paper present a comprehensive survey of applications and use cases of Blockchain technology. Specifically, readers of this paper can have thorough understanding of applications and user cases of Blockchain technology.
BACKGROUND: Huge amounts of health-related data are generated every moment with the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. These big health data contain great value and can bring benefit to all stakeholders in the health care ecosystem. Currently, most of these data are siloed and fragmented in different health care systems or public and private databases. It prevents the fulfillment of intelligent health care inspired by these big data. Security and privacy concerns and the lack of ensured authenticity trails of data bring even more obstacles to health data sharing. With a decentralized and consensus-driven nature, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) provide reliable solutions such as blockchain, Ethereum, and IOTA Tangle to facilitate the health care data sharing. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to develop a health-related data sharing system by integrating IoT and DLT to enable secure, fee-less, tamper-resistant, highly-scalable, and granularly-controllable health data exchange, as well as build a prototype and conduct experiments to verify the feasibility of the proposed solution. METHODS: The health-related data are generated by 2 types of IoT devices: wearable devices and stationary air quality sensors. The data sharing mechanism is enabled by IOTA's distributed ledger, the Tangle, which is a directed acyclic graph. Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) is adopted to facilitate data communications among different parties. Merkle Hash Tree is used for data encryption and verification. RESULTS: A prototype system was built according to the proposed solution. It uses a smartwatch and multiple air sensors as the sensing layer; a smartphone and a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) as the gateway; and a local server for data publishing. The prototype was applied to the remote diagnosis of tremor disease. The results proved that the solution could enable costless data integrity and flexible access management during data sharing. CONCLUSIONS: DLT integrated with IoT technologies could greatly improve the health-related data sharing. The proposed solution based on IOTA Tangle and MAM could overcome many challenges faced by other traditional blockchain-based solutions in terms of cost, efficiency, scalability, and flexibility in data access management. This study also showed the possibility of fully decentralized health data sharing by replacing the local server with edge computing devices.
Rakesh Shrestha, Rojeena Bajracharya, Anish Prasad Shrestha, Seung Yeob Nam
In the Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET), the collection and dissemination of life-threatening traffic event information by vehicles are of utmost importance. However, traditional VANETs face several security issues. We propose a new type of blockchain to resolve critical message dissemination issues in the VANET. We create a local blockchain for real-world event message exchange among vehicles within the boundary of a country, which is a new type of blockchain suitable for the VANET. We present a public blockchain that stores the node trustworthiness and message trustworthiness in a distributed ledger that is appropriate for secure message dissemination.
One of the most important discoveries and creative developments that is playing a vital role in the professional world today is blockchain technology. Blockchain technology moves in the direction of persistent revolution and change. It is a chain of blocks that covers information and maintains trust between individuals no matter how far they are. In the last couple of years, the upsurge in blockchain technology has obliged scholars and specialists to scrutinize new ways to apply blockchain technology with a wide range of domains. The dramatic increase in blockchain technology has provided many new application opportunities, including healthcare applications. This survey provides a comprehensive review of emerging blockchain-based healthcare technologies and related applications. In this inquiry, we call attention to the open research matters in this fast-growing field, explaining them in some details. We also show the potential of blockchain technology in revolutionizing healthcare industry.
Recent advancements in information and communication technology is enabling a significant revolution in e-Health research and industry. In the case of personal medical data sharing, data security and convenience are crucial requirements to the interaction and collaboration of electronic medical record (EMR) systems. However, it’s hard for current systems to meet these requirements as they have inconsistent structures in terms of security policies and access control models. A new solution direction is essential to enhance data-accessing while regulating it with government mandates in privacy and security to ensure the accountability of the medical usage data. Blockchain seems to pave the way for revolution in the conventional healthcare industry benefiting by its unique features such as data privacy and transparency. In this paper, a blockchain-based medical platform using a smart contract is proposed to secure the EMR management. This approach provides patients a comprehensive, immutable log and easy access to their medical information across different departments within the hospital. A case study for hospital is built on a permissioned network, and a series of experimental tests are performed to demonstrate the usability and efficiency of the designed platform. Lastly, a benchmark study by leveraging various performance metrics is made and the outcomes indicate that the designed platform surpasses the ability of existing works in various aspects. The results of this work reveal that the proposed solution has the great potential to accelerate the development of a decentralized digital healthcare ecosystem.
Noshina Tariq, Muhammad Asim, Feras Al‐Obeidat, Muhammad Zubair Farooqi · 7 authors
The proliferation of inter-connected devices in critical industries, such as healthcare and power grid, is changing the perception of what constitutes critical infrastructure. The rising interconnectedness of new critical industries is driven by the growing demand for seamless access to information as the world becomes more mobile and connected and as the Internet of Things (IoT) grows. Critical industries are essential to the foundation of today's society, and interruption of service in any of these sectors can reverberate through other sectors and even around the globe. In today's hyper-connected world, the critical infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever to cyber threats, whether state sponsored, criminal groups or individuals. As the number of interconnected devices increases, the number of potential access points for hackers to disrupt critical infrastructure grows. This new attack surface emerges from fundamental changes in the critical infrastructure of organizations technology systems. This paper aims to improve understanding the challenges to secure future digital infrastructure while it is still evolving. After introducing the infrastructure generating big data, the functionality-based fog architecture is defined. In addition, a comprehensive review of security requirements in fog-enabled IoT systems is presented. Then, an in-depth analysis of the fog computing security challenges and big data privacy and trust concerns in relation to fog-enabled IoT are given. We also discuss blockchain as a key enabler to address many security related issues in IoT and consider closely the complementary interrelationships between blockchain and fog computing. In this context, this work formalizes the task of securing big data and its scope, provides a taxonomy to categories threats to fog-based IoT systems, presents a comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art contributions in the field according to their security service and recommends promising research directions for future investigations.
Blockchain is an expanding piece of technology helping us in designing and development of decentralized distributed solutions. It has impacted many industries by reducing intermediate authorities. So, we decided to explore its feasibility in the Food supply industry. The Food Agro sector has been responsible for several catastrophes, and as the industry expands globally it is strenuous to keep check and credence of and certify the food data. The fertile land for agriculture is diminishing and more yields need to be produced to content the need of the country. We propose a Blockchain based Decentralized market place where we implement a collaborative agro model between farmers and consumers. The farmers will be able to record the potential crops and the anticipated output on his farm land on the decentralized ledger. The consumers can check the information and the farmer integrity based on the previous supplies. This creates a far open and full proof digital market framework for agro-products and will help to reduce hoarding. This research paper explores one possible model of blockchain in the Food Supply Market by creating a breach proof ledger of records. We have used HTML, CSS, Javascript for frontend, Ethereum and Solidity based frameworks for backend working of this model.
Sara Falcone, Yingsheng Zhang, Agnes Cameron, Amira Abdel-Rahman
This paper proposes a blockchain-based mapping protocol for distributed robotic systems running on embedded hardware. This protocol was developed for a robotic system designed to locomote on lattice structures for space applications. A consensus mechanism, Proof of Validity, is introduced to allow the effort of mining blocks to correlate with the desired tasks the robotic system was designed for. These robots communicate using peer-to-peer LoRa radio. Options, trade-offs and considerations for implementing blockchain technology on an embedded system with wireless radio communication are explored and discussed.
Blockchain is the latest technology developed in recent years for storing and sharing valuable information about transactions. This technology applies different methods for storing information that is unlike other existing traditional ways. Blockchain technology is an excellent example of maintainin
Gregory Falco, Caleb Li, Pavel Fedorov, Carlos Caldera · 6 authors
Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices are ubiquitous and growing rapidly in number. However, IoT manufacturers have focused on the functionality and features of the devices and made security an afterthought. Since IoT devices have small memory capacities and low-power processors, many security firms have not been able to develop anti-malware software for these devices. Current IoT security solutions are heavy and unreliable. We have developed a lightweight IoT security solution that uses hacker tools against the hackers -- in essence, a vaccine for IoT. Our software provides managed security and intelligence to IoT devices using a "friendly" botnet operated through a proven, existing communication infrastructure for distributed systems -- the Bitcoin blockchain.
Jawad Ali, Toqeer Ali Syed, Yazed Alsaawy, Ahmad Shahrafidz Khalid · 5 authors
With a rapid growth in the IT industry, Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a tremendous attention and become a central aspect of our environment. In IoT the things (devices) communicate and exchange the data without the act of human intervention. Such autonomy and proliferation of IoT ecosystem make the devices more vulnerable to attacks. In this paper, we propose a behavior monitor in IoT-Blockchain setup which can provide trust-confidence to outside networks. Behavior monitor extracts the activity of each device and analyzes the behavior using deep auto-encoders. In addition, we also incorporate Trusted Execution Technology (Intel SGX) in order to provide a secure execution environment for applications and data on blockchain. Finally, in evaluation we analyze three IoT devices data that is infected by mirai attack. The evaluation results demonstrate the ability of our proposed method in terms of accuracy and time required for detection.