Alexander Raschendorfer, Benjamin Mörzinger, Eric Steinberger, Patrick Pelzmann · 7 authors
Recently, the manufacturing industry became aware of distributed ledger technologies, a protocol that, amongst other things, allows trustless transactions between machines. In this paper, we investigate whether an M2M economy would be feasible within the IOTA network, a popular cryptocurrency for IoT. We build and present a simple industrial lot-size one production system involving three agents that cooperate to create an artistic painting. Payments between agents and users are autonomously executed via IOTA. Amongst other points of criticism, we found that an M2M economy would benefit from the support of smart-contracts and conclude that IOTA is not a fitting solution.
Jerinas Gresch, Bruno Rodrigues, Eder J. Scheid, Salil S. Kanhere · 5 authors
Diplomas have high importance in society since they serve as official proofs for education. Therefore, it is not surprising that forgeries of such documents have become commonplace. Thus, employers ordinarily have the diplomas manually verified by the issuer. Blockchain creates opportunities to overcome these obstacles, as it has revolutionized the way in which people interact with each other. Based on this, a holistic solution that includes issuance and verification of diplomas can be realized. This paper presents a proposal of a blockchain based system for managing diplomas called UZHBC (University of ZuricH BlockChain).
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
<p>Blockchain (BC) in the Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel technology that acts with decentralized, distributed, public and real-time ledger to store transactions among IoT nodes. A blockchain is a series of blocks, each block is linked to its previous blocks. Every block has the cryptographic hash code, previous block hash, and its data. The transactions in BC are the basic units that are used to transfer data between IoT nodes. The IoT nodes are different kind of physical but smart devices with embedded sensors, actuators, programs and able to communicate with other IoT nodes. The role of BC in IoT is to provide a procedure to process secured records of data through IoT nodes. BC is a secured technology that can be used publicly and openly. IoT requires this kind of technology to allow secure communication among IoT nodes in heterogeneous environment. The transactions in BC could be traced and explored through anyone who are authenticated to communicate within the IoT. The BC in IoT may help to improve the communication security. In this paper, I explored this approach, its opportunities and challenges. </p>
Georgia Avarikioti, Lukas Käppeli, Yuyi Wang, Roger Wattenhofer
We prove Bitcoin is secure under temporary dishonest majority. We assume the adversary can corrupt a specific fraction of parties and also introduce crash failures, i.e., some honest participants are offline during the execution of the protocol. We demand a majority of honest online participants on expectation. We explore three different models and present the requirements for proving Bitcoin's security in all of them: we first examine a synchronous model, then extend to a bounded delay model and last we consider a synchronous model that allows message losses.
Nejc Rožman, Rok Vrabič, Marko Corn, Tomaž Požrl · 5 authors
This paper presents an approach to integrating Blockchain and IoT technologies into modern supply chains. We propose the concept of a new logistics platform that is built as a distributed network of nodes and offers an alternative approach dealing with the complexity of modern supply chains by breaking them into smaller, functionally independent parts. The modular structure of the platform allows users to add their own nodes or extend the functionality of the existing ones. Nodes are communicating with the use of IoT technology, which serves as a bridge between the virtual and real worlds, making this platform truly digital. Blockchain technology is not only used for writing down agreements and for making transactions, but also as a trustworthy public listing of services and information. It connects the nodes into a public and secure system that provides reliable services of a supply chain. In this work, we describe the individual nodes and their implementation and present preliminary results of experiments using a laboratory model of a logistic chain.
Blockchain is experiencing rapid development and has the full potential of revolutionizing the IoT platform in the industrial field. In this paper, a light-weighted Blockchain-based platform for IIoT is presented to address security, trust, and island connection problem in the process of IIoT ecosystem construction. BPIIoT is comprised of the on-chain network and the off-chain network. All transactions are processed in the on-chain network such as including digital signature based on access control and programmable permission. The off-chain network deals with the storage, complex data processing, and other problems that blockchain cannot solve. The smart contract is utilized as the service contract of consumers and manufacture resources, providing on-demand manufacturing service. Two smart application cases, manufacturing equipment data sharing and maintenance service sharing from smart manufacturing, are implemented to explain the smart contract for equipment maintenance service and status data sharing service throughout maintenance, repair, and operation service network by the BPIIoT.
Wenli Yang, Erfan Aghasian, Saurabh Garg, David Herbert · 6 authors
The emergence of Internet protocol suites and packet-switching technologies tends to the considerations of security, privacy, scalability, and reliability in layered Internet service architectures. The existing service systems allow us to access big data, but few studies focus on the fundamental security and stability in these systems, especially when they involve large-scale networks with overloaded private information. In this paper, we explored the blockchain-based mechanism that aims to improve the critical features of traditional Internet services, including autonomous and decentralized processing, smart contractual enforcement of goals, and traceable trustworthiness in tamper-proof transactions. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive review to conceptualize the blockchain-based framework to develop the decentralized protocols for the extensive number of Internet services. This comprehensive survey aims to address blockchain integration to secure Internet services and identify the critical requirements of developing a decentralized trustworthy Internet service. Additionally, we present a case study of the blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) for neuro-informatics to illustrate the potential applications of blockchain architectures. Finally, we summarize the trends and challenges of blockchain architectures that benefit a multitude of disciplines across all the Internet service fields of interest.
Blockchain, as well as Internet of Things (IoT), is considered as two major disruptive emerging technologies. However, both of them suffer from innate technological limitations to some extent. IoT requires strengthening its security features while Blockchain inherently possesses them due to its extensive use of cryptographic mechanisms and Blockchain, in an inverted manner, needs contributions from the distributed nodes for its P2P (Peer-to-Peer) consensus model while IoT rudimentarily embodies them within its architecture. This chapter, therefore, acutely dissects the viability, along with prospective challenges, of incorporating Blockchain with IoT technologies,inducing the notion of Blockchain of Things (BCoT), as well as the benefits such consolidation can offer.
Ali Vatankhah Barenji, Hanyang Guo, Zonggui Tian, Zhi Li · 6 authors
Recently, there has been growing interest in the field of cloud manufacturing (CM) amongst researchers in the manufacturing community. Cloud manufacturing is a customer-driven manufacturing model that was inspired by cloud computing, and its major objective was to provide ubiquitous on-demand access to services. However, the current CM architecture suffers from problems that are associated with a centralized based industrial network framework and third part operation. In a nutshell, centralized networking has had issues with flexibility, efficiency, availability, and security. Therefore, this paper aims to tackle these problems by introducing an ongoing project to a decentralized network architecture for cloud manufacturing which is based on the blockchain technology. In essence, this research paper introduces the blockchain technology as a decentralized peer to peer network for multiple cloud manufacturing providers.
An inclusive project is classified and alienated into several tasks where as task management is one of the foremost components of project management, since the roles and tasks assigned by the manager of this component to each employee working on a project. In scrupulous there are several ways to track the status of work and this monitoring is also required to find the efficiency of an individual and at the time of the annual and mid- term appraisal and all these monitoring records can be used to give qualifications to associates and employees. In this work, the authors have proposed a system along with the solution based on the ERC20 token which is identified as blockchain platform based on Ethereum in which they can implement Project Task Management which is tamper proof and as well as can track the assigned task of an employee on real time basis.
Blockchain is an emerging field which works on the concept of a digitally distributed ledger and consensus algorithm removing all the threats of intermediaries. Its early applications were related to the finance sector but now this concept has been extended to almost all the major areas of research includ-ing education, IoT, banking, supplychain, defense, governance, healthcare, etc. In the field of healthcare, stakeholders (provider, patient, payer, research organizations, and supply chain bearers) demand interoperability, security, authenticity, transparency, and streamlined transactions. Blockchain technology, built over the internet, has the potential to use the current healthcare data into peer to peer and interoperable manner by using a patient-centric approach eliminating the third party. Using this technology, applications can be built to manage and share secure, transparent and immutable audit trails with reduced systematic fraud. This study reviews existing literature in order to identify the major issues of various healthcare stakeholders and to explore the features of blockchain technology that could resolve identified issues. However, there are some challenges and limitations of this technology which are needed to be focused on future research.
Achieving data integrity verification for large-scale IoT data in cloud storage safely and efficiently has become one of the hot topics with further applications of Internet of Things. Traditional data integrity verification methods generally use encryption techniques to protect data in the cloud, relying on trusted Third Party Auditors (TPAs). Blockchain based data integrity schemes can successfully avoid the trust problem of TPAs, however, they have to face the problems of large computational and communication overhead. To address the issues above, we propose a Blockchain and Bilinear mapping based Data Integrity Scheme (BB-DIS) for large-scale IoT data. In our BB-DIS, IoT data is sliced into shards and homomorphic verifiable tags (HVTs) are generated for sampling verification. Data integrity can be achieved according to the characteristics of bilinear mapping in the form of blockchain transactions. Performance analysis of BB-DIS including feasibility, security, dynamicity and complexity is also discussed in detail. A prototype system of BB-DIS is then presented to illustrate how to implement our verification scheme. Experimental results based on Hyperledger Fabric demonstrate that the proposed verification scheme significantly improves the efficiency of integrity verification for large-scale IoT data with no need of TPAs.
Xintong Ling, Jiaheng Wang, Taha Bouchoucha, Bernard C. Levy · 5 authors
The relentless growth of wireless applications and data traffic continues to accentuate the long felt need for decentralized, self-managed, and cooperative network architectures. Enlightened by the power of blockchain technology, we propose a blockchain radio access network (B-RAN) architecture and develop decentralized, secure, and efficient mechanisms to manage network access and authentication among inherently trustless network entities. We further identify promising advanced functions made possible by adopting blockchain for open radio access networks. Our test results demonstrate the benefits of the B-RAN architecture. We also present a number of challenges and future research directions.
The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the explosive growth of valuable data produced by user equipment have led to strong demand for access control, especially hierarchical access control, which is performed from a group communication perspective. However, the key management strategies for such a future Internet are based mostly on a trusted third party that requires full trust of the key generation center (KGC) or central authority (CA). Recent studies indicate that centralized cloud centers will be unlikely to deliver satisfactory services to customers because we place too much trust in third parties; therefore, these centers do not apply to user privacy-oriented scenarios. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a novel blockchain-based distributed key management architecture (BDKMA) with fog computing to reduce latency and multiblockchains operated in the cloud to achieve cross-domain access. The proposed scheme utilizes blockchain technology to satisfy the decentralization, fine-grained auditability, high scalability, and extensibility requirements, as well as the privacy-preserving principles for hierarchical access control in IoT. We designed system operations methods and introduced different authorization assignment modes and group access patterns to reinforce the extensibility. We evaluated the performance of our proposed architecture and compared it with existing models using various performance measures. The simulation results show that the multiblockchain structure substantially improves system performance, and the scalability is excellent as the network size increases. Furthermore, dynamic transaction collection time adjustment enables the performance and system capacity to be optimized for various environments.
Following the rapid development and the maturity of blockchain (BC) and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper proposes two applications of a BC-IoT transaction model in the accounting field. The BC-IoT transaction model is capable of automatically collecting, uploading, and recording all relevant data in the enterprise transaction process under the premise of satisfying certain assumptions. This model does not require manual intervention at any point in the process; no data recorded on the distributed ledgers can be tampered with or revoked. The data collected using this model can be used as information on events, providing data support for the events approach to basic accounting theory. This practice responds to the important insight of sorter, who proposes the provision of accounting information in real time and on demand to substantially improve the usefulness of accounting information. This paper also identifies that BC technology can significantly improve the relevance, faithful representation, timeliness, comparability, and other aspects of accounting information quality.
Blockchain startups are basing their business models on disrupting the centralized way of data storage by highlighting the value of data to the public. A distributed approach to storing data is the safer way to prevent attacks is what is being evangelized. GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) have monopolized data, therefore bringing in the most revenue whilst depriving the data generators of any form of compensation. In our work, we propose a platform where a user can store his/her own personal data. Here, we present to the user the right to decide what happens to their data. These decisions include selling, renting, and deleting data. The deletion of data undermines the fundamentals the blockchain is built on (data immutability). We address the issues of personal data sharing and how a user's right to delete his/her data can be enforced in a blockchain based network such as ours.
Bruno Veloso, Fátima Leal, Benedita Malheiro, Fernando Moreira
Crowdsourced repositories have become an increasingly important source of information for users and businesses in multiple domains. Everyday examples of tourism crowdsourcing platforms focusing on accommodation, food or travelling in general, influence consumer behaviour in modern societies. These repositories, due to their intrinsic openness, can strongly benefit from independent data quality modelling mechanisms. In this context, building trust & reputation models of contributors and storing crowdsourced data using distributed ledger technology allows not only to ascertain the quality of crowdsourced contributions, but also ensures the integrity of the built models. This paper presents a survey on distributed trust & reputation modelling using blockchain technology and, for the specific case of tourism crowdsourcing platforms, discusses the open research problems and identifies future lines of research.
Kurt Yaeger, Michael L. Martini, Jonathan J. Rasouli, Anthony Costa
With a growing trend in medicine towards individualized, patient-centric care, traditional health information technology limits progress. With high administrative costs and the lack of universal data access, contemporary electronic medical records serve more the institution rather than the patient. Blockchain technology, as presently described, was initially developed for use in financial markets, serving as a decentralized, distributed ledger of transactions. However, certain inherent characteristics of this technology suit it for use in the healthcare sector. Potential applications of the blockchain in medicine include interoperable health data access, data storage and security, value-based payment mechanisms, medical supply chain efficiency, amongst others. While the technology remains in nascent stages, it is essential that members of the healthcare community understand the fundamental concepts behind blockchain, and recognize its potential impact on the future of medical care.
Federico Matteo Benčić, Pavle Skočir, Ivana Podnar Žarko
Supply chain management enhanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions integrate special tags (e.g., RFID, NFC, and QR-codes) with products to create Smart Tags, in addition to storing supplemental information about a product, which is also used to track products during their lifecycle. However, a product consumer has to implicitly trust the Smart Tag creator and other stakeholders within the supply chain that they are providing authentic data within a product's tag. The DL-Tags solution steps into this environment to offer a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and verifiable management of Smart Tags during a product's lifecycle. The solution is based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and uses the Ethereum blockchain to mediate interactions between the stakeholders during a product's exchange process. By reaching a consensus on the product's description and state logged on the blockchain, all involved stakeholders and product consumers can verify the product's authenticity without revealing their identity. The paper describes the DL-Tags solution and includes a cost analysis of all implemented transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The proposed solution provides evidence of the product's origin and its journey across the supply chain while preventing tag duplication and manipulation. It is among the first documented practical solutions using DLT and IoT for supply chain management, which is designed to be distributed ledger agnostic.
Michael Borkowski, Marten Sigwart, Philipp Frauenthaler, Taneli Hukkinen · 5 authors
Current blockchain technologies provide very limited interoperability. Restrictions with regard to asset transfers and data exchange between different blockchains reduce the usability and comfort of users, and hinder novel developments within the blockchain space. As a first step towards blockchain interoperability, we propose the DeXTT cross-blockchain transfer protocol, which can be used to record a token transfer on any number of blockchains simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We provide a reference implementation using Solidity, and evaluate its performance. We show logarithmic scalability of DeXTT with respect to the number of participating nodes, and analyze cost requirements of the transferred tokens.
Although the blockchain-based applications are considered to be less vulnerable due to the nature of the distributed ledger, they did not become the silver bullet with respect to securing the information against different security risks. In this paper, we present a literature review on the security risks that can be mitigated by introducing the blockchain technology, and on the security risks that are identified in the blockchain-based applications. In addition, we highlight the application and technology domains where these security risks are observed. The results of this study could be seen as a preliminary checklist of security risks when implementing blockchain-based applications.
The lack of interoperability among IoT platforms has led to a fragmented environment, where the users and society as a whole suffer from lock-ins, lack of privacy, and reduced functionality. This paper presents SOFIE, a solution for federating the existing IoT platforms in an open and secure manner using Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and without requiring modifications to the IoT platforms, and describes how SOFIE is used to enable two complex real life pilots: food supply chain tracking from field to fork and electricity distribution grid balancing with guided electrical vehicle (EV) charging. SOFIE's main contribution is to provide interoperability between IoT systems while also enabling new functionality and business models.
Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology to ensure trust between parties. By using this technology, we can establish a secure communication paradigm, where data integrity and immutability can be guaranteed. These inherited features underline blockchain as a suitable technology to optimise the adopted processing model in several domains, such as health, trade supply chain and food safety. In this paper, we present a detailed overview of the use of blockchain technology in (international) trade supply chains. Furthermore, the discussed proposals have been classified based on the target application scenarios. Our goal is to clarify the benefits of applying this technology to the trading domain and highlight the challenges that are associated with applying this technology to optimise the trading domain. Accordingly, we underline several issues that occur during the designing of the blockchain solution to optimise the (international) trade supply chain.