The idea of big data has gained extensive attention from governments and academia all over the world. It is especially relevant for the establishment of a smart city environment combining complex heterogeneous data with data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Big data is generated from many facilities and sensor networks in smart cities and often streamed and stored in the cloud storage platform. Ensuring the integrity and subsequent auditability of such big data is essential for the performance of AI-driven data analysis. Recent years has witnessed the emergence of many big data auditing schemes that are often characterized by third party auditors (TPAs). However, the TPA is a centralized entity, which is vulnerable to many security threats from both inside and outside the cloud. To avoid this centralized dependency, we propose a decentralized big data auditing scheme for smart city environments featuring blockchain capabilities supporting improved reliability and stability without the need for a centralized TPA in auditing schemes. To support this, we have designed an optimized blockchain instantiation and conducted a comprehensive comparison between the existing schemes and the proposed scheme through both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation. The comparison shows that lower communication and computation costs are incurred with our scheme than with existing schemes.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Miguel Pincheira, Koustabh Dolui · 6 authors
The blockchain technology has revolutionized the digital currency space with the pioneering cryptocurrency platform named Bitcoin. From an abstract perspective, a blockchain is a distributed ledger capable of maintaining an immutable log of transactions happening in a network. In recent years, this technology has attracted significant scientific interest in research areas beyond the financial sector, one of them being the Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, the blockchain is seen as the missing link toward building a truly decentralized, trustless, and secure environment for the IoT and, in this survey, we aim to shape a coherent and comprehensive picture of the current state-of-the-art efforts in this direction. We start with fundamental working principles of blockchains and how blockchain-based systems achieve the characteristics of decentralization, security, and auditability. From there, we build our narrative on the challenges posed by the current centralized IoT models, followed by recent advances made both in industry and research to solve these challenges and effectively use blockchains to provide a decentralized, secure medium for the IoT.
Thanks to its decentralized structure and immutability, blockchain technology has the potential to address relevant security and privacy challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, by hosting and executing smart contracts, blockchain allows secure, flexible, and traceable message communication between IoT devices. The unique characteristics of IoT systems, such as heterogeneity and pervasiveness, however, pose challenges in designing smart contracts for such systems. In this paper, we study these challenges and propose a design approach for smart contracts used in IoT systems. The main goal of our design model is to enhance the development of IoT smart contracts based on the inherent pervasive attributes of IoT systems. In particular, the design model allows the smart contracts to encapsulate functionalities such as contractlevel communication between IoT devices, access to data-sources within contracts, and interoperability of heterogeneous IoT smart contracts. The essence of our approach is structuring the design of IoT smart contracts as self-contained software services, inspired by the microservice architecture model. The flexibility, scalability and modularity of this model make it an efficient approach for developing pervasive IoT smart contracts.
Existing education systems are facing a threat of question paper leaking\n(QPL) in the exam which jeopardizes the quality of education. Therefore, it is\nhigh time to think about a more secure and flexible question sharing system\nwhich can prevent QPL issue in the future education system. Blockchain enables\na way of creating and storing transactions, contracts or anything that requires\nprotection against tampering, accessing etc. This paper presents a new scheme\nfor smart education, by utilizing the concept of blockchain, for question\nsharing. A two-phase encryption technique for encrypting question paper (QSP)\nis proposed. In the first phase, QSPs are encrypted using timestamp and in the\nsecond phase, previous encrypted QSPs are encrypted again using a timestamp,\nsalt hash and hashes from previous QSPs. These encrypted QSPs are stored in the\nblockchain along with a smart contract which helps the user to unlock the\nselected QSP. An algorithm is also proposed for selecting a QSP for the exam\nwhich picks a QSP randomly. Moreover, a timestamp based lock is imposed on the\nscheme so that no one can decrypt the QSP before the allowed time. Finally,\nsecurity is analyzed by proving different propositions and the superiority of\nthe proposed scheme over existing schemes is proven through a comparative study\nbased on the different features.\n
Byung-Wan Jo, Rana Muhammad Asad Khan, Yun‐Sung Lee
The Internet-of-things (IoT) and blockchain are growing realities of modern society, and both are rapidly transforming civilization, either separately or in combination. However, the leverage of both technologies for structural health monitoring (SHM) to enable transparent information sharing among involved parties and autonomous decision making has not yet been achieved. Therefore, this study combines IoT with blockchain-based smart contracts for SHM of underground structures to define a novel, efficient, scalable, and secure distributed network for enhancing operational safety. In this blockchain-IoT network, the characteristics of locally centralized and globally decentralized distribution have been activated by dividing them into core and edge networks. This division enhances the efficiency and scalability of the system. The proposed system was effective in simulation for autonomous monitoring and control of structures. After proper design, the decentralized blockchain networks may effectively be deployed for transparent and efficient information sharing, smart contracts-based autonomous decision making, and data security in SHM.
Mei Yu, Jie Zhang, Jianrong Wang, Jie Gao · 8 authors
Now, the security and privacy-preserving of Internet of Things are receiving more attention. This article proposes a new method of Internet of Things security and privacy preserving by combining differentiated nodes, precision clustering, RSA, multi-signature, and blockchain. To calculate the node rank value in Internet of Things, the number of nodes’ links is taken as the weight of nodes based on PageRank. This method increases the node rank values’ difference between nodes. Accurate clustering determines the initial central nodes of k-means based on the differentiated node rank values, which effectively differentiates the active and inactive nodes in Internet of Things and achieve different levels of protection. To ensure data’s reusability, we adopt the multi-signature. And considering node’s incoming nodes have certain decision on whether data can be transmitted, we filter out two nodes with the highest node rank value from active node’s incoming nodes to do 2/3 multi-signature which saves resources. We encrypt and sign the transmitted data with RSA, helping receivers to verify data. Data are transmitted safely through the blockchain. Successful validation indicates successful transmission. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively distinguish between active and inactive nodes, which increases the difficulty of attackers’ attack and effectively protects the security and privacy of Internet of Things nodes and data.
Beverley A. MacKenzie, Robert Ian Ferguson, Xavier Bellekens
In a few short years the Internet of Things has become an intrinsic part of everyday life, with connected devices included in products created for homes, cars and even medical equipment. But its rapid growth has created several security problems, with respect to the transmission and storage of vast amounts of customers data, across an insecure heterogeneous collection of networks. The Internet of Things is therefore creating a unique set of risk and problems that will affect most households. From breaches in confidentiality, which could allow users to be snooped on, through to failures in integrity, which could lead to consumer data being compromised; devices are presenting many security challenges to which consumers are ill equipped to protect themselves from. Moreover, when this is coupled with the heterogeneous nature of the industry, and the interoperable and scalability problems it becomes apparent that the Internet of Things has created an increased attack surface from which security vulnerabilities may be easily exploited. However, it has been conjectured that blockchain may provide a solution to the Internet of Things security and scalability problems. Because of blockchain's immutability, integrity and scalability, it is possible that its architecture could be used for the storage and transfer of Internet of Things data. Within this paper a cross section of blockchain consensus protocols have been assessed against a requirement framework, to establish each consensus protocols strengths and weaknesses with respect to their potential implementation in an Internet of Things blockchain environment.
The Internet of Things aims at connecting everything, ranging from individuals, organizations, and companies to things in the physical and virtual world. The digital identity has always been considered as the keystone for all online services and the foundation for building security mechanisms such as authentication and authorization. However, the current literature still lacks a comprehensive study on the digital identity management for the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we firstly identify the requirements of building identity management systems for IoT, which comprises scalability, interoperability, mobility, security and privacy. Then, we trace the identity problem back to the origin in philosophy, analyze the Internet digital identity management solutions in the context of IoT and investigate recent surging blockchain sovereign identity solutions. Finally, we point out the promising future research trends in building IoT identity management systems and elaborate challenges of building a complete identity management system for the IoT, including access control, privacy preserving, trust and performance respectively.
Today's commercial model for edge computing services consists in lightweight devices at the network edge connected through the Internet to remote cloud data centers. Microclouds are an alternative vision of edge computing, where the cloud infrastructure runs at the network edge leveraging decentralized resource contributions of a community. But current attempts to build such microclouds lack a collaborative governance system to operate successfully. In this paper we discuss the opportunity to implement with blockchain technologies key services to enable the decentralized collaborative governance of microclouds. A multiagent approach could further contribute to improve the efficiency in the decision making in the collaborative governance service.
The requirement of supporting both latency sensitive and computing intensive Internet of Things (IoT) applications is consistently boosting the necessity for integrating Edge, Fog and Cloud infrastructure. Although there are a number of real-world frameworks attempt to support such integration, they have many limitations from various perspectives including platform independence, security, resource management and multi-application assistance. To address these limitations, we propose a simplified but effective framework, named FogBus for facilitating end-to-end IoT-Fog(Edge)-Cloud integration. FogBus offers a platform independent interface to IoT applications and computing instances for execution and interaction. It not only assists developers in building applications but also helps users in running multiple applications at a time and service providers to manage their resources. In addition, FogBus applies Blockchain, authentication and encryption techniques to secure operations on sensitive data. Because of its lightweight and cross platform software systems, it is easy to deploy, scalable and cost e_cient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by creating a computing environment with it that integrates finger pulse oximeter as IoT devices with Smartphone-based gateway and Raspberry Pi-based Fog nodes for Sleep Apnea analysis. We also run several experiments on this computing environment varying FogBus settings. The experimental results show that different FogBus settings can improve latency, energy, network and CPU usage of the computing infrastructure.
Proponents of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) claim it could have an impact greater than the internet; a breakthrough defying organisational boundaries by securely storing data across trustless entities. This would allow decisions to be made on verifiable data in an automated manner without the costs imposed by middlemen, with a corresponding economy-wide impact. Despite this potential, real-world application is embryonic with public and private sectors rapidly seeking exploitation opportunities. This research seeks to understand how DLT might apply to the Defence Support Network (DSN), the mechanism used to sustain UK Armed Forces with materiel and equipment. Drawing on academic and commercial models, a framework was produced for evaluating DLT use cases which measures utility, ease of implementation and impact. Using a functionalist research paradigm, interviews were conducted with DLT and DSN experts on potential use cases, the data from which was then analysed against a lightweight version of the evaluation framework. Results show that use cases involving codification, certification and supply chain provenance merit further investigation. The research concluded with recommendations that the DSN should pilot DLT use cases, but these should be carefully selected utilising an evaluation framework due to DLT's emergent nature.
The blockchain is a safe, reliable and innovative mechanism for managing numerous vehicles seeking connectivity. However, following the principles of the blockchain, the number of transactions required to update ledgers pose serious issues for vehicles as these may consume the maximum available energy. To resolve this, an efficient model is presented in this letter which is capable of handling the energy demands of the blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles (IoV) by optimally controlling the number of transactions through distributed clustering. Numerical results suggest that the proposed approach is 40.16% better in terms of energy conservation and 82.06% better in terms of the number of transactions required to share the entire blockchain-data compared with the traditional blockchain.
Yury Yanovich, Igor Shiyanov, Timur Myaldzin, Ivan Prokhorov · 6 authors
Counterfeit and unaccounted postage stamps used on mailings cost postal administrations a significant amount of money each year. Corporate and individual clients become victim to stamp fraud and incur losses when security teams investigate such mailings. The blockchain technology is supposed to be a solution to make postage stamps market transparent and to guarantee invariability of stamps volume produced and used. The blockchain-based supply chain for postage stamps is introduced in the article.
Diabetes Mellitus, usually called only Diabetes, is a worldwide chronic metabolic disorder that is characterized by abnormal oscillations in blood sugar levels. Such levels should be monitored by diabetes patients, which traditionally have had to take blood samples by finger-pricking, at least between twice and four times a day. Finger-pricking has a number of drawbacks that can be tackled by Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), which are able to determine blood sugar levels throughout the day and not only at specific time instants. In this paper, the design of an IoT CGM-based system is proposed, whose collected blood sugar sample values can be accessed remotely; thus being able to monitor patients, specifically dependent ones (e.g., children, elders, and pregnant women) and warn them in the case where a dangerous situation is detected. In order to create such a system, a fog computing system, based on distributed mobile smart phones, has been devised to collect data from the CGMs. Moreover, the use of a blockchain is proposed, to receive, validate, and store the collected data with the objective of avoiding untrusted sources and, thus, to provide a transparent and trustworthy data source of a population, which can vary in age, ethnicity, psychology, education, self-care, and/or geographic location, in a rapid, flexible, scalable, and low-cost way. These crowdsourced data can enable novel mHealth applications for diagnosis, patient monitoring, or even public health actions, which can help to advance in the control of the disease and raise global awareness on the increasing prevalence of diabetes.
Samuel Fosso Wamba, Jean Robert Kala Kamdjoug, Ransome Epie Bawack, John G. Keogh
This paper aims to bridge the knowledge gap in the existing literature on Bitcoin, Blockchain and Fintech. It begins by clarifying the definition of these concepts. Through a systematic review and case studies in the supply chain industry, this paper brings out the applications, the benefits/value, and the challenges/issues of Bitcoin, Blockchain and Fintech in several industries. It also presents the research methodologies/approaches used during such research. The classification framework developed and used to perform an analysis of 141 articles from five top academic databases serves as a baseline study. It offers the opportunity to evaluate the level of knowledge on Bitcoin, Blockchain and Fintech, and their evolution over time. The findings show that these technologies are evolving, and organizations are embracing them for competitive advantage. Thus, organizations need to leverage research on these technologies to better understand them, optimize their business strategies, and develop critical insights for decision-making.
Ahsan Manzoor, Madhusanka Liyanage, An Braeken, Salil S. Kanhere · 5 authors
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. Involvement of such third-party service provider requires also trust from both sensor owner and sensor data user. Moreover, the fees need to be paid for their services. To tackle both the scalability and trust issues and to automatize the payments, this paper presents a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme. The system stores the IoT data in a distributed cloud after encryption. To share the collected IoT data, the system establishes runtime dynamic smart contracts between the sensor and data user without the involvement of a trusted third party. It also uses a very efficient proxy re-encryption scheme which allows that the data is only visible by the owner and the person present in the smart contract. This novel combination of smart contracts with proxy re-encryption provides an efficient, fast and secure platform for storing, trading and managing of sensor data. The proposed system is implemented in an Ethereum based testbed to analyze the performance and the security properties.
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) implies new technical challenges such as managing a universally vast number of IoT devices. Despite the fact that there are already a variety of secure management frameworks for IoT, they are based on centralized models, which limits their applicability in scenarios with a large number of IoT devices. In order to overcome those limitations, we have developed a distributed IoT management system based on blockchain. In this paper, we compare the performance of our solution with the existing access management solutions in IoT. We study the delays and the throughput rate associated with the systems and analyze different configurations of our solution to maximize its scalability. The objective of this paper is to find out whether our solution can scale as well as the existing management systems in IoT.
Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used. 1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.
With the increasing number of connected devices and the number of online transactions today, managing all these transactions and devices and maintaining network security is a research issue. Current solutions are mainly based on cloud computing infrastructures, which require servers high-end and broadband networks to provide data storage and computing services. These solutions have a number of significant disadvantages, such as high maintenance costs of centralized servers, critical weakness of Internet Of Things applications, security and trust issues, etc. The blockchain is seen as a promising technique for addressing the mentioned security issues and design new decentralization frameworks. However, this new technology has a great potential in the most diverse technological fields. In this paper, we focus on presenting an overview of blockchain technology, highlighting its advantages, limitations and areas of application. The originality of this work resides in the comparison between the different blockchain systems and their security schemes and the perspective of integrating this technology into secured systems models for our comfort and our private life.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain as a new technique has attracted attentions from industry and academics for sharing data across organizations. Many blockchain-based data sharing applications, such as Internet of Things devices management, need privacy-preserving access services over encrypted data with dual capabilities. On one hand, they need to keep the sensitive data private such that others cannot trace and infer sensitive data stored in the block. On the other hand, they need to support fine-grained access control both from time and users’ attributes. However, to the best of our knowledge, no blockchain systems can support time-bound and attributes-based access with high efficiency. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving Internet of Things devices management scheme based on blockchain, which provides efficient time-bound and attribute-based access and supports key automatic revocation. The analysis and experiments show that our scheme is quite efficient and deployable.
There has been increased interest in the use of blockchains to control Internet of Things devices either directly, or through smart contracts. Many blockchains, such as Ethereum and Fabric, have support for smart contracts. The use of public blockchains while attractive due to their decentralization and availability, do pose challenges, such as unpredictable transaction latencies and cryptocurrency price fluctuations. Transactions in the Ethereum network, such as invokations of smart contracts used to control an IoT device, have no fairness or eventuality guarantees. In this work we describe a “spam attack” method available to parties with sufficient cryptocurrency reserves to delay a statistically significant portion of transactions submitted to the Ethereum network. This paper derives estimations on the costs and effects of such an attack, and is based on an analysis of historical transactions.
Nov 1, 2018·B. Varghese et al., "Realizing Edge Marketplaces: Challenges and Opportunities," in IEEE Cloud Computing, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 9-20, Nov./Dec. 2018
Blesson Varghese, Massimo Villari, Omer Rana, Philip James · 7 authors
The edge of the network has the potential to host services for supporting a variety of user applications, ranging in complexity from data preprocessing, image and video rendering, and interactive gaming, to embedded systems in autonomous cars and built environments. However, the computational and data resources over which such services are hosted, and the actors that interact with these services, have an intermittent availability and access profile, introducing significant risk for user applications that must rely on them. This article investigates the development of an edge marketplace, which is able to support multiple providers for offering services at the network edge, and to enable demand supply for influencing the operation of such a marketplace. Resilience, cost, and quality of service and experience will subsequently enable such a marketplace to adapt its services over time. This article also describes how distributed-ledger technologies (such as blockchains) provide a promising approach to support the operation of such a marketplace and regulate its behavior (such as the GDPR in Europe) and operation. Two application scenarios provide context for the discussion of how such a marketplace would function and be utilized in practice.
George Suciu, Carmen Nădrag, Cristiana Istrate, Alexandru Vulpe · 6 authors
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) refers to a digital method for registering virtual transactions and other similar data in multiple locations simultaneously. The main characteristic of distributed ledgers is that they do not have a central administration component, due to advanced algorithms and methods used for record-keeping. Thus, transactions are faster and reasonable, as they do not require a central authority to validate them. The network is formed by multiple nodes through which the participant can access recordings, making the network become less vulnerable when referring to cyberattacks. After several years of technological development in this area, different distributed ledger technologies are available. This article presents Blockchain and Tangle technologies along with their main characteristics, in order to make an extended comparison of their approaches. In addition to this, the paper contains experimentation details and results for each technology presented.