Pietro Danzi, Anders E. Kalør, Čedomir Stefanović, Petar Popovski
The emerging blockchain protocols provide a decentralized architecture that is suitable of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) interactions. However, keeping a local copy of the blockchain ledger is infeasible for low-power and memory-constrained devices. For this reason, they are equipped with lightweight software implementations that only download the useful data structures, e.g. state of accounts, from the blockchain network, when they are updated. In this paper, we consider and analyze a novel scheme, implemented by the nodes of the blockchain network, which aggregates the blockchain data in periodic updates and further reduces the communication cost of the connected IoT devices. We show that the aggregation period should be selected based on the channel quality, the offered rate, and the statistics of updates of the useful data structures. The results, obtained for the Ethereum protocol, illustrate the benefits of the aggregation scheme in terms of a reduced duty cycle of the device, particularly for low signal-to-noise ratios, and the overall reduction of the amount of information transmitted in downlink (e.g., from the wireless base station to the IoT device). A potential application of the proposed scheme is to let the IoT device request more information than actually needed, hence increasing its privacy, while keeping the communication cost constant. In conclusion, our work is the first to provide rigorous guidelines for the design of lightweight blockchain protocols with wireless connectivity.
Information from surveillance video is essential for situational awareness (SAW). Nowadays, a prohibitively large amount of surveillance data is being generated continuously by ubiquitously distributed video sensors. It is very challenging to immediately identify the objects of interest or zoom in suspicious actions from thousands of video frames. Making the big data indexable is critical to tackle this problem. It is ideal to generate pattern indexes in a real-time, on-site manner on the video streaming instead of depending on the batch processing at the cloud centers. The modern edge-fog-cloud computing paradigm allows implementation of time sensitive tasks at the edge of the network. The on-site edge devices collect the information sensed in format of frames and extracts useful features. The near-site fog nodes conduct the contextualization and classification of the features. The remote cloud center is in charge of more data intensive and computing intensive tasks. However, exchanging the index information among devices in different layers raises security concerns where an adversary can capture or tamper with features to mislead the surveillance system. In this paper, a blockchain enabled scheme is proposed to protect the index data through an encrypted secure channel between the edge and fog nodes. It reduces the chance of attacks on the small edge and fog devices. The feasibility of the proposal is validated through intensive experimental analysis.
Paolo Missier, Shaimaa Bajoudah, Angelo Capossele, Andrea Gaglione · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) data are increasingly viewed as a new form of massively distributed and large scale digital assets, which are continuously generated by millions of connected devices. The real value of such assets can only be realized by allowing IoT data trading to occur on a marketplace that rewards every single producer and consumer, at a very granular level. Crucially, we believe that such a marketplace should not be owned by anybody, and should instead fairly and transparently self-enforce a well defined set of governance rules. In this paper we address some of the technical challenges involved in realizing such a marketplace. We leverage emerging blockchain technologies to build a decentralized, trusted, transparent and open architecture for IoT traffic metering and contract compliance, on top of the largely adopted IoT brokered data infrastructure. We discuss an Ethereum-based prototype implementation and experimentally evaluate the overhead cost associated with Smart Contract transactions, concluding that a viable business model can indeed be associated with our technical approach.
Modern power systems are rapidly evolving into complex cyber-physical systems. The increasingly complex interaction among different energy entities calls for a secure, efficient, and robust cyber infrastructure. As an emerging distributed computing technology, Blockchain provides a secure environment to support such interactions. This paper gives a prospective on using Blockchain as a secure, distributed cyber infrastructure for the future grid. Firstly, the basic principles of Blockchain and its state-of-the-art are introduced. Then, a Blockchain based smart grid cyber-physical infrastructure model is proposed. Afterwards, some promising application domains of Blockchain in future grids are presented. Following this, some potential challenges are discussed.
Gihan J. Mendis, Yifu Wu, Jin Wei, Moein Sabounchi · 5 authors
Thanks to the advances in machine learning, data-driven analysis tools have become valuable solutions for various applications. However, there still remain essential challenges to develop effective data-driven methods because of the need to acquire a large amount of data and to have sufficient computing power to handle the data. In many instances these challenges are addressed by relying on a dominant cloud computing vendor, but, although commercial cloud vendors provide valuable platforms for data analytics, they can suffer from a lack of transparency, security, and privacy-perservation. Furthermore, reliance on cloud servers prevents applying big data analytics in environments where the computing power is scattered. To address these challenges, a decentralize, secure, and privacy-preserving computing paradigm is proposed to enable an asynchronized cooperative computing process amongst scattered and untrustworthy computing nodes that may have limited computing power and computing intelligence. This paradigm is designed by exploring blockchain, decentralized learning, homomorphic encryption, and software defined networking(SDN) techniques. The performance of the proposed paradigm is evaluated via different scenarios in the simulation section.
Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Marco Steger · 7 authors
There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience and non-repudiation in a decentralized, and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing for fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block to avoid large sized blocks is proposed. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
Currently, blockchain technology, which is decentralized and may provide tamper-resistance to recorded data, is experiencing exponential growth in industry and research. In this paper, we propose the MIStore, a blockchain-based medical insurance storage system. Due to blockchain's the property of tamper-resistance, MIStore may provide a high-credibility to users. In a basic instance of the system, there are a hospital, patient, insurance company and n servers. Specifically, the hospital performs a (t, n)-threshold MIStore protocol among the n servers. For the protocol, any node of the blockchain may join the protocol to be a server if the node and the hospital wish. Patient's spending data is stored by the hospital in the blockchain and is protected by the n servers. Any t servers may help the insurance company to obtain a sum of a part of the patient's spending data, which servers can perform homomorphic computations on. However, the n servers cannot learn anything from the patient's spending data, which recorded in the blockchain, forever as long as more than n - t servers are honest. Besides, because most of verifications are performed by record-nodes and all related data is stored at the blockchain, thus the insurance company, servers and the hospital only need small memory and CPU. Finally, we deploy the MIStore on the Ethererum blockchain and give the corresponding performance evaluation.
Juan Carlos Farah, Andrii Vozniuk, María Jesús Rodríguez‐Triana, Denis Gillet
The need to ensure privacy and data protection in educational contexts is driving a shift towards new ways of securing and managing learning records. Although there are platforms available to store educational activity traces outside of a central repository, no solution currently guarantees that these traces are authentic when they are retrieved for review. This paper presents a blueprint for an architecture that employs blockchain technology to sign and validate learning traces, allowing them to be stored in a distributed network of repositories without diminishing their authenticity. Our proposal puts participants in online learning activities at the center of the design process, granting them the option to store learning traces in a location of their choice. Using smart contracts, stakeholders can retrieve the data, securely share it with third parties and ensure it has not been tampered with, providing a more transparent and reliable source for learning analytics. Nonetheless, a preliminary evaluation found that only 56% of teachers surveyed considered tamper-evident storage a useful feature of a learning trace repository. These results motivate further examination with other end users, such as learning analytics researchers, who may have stricter expectations of authenticity for data used in their practice.
Using blockchain as a decentralized backend infrastructure has been attracting many startups entrepreneurs' and developers' attention. Blockchain records transactions permanently and protects them from undesirable tampering. It provides a reliable tamper-proof database which can be considered as a trustable resource for tracking previous system's state. In this paper, we present our access control application based on Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain and Hyperledger Composer to control access to physical places. The system components and modular architecture are illustrated, and we have extracted metadata include historian transactions' details arising from our demo test. Finally, the performance metrics and resources consumption are provided using Hyperledger Caliper, a benchmark framework for measuring Hyperledger blockchains performance.
Γεώργιος Σπαθούλας, Anastasija Collen, Pankaj Pandey, Niels Alexander Nijdam · 10 authors
The European research project GHOST challenges the traditional cyber security solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector by exploiting novel technologies, such as blockchain, to provide resilience and integrity of decision making on the communication exchange in a smart home context. When it comes to novel cyber security solutions for extremely heterogeneous environments like IoT and smart homes, the key focus is typically given to the understanding of network activities and elimination of suspicious traffic. The GHOST project adds an extra dimension to this approach by integrating blockchain technology at its core decision mechanism. On a daily basis, each GHOST installation is encountering malicious behaviour and suspicious IoT communications, where easy information sharing with other installations, as well as decentralised decision making, are mandatory features for the efficient protection of the end-user. GHOST's Smart Contracts (SC) are designed to tackle in an easy, yet productive way, the reporting on suspicious IP addresses which the IoT devices in a smart home are trying to communicate with. Two variations of blacklisting smart contracts are presented in this paper, covering a diverse spectrum of possible attack vectors while closely following the Privacy by Design (PbD) principles. A reputation scoring scheme for malicious IPs reporting is integrated in the SC, uncovering the implementation details on the penalisation of existing entries in case of malicious behaviour of reporting devices.
C. Kouzinopoulos, Konstantinos M. Giannoutakis, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras · 10 authors
The H2020 European research project Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control (GHOST) aims to develop a cyber-security layer on IoT smart home installations. The proposed system analyses packet-level data flows for building patterns of communications between IoT devices and external entities. To ensure non-repudiation, integrity and authentication of the data captured, they are stored in a Blockchain, a distributed ledger network, as digitally-signed transactions. Since the data can potentially include sensitive user information, it is imperative to promote trust by informing users about the operating principles of the network as well as to request the acceptance of a consent form by them. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Forms of Consent application, a Distributed Application that interacts with a set of Smart Contracts deployed on a private Ethereum network. The application is being developed as part of the GHOST project.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a name coined to the digital ecosystem of numerous internet connected devices. It brings the physical world closer to the digital one and as a result, allows for new applications and services. The emergence of Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, presents a possible solution to ensure trust in decentralized systems. Blockchain brings trust, immutability, and verifiability of a distributed ledger in a decentralized network which could be useful to build trust in IoT. However, the integration of IoT with Blockchain involves a number of challenges. The use of Blockchain within the IoT is a recent and a fast paced topic. Therefore, conducting a systematic literature review is essential to understand what has been proposed on the topic. Recent work has provided a systematic review with a focus on Bitcoin. In this paper, we present a systematic review of more recent work on Blockchain and IoT, with a broader focus on Blockchain platforms beyond Bitcoin. Our work provides an overview of what has been done so far on the use of Blockchain and IoT.
Uchi Ugobame Uchibeke, Kevin A. Schneider, Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Ralph Deters
In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has not only resulted in an explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields, but also given rise to concerns in the security and protection of data during storage, transmission, processing, and access. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions in a secure, flexible, verifiable and permanent way. Transactions in a blockchain can be an exchange of an asset, the execution of the terms of a smart contract, or an update to a record. In this paper, we have developed a blockchain access control ecosystem that gives asset owners the sovereign right to effectively manage access control of large data sets and protect against data breaches. The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric blockchain is used to run the business network while the Hyperledger composer modeling tool is used to implement the smart contracts or transaction processing functions that run on the blockchain network.
Chao Qu, Ming Tao, Jie Zhang, Xiaoyu Hong · 5 authors
With the fast development of mobile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) has been found in many important applications recently. However, it still faces many challenges in security and privacy. Blockchain (BC) technology, which underpins the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has played an important role in the development of decentralized and data intensive applications running on millions of devices. In this paper, to establish the relationship between IoT and BC for device credibility verification, we propose a framework with layers, intersect, and self-organization Blockchain Structures (BCS). In this new framework, each BCS is organized by Blockchain technology. We describe the credibility verification method and show how it provide the verification. The efficiency and security analysis are also given in this paper, including its response time, storage efficiency, and verification. The conducted experiments have been shown to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method in satisfying the credible requirement achieved by Blockchain technology and certain advantages in storage space and response time.
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing blockchain protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. We start by describing the blockchains and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with blockchain technologies. Then, we provide an overview of the application domains of blockchain technologies in IoT, e.g., Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Energy, Internet of Cloud, Edge computing, etc. Moreover, we provide a classification of threat models, which are considered by blockchain protocols in IoT networks, into five main categories, namely identity-based attacks, manipulation-based attacks, cryptanalytic attacks, reputation-based attacks, and service-based attacks. In addition, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving blockchain technologies with respect to the blockchain model, specific security goals, performance, limitations, computation complexity, and communication overhead. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the blockchain technologies for IoT.
Jianli Pan, Jianyu Wang, A. MARIA HESTER, Ismail AlQerm · 6 authors
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On the one hand, IoT devices are "weak" and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively "vulnerable" facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we design and prototype an edge-IoT framework named "EdgeChain" based on blockchain and smart contracts. The core idea is to integrate a permissioned blockchain and the internal currency or "coin" system to link the edge cloud resource pool with each IoT device' account and resource usage, and hence behavior of the IoT devices. EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management system to control how much resource IoT devices can obtain from edge servers, based on pre-defined rules on priority, application types and past behaviors. Smart contracts are used to enforce the rules and policies to regulate the IoT device behavior in a non-deniable and automated manner. All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into blockchain for secure data logging and auditing. We implement an EdgeChain prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ideas. The results show that while gaining the security benefits of blockchain and smart contracts, the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is within a reasonable and acceptable range.
A blockchain is a datastructure that is an append-only chain of blocks. Each\nblock contains a set of transaction and has a cryptographic link back to\nits predecessor. The cryptographic link serves to protect the integrity of\nthe blockchain. A key property of blockchain systems is that it allows mu-\ntually distrusting entities to reach consensus over a unique order in which\ntransactions are appended. The most common usage of blockchains is in\ncryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.\nIn this thesis we use blockchain technology to design a scalable architec-\nture for a storage system that can provide strong data integrity and ensure the\npermanent availability of the data. We study recent literature in blockchain\nand cryptography to identify the desired characteristics of such a system. In\ncomparison to similar systems, we are able to gain increased performance by\ndesigning ours around a permissioned blockchain, allowing only a predefined\nset of nodes to write to the ledger. A prototype of the system is built on top\nof existing open-source software. An experimental evaluation using different\nquorum sizes of the prototype is also presented.
Hashgraph is data structure and consensus algorithm that is fast, with a very high throughput and low consensus latency, secure because of the asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant and fair due to the fairness of access, ordering, and timestamps. These properties enable new decentralized applications such as a stock market, improved collaborative applications, games, and auctions. Hashgraph is a new consensus protocol that has garnered attention lately by being projected as a technology that will make blockchains obsolete. Hashgraph currently scales only in the number of transactions processed but does not scale with the number of nodes in the network. Hashgraph will face the same issues that other public blockchains are facing today and may not be able to maintain its security and performance. In fact, scalability is still an open problem for public blockchains.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Supply Chain monitoring applications rely on messaging protocols for exchanging data. Contemporary IoT deployments widely use the publish-subscribe messaging model because of its resource-efficiency. However, the systems with publish-subscribe messaging model employ a centralized architecture, wherein the data from all the devices in the application network flows via a central broker to the subscribers. Such a centralized architecture make publish-subscribe messaging model susceptible to a central point of failure. Besides, it provides an opportunity for the organization that owns the broker to tamper with the data. In this work, we contribute Trinity, a novel distributed publish-subscribe broker with blockchain-based immutability. Trinity distributes the data published to one of the brokers in the network to all the brokers in the network. The distributed data is stored in an immutable ledger through the use of the blockchain technology. Furthermore, Trinity executes smart contracts to validate the data before saving the data on the blockchain. Through the use of a blockchain network, Trinity can guarantee persistence, ordering, and immutability across trust boundaries. Our evaluation results show that Trinity consumes minimal resources, and the use of smart contracts enable the stakeholders to automate the data management processes. To the best of our knowledge, Trinity is the first framework that combines the components of the blockchain technology with the publish-subscribe messaging model.
Hany F. Atlam, Ahmed Alenezi, Madini O. Alassafi, Gary Wills
The Internet of Things (IoT) has extended the internet connectivity to reach not just computers and humans, but most of our environment things. The IoT has the potential to connect billions of objects simultaneously which has the impact of improving information sharing needs that result in improving our life. Although the IoT benefits are unlimited, there are many challenges facing adopting the IoT in the real world due to its centralized server/client model. For instance, scalability and security issues that arise due to the excessive numbers of IoT objects in the network. The server/client model requires all devices to be connected and authenticated through the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, moving the IoT system into the decentralized path may be the right decision. One of the popular decentralization systems is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management processes which can solve many of IoT issues, especially security. This paper provides an overview of the integration of the blockchain with the IoT with highlighting the integration benefits and challenges. The future research directions of blockchain with IoT are also discussed. We conclude that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.
Roberto Di Pietro, Xavier Salleras, Matteo Signorini, Erez Waisbard
One of the biggest challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) is to bridge the currently fragmented trust domains. The traditional PKI model relies on a common root of trust and does not fit well with the heterogeneous IoT ecosystem where constrained devices belong to independent administrative domains. In this work we describe a distributed trust model for the IoT that leverages the existing trust domains and bridges them to create end-to-end trust between IoT devices without relying on any common root of trust. Furthermore we define a new cryptographic primitive, denoted as obligation chain designed as a credit-based Blockchain with a built-in reputation mechanism. Its innovative design enables a wide range of use cases and business models that are simply not possible with current Blockchain-based solutions while not experiencing traditional blockchain delays. We provide a security analysis for both the obligation chain and the overall architecture and provide experimental tests that show its viability and quality.
Zijian Bao, Wenbo Shi, Debiao He, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
There has been increasing interest in the potential of blockchain in enhancing the security of devices and systems, such as Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we present a blockchain-based IoT security architecture, IoTchain. The three-tier architecture comprises an authentication layer, a blockchain layer and an application layer, and is designed to achieve identity authentication, access control, privacy protection, lightweight feature, regional node fault tolerance, denial-of-service resilience, and storage integrity. We also evaluate the performance of IoTchain to demonstrate its utility in an IoT deployment.
Blockchain technologies, such as smart contracts, present a unique interface for machine-to-machine communication that provides a secure, append-only record that can be shared without trust and without a central administrator. We study the possibilities and limitations of using smart contracts for machine-to-machine communication by designing, implementing, and evaluating AGasP, an application for automated gasoline purchases. We find that using smart contracts allows us to directly address the challenges of transparency, longevity, and trust in IoT applications. However, real-world applications using smart contracts must address their important trade-offs, such as performance, privacy, and the challenge of ensuring they are written correctly.