Blockchain has recently been able to draw wider attention throughout the research community. Since its emergence, the world has seen the mind-blowing expansion of this new technology, which was initially developed as a pawn of digital currency more than a decade back. A self-administering ledger that ensures extensive data immutability over the peer-to-peer network has made it attractive for cybersecurity applications such as a sensor-enabled system called the Internet of things (IoT). Brand new challenges and questions now demand solutions as huge IoT devices are now online in a distributed fashion to ease our everyday lives. After being motivated by those challenges, the work here has figured out the issues and perspectives an IoT infrastructure can suffer because of the wrong choice of blockchain technology. Though it may look like a typical review, however, unlike that, this paper targets sorting out the specific security challenges of the blockchain-IoT eco-system through critical findings and applicable use-cases. Therefore, the contribution includes directing Blockchain architects, designers, and researchers in the broad domain to select the unblemished combinations of Blockchain-powered IoT applications. In addition, the paper promises to bring a deep insight into the state-of-the-art Blockchain platforms, namely Ethereum, Hyperledger, and IOTA, to exhibit the respective challenges, constraints, and prospects in terms of performance and scalability.
The heterogeneous and decentralized nature of renewable energy sources is too much to handle for traditional and centralized IT grid infrastructure. Blockchain technology can address many of the associated challenges. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art technology layers of grid system infrastructure, a proposed future state using blockchain technology, and gap analysis. The paper also contributes a set of architectural requirements for a blockchain-enabled future state and a proposed hybrid architecture using blockchain technology, verifiable credentials, and smart contracts. This architecture can uniquely support the technology layers critical to renewable energies, including system architecture, registries, grid management, billing, privacy, and interoperability.
The primary purpose of this paper is to bridge the technology gap between Blockchain and Fintech applications. Blockchain technology is already being explored in a wide number of Fintech sectors. After creating a unique taxonomy for Fintech ecosystems, this paper outlines a number of implementation scenarios. For each of the industries in which blockchain is already in use and has established itself as a complementary technology to traditional systems, we give a taxonomy of use cases. In this procedure, we cover both public and private blockchains. Because it is still believed to be in its infancy, especially when it comes to financial use cases, blockchain has both positive and negative aspects. As a result, it is critical to be aware of all of the open research issues in this field. Our goal is to compile a list of open research challenges related to various aspects of the blockchain’s protocol and application layers. Finally, we will provide a clear understanding of the applications for which blockchain can be valuable, as well as the risks associated with its use in parallel.
Bin Li, Yang Fan, Bing Qi, Xuefeng Bai · 6 authors
Abstract It is a critical part of increasing renewable energy accommodation by using virtual power plant (VPP) to attain carbon neutrality. However, VPP applications primarily consider VPP's participation in power market transactions as a whole and rarely consider the transaction interaction between internal resources. VPP's internal resources complement each other organically, and blockchain technology for distributed transactions has incorporated points. In this article, the authors undertake a study and examine the P2P scenario of VPP internal transactions in light of the issues experienced by DERs transactions. Next, the authors analyse the consensus mechanism, smart contract, inter‐blockchain technology, and game theory, and how to apply them in the P2P scenarios of VPP internal transactions. Further, the authors design the function of the DER transaction system, which lays the foundation for the realisation of the system in the future. Finally, the authors conclude that the potential of blockchain technology in P2P transactions between internal entities of the VPP is significant and warrants further investigation.
Kyle P. Michelson, Anjali Sridharan, Umut Can Çabuk, Ethan Reesor · 9 authors
The Accumulate Protocol ("Accumulate") is an identity-based, Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) blockchain designed to power the digital economy through interoperability with Layer-1 blockchains, integration with enterprise tech stacks, and interfacing with the World Wide Web. Accumulate bypasses the trilemma of security, scalability, and decentralization by implementing a chain-of-chains architecture in which digital identities with the ability to manage keys, tokens, data, and other identities are treated as their own independent blockchains. This architecture allows these identities, known as Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs), to be processed and validated in parallel over the Accumulate network. Each ADI also possesses a hierarchical set of keys with different priority levels that allow users to manage their security over time and create complex signature authorization schemes that expand the utility of multi-signature transactions. A two token system provides predictable costs for enterprise users, while anchoring all transactions to Layer-1 blockchains provides enterprise-grade security to everyone.
In this study, we propose an Information-Centric Network (ICN) approach for the Internet as an alternative to the present host-centric architecture. The proposed approach solves present Internet challenges, where most Internet users nowadays are involved in seeking knowledge by searching through large amounts of data, independent of the data's physical locations and these users usually have requests that need prompt responses. Hence, Internet requirements have got a new shape and the whole Internet paradigm should be shifting where different network considerations are needed. In this context, ICNs can play a vital role where the host-centered architecture is replaced by a content-centered one since the content itself is the aim and not the location. However, the ICN paradigm as a substitute for traditional Internet faces some challenges in terms of security and performance. ICN needs to be protected against some threats such as Denial-of-Service attacks (DoS), hacker attacks, loss of data, data replication, and cache pollution. To accomplish this, we propose this Secured Blockchain-Based ICN (SBBICN) implementation that exploits the secure aspects of Blockchain technology such as data integrity and non-tampering to secure the ICN against the aforementioned threats. In this proposed system, we describe and develop a voting system based on a blockchain consensus algorithm to avoid a single point of failure during the verification process and we apply the system using an Ethereum smart contract to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system. The experimental results and the security analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the SBBICN proposal when compared to other schemes in the literature.
Sultan Algarni, Fathy Eassa, Khalid Ali Almarhabi, Abdullah Algarni · 5 authors
Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a flexible and programmable network architecture that takes advantage of the benefits of global visibility and centralized control over a network. One of the main properties of the SDN architecture is the ability to offer a northbound interface (NBI), which enables network applications to access the SDN controller resources. However, the NBI can be compromised by a malicious application due to the lack of standardization and security aspects in the most current NBI designs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel comprehensive security solution for securing the application–controller interface, named BCNBI. We propose a controller-independent lightweight blockchain architecture and exploit the security features of blockchain while limiting the blockchain’s computational overhead. BCNBI automatically verifies application and SDN controller credentials through token-based authentication. The proposed solution enforces fine-grained access control for each application’s API request and classifies the permission set into strict and normal policies, in order to add an extra level of security. In addition, the trustworthiness of applications is evaluated in order to prevent malicious activities. We implemented our blockchain-based solution to analyze its security, based on the confidentiality–integrity–availability model criteria, and evaluated the introduced overhead in terms of processing time and packet overhead. The experimental results demonstrate that the BCNBI can effectively secure the NBI, based on the fundamental security goals, while introducing insignificant overhead.
Andrew Cullen, Lianna Zhao, Luigi Vigneri, Robert Shorten
An outstanding problem in the design of distributed ledgers concerns policies that govern the manner in which users interact with the network. Network usability is crucial to the mainstream adoption of distributed ledgers, particularly for enterprise applications in which most users do not wish to operate full node. For DAG-based ledgers such as IOTA, we propose a user-node interaction mechanism that is designed to ensure the risk of a user experiencing a poor quality of service is low. Our mechanism involves users selecting nodes to issue their transactions to the ledger based on quality of service indicators advertised by the nodes. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed policies.
In recent years, due to the wide implementation of mobile agents, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks have been applied in several real-life scenarios, servicing applications in the areas of public safety, proximity-based services, and fog computing. Meanwhile, when more complex tasks are processed in IoT networks, demands on identity authentication, certifiable traceability, and privacy protection for services in IoT networks increase. Building a blockchain system in IoT networks can greatly satisfy such demands. However, the blockchain building in IoT brings about new challenges compared with that in the traditional full-blown Internet with reliable transmissions, especially in terms of achieving consensus on each block in complex wireless environments, which directly motivates our work. In this study, we fully considered the challenges of achieving a consensus in a blockchain system in IoT networks, including the negative impacts caused by contention and interference in wireless channel, and the lack of reliable transmissions and prior network organizations. By proposing a distributed consensus algorithm for blockchains on multi-hop IoT networks, we showed that it is possible to directly reach a consensus for blockchains in IoT networks, without relying on any additional network layers or protocols to provide reliable and ordered communications. In our theoretical analysis, we showed that our consensus algorithm is asymptotically optimal on time complexity and is energy saving. The extensive simulation results also validate our conclusions in the theoretical analysis.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) offers new and unique advantages for information systems, but some of its features are not a good fit for many applications. We review the properties of DLT and propose a new type of architecture for DLT based on main-sub ledger. Our scheme pays more attention to data privacy, effectively relieves the pressure of data storage for nodes, thereby improves data handling capability.
A deeper decarbonization perspective is undergoing with the increasing engagement of new distributed players and the deployment of innovative behind-the-meter flexibility services. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trading has emerged as an innovative mechanism to foster the direct energy sharing among multi-level market players with pre-determined responsibility and privacy. However, compared with other P2P assets trading, P2P energy trading is facing huge challenges in achieving a large-scale commercialization due to the cooperation obstacles between non-professional distributed players and regulated players as Distributed System Operator (DSO), Transmission System Operator (TSO) and utilities. It is related to not only business and marketing, but also energy system operation to keep secure and reliable with injection of new roles, new utilization patterns, and new markets. This paper investigates the socio-technical interaction and mechanism for the sustainable P2P energy trading from the social dimension on the cooperation of multi-level market players, the technical dimension on the cutting-edge exchange of flexibility, and the economical dimension on the inter-operative decentralized/regulated marketplaces. Three questions are targeted on: (1) How Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enables co-creation of decentralized heterogeneous user-centered digital frameworks for the large-scale P2P trading interaction, (2) What specific energy services drive the cross-border interactions for exchange of multi-scale P2P flexibility, (3) How operational framework in P2P energy trading achieves the inter-operative marketplaces with the formation of trusted P2P energy society and the injection of multi-scale flexibility services. Finally, regulation challenges on P2P energy trading implementation are discussed for the guide of future work.
There is a resurgence of interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems due to blockchains. However, leader-based BFT consensus protocols used by permissioned blockchains have limited scalability and robustness. To alleviate the leader bottleneck in BFT consensus, we introduce Stratus, a robust shared mempool protocol that decouples transaction distribution from consensus. Our idea is to have replicas disseminate transactions in a distributed manner and have the leader only propose transaction ids. Stratus uses a provably available broadcast (PAB) protocol to ensure the availability of the referenced transactions. We implemented and evaluated Stratus by integrating it with state-of-the-art BFT-based blockchain protocols and evaluated these protocols in both LAN and WAN settings. Our results show that Stratus-based protocols achieve up to $5\sim20\times$ more throughput than their native counterparts in a network with hundreds of replicas. In addition, the performance of Stratus degrades gracefully in the presence of network asynchrony, Byzantine attackers, and unbalanced workloads. Our design provides easy-to-use APIs so that other BFT systems suffering from leader bottlenecks can use Stratus.
The increasing prevalence of renewable energy resources introduces a high variability that complicates the task of energy management in modern power grids. Among other technologies, batteries have proven effective in managing power imbalances in such grids. However, the high cost of large-scale batteries, coupled with their enormous space requirements, could deter their adoption by large consumers such as shared facility controllers. The aggregation of residential energy storage units offers shared facility controllers (SFCs) an alternative way to leverage storage; however, a secure scheme that promotes fairness and transparency in the selection and compensation of shared storage unit owners is needed. To this end, an Ethereum smart contract that makes residential storage capacities available to SFCs via a double auction mechanism is proposed. The contract is written with solidity and deployed in the browser-based Remix-integrated development environment. Scenario tests prove the effectiveness of the smart contract in selecting and compensating the owners of shared storage capacities, according to predefined auction rules.
This paper proposes a solution for validating an End-to-End service chain built by multiple actors that may not trust each other. We notably introduce a “data layer” powered by a Distributed Ledger (DL, a.k.a “Blockchain”) using a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This component will enable all players involved in a network service chain to share trusted and secure performance data, whilst avoiding the participation of trusted third parties. We consider as a driving use case a scenario where resource providers and resource consumers (a.k.a “prosumers”) interact together to build on-demand network services. We thus focus on a Cloud-based Radio Access Network scenario and anticipate network disaggregation, allowing the infrastructure to be shared between multiple providers. We show through simulation that the usage of a DAG-based ledger will make the proposed data layer scalable despite the amount of performance data required for monitoring.
Peer to peer (P2P) and blockchain are highly coupled in terms of decentralization and autonomous transactions. This paper designs a P2P power transaction mechanism based on block chain to meet the economic and security requirements of photovoltaic prosumer. Day-ahead and real-time P2P trading mechanism is designed. Fully open P2P trading mode and decentralized electricity price mechanism are adopted in day-ahead market, and P2P pool trading mode and electricity price mechanism based on supply/demand ratio are adopted in real-time market. In addition, smart contract rules based on blockchain Ethereum are designed to ensure safe operation and efficient intelligence on the blockchain platform. Finally, effectiveness and economy Prosumer P2P trading mechanism in IEEE 14-node simulation and verification of the design.
Abstract Blockchain is a distributed ledger based on peer‐to‐peer networks, originally used for crypto‐currency systems. Blockchains are being used as an enabling technology for decentralised applications in the areas of Internet‐of‐Things, finance, supply‐chain and others. Consistency, data privacy, performance, and energy efficiency are of paramount importance in such applications. The full nodes of public, permissionless blockchains undertake the task of verifying the transactions generated by the network. Full nodes perform operations such as confirming balances, transactions, and history, i.e. mostly database search queries. Consequently, their throughput is crucial for the performance of blockchain systems. In this work, the benefits of accelerating the blockchain search and insert queries by leveraging GPU platforms are studied. An extensive comparison between the most dominant utilized database is provided, i.e. LevelDB, and MegaKV, a high‐performance GPU‐accelerated database. Realistic operations that take place in blockchain systems are emulated and evaluated over representative scenarios, showing three orders of magnitude gains in throughput and energy efficiency without compromising the security aspect. The extensive comparison between LevelDB and MegaKV indicates that GPU acceleration is an effective solution for runtime and energy efficiency enhancement of blockchain systems, and the integration of the two technologies is a promising field of research.
In the last few years, electric utility companies have increasingly invested into transactive energy systems. This trend was primarily caused by the integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and internet-of-things (IoT) devices into their existing distribution networks. Influenced by the general interest in blockchain technologies, many industry specialists are considering new, more efficient peer-to-peer market structures for DERs. Since blockchain-based energy exchanges can automate transactions between their members and provide increased levels of security thanks to smart contracts, these new initiatives may eventually revolutionize how customers interact with utility companies. In this paper, we explore the trade-off between cost and traceability in the form of on-chain and off-chain solutions. We also propose ZipZap, a first step towards a blockchain-based local smart grid system. ZipZap is an ERC-1155 compliant solution with four different prototypes: Heavyweight, Featherweight, Lightweight and Weightless. The first three prototypes were developed in Solidity and deployed using Ethereum. Heavyweight is fully on-chain, whereas Featherweight and Lightweight showcase various levels of hybridization. Weightless, in turn, was deployed using Quorum, a gas-free alternative to Ethereum. Our evaluation uses realistic parameters and measures the impact of different types of metadata storage scopes, with some Ethereum prototypes showcasing gas cost reductions of more than 97% in comparison to our fully on-chain baseline.
Abstract : People’s lives have been profoundly impacted by the headway of innovation which has worked on their lives from each viewpoint. Clearly, innovation assumes a significant part in each circle of life and information stockpiling and sharing is a significant part of it. Current information sharing and storage devices depend on trusted third parties (TTP) and because of the contribution of third parties, such frameworks need straightforwardness, security, trust and strength. To solve these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based secure information sharing application by consolidating the highlights of IPFS and Ethereum. In this proposed scheme ethereum blockchain, decentralized storage, encryption and IPFS are combined to build an application that maximizes the tech<em>nological resources and provide</em> with an effective storage website ,Ethereum blockchain, decentralized capacity, encryption, and InterPlanetary File System are consolidated to assemble an application that boosts the innovative assets and gives a viable storage site. To carry out the proposed situation, smart contracts are written in solidity and sent on the nearby Ethereum test network. The proposed plot accomplishes security, transparency, legitimacy of owner, access control and nature of information.
Light clients for distributed ledger networks can verify blockchain integrity by downloading and analyzing blockchain headers. They are designed to circumvent the high resource requirements, i.e., the large bandwidth and memory requirements that full nodes must meet, which are unsuitable for consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices. Light clients rely on full nodes and trust them implicitly. This leaves them vulnerable to various types of attacks, ranging from accepting maliciously forged data to Eclipse attacks. We introduce Aurora-Trinity, a novel version of light clients that addresses the above-mentioned vulnerability by relying on our original Aurora module, which extends the Ethereum Trinity client. The Aurora module efficiently discovers the presence of malicious or Byzantine nodes in distributed ledger networks with a predefined and acceptable error rate and identifies at least one honest node for persistent or ephemeral communication. The identified honest node is used to detect the latest canonical chain head or to infer the state of an entry in the ledger without downloading the header chain, making the Aurora-Trinity client extremely efficient. It can run on consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices, as the Aurora module consumes about 0.31 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage at runtime.
Video conferencing applications help people communicate via the Internet and provide a significant and consistent basis for virtual meetings. However, integrity, security, identification, and authentication problems are still universal. Current video conference technologies typically rely on cloud systems to provide a stable and secure basis for executing tasks and processes. At the same time, video conferencing applications are being migrated from centralized to decentralized solutions for better performance without the need for third-party interactions. This article demonstrates a decentralized smart identification scheme for video conferencing applications based on biometric technology, machine learning, and a decentralized hash table combined with blockchain technology. We store users' information on a distributed hash table and transactional events on the distributed ledger after identifying users by implementing machine learning functions. Furthermore, we leverage distributed ledger technology's immutability and traceability properties and distributed hash table unlimited storage feature to improve the system's storage capacity and immutability by evaluating three possible architectures. The experimental results show that an architecture based on blockchain and distributed hash table has better efficiency but needs a longer time to execute than the two other architectures using a centralized database.
Open access
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In this study, we proposed an architecture for Web 3.0, which is based on the hashed interactions among user nodes that can transform bilateral trusts into collective time order, which is the major achievement of blockchain technology, without the expensive Proof of Work or the questionable Proof of Stake.
Abdelzahir Abdelmaboud, Abdelmuttlib Ibrahim Abdalla Ahmed, Mohammed Abaker, Taiseer Abdalla Elfadil Eisa · 7 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a popular computing technology paradigm. It is increasingly being utilized to facilitate human life processes through a variety of applications, including smart healthcare, smart grids, smart finance, and smart cities. Scalability, interoperability, security, and privacy, as well as trustworthiness, are all issues that IoT applications face. Blockchain solutions have recently been created to help overcome these difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey and tutorial on the use of blockchain in IoT systems. The importance of blockchain technology in terms of features and benefits for constituents of IoT applications is discussed. We propose a blockchain taxonomy for IoT applications based on the most significant factors. In addition, we examine the most widely used blockchain platforms for IoT applications. Furthermore, we discuss how blockchain technology can be used to broaden the spectrum of IoT applications. Besides, we discuss the recent advances and solutions offered for IoT environments. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future research directions of the use of blockchain for the IoT.
An increased pattern of hidden Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been observed. Due to the increased number of security attacks, a large number of IoT devices are disappearing from the public internet. Operating blockchain operations in such ad hoc connectivity becomes challenging. However, multiple past studies have pointed towards IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that closely caters to offline blockchain use cases. However, there has been little to no empirical study or introduction to time bounds on transaction confirmation. Therefore, this study explains what provisions the existing IOTA blockchain has to accommodate the increased pattern of hidden IoT devices, and if IOTA is truly sufficient as a solution. In summary, we approach research questions by analyzing the studies that explore the trend of offline IoT devices and evaluating the relevance of offline blockchains, assessing the IOTA specification and codebase around offline transaction-making capabilities and pointing out some bounds that IOTA blockchain nodes must follow towards incoming transactions. Furthermore, we confirm by experimental runs that outside and within the tight time bounds transactions in offline Tangle can become stale and not get confirmed, and the effective time-bound can be even less. Realizing the need for a better offline blockchain scalability solution.