Mohammed Baz, Sabita Khatri, Abdullah Baz, Hosam Alhakami · 6 authors
The rapid emergence of novel virus named SARS-CoV2 and unchecked dissemination of this virus around the world ever since its outbreak in 2020, provide critical research criteria to assess the vulnerabilities of our current he... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Tech Science Press
The world is undergoing a profound transformation with the advent of intelligent information era. 6G networks envisioned being the game changer in next generation wireless communication systems that will address the challenges of limited information speed escalated with the augmentation of billions of data applications encountered by the current fifth generation (5G) networks. Some key radical technologies in 6G together with existing 5G candidate schemes will guarantee the expected quality of experience (QoE) to attain ubiquitous wireless connectivity for the Internet of Everything (IoE) ranging from the telecom industry to digital smart industries. Blockchain technology (BCT) has gained significant attention due to undertake the decentralization, transparency, spectrum resource scarcity, inherent privacy and security, poor interoperability, confidentiality, and emerging smart applications domains including Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0. The mismatch between the requirements of many data intensive disruptive IoT applications and 5G network capabilities steered the demand of decentralized BCT based 6G architecture. Inspired by these facts, this paper studies an extensive survey to draw a new direction of blockchain integration into 6G mobile networks, IoT technologies, and smart industries focusing the potential merits and challenges in terms of infrastructure sharing, computational loads, latency, bandwidth overhead, business model, sustainability goals, and edge intelligence. We highlighted the convergence of IoT in blockchain to enable intelligent distribution in future industrial IoT and the technical model of 6G networks to realize the successful deployment of BCT schemes. This paper pointed out the current intriguing challenges, canvassed the mitigation techniques, and plausible future research opportunities that may benefit the pursuit of this vision.
Mohamed Elhoseny, Khalid Haseeb, Asghar Ali Shah, Irshad Ahmad · 6 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) performs a vital role in providing connectivity between computing devices, processes, and things. It significantly increases the communication facilities and giving up-to-date information to distributed networks. On the other hand, the techniques of artificial intelligence offer numerous and valuable services in emerging fields. An IoT-based healthcare solution facilitates patients, hospitals, and professionals to observe real-time and critical data. In the literature, most of the solution suffers from data intermission, high ethical standards, and trustworthiness communication. Moreover, network interruption with recurrent expose of sensitive and personal health data decreases the reliance on network systems. Therefore, this paper intends to propose an IoT solution for AI-enabled privacy-preserving with big data transferring using blockchain. Firstly, the proposed algorithm uses a graph-modeling to develop a scalable and reliable system for gathering and transmitting data. In addition, it extracts the subset of nodes using the artificial intelligence approach and achieves efficient services for the healthcare system. Secondly, symmetric-based digital certificates are utilized to offer authentic and confidential transmission with communication resources using blockchain. The proposed algorithm is explored with existing solutions through multiple simulations and proved improvement in terms of realistic parameters.
Modern IT technologies shaped the shift in economic models with many advantages on cost, optimization, and time to market. This economic shift has increased the need for transparency and traceability in supply chain platforms to achieve trust among partners. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is proposed to enable supply chains systems with trust requirements. In this paper, we investigate the existing DLT-based supply chain projects to show their technical part and limitations and extract the tools and techniques used to avoid the DLT scalability issue. We then set the requirements for a typical DLT-based supply chain in this context. The analyses are based on the scalability metrics such as computing, data storage, and transaction fees that fit the typical supply chain system. This paper highlights the effects of Blockchain techniques on scalability and their incorporation in supply chains systems. It also presents other existing solutions that can be applied to the supply chain. The investigation shows the necessity of having such tools in supply chains and developing them to achieve an efficient and scalable system. The paper calls for further scalability enhancements throughout introducing new tools and/or reutilize the current ones. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-SP1-04 Full Text: PDF
Industry 4.0 connects the latest technologies such as cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI), and blockchain to provide more automation in the industrial process and also bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds through the cyber-physical system. The inherent feature of IoT devices creates the industry to smart industry (referred to as industrial IoT, i.e., IIoT) through its data-driven decision policies. However, several challenges such as decentralization, security and privacy vulnerability, single point of failure (SPOF), and trust issues exist in the IoT system. Blockchain is one of the promising technologies that can bring about opportunities for addressing the challenges of IoT systems. In this article, we have investigated the integration of IoT with blockchain technology and provided an in-depth study of the blockchain-enabled IoT and IIoT systems. The state-of-the-art research is categorized into data storage and management technique, big data and cloud computing technique (finance and data auditing), and industrial sectors (supply chain, energy, and healthcare sector). The insightful discussion based on the different categories is also presented in the paper. In particular, first, we introduce the IoT and IIoT and then discuss the need for smart contracts in IoT and IIoT systems. Next, we concentrate on the convergence of blockchain and IoT with state-of-the-art research. In addition, this article also provides the open and future research directions towards this era with the highlighted observations.
Aitizaz Ali, Hasliza A. Rahim, Muhammad Fermi Pasha, Rafael Dowsley · 7 authors
According to the security breach level index, millions of records are stolen worldwide on every single day. Personal health records are the most targeted records on the internet, and they are considered sensitive, and valuable. Security and privacy are the most important parameters of cryptography and encryption. They reduce the availability of data on patients and healthcare to the appropriate personnel and ultimately lead to a barrier in the transfer of healthcare into a digital health system. Using a permission blockchain to share healthcare data can reduce security and privacy issues. According to the literature, most healthcare systems rely on a centralized system, which is more prone to security vulnerabilities. The existing blockchain-based healthcare schemes provide only a data-sharing framework, but they lack security and privacy. To cope with these kinds of security issues, we have designed a novel security algorithm that provides security as well as privacy with much better efficiency and a lower cost. Hence, in this research, we have proposed a patient healthcare framework that provides greater security, reliability, and authentication compared to existing blockchain-based access control.
Sarath Sabu, Hariharan Ramalingam, M Vishaka, H Swapna · 5 authors
Medical applications are fast growing in popularity, both for professional use and for patient-centered apps. The current Health record and IoT data sharing systems however have a fair amount of problems associated with privacy and security. The secure and privacy aware E-Health record to propose a mechanism using blockchain and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) which offers a solution to all these problems. It also includes limitations and safeguards on what can be done and cannot be done with your personal information in some cases. The IPFS data will be dispersed among the nodes. Use of IPFS (Interplanetary File System) to store health records, which has the benefit of being distributed which in turn makes record tamper-free. In addition, the proposed model keeps track of disease statistics without invading any patient's privacy. This is conceivable not only for web pages, but for any type of file that a computer might save, whether it's a document, an email, or even a database record, thanks to IPFS.
Conventional crop insurance systems are complex and often not economically feasible. Farmers are often reluctant to be covered for their crops due to lack of trust in insurance firms and the fear of delayed or non-payment of claims. In this paper, a blockchain based crop insurance solution is suggested. The solution suggested in this paper is an affordable, efficient, low cost crop insurance solution which will ensure many farmers are insured and benefiting from timely crop insurance. Currently the cost of administering insurance is an essential barrier to accessing this facility. With the proper use of blockchain based on ethereum this expense can be reduced dramatically. We have conducted various tests on platforms such as Google Cloud and found that the least throughput is 165 transactions. Upon analysis we have found that the time taken by the block formation is directly proportional to the timing of processing. The end-to-end average latency of the system was achieved as 31.2 s, which was quite effective for the infrastructure what we are using. Upon conducting acceptance testing, we found that the system suggested in the paper is effective and we are planning to release the application on open source platforms for future improvements.
Rajesh Kumar Kaushal, Naveen Kumar, Surya Narayan Panda
Abstract Blockchain is a technology that operates on distributed peer-to-peer network and is widely adopted by large number of organizations due to its attractive features such as highly secured, transparent, traceable, low transaction fee, no need of central authority and confidentiality. There are lot of confusions and myths regarding the blockchain technology as it is emerging technology and too complex in nature. This paper is aimed at revealing blockchain technology in depth along with its applications and open research challenges. The past published literature was reviewed to achieve the objectives. The study found that apart from cryptocurrency, blockchain is also suitable for other applications such as smart cities, supply chain, healthcare, smart transportation and authenticating IoT (Internet of Things) devices. This study is also disclosing various open research challenges such as scalability issues, huge power consumption and delay in completing transactions. This paper is also sharing the mitigation approaches and the future of blockchain with smart contracts.
The grain supply chain not only broadens the financing channels for small and medium-sized enterprises in the supply chain and strengthens the cohesion of the supply chain but also opens up new business models and sources of profit for commercial banks. This article aims to study the use of advanced information technologies such as mobile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) transmission, BT, and other advanced information technologies to design intelligent grain depot integrated systems based on the IoT technology, in accordance with the principles of practicality and advancement, to realize the informatization of the daily management of the grain depot and provide construction experience for the informatization construction of the food industry. This article proposes a detailed summary of several models of agricultural supply chain finance from the perspective of supply chain management and analyzes the applicable conditions and basic processes of these models. It also analyzes the structure of the agricultural supply chain through typical cases, introduces the operation of supply chain finance, and evaluates and analyzes its effectiveness and problems. The experimental results in this paper show that, compared with other storage methods, this solution has obvious advantages in data query efficiency and data storage cost. Without a central server, the entire distributed system will have a certain degree of efficiency, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. When the amount of grain data reaches 100,000, 1 million, and 10 million, the system data integrity check time is 0.0263 seconds, 0.3251 seconds, and 1.5032 seconds, respectively. The program seems very useful.
The existing agriculture system is having several components such as supply chain management, crop insurance, the shipment of goods, and it involves numerous untrusted stakeholders such as users (farmers, retailers, customers, wholesalers, etc.), agencies (bank, insurance company) and regulators (assessor, surveyors). Due to the active engrossment of the middle man (mostly human beings or agencies operated by human beings) some key issues are raised such as transparency, timeliness, traceability, security, and immutability resulting in financial loss, crop contamination, and spoilage. Secure distributed public ledger technology and decentralized computing paradigm make Blockchain an appropriate alternative to resolve these issues and to achieve profitability & trust for all its stakeholders. In this research, we intend to propose a Blockchain-based mechanism viz. AgriOnBlock which would address the issues mentioned in the agriculture sector by connecting various stakeholders through the usage of IoT devices and smart contracts in Ethereum. We further discuss implications, constraints (methodological, awareness related, regulatory, etc.), and potential for actual adoption of AgriOnBlock.
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the digital world by connecting billions of electronic devices over the internet. IoT devices play an essential role in the modern era when conventional devices become more autonomous and smart. On the one hand, high‐speed data transfer is a major issue where the 5G‐enabled environment plays an important role. On the other hand, these IoT devices transfer the data by using protocols based on centralized architecture and may cause several security issues for the data. Merging artificial intelligence to 5G wireless systems solves several issues such as autonomous robots, self‐driving vehicles, virtual reality, and engender security problems. Building trust among the network users without trusting third party authorities is the system's primary concern. Blockchain emerged as a key technology based on a distributed ledger to maintain the network's event logs. Blockchain provides a secure, decentralized, and trustless environment for IoT devices. However, integrating IoT and blockchain also has several challenges; for example, major challenge is low throughput. Currently, the ethereum blockchain network can process approximately 12 to 15 transactions per second, while IoT devices require relatively higher throughput. Therefore, blockchains are incapable of providing functionality for a 5G‐enabled IoT based network. The limiting factor of throughput in the blockchain is their network. The slow propagation of transactions and blocks in the P2P network does not allow miners and verifiers to fastly mine and verify new blocks, respectively. Therefore, network scalability is the major issue of IoT based blockchains. In this work, we solved the network scalability issue using blockchain distributed network while to increase the throughput of blockchain, this article uses the Raft consensus algorithm. Another most important issue with IoT networks is privacy. Unfortunately, the blockchain distributed ledgers are public and sensitive information is available on the network for everyone are private, but in such cases, third party editing is not possible without revealing the original contents. To solve privacy issues, we used zkLedger as a solution that is based on zero knowledge‐based cryptography.
Sheikh Mohammad Idrees, Iflah Aijaz, Roshan Jameel, Mariusz Nowostawski
The blockchain is revolutionizing the current IT industry by increasing its integration with other prominent technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Big Data and Cloud Computing to name a few. It works as a distributed network with no central authority, where the data is continuously added in the form of blocks. The blocks are validated by the network itself, which makes it transparent and secure. It was first used as a ledger for the transactions of a crypto currency named bitcoin, but with time, innumerable industries have started to implement it. And because of its promising future, it would not take much time to spread in all the IT related areas globally. The blockchain technology is contemplated to be a technology that is still in its infancy and needs a thorough research so that it can be utilized to its full capacity. Consequently, in order to provide a thorough analysis, this paper gives a systematic and comprehensive review of architecture and working of the blockchain along with its types and important characteristics. This paper also discusses about the prominent blockchain platforms available today along with the description of diverse blockchain supported application areas. The issues related to the blockchain technology and the areas in which the work can be done in future are also pointed in this paper, which would be helpful for practitioners and researchers who are willing to work on this fast growing platform.
M. Poongodi, Mohit Malviya, Mounir Hamdi, V. Vijayakumar · 7 authors
Abstract The evolution of 4G telecommunication propagated various resource‐crunched clients to experience rate‐effective resources at ease. However, it extends its underlying centralised architecture, which arouses various challenges correlated with network data availability, network information protection, and operational infrastructure charges. With the recent revolution of telecommunication, 5G networks promised to provide credible schemes like the high quality of service, ultra‐low latency, and much security over the pre‐existing architecture. However, the deployment of end‐to‐end 5G network cutting‐edge systems in the present heterogeneous world limits its core idea of extensive data privacy, native interoperability, risk‐free interference, and radio spectrum sharing. Perhaps, to achieve its true capability, improved versions of blockchain technology could be aligned to strengthen various real‐time complex applications at a flourishing rate. One of the multiplexed real‐time enterprise applications is a keyword search engine where the integrity of user data files and keyword searches are bound to come under cyber hackers. On the one hand, it was found that when a 5G‐based blockchain emulated network gets deployed with intact encryption techniques, the entire system facilitates to give reliable, efficient, and risk‐free keyword search over variegated 5G network data and its complex computational calculations. Consequently, the use of blockchain‐based decentralised cloud orchestration scheme at various levels enabled the architecture to remain incorruptible and protects all the confidential files and keywords in a fully controlled file access environment. The results of the simulation kernel shows that proposed architecture which, when combined with blockchain‐based decentralised cloud orchestration network system, justify all the essential characteristics and effectuates the optimal use of 5G network sharing by each network entity.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered a high-impact technology in many major markets. It promises many opportunities, but there are several risks and drawbacks associated with this technology stand in the way of realizing its potential opportunities, such as the IoT devices limited capabilities (restricted resources) as well as the current access control systems based on central structures and central hierarchies. with all IoT devices, the security risks and threats are enormous. Blockchain is defined as tamper-proof, tamper-resistant digital ledgers that are executed in a distributed fashion, i.e., without a central repository and usually without central authority, allowing all parties to track information over an insecure network without the need for third-party verification. This technology could be a solution to the problems facing the Internet of Things, however the integrating between blockchain and Internet of Things system comes with many challenges as such blockchain suffers from high resource consumption, slow response, etc. In this research we will propose a new architecture for how to integrate blockchain with the Internet of Things. This structure consists of the smart home responsible for its own data (own chain) and the service provider which considered indirect manager of the network. The performance of the proposed architecture will be studied in terms of expansion, decentralization, security and permanent availability.
Saurabh Shukla, Subhasis Thakur, Shahid Hussain, John G. Breslin · 5 authors
The healthcare Internet-of-Things (IoT) offers many benefits including data transmission in real-time mode, the ability to monitor the physiological state of the patient in a different interval of time. Devices such as blood-pressure monitors, glucose meters, heart monitoring implants, Electroencephalography (EEG), Electrocardiogram (ECG), and Electromyography (EMG) wearable devices allow health providers to collect the patient health information locally and make a real-time decision based on the Patient Health Data (PHD). Hospitals have been adopting the IoT for many years and now they have healthcare IoT devices in patients’ rooms and their bodies. However, the medical agencies, hospitals, and companies do not consider the security risk of healthcare IoT devices connected to a Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN). The IoT devices can be easily hacked and may lead to several potentially life-threatening risks due to poor authentication and encryption practices. Existing machine learning algorithms and blockchain approach working in the cloud computing environment are unable to meet the Quality of Service (QoS) like reliability, authentication, identification, and security requirements of healthcare IoT devices. Most of the traditional machine learning algorithms and techniques for healthcare IoT lacks the real-world implementation for secure data transmission. Therefore, blockchain is introduced for secure and reliable transaction in healthcare IoT. Whereas Fog Computing (FC) is introduced to extend the services of the cloud at the edge of networks. Integration of FC with blockchain can overcome the issue of healthcare IoT device identification, authentication, and verification for scalable frequent data transmission in a decentralized environment. Hence, a novel solution for the abovementioned problem is proposed using FC and blockchain. It includes an FC-based three-tier architecture, an analytical model, a mathematical framework, and an Advanced Signature-Based Encryption (ASE) algorithm for healthcare IoT device identification, verification, and Patient Health Data (PHD) authentication. The aim is to extend secure data transmission for healthcare IoT and end-users availing the real-time services. The proposed model and algorithm will be able to provide services for transaction and transmission near the edge in a secure manner. By analyzing the generated results from the proposed novel ASE algorithm for throughput, packet error, reliability, and malicious node detection accuracy; it is observed that the ASE algorithm in the FC environment easily outperforms the cloud and the other existing state of the art techniques such as FogBus, Femto cloud, Blockchain Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN), and BeeKeeper. The malicious node detection accuracy of the ASE algorithm in the FC environment is 91% and in the cloud is 83%. Whereas the reliability percentage of the ASE algorithm in FC is 95% and in the cloud is 87%. The proposed approach is tested on simulators iFogSim (Net-Beans) and SimBlock.
Since the invention of the Blockchain technology in 2008, it has been used in many domains to ensurehigh security and reliability of data, like from the use of Bitcoin to BaaS (Blockchain as a Service)which is a new blockchain trend and is a sort of cloud-based network for the organizations in thebusiness of building blockchain-based applications. This paper implements the combined approachof the decentralized Blockchain technology and the Supply Chain to establish that the end-users ina supply chain do not completely rely on the trader to establish that the product is counterfeited ornot and this can be done by authenticating the product at every stage in the Supply Chain by usingOne Time Passwords on the receiver’s mobile phone along with a deployed personnel who willbe responsible for assuring the quality of products. Furthermore, using this combined technical approachcan considerably lower down the cost of product quality assurance and this proposed systemwill track the authenticity of the product from its origin from the manufacturer to the end-user as well.
In the contemporary world, with ever-evolving internet models in the process of automating and digitalizing various industrial and domestic implementations, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made remarkable advancements in sharing the healthcare data and triggering the associated necessary actions. Healthcare-related data sharing among the intermediate nodes, privacy, and data integrity are the two critical challenges in the present-day scenario. Data needs to be encrypted to ensure the confidentiality of the sensitive information shared among the nodes, especially in the case of healthcare-related data records. Implementing the conventional encryption algorithms over the intermediate node may not be technically feasible, and too much burden on the intermediate nodes is not advisable. This article has focused on various security challenges in the existing mechanism, existing strategies in security solutions for IoT driven healthcare monitoring frameworks and proposes a context-aware state of art model based on Blockchain technology that has been deployed for encrypting the data among the nodes in the architecture of a 5G network. The proposed strategy was examined through various performance evaluation metrics, and the proposed approach had outperformed compared to its counterparts.
Abdullah Lakhan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Ahmed Noori Rashid, Seifedine Kadry · 7 authors
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is increasingly being used for healthcare purposes. IoMT enables many sensors to collect patient data from various locations and send it to a distributed hospital for further study. IoMT provides patients with a variety of paid programmes to help them keep track of their health problems. However, the current system services are expensive, and offloaded data in the healthcare network are insecure. The research develops a new, cost-effective and stable IoMT framework based on a blockchain-enabled fog cloud. The study aims to reduce the cost of healthcare application services as they are processing in the system. The study devises an IoMT system based on different algorithm techniques, such as Blockchain-Enable Smart-Contract Cost-Efficient Scheduling Algorithm Framework (BECSAF) schemes. Smart-Contract Blockchain schemes ensure data consistency and validation with symmetric cryptography. However, due to the different workflow tasks scheduled on other nodes, the heterogeneous, earliest finish, time-based scheduling deals with execution under their deadlines. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm schemes outperform all existing baseline approaches in terms of the implementation of applications.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.
Geetanjali Rathee, Sahil Garg, Georges Kaddoum, Dushantha Nalin K. Jayakody
COVID-19 is an extremely dangerous disease because of its highly infectious nature. In order to provide quick and immediate identification of infection, proper and immediate clinical support is needed. Researchers have proposed various machine learning and smart IoT-based schemes for categorizing COVID-19 patients. Artificial neural networks (ANNs), which are inspired by the biological concept of neurons, are generally used in various applications including healthcare systems. The ANN scheme provides a viable solution in the decision making process for managing healthcare information. The aim of this article is to provide secure COVID-19 vaccine distribution through IoT-based systems. The level-wise blockchain network is used to ensure security among IoT devices while distributing the vaccines. The proposed phenomenon is analyzed and verified over synthesized data where vaccine units are supplied by various distributors. The proposed approach is validated over accurate report generation and data alteration parameters against existing methods.
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the recent innovations in Information Technology, which intends to interconnect the physical and digital worlds. It introduces a vision of smartness by enabling communication between objects and humans through the Internet. IoT has diverse applications in almost all sectors like Smart Health, Smart Transportation, and Smart Cities, etc. In healthcare applications, IoT eases communication between doctors and patients as the latter can be diagnosed remotely in emergency scenarios through body sensor networks and wearable sensors. However, using IoT in healthcare systems can lead to violation of the privacy of patients. Thus, security should be taken into consideration. Blockchain is one of the trending research topics nowadays and can be applied to the majority of IoT scenarios. Few major reasons for using the Blockchain in healthcare systems are its prominent features, i.e., Decentralization, Immutability, Security and Privacy, and Transparency. This paper’s main objective was to enhance the functionality of healthcare systems using emerging and innovative computer technologies like IoT and Blockchain. So, initially, a brief introduction to the basic concepts of IoT and Blockchain is provided. After this, the applicability of IoT and Blockchain in the medical sector is explored in three major areas—drug traceability, remote patient-monitoring, and medical record management. At last, the challenges of deploying IoT and Blockchain in healthcare systems are discussed.