Satyanand Singh, Joanna Rosak-Szyrocka, László Tamàndl
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is laying the groundwork for a world in which many of our everyday devices will be connected and will interact with their surroundings to gather data and automate some operations. Among other things, such a concept necessitates seamless authentication, data privacy, security, attack resilience, simplicity of deployment, and self-maintenance. Blockchain, a technology created with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, can provide such advantages. To create blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) applications, a full discussion of how to modify blockchain to meet the unique requirements of IoT is offered in this paper. The most important BIoT applications are detailed after a brief introduction to blockchain, with the goal of highlighting how blockchain can affect conventional cloud-based IoT applications. Then, several factors that have an impact on the design, development, and deployment of a BIoT application are covered, along with present obstacles and potential improvements. Lastly, a list of recommendations is provided to help future BIoT researchers and developers understand some of the problems that need to be solved before deploying the upcoming generation of BIoT applications. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-01-010 Full Text: PDF
Abstract The Fog computing concept has been introduced to aid in the data processing of Internet of things applications using Cloud computing. Due to the profitable benefits of this combination, several papers have lately been published proposing the deployment of Blockchain alongside Fog computing in a variety of fields. A comprehensive evaluation and synthesis of the literature on Blockchain-Fog computing integration applications that have emerged in recent years is required. Although there have been several articles on the integration of Blockchain with Fog computing, the applications connected with this combination are still fragmented and require further exploration. Hence, in this paper, the applications of Blockchain-Fog computing integration are identified using a systematic literature review technique and tailored search criteria generated from the study objectives. This article found and evaluated 144 relevant papers. The findings of this article can be used as a resource for future Fog computing research and designs.
Edge computing brings computational ability to network edges to enable low latency based on deploying devices close to the environment where the data is generated. Nevertheless, the limitation of size and energy consumption constrain the scalability and performance of edge device applications such as deep learning, although, cloud computing can be adopted to support high-performance tasks with centralized data collection. However, frequently communicating with a central cloud server brings potential risks to security and privacy issues by exposing data on the Internet. In this paper, we propose a secure continuous knowledge transfer approach to improve knowledge by collaborating with multiple edge devices in the decentralized edge computing architecture without a central server. Using blockchain, the knowledge integrity is maintained in the transfer process by recording the transaction information of each knowledge improvement and synchronizing the blockchain in each edge device. The knowledge is a trained deep-learning model that is derived by learning the local data. Using the local data of each edge device, the model is continuously trained to improve performance. Therefore, each improvement is recorded as the contribution of each edge device immutably in the decentralized edge computing architecture.
The successful operation of Bitcoin has made its underlying blockchain technology receive wide attention. As the application scenarios of blockchain technology are enriched, the requirements for its performance are getting higher. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to effectively solve the problem of high-performance data interaction in the blockchain. In this paper, based on relevant domestic and foreign research literature, we start from the development history of blockchain technology and review the relevant research work on improving the performance of blockchain from three perspectives: on-chain interaction technology, off-chain interaction technology, and cross-chain interaction technology in turn. The on-chain and off-chain interaction technologies improve performance by improving the architecture of the blockchain system. The performance improvement solution of on-chain interaction technology is to modify and optimize the basic protocol and architecture of the blockchain itself to achieve a performance improvement. Still, the impact of this approach is limited in terms of performance improvement. The performance improvement solution of off-chain interaction technology is to transfer part of the data processing to off-chain and only return the final result to on-chain for storage and recording, which reduces the burden of on-chain operation and improves the efficiency of data processing. In terms of cross-chain interaction technology, this paper analyses four mainstream technology, namely, Notary Scheme, Side chain and Chain relay, Hash-Locking, and Distributed Private Key Control, and ultimately concludes through comparative analysis that cross-chain technology has a significant impact on improving blockchain performance. Finally, the paper provides a systematic overview of the above and an outlook on the possible future development of technologies related to enhancing blockchain performance.
Muhammad Hammad, Jawaid Iqbal, Ch Anwar Ul Hassan, Saddam Hussain · 9 authors
Version control is an important component of configuration management, and most enterprise-level software uses different tools and technologies to manage the software version control such as CVS, Subversion, or Perforce. Following the success of bitcoin, the first practical application of blockchain, it is being implemented in other fields such as healthcare, supply chains, financial management, real estate, electoral systems, and so on. Blockchain’s core features include decentralization, immutability, and interminability. Most version control repositories are centralized and can be modified by external sources, implying that they are in danger of being corrupted or controlled. In this study, we present the BDA-SCV architecture for implementing a version control system in blockchain technology. Our proposed approach would replace the necessity for a centralized system, with a decentralized approach implemented in the blockchain using distributed file storage, for which we will use the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which is a distributed file system. The proof of authority (PoA) consensus algorithm will be used to approve the developer communicating modifications to the private blockchain network; the authority will only provide permission and will not be able to add, edit, or delete code files. For each change, a ledger block will be created with a reference to the file stored in the distributed repository. A block cannot be manipulated once it has been created. Smart contracts will be used to register developers, create blocks, and manage the repository. The suggested model is implemented using the Hyperledger Fabric network, and the developer and authorizer ends are built into the dotnet web application.
Joshua Roberts, Joanna F. DeFranco, D. Richard Kuhn
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) , including blockchain, has a number of properties that make it useful for distributed systems. However, the immutability of blockchain and most forms of DLT make it impossible to delete data, as is required for compliance with many privacy rules regarding personally identifiable information. Thus, there is a need for DLT that can provide the integrity-preserving property of DLT while also allowing support for privacy rules. The data block matrix (DBM) is a variant of distributed ledger technology. It provides the integrity assurance of blockchain but allows for controlled revision or deletion of data. This property is essential for using DLT in applications that must guarantee privacy requirements by the deleting of a user's private data at their request. The DBM design solves the blockchain privacy conflict thus expanding the range of blockchain applications by also allowing exception management. It has been implemented and is available ( https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/redactable-distributed-ledger ) as a configurable option for Hyperledger Fabric (HF) , with a proof-of-concept application for data sharing in a health care environment. Other potential applications include logistics management and digital currency. This paper will cover the DBM properties and data structure, the DBM implementation in HF, and a use case and application design of the DBM implementation using the pharmaceutical industry supply chain.
Zalina Fatima Azzahra, I Gusti Bagus Baskara Nugraha
Information Technology Service Management is managing information technology services that focus on customer satisfaction and ensure meeting Service Level Agreements (SLA). The organization used in this study is a university, and there are service providers, namely the information technology directorate center, and the service users are several sections in the university. SLA management is currently conducted by emailing SLA documents to each section. The current SLA management is challenging to manage contract recording because documents are in separate emails, and there needs to be a monitoring process for SLA. This study proposes a service-level agreement management system using blockchain-based smart contracts and uses a private blockchain network for implementing smart contracts. The results of this study show the process of managing SLA using a smart contract in a more structured to improve the quality of IT service management.
Guzmán Llambías, Bruno Bradach, Juan J. Nogueira, Laura González · 5 authors
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) to manage data in a decentralised way. During the last years, interoperability has become one of the main challenges within blockchain research as blockchains increasingly require integration between each other. Indeed, blockchains work by design in silos of information as interoperability is not a native feature. The main efforts in the field are focused on blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, interoperability in DLT remains as an almost untouched area of work as they introduce additional requirements focusing on privacy and identity. Although there are some interoperability solutions for DLT, they are either high-level design proposals not providing concrete implementations or focus on interoperability issues between business applications and blockchain platforms. In this paper we propose a gateway-based platform-to-platform interoperability solution for DLT, which comprises a detailed solution design and a reference implementation. The proposal was assessed through the development of a social security case scenario and the evaluation through two interoperability frameworks. A reference implementation was built using two DLT: Hyperledger Fabric and Corda. The experimental results shows that it is possible to achieve technical interoperability between two heterogeneous DLT platforms using a gateway-based interoperability solution, relaxing decentralisation, data privacy, identity and authorisation management properties.
In the traditional mobile edge computing (MEC) system, the availability of MEC services is greatly limited for the edge users of the cell due to serious signal attenuation and inter-cell interference. User-centric MEC (UC-MEC) can be seen as a promising solution to address this issue. In UC-MEC, each user is served by a dedicated access point (AP) cluster enabled with MEC capability instead of a single MEC server, however, at the expense of more energy consumption and greater privacy risks. To achieve efficient and reliable resource utilization with user-centric services, we propose an energy-efficient blockchain-enabled UC-MEC system where blockchain operations and resource optimization are jointly performed. Firstly, we design a resource-aware, reliable, replicated, redundant, and fault-tolerant (R-RAFT) consensus mechanism to implement secure and reliable resource trading. Then, an optimization framework based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed to minimize the total energy consumed by wireless transmission, consensus, and task computing, where AP clustering, computing resource allocation, and bandwidth allocation are jointly considered. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed UC-MEC system over reference schemes, with at most 33.96% reduction in the total delay and 48.77% reduction in the total energy consumption.
Electronic health records (EHRs) play an important role in our life. However, most of the time, they are scattered and saved on different databases belonging to distinct institutions (hospitals, laboratories, clinics, etc.) geographically distributed across one or many countries. Due to this decentralization and the heterogeneity of the different involved systems, medical staff are facing difficulties in correctly collaborating by sharing, protecting, and tracking their patient’s electronic health-record history to provide them with the best care. Additionally, patients have no control over their private EHRs. Blockchain has many promising future uses for the healthcare domain because it provides a better solution for sharing data while preserving the integrity, the interoperability, the availability of the classical client–server architectures used to manage EHRS. This paper proposes a framework called HealthBlock for collaboratively sharing EHRs and their privacy preservation. Different technologies have been combined to achieve this goal. The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) technology stores and shares patients’ EHRs in distributed off-chain storage and ensures the record’s immutability; Hyperledger Indy gives patients full control over their EHRs, and Hyperledger Fabric stores the patient-access control policy and delegations.
The pervasiveness of healthcare data to create better healthcare facilities and opportunities is one of the most-imperative parts of human life that offers radical advancements in healthcare services practiced through the blockchain-based management, analysis, storage, and sharing of health-related big data. Researchers can accelerate the challenges of developing a secure, scalable, and accessible dynamic healthcare infrastructure by the extensive data exchange required through individual microservices of blockchain-based privacy-preserving health data management ledgers in Healthcare Industry 4.0. Conducting secure and privacy-preserving platforms through primitive cryptographic algorithms is risky and can be a serious concern as the need to authenticate and store sensitive health data automatically are increasingly high. To achieve interoperability, security, efficiency, scalability, availability, and accountability among healthcare providers in heterogeneous networks, this paper proposes a blockchain-enabled decentralized, trustworthy privacy-preserving platform in the healthcare industry. In the healthcare-chain system, blockchain provides an appreciated secure environment for the privacy-preserving health data management ledger through hash processing, which updates high data security, storage immutability, and authentication functionality with an integrated attribute signature in accessing prescribed health block data. This article describes a new secure data retention design, prescribed evidence collection, and evaluation mechanism with integrity–confidentiality–availability to enforce the data access control policies for transactions of healthcare microservices. This scheme revealed the optimal performance in terms of mining health data size, average response time, transaction latency, and throughput for secured block transactions in blockchain networks.
Blockchain-related studies that focus on solving AECO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operation) digital management environment issues, such as data protection and data ownership, show the projected benefits of Blockchain-based digital construction environments. However, adopting such technology will require a holistic approach to ensure it does not result in data redundancy, leading to digital system inefficiencies. This article studies the Blockchain construction synergies from the infrastructure point of view to understand its future in construction. The article visualises Blockchain infrastructure elements and fits them within the construction project’s digital environment. A novel framework for Blockchain orchestration and implementation and a blueprint for developing Blockchain applications for construction are presented. The proposed blueprint is then used to develop a Blockchain application using Hyperledger Firefly. The article builds on the previous literature and Blockchain applications on the Ethereum public Blockchain. The expected benefit of such a framework is providing a practical perspective on the implementation side of Blockchain in construction.
The widespread usage of smart devices with various city-centric services speeds up and improves civic life, in contrast to growing privacy and security concerns. Security issues are exacerbated when e-government service providers trade their services within a centralised framework. Due to security concerns, city-centric centralised services are being converted to blockchain-based systems, which is a very time-consuming and challenging process. The interoperability of these blockchain-based systems is also more challenging due to protocol variances, an excessive amount of local transactions that raise scalability and rapidly occupy memory. In this paper, we have proposed a framework for interoperability across various blockchain-based smart city services. It also summarises how independent service providers might continue self-service choices (i.e., local transactions) without overloading the blockchain network and other organisations. A simulated interoperability network is used to show the network’s effectiveness. The experimental outcomes show the scalability and memory optimization of the blockchain network.
The Internet of things (IoT) is on the rise, and it is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous computing service that requires large data storage and processing. Due to the limited capabilities of most IoT devices, they always rely on cloud services for storage and computing, posing security and privacy risks. Due to its significant aspects, such as data security and privacy, Blockchain (BC) has drawn significant interest in alleviating these concerns. Despite its potential benefits, Blockchain’s high complexity and limited scalability make it computationally expensive and incompatible with IoT devices requiring lightweight solutions. Although several models have been proposed for this purpose, the issue is still far from being resolved. These models have significant constraints, such as resource optimization during operation. By presenting a scalable lightweight Blockchain integrated model (LightBlock), the primary objective of this work is to enable the usage of BC in the IoT environment. LightBlock is implemented by optimizing the components of a lightweight, scalable Blockchain. Lastly, the study’s findings should provide IoT users with a high level of security and privacy by ensuring applicability and offering end-to-end security.
Víctor Abraham Villagrá González, Luı́s Sánchez, Jorge Lanza, Juan Ramón Santana · 6 authors
As data becomes the new fuel of the economy and a key asset to address our societal challenges, we cannot afford to have the data of businesses, public sector and individuals stored and kept unexploited or, what is worse, exploited by others that actually have the resources and capacity to do it. This is affecting not only our economic performance but also our security, safety and sovereignty. Among the plethora of data sources that exist nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is recognised as a game-changer technology that expands its applicability to a huge variety of domains. Its main asset is, precisely, the data that the myriad of sensors embedded in the environment are constantly generating. The diffusion of platforms for IoT data sharing and monetisation is one of the key success factors which may help to drive the data economy and industrial transformation. In this paper, we are presenting a data sharing platform based on Blockchain, so-called Blockchain-based IoT Data Marketplace (BIDM) over which data producers and data consumers are able to share data in a decentralised and trustworthy manner. The BIDM enables a data marketplace where owners of IoT infrastructures can expose the observations that their devices generate while retaining control over who accesses each observation and directly getting revenues according to the price they have set. The evaluation that we have carried out of the BIDM’s behaviour and performance in terms of operational execution times and scalability has been the basis for the discussion that we are presenting on the shortcomings that are typically associated with the use of Blockchain technologies as enablers for data marketplaces. This discussion also includes the evaluation of the challenges that must be considered for the creation of secure and interoperable Data Spaces based on Blockchain.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have rapidly developed over the last decade due to their environmental benefits. As a key component of EVs, electric vehicle chargers are becoming increasingly digital and intelligent. However, due to the vast attack surface and the lack of systematic study, EV chargers and charging management cloud platforms are facing cyber security problems. These problems include weak cryptographic mechanisms, insecure data communication, and malicious firmware attacks. Through specific vulnerabilities, attackers can tamper with the data communication or replay network requests between EV chargers and cloud platforms. It will cause threats such as user-level privacy leakage, power fluctuations in the smart grid, and damage to Electric vehicles, damaging public life and property safety. Given the above, this paper proposes a security protection scheme incorporating blockchain, zero trust, and ShangMi cryptographic (SM) algorithms. The scheme uses Hyperledger Fabric for key management and trust evaluation event storage to guarantee the authenticity, non-repudiation, and tamper-proof of keys and events. In addition, zero trust is applied to secure valuable resources and enforce identity and access management (IAM) for accessing entities. We adopt the dynamic trust evaluation method to assess the trustworthiness of accessing entities in real time to implement dynamic authorization. Furthermore, the SM algorithms SM2, SM3, and SM4 are used to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively resist replay and tampering attacks, securing data communication between EV chargers and cloud platforms. And the performance of the cryptographic algorithm, blockchain system, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) meets Chinese national and industry standards.
The integration of blockchain and digital twins (DT) for better building-lifecycle data management has recently received much attention from researchers in the field. In this respect, the adoption of enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, Big Data analytics, etc., has also been investigated in an abundance of studies. The present review inspects the recent studies to shed light on the foremost among those enabling technologies and their scope, challenges, and integration potential. To this end, 86 scientific papers, recognized and retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, were reviewed and a thorough bibliometric analysis was performed on them. The obtained results demonstrate the nascency of the research in this field and the necessity of further implementation of practical methods to discover and prove the real potential of these technologies and their fusion. It was also found that the integration of these technologies can be beneficial for addressing the implementation challenges they face individually. In the end, an abstract descriptive model is presented to provide a better understanding of how the technologies can become integrated into a unified system for smartening the built environment.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) serve as a solid documentation of health transactions and as a vital resource of information for healthcare stakeholders. EHR integrity and security issues, however, continue to be intractable. Blockchain-based EHR architectures, however, address the issues of integrity very effectively. In this work, we suggest a decentralized patient-centered healthcare data management (PCHDM) with a blockchain-based EHR framework to address issues of confidentiality, access control, and privacy of record. This patient-centric architecture keeps the patient at the center of control for secured storage of EHR data. It is effective in the storage environment with the interplanetary file system (IPFS) and blockchain technology. In order to control unauthorized users, the proposed secure password authentication-based key exchange (SPAKE) implements smart contract-based access control to EHR transactions and access policies. The experimental setup comprises four hyperledger fabric nodes with level DB database and IPFS off-chain storage. The framework was evaluated using the public hepatitis dataset, with parameters such as block creation time, transactional computational overhead with encryption key size, and uploading/downloading time with EHR size. The framework enables patient-centric access control of the EHR with the SPAKE encryption algorithm.
With the rapid development of Industry 4.0, the data security of Industrial Internet of Things in the Industry 4.0 environment has received widespread attention. Blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization and tamper-proof. Therefore, it has a natural advantage in solving the data security problem of Industrial Internet of Things. However, current blockchain technologies face challenges in providing consistency, scalability and data security at the same time in Industrial Internet of Things. To address the scalability problem and data security problem of Industrial Internet of Things, this paper constructs a highly scalable data storage mechanism for Industrial Internet of Things based on coded sharding blockchain. The mechanism uses coded sharding technology for data processing to improve the fault tolerance and storage load of the blockchain to solve the scalability problem. Then a cryptographic accumulator-based data storage scheme is designed which connects the cryptographic accumulator with the sharding nodes to save storage overhead and solve the security problem of data storage and verification. Finally, the scheme is proved to be security and the performance of the scheme is evaluated.
This PhD dissertation concludes a three-year long research journey on the integration of Fog Computing and Blockchain technologies. The main aim of such integration is to address the challenges of each of these technologies, by integrating it with the other. Blockchain technology (BC) is a distributed ledger technology in the form of a distributed transactional database, secured by cryptography, and governed by a consensus mechanism. It was initially proposed for decentralized cryptocurrency applications with practically proven high robustness. Fog Computing (FC) is a geographically distributed computing architecture, in which various heterogeneous devices at the edge of network are ubiquitously connected to collaboratively provide elastic computation services. FC provides enhanced services closer to end-users in terms of time, energy, and network load. The integration of FC with BC can result in more efficient services, in terms of latency and privacy, mostly required by Internet of Things systems.
Ammar Riadh Kairaldeen, Nor Fadzilah Abdullah, Asma Abu-Samah, Rosdiadee Nordin
Blockchain introduces challenges related to the reliability of user identity and identity management systems; this includes detecting unfalsified identities linked to IoT applications. This study focuses on optimizing user identity verification time by employing an efficient encryption algorithm for the user signature in a peer-to-peer decentralized IoT blockchain network. To achieve this, a user signature-based identity management framework is examined by using various encryption techniques and contrasting various hash functions built on top of the Modified Merkle Hash Tree (MMHT) data structure algorithm. The paper presents the execution of varying dataset sizes based on transactions between nodes to test the scalability of the proposed design for secure blockchain communication. The results show that the MMHT data structure algorithm using SHA3 and AES-128 encryption algorithm gives the lowest execution time, offering a minimum of 36% gain in time optimization compared to other algorithms. This work shows that using the AES-128 encryption algorithm with the MMHT algorithm and SHA3 hash function not only identifies malicious codes but also improves user integrity check performance in a blockchain network, while ensuring network scalability. Therefore, this study presents the performance evaluation of a blockchain network considering its distinct types, properties, components, and algorithms' taxonomy.
Faheem Nawaz Tareen, Ahmad Naseem Alvi, Asad Ali Malik, Muhammad Awais Javed · 8 authors
Smart cities are emerging rapidly due to the provisioning of comfort in the human lifestyle. The healthcare system is an important segment of the smart city. The timely delivery of critical human vital signs data to emergency health centers without delay can save human lives. Blockchain is a secure technology that provides the immutable record-keeping of data. Secure data transmission by avoiding erroneous data delivery also demands blockchain technology in healthcare systems of smart cities where patients’ health history is required for their necessary treatments. The health parameter data of each patient are embedded in a separate block in blockchain technology with SHA-256-based cryptography hash values. Mining computing nodes are responsible to find a 32-bit nonce (number only used once) value for each data block to compute a valid SHA-256-based hash value in blockchain technology. Computing nonce for valid hash values is a time-taking process that may cause life losses in the healthcare system. Increasing the mining nodes reduces this delay; however, the uniform distribution of mining data blocks to these nodes by considering the priority data is a challenging task. In this work, an efficient scheme is proposed for scheduling nonce computing tasks at the mining nodes to ensure the timely execution of these tasks. The proposed scheme consists of two parts, the first one provides a load balancing scheme to distribute the nonce execution tasks among the mining nodes such that makespan is minimized and the second part prioritizes more sensitive patient data for quick execution. The results show that the proposed load balancing scheme effectively allocates data blocks in different mining nodes as compared to round-robin and greedy algorithms and computes hash values of most of the higher-risk patients’ data blocks in a reduced amount of time.
Ashraf Mohey Eldin, Eman Hossny, Khaled Wassif, Fatma A. Omara
Blockchain is a distributed technology that introduced the well known Bitcoin cryptocurrency into action. Blockchain has been considered for research by many countries and industries. It is being applied in many fields such as the healthcare domain. Many companies started using Blockchain to increase the security and privacy of the Electronic Healthcare Records for their patients. The work in this paper discusses some existing healthcare problems and challenges. In addition, the paper reviews some related work models and provides a comparison that shows their objectives and limitations. Also, a proposed Federated Blockchain System (FBS) is introduced to provide solutions for these healthcare problems and elaborates the technical details of the system architecture. Moreover, the effectiveness of the system has been validated which showed an average of 68-100 ms for performing query operations and average of 0.944-19.041 s for performing writing operations on the system. Finally, a discussion of the system validation and future work are presented.