Over the last few decades, the healthcare industry has continuously grown, with hundreds of thousands of patients obtaining treatment remotely using smart devices. Data security becomes a prime concern with such a massive increase in the number of patients. Numerous attacks on healthcare data have recently been identified that can put the patient’s identity at stake. For example, the private data of millions of patients have been published online, posing a severe risk to patients’ data privacy. However, with the advent of Industry 4.0, medical practitioners can digitally assess the patient’s condition and administer prompt prescriptions. However, wearable devices are also vulnerable to numerous security threats, such as session hijacking, data manipulation, and spoofing attacks. Attackers can tamper with the patient’s wearable device and relays the tampered data to the concerned doctor. This can put the patient’s life at high risk. Since blockchain is a transparent and immutable decentralized system, it can be utilized for securely storing patient’s wearable data. Artificial Intelligence (AI), on the other hand, utilizes different machine learning techniques to classify malicious data from an oncoming stream of patient’s wearable data. An amalgamation of these two technologies would make the possibility of tampering the patient’s data extremely difficult. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a blockchain and AI-envisioned secure and trusted framework (HEART). Here, Long-Short Term Model (LSTM) is used to classify wearable devices as malicious or non-malicious. Then, we design a smart contract that allows only of those patients’ data having a wearable device to be classified as non-malicious to the public blockchain network. This information is then accessible to all involved in the patient’s care. We then evaluate the HEART’s performance considering various evaluation metrics such as accuracy, recall, precision, scalability, and network latency. On the training and testing sets, the model achieves accuracies of 93% and 92.92%, respectively.
Blockchain can ensure data security and reliability during the stage of building operation and maintenance (BOM), provide reliable data for decision-making. However, existing schemes based on single-chain architecture have the problems of storage limitation and scalability, and ignore the impact of event's priority and real-time on blockchain transaction. Therefore, for BOM, this paper provides a BOM framework based on sharding blockchain (SBC-BOMF), which constructs two-layer architecture based on master-chain and multiple shards, relieves the storage pressure of blockchain nodes and improves the concurrency capability. Priority-based transaction handling strategy is designed to achieve reasonable and rapid response for multi-level transactions. Finally, an actual BOM project is taken as example to illustrate the effectiveness of proposed scheme; experiments are conducted for performance testing and evaluation. Results show that proposed scheme can effectively solve the scalability problem caused by the application of blockchain in BOM, reduce storage overhead, and realize efficient handling for blockchain transactions.
In order to promote the value circulation of energy resources and improve energy efficiency, credible energy sharing between Internet of Things Devices (IoTDs) came into being. However, sometimes IoTDs do not obtain the required energy in the required time period, resulting in less active participation in energy sharing. To address these challenges, this paper first proposes a credible energy transaction model based on the distributed ledger blockchain at the Edge of the Internet of Things, where the Edge Cloud Server (ECS) can collect a large number of surplus energy resources of IoTDs in a secure and credible energy sharing environment and share them with other IoTDs in urgent need of charging. Meanwhile, in order to attract IoTDs to participate in energy sharing for a long time and meet the energy demand of ECS to the maximum extent, a smart contract-based Expected Social Welfare Maximized double auction incentive mechanism of Single ECS to Multi-IoTDs (ESWM-StM) is proposed to enable dynamic and adaptive energy sharing from multiple IoTDs to a single ECS. In addition, this paper compares the proposed algorithm with the benchmark method in terms of energy-sharing cost and long-term utility. The simulation results show that the proposed incentive mechanism can enable IoTDs to provide more surplus energy per unit cost to meet the energy demand of ECSs, and can sustainably attract more energy trading participants to enhance the expected social welfare in the long term.
One of the main issues over the ages has been the lack of water. The water supply networks are now being affected by the increased deployment of IOT technology and devices. The development of a trustworthy, auditable, and transparent traceable system like Blockchain is the product of creative research. Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, introduces a fresh, creative strategy for the development of centralized, distrust-free systems. The use of blockchain technology eliminates corruption since it can keep track of every transaction. Blockchain has built-in capabilities for fault tolerance, immutability, transparency, and full transaction tracing for records that are saved, as well as for digital asset representation and transaction executions. The blockchain-based water management system described in this study is completely decentralized, with IoT devices collecting data as it is setup and adding it to the blockchain. We use the Ethereum blockchain to represent a supplier to consumer use case in our blockchain-based water management system. We also talk about the network's participants' duties in the water management system. Finally, we assessed the benefits of blockchain-based water management over existing ones and showed how it might benefit contemporary society.
During the recent decade, two variants of evolving computing networks have augmented the Internet: (i) The Internet of Things (IoT) and (ii) Blockchain Network(s) (BCNs). The IoT is a network of heterogeneous digital devices embedded with sensors and software for various automation and monitoring purposes. A Blockchain Network is a broadcast network of computing nodes provisioned for validating digital transactions and recording the “well-formed” transactions in a unique data storage called a blockchain ledger. The power of a blockchain network is that (ideally) every node maintains its own copy of the ledger and takes part in validating the transactions. Integrating IoT and BCNs brings promising applications in many areas, including education, health, finance, agriculture, industry, and the environment. However, the complex, dynamic and heterogeneous computing and communication needs of IoT technologies, optionally integrated by blockchain technologies (if mandated), draw several challenges on scaling, interoperability, and security goals. In recent years, numerous models integrating IoT with blockchain networks have been proposed, tested, and deployed for businesses. Numerous studies are underway to uncover the applications of IoT and Blockchain technology. However, a close look reveals that very few applications successfully cater to the security needs of an enterprise. Needless to say, it makes less sense to integrate blockchain technology with an existing IoT that can serve the security need of an enterprise. In this article, we investigate several frameworks for IoT operations, the applicability of integrating them with blockchain technology, and due security considerations that the security personnel must make during the deployment and operations of IoT and BCN. Furthermore, we discuss the underlying security concerns and recommendations for blockchain-integrated IoT networks.
Raman Singh, Sean Sturley, Bhisham Sharma, Imed Ben Dhaou
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of multiple devices known as “things” which includes sensors, security cameras, smart lights, smart TV, traffic lights etc. in the smart home or industrial environment. In many applications, these IoT devices are installed in open areas for example traffic lights/ security cameras in a smart city. Strong authentication and authorisation for these devices need to be deployed to ensure trust among IoT networks. IoT devices produce and forward security-sensitive data and hence confidentiality, authentication and proper authorisation should be the primary priority of an IoT system. Implementing Certificate Authority-based digital certificate solutions is costly because of the number of devices involved in IoT networks. Blockchain is a decentralized ledger-based technology which can help to provide seamless yet cost-effective solutions for confidentiality, authentication, and authorisation for IoT environments. A blockchain-based system for device registration, authentication, authorisation, and data confidentiality is proposed. The paper shows the methodological and procedural details of the proposed security scheme.
In the scenario of highly mobile nodes, applying blockchain not only needs to ensure high performance and security but also needs to consider the low stability of consensus nodes. We introduce a novel framework to reduce the negative impact of low-stable consensus nodes. In addition, we have developed an intelligent algorithm for selecting the optimal number of Mobile Consensus Nodes (MCNs) considering various parameters including Stability of Node (SoN). The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves the average reputation and stability of consensus nodes by 6.8% and 17.5%, respectively while reducing the average message counts by 33.9%.
Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing fast proliferation with emerging trends in autonomy and local decision-making to avoid the explosive burden on network infrastructure between cloud and edge. Thereby, blockchain as a Service (BaaS) for IoT, as an emerging distributed services computing paradigm, has drawn intense attention due to its decentralization, auditability, and tamper-resistance. However, the primary challenge is to design a tailor-made consensus protocol that is applicable to BaaS for IoT. Existing consensus protocols generally focus on power-intensive environments, which is not feasible for power-constrained BaaS-enabled IoT systems. In this article, to fully exploit BaaS's superiority (e.g., to sharing data securely), we propose a lightweight model-based evolutionary consensus protocol called Proof of Evolutionary Model (PoEM) that can improve the quality of BaaS in IoT environments. Beyond existing rule-based consensus protocols, PoEM iteratively trains a machine learning model to achieve consensus. In this way, PoEM enhances consensus efficiency and enables low-performance IoT devices to be involved. Moreover, considering IoT environments’ dynamics, a novel mechanism is designed to manage nodes joining and exiting dynamically. Extensive analytical and experimental results show PoEM's improved consensus efficiency and applicability in dynamic BaaS-based IoT environments while providing high-level security guarantees.
Given the issues of low efficiency of agricultural Internet of Things (IoT) data collection and data storage security, this study proposes a fast and reliable storage method for IoT data based on blockchain. Firstly, it performs RC5 encryption for data in the IoT sensor module. Secondly, it aggregates the same batch of collected data in the gateway into a transaction and reconstructs the Merkle ordered tree to verify the data integrity. Finally, it modifies the configuration rules of blockchain to improve the efficiency of blockchain data storage. Compared with experimental results for hash values of blockchain storage data and the stored data itself in the blockchain, the proposed method has significant advantages in data writing, and its efficiency in data reading was nearly 10 times higher than the other methods. At the same time, the method has the advantages of confidentiality, integrity, availability, controllability and non-repudiation of information security. The study can provide a solution for efficient collection and secure storage of agricultural IoT data, and it can provide technical support for realizing decentralized agricultural IoT data collection.
BACKGROUND: Wearable devices have limited ability to store and process such data. Currently, individual users or data aggregators are unable to monetize or contribute such data to wider analytics use cases. When combined with clinical health data, such data can improve the predictive power of data-driven analytics and can proffer many benefits to improve the quality of care. We propose and provide a marketplace mechanism to make these data available while benefiting data providers. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to propose the concept of a decentralized marketplace for patient-generated health data that can improve provenance, data accuracy, security, and privacy. Using a proof-of-concept prototype with an interplanetary file system (IPFS) and Ethereum smart contracts, we aimed to demonstrate decentralized marketplace functionality with the blockchain. We also aimed to illustrate and demonstrate the benefits of such a marketplace. METHODS: We used a design science research methodology to define and prototype our decentralized marketplace and used the Ethereum blockchain, solidity smart-contract programming language, the web3.js library, and node.js with the MetaMask application to prototype our system. RESULTS: We designed and implemented a prototype of a decentralized health care marketplace catering to health data. We used an IPFS to store data, provide an encryption scheme for the data, and provide smart contracts to communicate with users on the Ethereum blockchain. We met the design goals we set out to accomplish in this study. CONCLUSIONS: A decentralized marketplace for trading patient-generated health data can be created using smart-contract technology and IPFS-based data storage. Such a marketplace can improve quality, availability, and provenance and satisfy data privacy, access, auditability, and security needs for such data when compared with centralized systems.
Miodrag J. Mihaljević, Milica Knežević, Dragan Urošević, Lianhai Wang · 5 authors
This paper considers the problem of data access control when the subscribers are IoT devices with initialization that cannot be updated during the entire life cycle. A generic framework and a particular instance for conditional data access control within IoT are proposed. The generic framework is based on the employment of a dedicated secret key-based broadcast encryption scheme where encrypted credentials for conditional data access is available in the blockchain and encrypted data subject to conditional access are available in an off-chain source of streaming data. Reduction of the keys management overhead in comparison with a straightforward decryption keys delivery is experimentally illustrated. An instance of the proposed framework built over the Ethereum blockchain platform is developed and experimentally evaluated.
With the continuous development of communication technology, drones are playing an important role in many fields, such as power transmission line inspection and agricultural pesticide spraying. In order to protect the data privacy and communication security of drones, many experts are considering blockchain as its enabling technology. However, due to their small size and limited power storage, drones cannot support energy-intensive blockchain applications. In addition, the future 6G communications need to implement an important key performance indicator, namely extremely low-power communications (ELPCs). As a consequence, research into green blockchain is becoming more and more popular. The broadcast of the blockchain is one of the most energy-intensive parts because it entails flooding and there are a lot of unnecessary communication processes. Therefore, in order to make blockchain more suitable for ELPC requirements in 6G communications and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, we took the blockchain broadcast as an improvement candidate and designed LECast, a low-energy-consumption protocol. LECast first analyzes the energy consumption model of the communication between two drones and constructs the shortest-path broadcast tree (SPB Tree) for the UAV networks to minimize energy consumption. Meanwhile, to make the sending drone address the receiving drone in a more convenient way, we proposed an extended Huffman coding (EHC) scheme to name the drones. Furthermore, the other issues with the broadcast tree are reliability and security. When a channel fails, subsequent drones cannot smoothly receive the transaction or block data. As a result, we introduced multichannel transmission with splitting data (MTSD); that is, the transaction or block data are divided into segments and transmitted in parallel multiple times over multiple channels. Finally, through the analysis and simulation of LECast in terms of energy consumption, latency, throughput, reliability, security, and coverage rate, the advantages of LECast were confirmed, which could meet the requirements of ELPCs and be well applied to UAV networks.
The public’s health depends on a reliable drug supply chain. Recently, the number of drug counterfeit has increased drastically, resulting in thousands of victims suffering from poisoning and/or treatment failures, which have resulted in new expectations on drug supply chain traceability. Indeed, the drug supply chain involves many parties having heterogeneous interests and are usually reluctant to share traceability data with each other. Furthermore, existing traceability and provenance systems for drug supply chains suffer from separated data storage, lack of information sharing transparency, and trust. Decentralized blockchain-based solutions are advocated to address these limitations by realizing decentralized trustless systems. In this work, we present a fully decentralized, blockchain-based drug traceability solution, worthy of seamless integrating IoT devices throughout the chain. It uses both smart contracts and decentralized off-chain storage to remove the need for middleman and to provide trusted, secure and immutable transaction history. Moreover, to preserve the traceability of drugs, it ensures and enforces data provenance and data integrity in the proposed IoT environment by using blockchain Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). We give a test and validation of the approach’s effectiveness in enhancing drug traceability supply chains, as well as an analysis of the approach’s costs and security.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Blockchain technology provides a data structure with inherent security properties that include cryptography, decentralization, and consensus, which ensure trust in transactions. It covers widely applicable usages, such as in intelligent manufacturing, finance, the Internet of things (IoT), medicine and health, and many different areas, especially in medical health data security and privacy protection areas. Its natural attributes, such as contracts and consensus mechanisms, have leading-edge advantages in protecting data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The security issues are gradually revealed with in-depth research and vigorous development. Unlike traditional paper storage methods, modern medical records are stored electronically. Blockchain technology provided a decentralized solution to the trust-less issues between distrusting parties without third-party guarantees, but the “trust-less” security through technology was easily misunderstood and hindered the security differences between public and private blockchains appropriately. The mentioned advantages and disadvantages motivated us to provide an advancement and comprehensive study regarding the applicability of blockchain technology. This paper focuses on the healthcare security issues in blockchain and sorts out the security risks in six layers of blockchain technology by comparing and analyzing existing security measures. It also explores and defines the different security attacks and challenges when applying blockchain technology, which promotes theoretical research and robust security protocol development in the current and future distributed work environment.
Abstract: Decentralized application make use of peer-to-peer networks, this ensures that no network failure can occur due to central node failure. Blockchain serves as an immutable ledger which allows messaging to take place in a decentralized manner. A decentralized application for communication and resource sharing is need in today’s world, where keeping data on a centralized server can be risky and costly experience. With the help of various consensus, we can implement different ways to share resources and communicate. Together with Blockchain and Decentralized Applications, we can create a secure and reliable messaging application that overcomes the drawbacks of traditional messaging applications.
K. M. Baalamurugan, P. Prabu, Nebojša Bačanin, K. Venkatachalam · 6 authors
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based systems have become an important part of industry consortium systems because of their rapid growth and wide-ranging application. Various physical objects that are interconnected in the IIoT network communicate with each other and simplify the process of decision-making by observing and analyzing the surrounding environment. While making such intelligent decisions, devices need to transfer and communicate data with each other. However, as devices involved in IIoT networks grow and the methods of connections diversify, the traditional security frameworks face many shortcomings, including vulnerabilities to attack, lags in data, sharing data, and lack of proper authentication. Blockchain technology has the potential to empower safe data distribution of big data generated by the IIoT. Prevailing data-sharing methods in blockchain only concentrate on the data interchanging among parties, not on the efficiency in sharing, and storing. Hence an element-based K-harmonic means clustering algorithm (CA) is proposed for the effective sharing of data among the entities along with an algorithm named underweight data block (UDB) for overcoming the obstacle of storage space. The performance metrics considered for the evaluation of the proposed framework are the sum of squared error (SSE), time complexity with respect to different m values, and storage complexity with CPU utilization. The results have experimented with MATLAB 2018a simulation environment. The proposed model has better sharing, and storing based on blockchain technology, which is appropriate IIoT.
IoMT sensor nodes, Internet of Things (IoT) wearable medical equipment, healthcare facilities, patients, and insurance firms are all increasingly being included in IoMT systems. Therefore, it is difficult to create a blockchain design for such systems, since scalability is among the most important aspects of blockchain technology. This realization prompted us to comprehensively analyze blockchain-based IoMT solutions developed in English between 2017 and 2022. This review incorporates the theoretical underpinnings of a large body of work published in highly regarded academic journals over the past decade, to standardize evaluation methods and fully capture the rapidly developing blockchain space. This study categorizes blockchain-enabled applications across various industries such as information management, privacy, healthcare, business, and supply chains according to a structured, systematic evaluation, and thematic content analysis of the literature that is already identified. The gaps in the literature on the topic have also been highlighted, with a special focus on the restrictions posed by blockchain technology and the knock-on effects that such restrictions have in other fields. Based on these results, several open research questions and potential avenues for further investigation that are likely to be useful to academics and professionals alike are pinpointed.
<p>This is a preprint. Blockchain technology (BCT) is emerging as a gamechanger for many industries due to its unique benefits like ability to conduct peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions in trustless environment with increased data security and transparency in real-time. It is employed in Blockchain Enabled Interconnected Smart Microgrids (BSMGs) to automate local energy markets, facilitate energy trading, and manage microgrid operations. However, with the increasing adoption of BSMGs, several challenges regarding interoperability between BSMGs may arise. Different BCT platforms may use their indigenous tokens or specially designed energy tokens for financial transactions. Also, cross-border international energy trades can become P2P which may involve real-time transactions using the countries’ digital currencies. Thus, in order to overcome the geographical and technological barriers impeding the widespread usage of BSMGs and access to energy for all, decentralized exchanges (DEX) must be incorporated. DEX are used in decentralized finance to exchange digital tokens and cryptocurrencies on blockchains. In this paper, an Order Book DEX is implemented on Cosmos which exchanges tokens between different chains using the Inter Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC). The working logic of the DEX is discussed and implemented using Ignite CLI. The financial exchanges and recording using buy and sell orders are demonstrated for the first time in energy domain.</p>
Yijia Liu, Jie Wang, Zheng Yan, Zhiguo Wan · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) aims to create a vast network with billions of things that can seamlessly create and exchange data, establishing intelligent interactions between people and objects around them. It is characterized with openness, heterogeneity, and dynamicity, which inevitably introduce severe security, privacy, and trust issues that hinder the widespread application of IoT. Trust management (TM) holds great promise in identifying malicious nodes, maintaining trust relationships, and enhancing system security. Traditional TM systems (TMSs) can be classified into centralized, semi-centralized, and distributed ones, all three of which suffer from critical challenges and thus are not sufficient for facilitating IoT development. Blockchain, as a disruptive technology, can help addressing the challenges of TM in IoT, thanks to its advanced features, such as decentralization, consistency, and tamper-proofing. As a result, blockchain-based TM (BC-TM) has been extensively studied in recent years to achieve decentralized TM in IoT. However, it still lacks a comprehensive survey on the current state of the arts. To fill this gap, in this article, we conduct a serious survey on BC-TM in IoT. We first propose a set of evaluation criteria that should be met by a TMS in IoT. Then, we propose a taxonomy of TMSs and continue with a thorough review on BC-TM in IoT by employing the proposed criteria. In the end, based on the review, a series of open issues are identified, and future research directions are suggested.
Benjamin Hellenborn, Oscar Eliasson, İbrahim Yitmen, Habib Sadri
Purpose The purpose of this study is to identify the key data categories and characteristics defined by asset information requirements (AIR) and how this affects the development and maintenance of an asset information model (AIM) for a blockchain-based digital twin (DT). Design/methodology/approach A mixed-method approach involving qualitative and quantitative analysis was used to gather empirical data through semistructured interviews and a digital questionnaire survey with an emphasis on AIR for blockchain-based DTs from a data-driven predictive analytics perspective. Findings Based on the analysis of results three key data categories were identified, core data, static operation and maintenance (OM) data, and dynamic OM data, along with the data characteristics required to perform data-driven predictive analytics through artificial intelligence (AI) in a blockchain-based DT platform. The findings also include how the creation and maintenance of an AIM is affected in this context. Practical implications The key data categories and characteristics specified through AIR to support predictive data-driven analytics through AI in a blockchain-based DT will contribute to the development and maintenance of an AIM. Originality/value The research explores the process of defining, delivering and maintaining the AIM and the potential use of blockchain technology (BCT) as a facilitator for data trust, integrity and security.
Muhammad Muneem Shabir, Syed Muhammad Danish, Kaiwen Zhang
Video conferencing has become an essential tool for working from home. However, poor audio/video quality resulting from unstable Internet connections undermines the productivity of important tasks. Additionally, the static monetization model for ISP networks, which employs third parties, cannot support on-demand and dynamic Quality-of-Service sessions that are necessary to maximize the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) of video conferencing. To address this, we introduce BlockQoS: Fair Monetization of On-Demand Quality-of-Service using Blockchains. BlockQoS allows clients to request and manage their Quality-of-Service requirements through a blockchain-based platform operating using a smart contract. It implements a decentralized monetization model to eliminate third parties, enforce transparency in service-level agreements (SLAs), and reduce blockchain operating costs by utilizing off-chain billing validated using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARK). Additionally, we propose a Quality-of-Service delivery verification mechanism that enforces service level agreements on the hardware external to the blockchain, and a dynamic evaluation method based on the concept of Nash equilibrium in game theory that prevents malicious behavior by ISPs and users. We implemented BlockQoS over Ethereum with a Ryu controller, zk-SNARK, and SGX. Our experiments show that BlockQoS offers transaction cost reduction of up to 88% (gas cost) and latency reduction of up to 87% compared to the state-of-the-art on-chain solutions.
Dennis Krummacker, Benedikt Veith, Daniel Lindenschmitt, Hans D. Schotten
Abstract This manuscript investigates viable Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) architecture approaches to be used as basis for the distribution of integrity verification data. We discuss what can be a Trust Anchor and how the property of trust can be enabled as a service for mobile communications infrastructures. This follows up on a preceding publication, in the course of which a service was developed that can be utilized to create trust and traceability in transactions between other services. Crucial for the integrity of such an audit trail is proof for which side was committing, in case a tampering was detected. For such verification in the aftermath, mechanisms for the distribution of meta data are necessary. Where our ultimate goal is to develop a versatile framework for Trust as a Service (TaaS), the work at hand contributes the investigation on header distribution. We put a major focus on providing Trust as a Service (TaaS) especially in the mobile communications domain since a reliable concept for trustworthiness is indispensable for the vision of organic infrastructures beyond 5G, which means that such networks are flexible regarding their composition and open for stakeholders.
The advent of blockchain technology in the development and design of smart internet of things (IoT) systems offers the opportunity to secure and transfer data flow, preserve its integrity, and provide transparent mechanisms for its management. Blockchain has actually attracted applications in vital fields because it provides many advantages over centralized database such as traceability, confidentiality, availability and trust. A private network offers the most secure and peer-restricted environment for big data flow, specifically in IoT ecosystems. An integrated blockchain-IoT ecosystem in which three Raspberry Pi 4 nodes communicate and interact in a closed loop to control smart applications via an Ethereum platform in a secure and an efficiently emulated environment is piloted. The proposed blockchain of things (BCoT) ecosystem adds a new layer to the physical, network and application layers of a typical IoT architecture. The concept of a fully decentralized private Ethereum BCoT network may find applications in several fields that call for the removal of single-point of failure and ensures data integrity and transparency.