Increasing convergence of virtual space and physical space driven by society 5.0 has propelled research in distributed ledgers to identify how trust in autonomous systems and robotics can be enabled through decentralised frameworks for decision making and consensus building. Industrial, multi-robot systems, embedded systems, and more have seen growth in applications using distributed ledgers. Although progressing, implementations are currently ad-hoc with middleware systems, such as ROS, not yet adopting a standard to permit easy integration of these technologies. Nor is the technology readiness level of distributed ledgers easily identifiable. This creates challenges for adoption and system integration.
Mobile applications have rapidly grown over the past few decades to offer futuristic applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart farming, and smart city. Such applications require ubiquitous, real-time, and secure communications to deliver services quickly. Toward this aim, sixth-generation (6G) wireless technology offers superior performance with high reliability, enhanced transmission rate, and low latency. However, managing the resources of the aforementioned applications is highly complex in the precarious network. An adversary can perform various network-related attacks (i.e., data injection or modification) to jeopardize the regular operation of the smart applications. Therefore, incorporating blockchain technology in the smart application can be a prominent solution to tackle security, reliability, and data-sharing privacy concerns. Motivated by the same, we presented a case study on public safety applications that utilizes the essential characteristics of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and a 6G network to handle data integrity attacks on the crime data. The case study is assessed using various performance parameters by considering blockchain scalability, packet drop ratio, and training accuracy. Lastly, we explored different research challenges of adopting blockchain in the 6G wireless network.
Liang Yang, Rong Jiang, Xuetao Pu, Chenguang Wang · 8 authors
Abstract The centralized storage and centralized authorization approach in medical information systems can lead to data tampering and private information privacy leakage, while the traditional access control model has an overly simple authentication approach, relies excessively on trusted third-party organizations for the enforcement of access control policies, and has low efficiency in processing access requests. To address these problems, this paper proposes an access control model based on the collaboration of blockchain main and side chains, AC-BMS. Firstly, a password-based authentication scheme is designed based on doctors’ identity information; then Polygon side chain is designed to enhance the storage scalability of the blockchain; finally, the access node information on the main Ethereum chain is located on the side chain, and resources are obtained by executing Roll-up contracts deployed on the side chain. It is confirmed by simulation experiments in Hyperledger Fabric that the access efficiency and throughput of the blockchain access model proposed in this paper are improved when the number of accesses is multiplied, the average access time is saved by 2–3 s, the latency time is floating and stable, and the security, scalability, and availability are enhanced.
User-centric data sharing is essential to encourage citizens' active participation in the digital economy. One key to smart cities, a form of the digital economy, is the promotion of public use of citizen data. Nevertheless, it is not easy to utilize data without citizens’ consent. In this study, we took a technological approach to these issues. User-managed access (UMA) is a well-known framework for delegating resource access rights to others on the Internet. In UMA, authorization mechanisms are designed to be centralized so that resource owners can centrally manage access rights for various resources stored in different domains. However, the lack of transparency in the authorization mechanism is a barrier to its implementation in large-scale systems such as smart cities. In this study, we developed a blockchain-based cross-domain authorization architecture that enables a resource-sharing ecosystem in which organizations that wish to utilize data can freely trade with each other. The proposed architecture solves the transparency problem that conventional authorization systems have had by designing the authorization mechanism on blockchain technology. We implemented the proposed architecture as smart contracts and evaluated its processing performance. The resultant time required for delegating access rights and accessing resources was less than 500 ms. Furthermore, we found that the fluctuation in the processing time overhead was small. Based on these results, we concluded that performance degradation with the proposed architecture is minor.
The massive deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including sensors and actuators, is ushering in smart and connected communities of the future. The massive deployment of IoT devices, including sensors and actuators, is ushering in smart and connected communities of the future. The availability of real-time and high-quality sensor data is crucial for various IoT applications, particularly in healthcare, energy, transportation, etc. However, data collection may have to be outsourced to external service providers (SPs) due to cost considerations or lack of specialized equipment. Hence, the data market plays a critical role in such scenarios where SPs have different quality levels of available data, and IoT users have different application-specific data needs. The pairing between data available to the SP and users in the data market requires an effective mechanism design that considers the SPs’ profitability and the Quality-of-Service (QoS) needs of the users. We develop a generic framework to analyze and enable such interactions efficiently, leveraging tools from contract theory and mechanism design theory. It can enable and empower emerging data-sharing paradigms, such as Sensing-as-a-Service (SaaS). The contract design creates a pricing structure for on-demand sensing data for IoT users. By considering a continuum of user types, we capture a diverse range of application requirements and propose optimal pricing and allocation rules that ensure QoS provisioning and maximum profitability for the SP. Furthermore, we provide analytical solutions for fixed distributions of user types to analyze the developed approach. For comparison, we consider the benchmark case assuming complete information of the user types and obtain optimal contract solutions. Finally, a case study based on the example of a virtual reality application delivered using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed contract design framework.
József Udvaros, Norbert Forman, Szilárd Mihály Avornicului
We present a solution based on blockchain technology and smart contracts for agile project management in light of the continuing transition in the software development industry. Due to the fact that these technologies are self-executing, customized, and impervious to tampering, they are considered to be crucial for the transition to a more efficient, transparent, and transactive payment gateway between major stakeholders. These major stakeholders will be able to communicate through smart contracts, which will act as a bridge between them. As part of their responsibility, they will make sure that all of the terms of the contract are met and acknowledged by all members of the team. As a result of our research, we propose a model in which payouts could be automatically enabled and penalties or grants could be introduced based on performance. If any changes were to be made to the contract in the future, all parties involved would be automatically notified. To maintain the development cycle, they should accept these changes as soon as possible. Because of this, the product owner and client are able to concentrate their resources on more profitable and productive tasks, without the need to monitor this aspect of agile project management. Our proposed model brings together different partners with the objective of successfully developing different IT projects by leveraging software engineering solutions such as smart contracts.
Amit Kumar Tyagi, Sathian Dananjayan, Deepshikha Agarwal, Hasmath Farhana Thariq Ahmed
Today, blockchain is becoming more popular in academia and industry because it is a distributed, decentralised technology which is changing many industries in terms of security, building trust, etc. A few blockchain applications are banking, insurance, logistics, transportation, etc. Many insurance companies have been thinking about how blockchain could help them be more efficient. There is still a lot of hype about this immutable technology, even though it has not been utilised to its full potential. Insurers have to decide whether or not to use blockchain, just like many other businesses do. This technology keeps a distributed ledger on each blockchain node, making it more secure and transparent. The blockchain network can operate smart contracts and convince others to agree, so criminals cannot make mistakes. On another side, the Internet of Things (IoT) might make a real-time application work faster through its automation. With the integration of blockchain and IoT, there will always be a problem with technology regarding IoT devices and mining the blockchain. This paper gives a real-time view of blockchain-IoT-based applications for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. The last few sections discuss essential topics such as open issues, challenges, and research opportunities for future researchers to expand research in blockchain-IoT-based applications.
Rayan Anwar Abutaleb, Saad Said Alqahtany, Toqeer Ali Syed
Blockchains are gaining traction as secure and reliable platforms for data sharing in fields such as banking, supply chain management, food production, energy, the Internet, and medical services. Furthermore, when decentralized, a blockchain can be regarded as an immutable ledger storing data entries. Moreover, this modern technology was designed to disrupt various data-driven industries, including the healthcare industry. While electronic healthcare services have enabled more straightforward and accessible treatment, patient privacy has become vulnerable to external and internal attacks by healthcare personnel. Therefore, we aimed to design a framework to control patient health records that ensures the patient can provide the necessary permissions to those who access his/her health records. This framework will record all activities via blockchain and usage control. Through this framework, we aim to create a user-centric and privacy-aware experience. A literature review and experiments have been performed to select an optimized and placable blockchain operating system. In addition, performance analysis showed that the OS and smart contracts work at an acceptable speed.
Shams Mhmood Abd Ali, Mohd Najwadi Yusoff, Hasan Falah Hasan
The continuous advancements of blockchain applications impose constant improvements on their technical features. Particularly immutability, a highly secure blockchain attribute forbidding unauthorized or illicit data editing or deletion, which functions as crucial blockchain security. Nonetheless, the security function is currently being challenged due to improper data stored, such as child pornography, copyright violation, and lately the enaction of the “Right to be Forgotten (RtbF)” principle disseminated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), where it requires blockchain data to be redacted to suit current applications’ urgent demands, and even compliance with the regulation is a challenge and an unfeasible practice for various blockchain technology providers owing to the immutability characteristic. To overcome this challenge, mutable blockchain is highly demanded to solve previously mentioned issues, where controlled and supervised amendments to certain content within constrained privileges granted are suggested by several researchers through numerous blockchain redaction mechanisms using chameleon and non-chameleon hashing function approaches, and methods were proposed to achieve reasonable policies while ensuring high blockchain security levels. Accordingly, the current study seeks to thoroughly define redaction implementation challenges and security properties criteria. The analysis performed has mapped these criteria with chameleon-based research methodologies, technical approaches, and the latest cryptographic techniques implemented to resolve the challenge posed by the policy in which comparisons paved current open issues, leading to shaping future research directions in the scoped field.
Internet of Things (IoT) enables communication among objects to collect information and make decisions to improve the quality of life. There are several unresolved security and privacy concerns in IoT due to multiple resource constrained devices, which lead to various cyber attacks. The conventional access control techniques depend on a central authority that further poses privacy and scalability issues in IoT. Various problems with access control in IoT can be resolved to prevent various cyber attacks using the decentralization and immutability properties of the blockchain. This study explored the current research trends in blockchain-enabled secure access control mechanisms and also identifies their applicability in creating reliable access control solutions for IoT. The basic properties of blockchain, such as decentralization, auditability, transparency, and immutability, act as the propulsion that provides integrity and security, disregarding the participation of an external entity. Initially, the application of blockchain was created only for cryptocurrencies but with the introduction of Ethereum, which allows the writiting and execution of smart contracts, applications other than cryptocurrencies are also being created. As various research articles have been written on the usage of different types of blockchains for creating secure access control solutions for IoT, this study intends to find and examine such primary researches as well as come up with a systematic review of various findings. This study perceives the most frequently utilized blockchain for creating blockchain-based access control solutions to prevent various cyber attacks and also discusses the improvement in access control mechanisms using blockchain along with smart contracts in IoT. The present study also discusses the obstacles in building decentralized access control solutions for IoT systems as well as future research areas. For new researchers, this article is a nice place to start and a strong reference point.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a key enabler technology that recently received significant attention from the scientific community across the globe. It helps transform everyone’s life by connecting physical and virtual devices with each other to offer staggering benefits, such as automation and control, higher productivity, real-time information access, and improved efficiency. However, IoT devices and their accumulated data are susceptible to various security threats and vulnerabilities, such as data integrity, denial-of-service, interception, and information disclosure attacks. In recent years, the IoT with blockchain technology has seen rapid growth, where smart contracts play an essential role in validating IoT data. However, these smart contracts can be vulnerable and degrade the performance of IoT applications. Hence, besides offering indispensable features to ease human lives, there is also a need to confront IoT environment security attacks, especially data integrity attacks. Toward this aim, this paper proposed an artificial intelligence-based system model with a dual objective. It first detects the malicious user trying to compromise the IoT environment using a binary classification problem. Further, blockchain technology is utilized to offer tamper-proof storage to store non-malicious IoT data. However, a malicious user can exploit the blockchain-based smart contract to deteriorate the performance IoT environment. For that, this paper utilizes deep learning algorithms to classify malicious and non-malicious smart contracts. The proposed system model offers an end-to-end security pipeline through which the IoT data are disseminated to the recipient. Lastly, the proposed system model is evaluated by considering different assessment measures that comprise the training accuracy, training loss, classification measures (precision, recall, and F1 score), and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.
Marc Jayson Baucas, Petros Spachos, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis
Over the years, the popularity and usage of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices in several healthcare services are increased. Among the services that benefit from the usage of such devices is predictive analysis, which can improve early diagnosis in e-health. However, due to the limitations of wearable IoT devices, challenges in data privacy, service integrity, and network structure adaptability arose. To address these concerns, we propose a platform using federated learning and private blockchain technology within a fog-IoT network. These technologies have privacy-preserving features securing data within the network. We utilized the fog-IoT network’s distributive structure to create an adaptive network for wearable IoT devices. We designed a testbed to examine the proposed platform’s ability to preserve the integrity of a classifier. According to experimental results, the introduced implementation can effectively preserve a patient’s privacy and a predictive service’s integrity. We further investigated the contributions of other technologies to the security and adaptability of the IoT network. Overall, we proved the feasibility of our platform in addressing significant security and privacy challenges of wearable IoT devices in predictive healthcare through analysis, simulation, and experimentation.
Research efforts on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) for industrial applications have constantly been increasing over the last years. The use of DLTs in the Industry 4.0 paradigm provides traceability, integrity, and immutability of the generated industrial data. However, Industry 4.0 ecosystems are typically composed of multiple smart factory clusters belonging to several companies, which are immersed in constant interaction with other business partners, clients, or suppliers. In such complex ecosystems, multiple DLTs are necessarily employed to maintain the integrity of the data throughout the whole process, from when the data is generated until it is processed at higher levels. Moreover, industrial data is commonly heterogeneous, which causes compatibility issues, along with security and efficiency issues in the homogenization process. Thus, the data needs to be pre-processed and homogenized in a secure manner before being exploited. Consequently, in this work, we address the issues mentioned above by providing an industrial raw data pre-processing and homogenization process according to a standard data model. We employ decentralized blockchain oracles to guarantee the integrity of the external data during the homogenization process. Hereafter, we design an interoperable plant blockchain for trustworthy storage and processing of the resulting homogenized data across several industrial plants. We also present a prototype implementation of the aforementioned scheme and discuss its effectiveness. Finally, we design a monitoring scheme to overview the usage the performance of the architecture processes and identify possible performance and security issues.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) concept materialized worldwide in complex ecosystems, the related data security and privacy issues became apparent. While the system elements and their communication paths could be protected individually, generic, ecosystem-wide approaches were sought after as well. On a parallel timeline to IoT, the concept of distributed ledgers and blockchains came into the technological limelight. Blockchains offer many advantageous features in relation to enhanced security, anonymity, increased capacity, and peer-to-peer capabilities. Although blockchain technology can provide IoT with effective and efficient solutions, there are many challenges related to various aspects of integrating these technologies. While security, anonymity/data privacy, and smart contract-related features are apparently advantageous for blockchain technologies (BCT), there are challenges in relation to storage capacity/scalability, resource utilization, transaction rate scalability, predictability, and legal issues. This paper provides a systematic review on state-of-the-art approaches of BCT and IoT integration, specifically in order to solve certain security- and privacy-related issues. The paper first provides a brief overview of BCT and IoT's basic principles, including their architecture, protocols and consensus algorithms, characteristics, and the challenges of integrating them. Afterwards, it describes the survey methodology, including the search strategy, eligibility criteria, selection results, and characteristics of the included articles. Later, we highlight the findings of this study which illustrates different works that addressed the integration of blockchain technology and IoT to tackle various aspects of privacy and security, which are followed by a categorization of applications that have been investigated with different characteristics, such as their primary information, objective, development level, target application, type of blockchain and platform, consensus algorithm, evaluation environment and metrics, future works or open issues (if any), and further notes for consideration. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of all articles is included from an architectural and operational perspective. Finally, we cover major gaps and future considerations that can be taken into account when integrating blockchain technology with IoT.
In the current 5th Generation (5G) networking paradigm, the enforcement of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is a non-trivial measure to ensure the scope and the quality of services and standards between tenants and service providers (SPs). On top of this, Secure Service Level Agreements (SSLA) are introduced to ensure that SPs deliver the most critical and required security-related standards defined in the contract, such as integrity, confidentiality, availability, non-repudiation, and privacy assurance. However, with the tendency for more distributed and multi-stakeholder networking architectures in next-generation networks, the management process of such SSLAs will be challenging due to the diversified security vulnerabilities and complexity of underlying technologies. Although blockchain is emerging as a platform to facilitate such distributed SSLA/SLA management frameworks, its currently available consensus mechanisms are more generic. Still, they need to improve in terms of applying in multi-stakeholder networks. Therefore, this paper presents a novel consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Monitoring (PoM) for a blockchain-based novel SSLA management framework. Moreover, we provide details about the prototype implementation of our proposed consensus algorithm and SSLA management framework. It is proven by comparing our proposal with the other existing solutions that our solution outperforms in many aspects, such as energy consumption, computation cost, and security features.
The metaverse gradually evolves into a virtual world containing a series of interconnected sub-metaverses. Diverse digital resources, including identities, contents, services, and supporting data, are key components of the sub-metaverse. Therefore, a Domain Name System (DNS)-like system is necessary for efficient management and resolution. However, the legacy DNS was designed with security vulnerabilities and trust risks due to centralized issues. Blockchain is used to mitigate these concerns due to its decentralized features. Additionally, it supports identity management as a default feature, making it a natural fit for the metaverse. While there are several DNS alternatives based on the blockchain, they either manage only a single type of identifiers or isolate identities from other sorts of identifiers, making it difficult for sub-metaverses to coexist and connect with each other. This paper proposes a Multi-Identifier management and resolution System (MIS) in the metaverse, supporting the registration, resolution, and inter-translation functions. The basic MIS is portrayed as a four-tier architecture on a consortium blockchain due to its manageability, enhanced security, and efficiency properties. On-chain data is lightweight and compressed to save on storage while accelerating reading and writing operations. The resource data is encrypted based on the attributes of the sub-metaverse in the storage tier for privacy protection and access control. For users with decentralization priorities, a modification named EMIS is built on top of Ethereum. Finally, MIS is implemented on two testbeds and is available online as the open-source system. The first testbed consists of 4 physical servers located in the UK and Malaysia while the second is made up of 200 virtual machines (VMs) spread over 26 countries across all 5 continents on Google Cloud.
IoT has enabled the rapid growth of smart remote healthcare applications. These IoT-based remote healthcare applications deliver fast and preventive medical services to patients at risk or with chronic diseases. However, ensuring data security and patient privacy while exchanging sensitive medical data among medical IoT devices is still a significant concern in remote healthcare applications. Altered or corrupted medical data may cause wrong treatment and create grave health issues for patients. Moreover, current remote medical applications' efficiency and response time need to be addressed and improved. Considering the need for secure and efficient patient care, this paper proposes a lightweight Blockchain-based and Fog-enabled remote patient monitoring system that provides a high level of security and efficient response time. Simulation results and security analysis show that the proposed lightweight blockchain architecture fits the resource-constrained IoT devices well and is secure against attacks. Moreover, the augmentation of Fog computing improved the responsiveness of the remote patient monitoring system by 40%.
In the recent years, blockchain technology has gained significant attention in the healthcare sector. It has the potential to alleviate a wide variety of major difficulties in electronic health record systems. This study presents an elaborate overview of the existing research works on blockchain applications in the healthcare industry. This paper evaluates 144 articles that discuss the importance and limits of using blockchain technologies to improve healthcare operations. The objective is to demonstrate the technology’s potential uses and highlight the difficulties and possible sectors for future blockchain research in the healthcare domain. The paper starts with an extensive background study of blockchain and its features. Then, the paper focuses on providing an extensive literature review of the selected articles to highlight the current research themes in blockchain-based healthcare systems. After that, major application areas along with the solutions provided by blockchain in healthcare systems are pointed out. Finally, a discussion section provides insight into the limitations, challenges and future research directions.
This study aims to identify the most influential blockchain types for potential implementation areas in the transforming mobility ecosystem, considering application area-specific needs such as transparency, transaction speed, scalability, energy usage, security, and operating cost. The study demonstrated the hybrid blockchain suitability for most of the 13 distinguished mobility applications, while private and consortium blockchains are found applicable based on the needs of specific use cases. A public blockchain is only found suitable for two of the use cases. Proof of Authority and Proof of Stake matches well with most use cases, while Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and Proof of Work could be suitable in particular.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence has pushed the Internet of Things (IoT) into a new stage. Facing with the explosive growth of data and the higher quality of service required by users, edge computing and caching are regarded as promising solutions. However, the resources in edge nodes (ENs) are not inexhaustible. In this paper, we propose an incentive-aware blockchain-assisted intelligent edge caching and computation offloading scheme for IoT, which is dedicated to providing a secure and intelligent solution for collaborative ENs in resource optimization and controls. Specifically, we jointly optimize offloading and caching decisions as well as computing and communication resources allocation to minimize the total cost for tasks completion in the EN. Furthermore, a blockchain incentive and contribution co-aware federated deep reinforcement learning algorithm is designed to solve this optimization problem. In this algorithm, we construct an incentive-aware blockchain-assisted collaboration mechanism which operates during local training, with the aim to strengthen the willingness of ENs to participate in collaboration with security guarantee. Meanwhile, a contribution-based federated aggregation method is developed, in which the aggregation weights of EN gradients are based on their contributions, thereby improving the training effect. Finally, compared with other baseline schemes, the numerical results prove that our scheme has an efficient optimization utility of resources with significant advantages in total cost reduction and caching performance.
Data sharing in the health sector represents a big problem due to privacy and security issues. Health data have tremendous value for organisations and criminals. The European Commission has classified health data as a unique resource owing to their ability to enable both retrospective and prospective research at a low cost. Similarly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) encourages member nations to create and implement health data governance systems that protect individual privacy while allowing data sharing. This paper proposes adopting a blockchain framework to enable the transparent sharing of medical information among health entities in a secure environment. We develop a laboratory-based prototype using a design science research methodology (DSRM). This approach has its roots in the sciences of engineering and artificial intelligence, and its primary goal is to create relevant artefacts that add value to the fields in which they are used. We adopt a patient-centric approach, according to which a patient is the owner of their data and may allow hospitals and health professionals access to their data.
Sandi Gec, Vlado Stankovski, Dejan Lavbič, Petar Kochovski
IoT environments are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in terms of their distributions and included entities by collaboratively involving not only data centers known from Cloud computing but also the different types of third-party entities that can provide computing resources. To transparently provide such resources and facilitate trust between the involved entities, it is necessary to develop and implement smart contracts. However, when developing smart contracts, developers face many challenges and concerns, such as security, contracts' correctness, a lack of documentation and/or design patterns, and others. To address this problem, we propose a new recommender system to facilitate the development and implementation of low-cost EVM-enabled smart contracts. The recommender system's algorithm provides the smart contract developer with smart contract templates that match their requirements and that are relevant to the typology of the fog architecture. It mainly relies on OpenZeppelin, a modular, reusable, and secure smart contract library that we use when classifying the smart contracts. The evaluation results indicate that by using our solution, the smart contracts' development times are overall reduced. Moreover, such smart contracts are sustainable for fog-computing IoT environments and applications in low-cost EVM-based ledgers. The recommender system has been successfully implemented in the ONTOCHAIN ecosystem, thus presenting its applicability.
A supply chain (SC) is a network of interests, information, and materials involved in processes that produce value for customers. The implementation of blockchain technology in SC management in healthcare has had results. This review aims to summarize how blockchain technology has been used to address SC challenges in healthcare, specifically for drugs, medical devices (DMDs), and blood, organs, and tissues (BOTs). A systematic review was conducted by following the PRISMA guidelines and searching the PubMed and Proquest databases. English-language studies were included, while non-primary studies, as well as surveys, were excluded. After full-text assessment, 28 articles met the criteria for inclusion. Of these, 15 (54%) were classified as simulation studies, 12 (43%) were classified as theoretical, and only one was classified as a real case study. Most of the articles (n = 23, 82%) included the adoption of smart contracts. The findings of this systematic review indicated a significant but immature interest in the topic, with diverse ideas and methodologies, but without effective real-life applications.