The immense success of Bitcoin has also highlighted the hidden potential of blockchains and distributed ledgers in general. However, most blockchains are based on the so-called Proof-of-Work principle, which requires significant resources, making them unsuitable for the growing number of Internet of Things devices, not to mention other problems such as ensuring privacy and resistance to quantum computing. This paper, therefore, analyses current approaches in the field of ledgers with applications for the Internet of Things. Based on this, it presents a new ledger architecture for cultural heritage preservation that is energy sustainable and tailored to smartphones while pushing the deployment boundaries closer to the rest of the Internet of Things world. It is also resistant to quantum computing and provides privacy with accountability. Moreover, the developed solution considers not only the core technological structure but also its broader social (business) context, i.e., links to the tourism sector. This is performed by incorporating the relevant business model, as business models are important for the successful adoption of new technologies.
Nowadays, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technology is growing and leading the revolution in the global healthcare field. Exchanged information through IoMT permits attackers to hack or modify the patientâs data. Hence, it is of critical importance to ensure the security and privacy of this information. The standard privacy techniques are not secured enough, so this paper introduces blockchain technology that is used for securing data. Blockchain is used with the smart contract to secure private patient records. This paper presents how a patient may send his vital signs to the physician through the Internet without meeting with the latter in person. These vital signs are collected from the IoMT system that we developed before. In the proposed method, each medical record is stored in the block and connected to the previous block by a hashing function. In order to secure the new block, the SHA256 algorithm is used. We modified the SHA256 algorithm by using run-length code in compressing data. If any hacker attempts to attack any medical record, he must change all previous blocks. In order to preserve the rights of the doctor and patient, a smart contract is built into the blockchain system. When the transaction begins, the smart contract withdraws the money from the patientâs wallet and stores it in the smart contract. When the physician sends the treatment to the patient, the smart contract transfers the money to the physician. This paper shows that all recent work implements Blockchain 2 into the security system. This paper also shows that our security system can create a new block with O (n + d) time complexity. As a result, our system can create one hundred blocks in two minutes. Additionally, our system can deposit the money from the patientâs wallet into the physicianâs wallet promptly. This paper also shows that our method performs better than all subsequent versions of the original blockchain.
Many researchers have introduced blockchain into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to support trading or other authentication applications between vehicles. However, the traditional blockchain cannot well support the query of transactions that occur in a specified area which is important for vehicle users since they are bound to the geolocations. Therefore, the querying efficiency of the geolocation attribute of transactions is vital for blockchain-based applications. Existing work does not well handle the geolocation of vehicles in the blockchain, and thus the querying efficiency is questionable. In this paper, we design a rapid query method of regional transactions in blockchain for IoV, including data structures and query algorithms. The main idea is to utilize the Geohash code to represent the area and serve as the key for transaction indexing and querying, and the geolocation is marked as one of the attributes of transactions in the blockchain. To further verify and evaluate the proposed design, on the basis of the implementation of Ethereum, which is a well-known blockchain, the results show that the proposed design achieves significantly better-querying speed than Ethereum.
Transport and Logistics stakeholders utilise Blockchain to interact within their networks in a transparent and secure manner. This creates islands of disconnected communities which prohibits visibility across the entire supply chain. This paper introduces a framework, which aims at unifying multiple proprietary Blockchain systems, offering an opportunity to empower stakeholders across the entire supply chain to collaborate and exchange information seamlessly. The Blockchain Interoperability framework employs smart contracts, which aspire to automate previously cumbersome processes and bring value to the Physical Internet (PI) paradigm. Smart contracts guarantee a trustworthy and distributed process of contract negotiation and execution that significantly reduces time, administrative overheads, and costs which are currently typically spent on manual inter-organisational processes.
This paper covers a novel solution to reduce the gas consumed by Decentralized Applications (DApps) running on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Smart contracts extend the capabilities of the Blockchain, but the strict gas policy of the EVM limits the implementation of various DApps. On the other hand, Oracle provides a means to use an external execution environment for smart contracts, but its functional limitations and additional costs limit the growth of the DApp market to DApp users. To address the gas consumption crisis of DApps, we designed an event-based resource offloading solution that allows DApp developers to run their own compute servers. By adopting our solution, DApp users only pay the constant and minimized amount of gas fee, while the external server pays highly reduced amount of gas fee instead. We describe the solution in detail with a sample DApp model and mathematically demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution compared to an Oracle-based implementation. Furthermore, we conducted empirical experiment of actual DApp using EVM and verified the reduction of the gas consumption.
Mizna Khalid, Sufian Hameed, Abdul Qadir, Syed Attique Shah · 5 authors
Access control is essential for the IoT environment to ensure that only approved and trusted parties are able to configure devices, access sensor information, and command actuators to execute activities. The IoT ecosystem is subject to various access control complications due to the limited latency between IoT devices and the Internet, low energy requirements of IoT devices, the distributed framework, ad-hoc networks, and an exceptionally large number of heterogeneous IoT devices that need to be managed. The motivation for this proposed work is to resolve the incurring challenges of IoT associated with management and access control security. Each IoT domain implementation has particular features and needs separate access control policies to be considered in order to design a secure solution. This research work aims to resolve the intricacy of policies management, forged policies, dissemination, tracking of access control policies, automation, and central management of IoT nodes and provides a trackable and auditable access control policy management system that prevents forged policy dissemination by applying Software Defined Network (SDN) and blockchain technology in an IoT environment. Integration of SDN and blockchain provides a robust solution for IoT environment security. Recently, smart contracts have become one of blockchain technologyâs most promising applications. The integration of smart contracts with blockchain technology provides the capability of designing tamper-proof and independently verifiable policies. In this paper, we propose a novel, scalable solution for implementing immutable, verifiable, adaptive, and automated access control policies for IoT devices together with a successful proof of concept that demonstrates the scalability of the proposed solution. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated in terms of throughput and resource access delay between the blockchain component and the controller as well as from node to node. The number of nodes in the IoT network and the number of resource access requests were independently and systematically increased during the evaluations. The results illustrate that the resource access delay and throughput were affected neither linearly nor exponentially; hence, the proposed solution shows no significant degradation in performance with an increase in the number of nodes and/or requests.
Many IoT-blockchain systems in which blockchain connections run on an infrastructure-based network, such as Wi-Fi or LTE, face a severe problem: the single point of failure (SPoF) (i.e., depending on the availability, an access point of an LTE base station). Using infrastructure-less networks (i.e., ad hoc networks) is an efficient approach to prevent such highly disruptive events. An ad hoc network can automatically restore blockchain communication using an ad hoc routing protocol, even if a node fails. Moreover, an ad hoc routing protocol is more efficient when considering the IoT nodesâ mobility. In this paper, we first construct IoT-blockchain systems on emulated and real ad hoc networks with Ethereum and three ad hoc routing protocols (i.e., OLSR, BATMAN, and BABEL). We then evaluate the blockchain recovery time in static and mobile scenarios. The results show that BATMAN achieves the best blockchain recovery performance in all investigated scenarios because BATMAN only determines whether to switch a route by comparing the number of OGM packets received from a different next-hop. More specifically, in the small-scale real IoT-blockchain, BATMAN recovers at least 73.9% and 59.8% better than OLSR and BABEL, respectively. In the medium-scale emulated IoT-blockchain, the recovery time of BATMAN is at least 69% and 60% shorter than OLSR or BABEL, respectively.
Anichur Rahman, Md. Jahidul Islam, Shahab S. Band, Ghulam Muhammad · 6 authors
Some of the significant new technologies researched in recent studies include BlockChain (BC), Software Defined Networking (SDN), and Smart Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). All three technologies provide data integrity, confidentiality, and integrity in their respective use cases (especially in industrial fields). Additionally, cloud computing has been in use for several years now. Confidential information is exchanged with cloud infrastructure to provide clients with access to distant resources, such as computing and storage activities in the IIoT. There are also significant security risks, concerns, and difficulties associated with cloud computing. To address these challenges, we propose merging BC and SDN into a cloud computing platform for the IIoT. This paper introduces âDistB-SDCloudâ, an architecture for enhanced cloud security for smart IIoT applications. The proposed architecture uses a distributed BC method to provide security, secrecy, privacy, and integrity while remaining flexible and scalable. Customers in the industrial sector benefit from the dispersed or decentralized, and efficient environment of BC. Additionally, we described an SDN method to improve the durability, stability, and load balancing of cloud infrastructure. The efficacy of our SDN and BC-based implementation was experimentally tested by using various parameters including throughput, packet analysis, response time, bandwidth, and latency analysis, as well as the monitoring of several attacks on the system itself.
Open access
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Cristhian Martinez-Rendon, J. L. GonzalezâCompean, Dante D. SĂĄnchezâGallegos, JesĂșs Carretero
This paper presents a continuous delivery/continuous verifiability ( CD/CV ) method for IoT dataflows in edgeâfogâcloud. A CD model based on extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) mechanism as well as a directed acyclic graph ( DAG ) construction, enable end-users to create efficient schemes for the continuous verification and validation of the execution of applications in edgeâfogâcloud infrastructures. This scheme also verifies and validates established execution sequences and the integrity of digital assets . CV model converts ETL and DAG into business model, smart contracts in a private blockchain for the automatic and transparent registration of transactions performed by each application in workflows/pipelines created by CD model without altering applications nor edgeâfogâcloud workflows. This model ensures that IoT dataflows delivers verifiable information for organizations to conduct critical decision-making processes with certainty. A containerized parallelism model solves portability issues and reduces/compensates the overhead produced by CD/CV operations. We developed and implemented a prototype to create CD/CV schemes, which were evaluated in a case study where user mobility information is used to identify interest points, patterns, and maps. The experimental evaluation revealed the efficiency of CD/CV to register the transactions performed in IoT dataflows through edgeâfogâcloud in a private blockchain network in comparison with state-of-art solutions.
Exploring the integration of blockchain technology into land registry systems is the primary focus of this research, concentrating on augmenting efficiency, transparency, and security within the domain.Employing an extensive research framework, we rigorously investigate the functionality of blockchain in the context of land registries.Our analysis reveals substantial reductions in transaction times, bolstered data integrity, and increased resilience against fraudulent activities.These findings accentuate the pivotal role that blockchain can play in restructuring conventional land registry practices, instilling trust, and mitigating discrepancies.Beyond the immediate benefits, the study extrapolates into a forward-looking perspective, contemplating the widespread adoption and potential consequences of implementing blockchain technology in the field of land registration.Key aspects encompassed in this exploration include blockchain, land registry, efficiency enhancements, transparent data management, heightened security protocols, and reduced transaction times.It is important to note that while the study acknowledges the transformative potential of blockchain, it does not underestimate the challenges and considerations associated with its implementation.By shedding light on both the positive and potential pitfalls, this research seeks to contribute to a nuanced understanding of how blockchain technology can be leveraged effectively in the context of land registries.The outlined key terms encapsulate the essence of this investigation, providing a comprehensive overview of the multifaceted impact that blockchain integration can have on land registration systems.
Blockchain technology (BCT) has emerged as a game-changer for many industries since its inception in 2008. Its application in the energy industry as blockchain enabled interconnected smart microgrids (BSMG) is on the rise as it can execute energy trading, automate the market operations, manage the grid, and facilitate real-time payments. With the increase in usage of BSMGs, different types of BCT will emerge, making the system heterogeneous in nature. BCT is also limited currently due to its scalability and low transaction rate. Interoperability between heterogeneous BSMGs can counteract the drawbacks and improve the functionality and, thereby, adoption of BCT in energy. This paper recognises the need for interoperability and thoroughly reviews the different methods of interoperability that currently exist (i.e., notary mechanism, relay or side chains, hashed time-locked contracts, and blockchain routers). Two relay mechanisms - Polkadot and Cosmos with Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) are reviewed further to determine the usability of the protocols. Finally, a conceptual architecture of interconnection of heterogeneous BSMGs is proposed. Conceptual solution to connecting Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric to the Cosmos Hub through IBC is explored. While interoperability between heterogeneous users is addressed in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), it has not yet been addressed in energy. A conceptual solution is provided for this research gap for the first time in energy domain.
This paper recognizes the need for interoperability between heterogeneous blockchain-enabled smart microgrids and heterogeneous prosumers involved in peer-to-peer transactions. It discusses methods of interoperability between different blockchain platforms like Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and Tendermint. It is a work-in-progress draft.
Usman Khalil, Owais Ahmed Malik, Wee-Hong Ong, Mueen Uddin
Smart city architecture brings all the underlying architectures, i.e., Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), and Internet of Everything (IoE), together to work as a system under its umbrella. The goal of smart city architecture is to come up with a solution that may integrate all the real-time response applications. However, the cyber-physical space poses threats that can jeopardize the working of a smart city where all the data belonging to people, systems, and processes will be at risk. Various architectures based on centralized and distributed mechanisms support smart cities; however, the security concerns regarding traceability, scalability, security services, platform assistance, and resource management persist. In this paper, private blockchain-based architecture Decentralized Smart City of Things (DSCoT) is proposed. It actively utilizes fog computing for all the users and smart devices connected to a fog node in a particular management system in a smart city, i.e., a smart house or hospital, etc. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been utilized for representation to define smart device attributes. NFTs in the proposed DSCoT architecture provide devices and user authentication (IoT) functionality. DSCoT has been designed to provide a smart city solution that ensures robust security features such as Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability (CIA), and authorization by defining new attributes and functions for Owner, User, Fog, and IoT devices authentication. The evaluation of the proposed functions and components in terms of Gas consumption and time complexity has shown promising results. Comparatively, the Gas consumption for minting DSCoT NFT showed approximately 27%, and a DSCoT approve() was approximately 11% more efficient than the PUF-based NFT solution.
With the increasing value of various kinds of data in the era of big data, the demand of different subjects for data transactions has become more and more urgent. In this paper, a blockchain-based data transaction protection scheme is proposed to realize the secure transaction sharing among data. This paper carries out the following work: by analyzing the existing data transaction models, we find the data security and transaction protection problems, establish a third-party-free data transaction platform using blockchain, protect usersâ data security by combining AES and improved homomorphic encryption technology, and upload the encrypted data to the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for distributed storage. Finally, we use the powerful functions of the IPFS, combined with inadvertent transmission protocol, two-way authentication, zero-knowledge proof, and other security verification for data transactions. The security analysis proves that this scheme has higher security despite the time overhead, and we will continue to optimize the scheme to improve efficiency in the future.
Blockchain is a technology that creates trust among non-trusting parties without relying on any intermediaries. Consequently, it has attracted the interest of companies operating in a multitude of sectors. However, due to the number of different blockchain solutions that have emerged in the last few years and their rapid changes, it is challenging for such companies to orient their technological decisions. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the key dimensionsânamely, governance, maturity, support, latency, privacy, interoperability, flexibility, efficiency, resiliency, and scalabilityâof some of the most-used permissioned blockchain platforms. Moreover, we present the results of a performance evaluation considering the following frameworks: Hyperledger Fabric 2.2, Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.2, and ConsenSys Quorum 21.1 (with both the GoQuorum client and the Hyperledger Besu client). The platforms were tested under similar conditions, and official releases were used, such that our findings provide a reference for companies establishing their technological orientation.
Abstract There are several features inherent in blockchain, including decentralized storage, distributed ledger, immutability, security and authentication, and it has shifted away from the hype to be used practically in different industries, such as in the healthcare sector. The use of blockchain technology has allowed the provision of improved services to industries. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the use of blockchain is influenced by data quality issues in the healthcare industry. The article is structured as a systematic literature review study that uses several articles issued in various databases from 2016 onwards. In this review study, 65 articles were chosen and grouped into a single key aspect of the challenge in the healthcare sector. The findings obtained were analyzed based on factors in three domains, classified as issues pertinent to the adoption, operational and technological domains. This review study aims to use the findings to provide support to the practitioners, stakeholders and professionals, whose purpose is to carry out and manage transformation projects pertinent to blockchain in the field of healthcare. In addition, the organizations would be facilitated in their decision-making processes when the potential blockchain users are made to comprehend the implicit factors related to blockchain.
Blockchains have seen growing traction with cryptocurrencies reaching a market cap of over 1 trillion dollars, major institution investors taking interests, and global impacts on governments, businesses, and individuals.
Several advanced features exist in fifth-generation (5G) correspondence than in fourth-generation (4G) correspondence. Centric cloud-computing architecture achieves resource sharing and effectively handles big data explosion. For data security problems, researchers had developed many methods to protect data against cyber-attacks. Only a few solutions are based on blockchain (BC), but are affected by expensive storage costs, network latency, confidence, and capacity. Things are represented in digital form in the virtual cyberspace which is the major responsibility of the communication model based on cybertwin. A novel cybertwin-based UAV 6G network architecture is proposed with new concepts such as cloud operators and cybertwin in UAV. Here, IoE applications have to be energy aware and provide scalability with less latency. A novel Compute first networking (CFN) framework named secure blockchain-based UAV communication (BC-UAV) is designed which offers network services such as computing, caching, and communication resources. The focus of the blockchain was to improve the security in the cloud using hashing technique. Edge clouds support core clouds to quickly respond to user requests.
Blockchain technology is becoming a promising technological solution for enterprise applications with the rise of interoperable solutions. A cross-chain architecture facilitates interoperability, thus improves its chain efficiency, reduces fragmentation, and allows users and features to flow more freely across multiple blockchains. However, enabling interoperability in silo networks will make a significant functional trade-off on the security and performance of the system. This paper review trade-offs in blockchain technologies related to interoperability.
Securing and managing medical data in hospitals is one of the significant challenges still existing in healthcare. There can be different kinds of patients staying in hospitals with various diseases. All these medical data records need to be secured appropriately for future use and verification. In the hospital, there will be essential documents such as criminal cases and postmortem reports, although it is unclear if they are being handled properly or not. Even the hospital staff can alter these data. This paper proposes a blockchain-based secured medical data management system to manage access to each medical record in a network of hospitals. The proposed system has three main access management categories: one for securing general (fever or cold) medical report, category 2 for postmortem or crime reports security and category 3 for securing cancer /brain death /genetic disorder reports. Sensitive clinical data should not be visible to patients with cancer or genetic disorders as these patients have a higher rate of suicide attempts. Hence, the data is accessible only to doctors, family members, and researchers. The data related to the crime or postmortem reports have only limited access for those with legal permission to access and verify these types of reports. So through blockchain distributed ledger technology and smart contracts, we could store the data in a tamper-proof manner and manage the user access to these data.
In recent years, with 5G and other key technology breakthroughs, IoT technology is accelerating penetration into various industries, and the era of Internet of Everything is coming. However, while the industry is promoting the rapid development of industrial IoT, IoT security issues are also coming up. Based on this, this paper proposes a data privacy protection method for the smart IoT platform, which first adopts zero-knowledge identity proof technology to complete the identity access authentication of a large number of IoT terminal devices; then the data is downscaled and aggregated in the intermediate data collection device, and then the processed data is added to the noise based on Laplace distribution, and finally the data is transmitted to the main server, thus realizing the smart IoT platform Data privacy protection in the process of data transmission.
Chenyuan Wu, B.R. Mehta, Mohammad Javad Amiri, Ryan Marcus · 5 authors
This paper presents AdaChain, a learning-based blockchain framework that adaptively chooses the best permissioned blockchain architecture in order to optimize effective throughput for dynamic transaction workloads. AdaChain addresses the challenge in the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) environments, where a large variety of possible smart contracts are deployed with different workload characteristics. AdaChain supports automatically adapting to an underlying, dynamically changing workload through the use of reinforcement learning. When a promising architecture is identified, AdaChain switches from the current architecture to the promising one at runtime in a way that respects correctness and security concerns. Experimentally, we show that AdaChain can converge quickly to optimal architectures under changing workloads, significantly outperform fixed architectures in terms of the number of successfully committed transactions, all while incurring low additional overhead.