The Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, despite the wide range of application is not without loop holes of which cyberattackers can take advantage. In order to improve the platform's security while also increasing other features, it has been proposed that blockchain technology be implemented in any IoT system. However, while blockchain technology has many advantages, it is important to consider other options because they all have their own drawbacks that may not be ideal for every use case situation. IoT network devices have limited computer power, storage space, and bandwidth. As a result, these systems are easily prone to assault than other network connected devices, such PCs, cell phones and tablets. With focus on IoT security challenges and the countermeasures offered by the blockchain technology, consensus algorithm, data encryption and smart contracts were discovered to be the common and effective algorithm employed by the blockchain technology in securing Iot systems over time.
Sharing data securely and efficiently has been identified as an issue in IoT-based smart systems such as smart cities, smart agriculture, smart health, etc. A large number of IoT devices are used in these smart systems and they produce a large amount of data. IoT devices generally have limited storage and processing capabilities, and configuring any security techniques on these devices is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel device identity management approach for blockchain-based IoT systems that provides data security in two ways. Firstly, a lightweight time-based identification protocol that uses hub identification for validating data. Secondly, data storage is augmented with an effective blockchain application for providing easy access and immutability for data sharing among multiple parties. Our initial prototype implementation shows that: our identity management approach can be implemented in large scale settings, our system can be effectively implemented in blockchain platforms, and our performance evaluation result shows that the prototype fulfills system requirements adequately.
Problem of secure transmission in cloud systems has been well studied; there exist number of approaches discussed around the problem. Number of threats has been identified in cloud which targets the services and data behind them. To mitigate the threats, different approaches are discussed in literature. The most approaches uses behavior of user in measuring trust, and some of them uses data level features in measuring trust of user. Also, various data encryption schemes are discussed which suffer with poor performance in security achievement. To handle this issue, an efficient Service Constraint NCBQ (Network Condition and Behavior Quality) Trust orient secure transmission protocol (SCNCQB-TSTP) is presented in this article. The proposed model involves in secure transmission by analyzing various factors of network, user behavior and quality of service. The method discovers set of routes to reach the service point and fetches several information about the transmission route like traffic, transmission frequency, bandwidth, IoT devices, hop count, throughput, and bandwidth utilization. According to the above information fetched about different routes, the method analyzes the trust of each route in three ways like Network Support Analysis, Behavior Support Analysis and QoS-Support Analysis. Based on the result of different analysis, the method estimates the value of Secure Transmission Score (STS). According to the value of STS, an optimal route has been selected to perform data transmission. Similarly, the method adapts Service Constraint Blockchain Model (SCBM) towards data security, which classifies the services in various levels. According to the service claimed by the user, the service data has been encrypted with specific class of scheme and key. Further, encrypted data has been placed is adapted to block chain to perform data transmission. The proposed SCNCQB-TSTP model improves the performance of secure transmission and data security.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abdul Razzaq, Syed Agha Hassnain Mohsan, Shahbaz Ahmed Khan Ghayyur, Mohammed H. Alsharif · 7 authors
Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising candidate for space exploration and sustainable energy systems. This transformative technology offers secure and decentralized strategies to process and manipulate space resources. Remote sensing provides viable potential with the coexistence of open data from various sources, such as short-range sensors on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or Internet-of-Things (IoT) tags and far-range sensors incorporated on satellites. Open data resources have most recently emerged as attractive connecting parties where owners have shown consent to share data. However, most data owners are anonymous and untrustworthy, which makes shared data likely insecure and unreliable. At present, there are several tools that distribute open data, serving as an intermediate party to link users with data owners. However, these platforms are operated by central authorities who develop guidelines for data ownership, integrity, and access, consequently restricting both users and data owners. Therefore, the need and feasibility of a decentralized system arise for data sharing and retrieving without involving these intermediate limiting parties. This study proposes a blockchain-based system without any central authority to share and retrieve data. Our proposed system features (i) data sharing, (ii) maintaining the historical data, and (iii) retrieving and evaluation of data along with enhanced security. We have also discussed the use of blockchain algorithms based on smart contracts to track space transactions and communications in a secure, verifiable, and transparent manner. We tested the suggested framework in the Windows environment by writing smart contracts prototype on an Ethereum TESTNET blockchain. The results of the study showed that the suggested strategy is efficient, practicable, and free of common security attacks and vulnerabilities.
Rasel Iqbal Emon, Md. Mehedi Hassan Onik, Abdullah Al Hussain, Toufiq Ahmed Tanna · 7 authors
A distributed ledger technology, embedded with privacy and security by architecture, provides a transparent application developing platform. Additionally, edge technology is trending rapidly which brings the computing and data storing facility closer to the user end (device), in order to overcome network bottlenecks. This study, therefore, utilises the transparency, security, efficiency of blockchain technology along with the computing and storing facility at the edge level to establish privacy preserved storing and tracking schemes for electronic health records (EHRs). Since the EHR stored in a block is accessible by the peer-to-peer (P2P) nodes, privacy has always been a matter of great concern for any blockchain-based activities. Therefore, to address this privacy issue, multilevel blockchain, which can enforce and preserve complete privacy and security of any blockchain-based application or environment, has become one of the recent blockchain research trends. In this article, we propose an EHR sharing architecture consisting of three different interrelated multilevel or hierarchical chains confined within three different network layers using edge computing. Furthermore, since EHRs are sensitive, a specific data de-identification or anonymisation strategy is also applied to further strengthen the privacy and security of the data shared.
Ahmed I. Taloba, Ahmed Elhadad, Alanazi Rayan, Rasha M. Abd El-Aziz · 8 authors
Blockchain technology must have sparked widespread interest, applications associated with data monitoring, banking sectors, computer security, the Internet of Things, and food chemistry to the healthcare sector and cognitive science. The use of multimedia in the healthcare architecture also allows for the storage, processing and transmission of patient information in a wide range of formats such as images, text and audio over the Internet using various smart particles. However, managing large amounts of data, including findings and images of each individual, increases human effort and increases protection risks. In this paper, to address these problems by using IoT in healthcare improves the performance of patient care while lowering costs by efficiently distributing healthcare resources. Nevertheless, various attackers can cause a variety of risks in IoT devices. To avoid these problems, Blockchain technology has been identified as the most effective method for maintaining the secrecy and security of control systems in real-time. This should provide a security architecture for healthcare multimedia content using blockchain technology by producing the hash of every information so that any transition or modification in information, as well as any breaches of medicines, would be evidenced across the whole blockchain platform.
Danilo Bizarria de Oliveira, Geraldo Lucas Fernandes do Amaral, Markel Pedrosa Duarte de Macedo, Matheus Ferreira Mesquita · 5 authors
Sistemas de processamento de transações são parte essencial de negócios online, e exigem tanto confiança quanto desempenho para entregar o serviço esperado. Uma ferramenta de blockchain é capaz de oferecer escalabilidade e confiança na validação de transações. A abordagem proposta neste trabalho é da avaliação do potencial de escalabilidade da rede Ethereum, e seu comportamento em cenários progressivamente mais distribuídos. Com destaque para um aumento observado de cerca de 10× o número de transações por segundo, quando comparados um nó isolado e uma rede de 16 nós, esta que também proporcionou uma queda de mais da metade da latência com relação ao cenário centralizado.
Someah Alangari, Saeed M. Alshahrani, Nayyar Ahmed Khan, Abdulrahman Abdullah Alghamdi · 6 authors
New universities and educational organizations are increasing in Saudi Arabia with the increase in the need for high-quality education. This increased the need for a fast transformation to digitise the educational system in Saudi Arabia, which is one of the important pillars of the Saudi Vision 2030. The students who study in these organizations suffer the verification of academic records and other educational documents. Students who want to study at universities abroad also face the challenge of academic records and certificates verification. A secure, fast, and transparent model is required in the education sector in order to verify academic certificates issued by various educational organizations. Blockchain technology can be used with high data security to empower the educational sector of Saudi Arabia in the digital transformation and to help the educational organizations in verifying academic documents. In order to avoid any document fraud and forgery, along with the ease of verification of academic records and educational documents for the students. This research focuses on developing a model which will be helpful in achieving digital transformation in academic document verification by blockchain technology.
Blockchain is regarded as a significant innovation and shows a set of promising features that can certainly address existing issues in real time applications. Decentralization, greater transparency, improved traceability and secure architecture can revolutionize healthcare systems. With the help of advancement in computer technologies, most healthcare institutions try to store patient data digitally rather than on paper. Electronic health records are regarded as some of the most important assets in healthcare system and are required to be shared among different hospitals and other organizations to improve diagnosis efficiency. While sharing patients' details, certain basic standards such as integrity and confidentiality of the information need to be considered. Blockchain technology provides the above standards with features of immutability and granting access to stored information only to authorized users. The examination approach depends on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (or PRISMA) rules and an efficient planned search convention is utilized to look through multiple scientific databases to recognize, investigate and separate every important publication. In this paper, we present a solid systematic review on the blockchain and healthcare domain to identify the existing challenges and benefits of applying blockchain technology in healthcare systems. More than 150 scientific papers published in the last ten years are surveyed, resulting in the identifications and summarization of observations made on the different privacy-preserving approaches and also assessment of their performances. We also present a significant architectural solutions of blockchain to achieve interoperability. Thereby, we attempt to analyse the ideas of blockchain in the medical domain, by assessing the advantages and limitations, subsequently giving guidance to other researchers in the area.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies characterizing the era of the fourth industrial revolution have enabled smart home networks to support their various systems and services. In a blockchain-based smart-home network environment, all connected IoT devices must be controlled safely and efficiently. Nevertheless, existing block-chain-based smart-home IoT systems pose a delay issue due to the necessary block generation time. In addition, IoT devices installed in smart homes should be able to prevent forgery attacks such as spoofing because they are often directly associated with personal information. In this study, we proposed an enhanced method to control smart home devices safely and efficiently by applying the zero-knowledge proof combined with a blockchain-based IoT system to protect the public keys of home network devices and the communication among them. The proposed model was approximately 10 s faster than the block generation-based model when it communicated three times in rinkeby, which is one of the test networks of Ethereum.
Michael Sammeth, Nicu-Cosmin Ursache, Sînică Alboaie
Introduction: Distributed ledger networks, chiefly those based on blockchain technologies, currently are heralding a next-generation of computer systems that aims to suit modern users’ demands. Over the recent years, several technologies for blockchains, off-chaining strategies, as well as decentralised and respectively self-sovereign identity systems have shot up so fast that standardisation of the protocols is lagging behind, severely hampering the interoperability of different approaches. Moreover, most of the currently available solutions for distributed ledgers focus on either home users or enterprise use case scenarios, failing to provide integrative solutions addressing the needs of both. Methods: Herein, we introduce the OpenDSU platform that allows to interoperate generic blockchain technologies, organised–and possibly cascaded in a hierarchical fashion–in domains. To achieve this flexibility, we seamlessly integrated a set of well conceived components that orchestrate off-chain data and provide granularly resolved and cryptographically secure access levels, intrinsically nested with sovereign identities across the different domains. The source code and extensive documentation of all OpenDSU components described herein are publicly available under the MIT open-source licence at https://opendsu.com . Results: Employing our platform to PharmaLedger, an inter-European network for the standardisation of data handling in the pharmaceutical industry and in healthcare, we demonstrate that OpenDSU can cope with generic demands of heterogeneous use cases in both, performance and handling substantially different business policies. Discussion: Importantly, whereas available solutions commonly require a pre-defined and fixed set of components, no such vendor lock-in restrictions on the blockchain technology or identity system exist in OpenDSU, making systems built on it flexibly adaptable to new standards evolving in the future.
With the advances of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G/6G wireless communications, the paradigms of mobile computing have developed dramatically in recent years, from centralized mobile cloud computing to distributed fog computing and mobile edge computing (MEC). MEC pushes compute-intensive assignments to the edge of the network and brings resources as close to the endpoints as possible, addressing the shortcomings of mobile devices with regard to storage space, resource optimisation, computational performance and efficiency. Compared to cloud computing, as the distributed and closer infrastructure, the convergence of MEC with other emerging technologies, including the Metaverse, 6G wireless communications, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain, also solves the problems of network resource allocation, more network load as well as latency requirements. Accordingly, this paper investigates the computational paradigms used to meet the stringent requirements of modern applications. The application scenarios of MEC in mobile augmented reality (MAR) are provided. Furthermore, this survey presents the motivation of MEC-based Metaverse and introduces the applications of MEC to the Metaverse. Particular emphasis is given on a set of technical fusions mentioned above, e.g., 6G with MEC paradigm, MEC strengthened by blockchain, etc.
This research presents a novel method to assess inter-chain message relay time in the Cosmos blockchain network, which employs the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol for blockchain interoperability. While inter-chain transactions in Cosmos lag behind intra-chain transactions, this research conducts a thorough performance evaluation, emphasizing message relay time across diverse Cosmos chains. The results show a strong association between inter-chain transaction frequency and overall transaction processing speed (TPS), underscoring the inherent trade-off between scalability and compatibility in inter-chain communication protocols. A thorough understanding of inter-chain transaction performance is essential for advancing interoperability and improving cross-blockchain network designs. As a result, this research improves our understanding of Cosmos’ functionality and provides insightful recommendations for boosting the effectiveness and scalability of inter-chain communication. The study also sheds light on message delivery patterns in the Cosmos ecosystem, showing that IBC message relay time has an average duration of 55.448 s and is distributed lognormally. Notably, the time between the commitment of the IBC RecvPacket transaction and the commitment of the IBC Acknowledgement transaction (R to A time) considerably impacts the effectiveness of message transmission, which causes delays in the IBC message relay process.
With the growing demand for smart, secure, and intelligent solutions, Industry 4.0 has emerged as the future of various applications. One of the primary sectors that are becoming more vulnerable to security assaults like ransomware is the healthcare sector. Researchers have proposed various mechanisms in smart and secure health care systems with this vision in mind. Existing systems are vulnerable to security attacks on medical data. It is required to build a real-time diagnosis device using a cyber-physical system with blockchain technology in a considerable manner. The proposed work’s main purpose is to build secure, real-time preservation and tamper-proof control of medical data. In this work, the Bayesian grey filter-based convolution neural network (BGF-CNN) approach is used to enhance accuracy and reduce time complexity and overhead. Additionally, PSO and GWO optimization techniques are used to improve network performance. As an outcome of the proposed work, the privacy preservation of medical data is improved with a high accuracy rate by a blockchain-based cyber-physical system using a deep neural network (BGF Blockchain). To summarize, the proposed system helps in the privacy preservation of medical data along with a reduction in communication overhead using the Bayesian Grey Filter–CNN.
Resilient manufacturing is a vision in the Industry 5.0 blueprint for satisfying sustainable development goals under pandemics or the rising individualized product needs. A resilient manufacturing strategy based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks plays an essential role in facilitating production and supply chain recovery. IIoT contains confidential data and private information, and many security issues arise through vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. The traditional centralized IIoT framework is not only of high cost for system configuration but also vulnerable to cyber-attacks and single-point failure, which is not suitable for achieving the resilient manufacturing vision in Industry 5.0. Recently, researchers are seeking a secure solution of middleware based on blockchain technology integration for decentralized IIoT, which can effectively protect the consistency, integrity, and availability of IIoT data by utilizing the auditing and tamper-proof features of the blockchain. This paper presented a review of secure blockchain middleware for decentralized IIoT towards Industry 5.0. Firstly, the security issues of conventional IIoT solutions and the advantages of blockchain middleware are analyzed. Secondly, an architecture of secure blockchain middleware for decentralized IIoT is proposed. Finally, enabling technologies, challenges, and future directions are reviewed. The innovation of this paper is to study and discuss the distributed blockchain middleware, investigating its ability to eliminate the risk of a single point of failure via a distributed feature in the context of resilient manufacturing in Industry 5.0 and to solve the security issues from traditional centralized IIoT. Also, the four-layer architecture of blockchain middleware presented based on the IIoT application framework is a novel aspect of this review. It is expected that the paper lays a solid foundation for making IIoT blockchain middleware a new venue for Industry 5.0 research.
Many high-impact Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, public safety, and military operations, require the establishment of a secure federated IoT environment. One of the critical challenges in the implementation of federated IoT solutions involves establishing a secure and authenticated key management mechanism. We propose and validate in a laboratory environment a novel federated IoT onboarding and key management solution. Our dl-mOT protocol integrates an efficient identity-based modified Okamoto-Tanaka (mOT) protocol with a distributed ledger in order to establish an anchor of trust between federation members.
Specializing Directed Acyclic Graph Federated Learning(SDAGFL) is a new federated learning framework which updates model from the devices with similar data distribution through Directed Acyclic Graph Distributed Ledger Technology (DAG-DLT). SDAGFL has the advantage of personalization, resisting single point of failure and poisoning attack in fully decentralized federated learning. Because of these advantages, the SDAGFL is suitable for the federated learning in IoT scenario where the device is usually battery-powered. To promote the application of SDAGFL in IoT, we propose an energy optimized SDAGFL based event-triggered communication mechanism, called ESDAGFL. In ESDAGFL, the new model is broadcasted only when it is significantly changed. We evaluate the ESDAGFL on a clustered synthetically FEMNIST dataset and a dataset from texts by Shakespeare and Goethe's works. The experiment results show that our approach can reduce energy consumption by 33\% compared with SDAGFL, and realize the same balance between training accuracy and specialization as SDAGFL.
Blockchain technology has gained increasing popularity in the research of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the past decade. As a distributed and immutable ledger secured by strong cryptography algorithms, the blockchain brings a new perspective to secure IoT systems. Many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy. In comparison, the blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is much less studied. Nonetheless, we see the potential of blockchain in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. This paper proposes an innovative IoT service platform powered by consortium blockchain technology. The presented solution abstracts machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) communications into services provided by IoT devices. Then, it materializes data exchange of the IoT network through smart contracts and blockchain transactions. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary storage layer to the proposed platform to address various data storage requirements. Our proof-of-concept implementation is tested against various workloads and connection sizes under different block configurations to evaluate the platform's transaction throughput, latency, and hardware utilization. The experiment results demonstrate that our solution can maintain high performance under most testing scenarios and provide valuable insights on optimizing the blockchain configuration to achieve the best performance.
Significant modifications have been seen in healthcare facilities over the past two decades. With the use of IoT-enabled devices, the monitoring and analysis of patient diagnostic parameters is made considerably easy. The new technology shift for medical field is IoMT. However, the problem of privacy for patient data and the security of information still a point to ponder. This research proposed a prototype model to integrate the blockchain and IoMT for providing better analysis of patient health factors. The authors suggested IoMT data to be collected over Edge Computing gateway devices and forward to Cloud Gateway. The three-layered decision making structure ensures the integrity of the data. The further analysis of information collected over sensor-based devices is done in the Cloud IoT Central Hub service. To ensure the secrecy and compliance of the patient data, Smart Contracts are integrated. After the exchange of smart contracts, a block of information is broadcast over the health blockchain. The P2P network makes it viable to retain all health statistics and further processing of information. The paper describes the scenario and experimental setup for a COVID-19 data-set analyzed in the proposed prototype mode. After the collection of information and decision making, the block of data is sent across all peer nodes. Thus, the power of IoMT and blockchain makes it easy for the healthcare worker to diagnose and handle patient data with privacy. The IoMT is integrated with artificial intelligence to enable decision making based on the classification of data. The results are saved as transactions in the blockchain hyperledger. This study demonstrates the prototype model with test data in a testing network with two peer nodes.
Anton Dziatkovskii, Uladzimir Hryneuski, Alexandra Krylova, Adrian Chun Minh Loy
The emergence of Industry 4.0 has awoken the adoption of blockchain as a key factor to enhance the industrial supply chain across the globe, enabling cost-effective and fast-paced delivery of products and services, ownership of products with privacy, and high security as well as traceability. This new digital horizon is underpinning the future direction of humankind, aligning with the Sustainable Development Goal themes of Good Health and Well-being (SDG3) and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11). Thus, the main objective of this paper is to elucidate the adoption of blockchain technology in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) disciplines by determining of the key academic research players and the evolution of blockchain in different fields. It begins by clarifying the definition of these concepts, followed by a discussion regarding the chronological progress of blockchain over time, an evaluation of the adoption of blockchain technologies in different key research areas, and lastly, providing comments on several directions to guide practitioners in developing a sustainable global blockchain roadmap in education science.
The agricultural domain in developing countries is mostly dictated by archaic rules based on traditions and inherited practices. With the evolution of digitalization and technology, it seems essential to apply new technologies to the agricultural field. Among the technologies to be exploited in agriculture, we mention sensors, IoT, WSN, cloud, blockchain, etc. We talk about smart agriculture in this case. In this paper, we propose a platform secured by blockchain for monitoring and securing production. This platform uses IoT connected sensors to track and save data. Our system is used to monitor the production process of olive trees. The goal is to track everything that enters and leaves our olive tree production from fertilizers, insecticides, and fortifiers to olives, trimming etc. The blockchain via its decentralized system allow a secure, irreversible, and clear monitoring. A dashboard allow us to highlight the changes while facilitating the work of farmers. Our prototype will be embedded via a Raspberry Pi 4 platform.
M. Rajesh, T. Archana Acharya, Hafis Hajiyev, E. Laxmi Lydia · 8 authors
Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) has been developed into a field of research and it purposes at linking many sensors enabling devices mostly to data collection and track applications. Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a vital element of IoT paradigm since its inception and has developed into one of the chosen platforms for deploying many smart city application regions such as disaster management, intelligent transportation, home automation, smart buildings, and other such IoT-based application. The routing approaches were extremely-utilized energy efficient approaches with an initial drive that is, for balancing the energy amongst sensor nodes. The clustering and routing procedures assumed that Non-Polynomial (NP) hard problems but bio-simulated approaches are utilized to a recognized time for resolving such problems. With this motivation, this paper presents a new blockchain with Enhanced Hunger Games Search based Route Planning (BCEHGS-RP) scheme for IoT assisted WSN. The presented BCEHGS-RP model majorly employs BC technology for secure communication in the IoT supported WSN environment. In addition, an effective multihop route planning approach was designed by the use of EHGS technique. The proposed EHGS technique is derived from the concept of Hill Climbing strategy (HCS) and HGS algorithm. Moreover, a fitness function with two parameters namely residual energy (RE) and inter-cluster distance to elect optimal routes. The performance validation of the BCEHGS-RP model is experimented with under diverse number of nodes. Extensive experimental outcomes highlighted the better performance of the BCEHGS-RP technique on recent approaches.