Despite numerous prior attempts to boost transaction per second (TPS) of blockchain systems, many sacrifice decentralization and security. This paper proposes a bodyless block propagation (BBP) scheme for which the blockbody is not validated and transmitted during block propagation, to increase TPS without compromising security. Nodes in the blockchain network anticipate the transactions and their ordering in the next upcoming block so that these transactions can be pre-executed and pre-validated before the block is born. For a network with $N$ nodes, our theoretical analysis reveals that BBP can improve TPS scalability from $O(1/log(N))$ to $O(1)$. Ensuring consensus on the next block's transaction content is crucial. We propose a transaction selection, ordering, and synchronization algorithm to drive this consensus. To address the undetermined Coinbase address issue, we further present an algorithm for such unresolvable transactions, ensuring a consistent and TPS-efficient scheme. With BBP, most transactions require neither validation nor transmission during block propagation, liberating system from transaction-block dependencies and rendering TPS scalable. Both theoretical analysis and experiments underscore BBP's potential for full TPS scalability. Experimental results reveal a 4x reduction in block propagation time compared to Ethereum blockchain, with TPS performance being limited by node hardware rather than block propagation.
Shenhui Zhang, Ming Tang, Xiulai Li, Boyi Liu · 8 authors
Robot Operating System (ROS) has received widespread utilization with the development of robotics, self-driving, etc., recently. Meanwhile, the other technology blockchain is frequently applied to various fields with its trustworthy characteristics and immutability in data storage. However, ROS has no ability to interact with the blockchain, which hinders research in related fields. Therefore, we wonder if we can develop a convenient tool to bridge ROS and blockchain. Inspired by this, we propose ROS-Ethereum. It bridges ROS and Ethereum, a widely used blockchain platform. ROS-Ethereum is based on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) communication mechanism and the SM algorithm family along with Ethereum technology. Simply put, ROS-Ethereum allows users to invoke the contract when interacting with the blockchain, which makes this process easier and safer. We conduct experiments in real robots to verify the effectiveness of ROS-Ethereum and evaluate it from the following metrics: (1) the encryption efficiency and stability of the algorithm and (2) ROS-Ethereum transaction response time and packet loss rate.
After the success of the Bitcoin blockchain, came several cryptocurrencies and blockchain solutions in the last decade. Nonetheless, Blockchain-based systems still suffer from low transaction rates and high transaction processing latencies, which hinder blockchains' scalability. An entire class of solutions, called Layer-1 scalability solutions, have attempted to incrementally improve such limitations by adding/modifying fundamental blockchain attributes. Recently, a completely different class of works, called Layer-2 protocols, have emerged to tackle the blockchain scalability issues using unconventional approaches. Layer-2 protocols improve transaction processing rates, periods, and fees by minimizing the use of underlying slow and costly blockchains. In fact, the main chain acts just as an instrument for trust establishment and dispute resolution among Layer-2 participants, where only a few transactions are dispatched to the main chain. Thus, Layer-2 blockchain protocols have the potential to transform the domain. However, rapid and discrete developments have resulted in diverse branches of Layer-2 protocols. In this work, we systematically create a broad taxonomy of such protocols and implementations. We discuss each Layer-2 protocol class in detail and also elucidate their respective approaches, salient features, requirements, etc. Moreover, we outline the issues related to these protocols along with a comparative discussion. Our thorough study will help further systematize the knowledge dispersed in the domain and help the readers to better understand the field of Layer-2 protocols.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices has completely new challenges regarding security and privacy. Blockchain technology could be a great to mitigate challenges of data security and privacy relay in the IoT. Crypto currency networks like Bit coin, can prove to be required towards understanding concept of decentralized, security and Leveraging of blockchain for privacy preserving. Differential privacy is a mathematical technique of adding a controlled amount of randomized noise to a dataset to prevent anyone from getting information about individuals in the dataset. The added randomized noise is in controlled manner. Therefore, the resultant dataset is still accurate enough to generate aggregate output while maintaining the privacy of individual participants. As Block chain is a peer-to-peer distributed ledger, it is an optimal way for preventing identity, monitoring, non-repudiation and providing tracking in IoT, so due to these aspects we can explore future research challenges to preserve privacy in blockchain.
This paper presents an overview of the basic concepts of cryptography and encryption. The work aims at presenting the main concepts and concerns of encryption on a high-level of abstraction, allowing non-domain expert readers to navigate through these topics. Less traditional arguments are also shown, from the relevance of Key Management Services with its usage in Envelope Encryption, to Zero Knowledge proofs and their innovative applications. The crucial importance of securing communications between IoT devices and widely used algorithms to do so, are also discussed.
Rana Fareed Ghani, Asia A. Salman, Abdullah B. Khudhair, Laith Al-Jobouri
One of the major capabilities of blockchain technology is the sharing of data in verifiable ways without losing control of information possession. Issuing and verifying student certifications for higher study applications or job recruitment require many steps that take days to complete and are considered time-consuming. Most universities around the world use centralized systems to control the entire procedure when a graduate applies for a job or postgraduate studies. Applying blockchain technology to certificate verification protocols through a comprehensive architecture provides authenticity and reduces time significantly. In this paper, a framework has been proposed to issue student certifications locally in addition to sharing them across the internet while maintaining control and ownership of the certifications. This framework leverages the advantages of blockchain technology to electronic certification sharing and verification. Applying the proposed blockchain-based certification system in universities will provide low latency for issuing, sharing, and verification of these certifications. The paper presents the proposed blockchain-based framework for e-certification sharing and an evaluation of the framework, which consists of measuring the average time to issue a certificate and transaction latency time.
Industry 4.0 is leading society into a new era characterized by smart communications between consumers and enterprises. While entertainment and fashion brands aim to consolidate their identities, increasing consumers’ participation in new, engaging, and immersive experiences, other industry sectors such as food and drugs are called to adhere to stricter regulations to increase the quality assurance of their processes. The pharmaceutical industry is inherently one of the most regulated sectors because the safety, integrity, and conservation along the distribution network are the main pillars for guaranteeing the efficacy of drugs for the general public. Favoured by Industry 4.0 incentives, pharmaceutical serialization has become a must in the last few years and is now in place worldwide. In this paper, a decentralized solution based on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which can improve the track and trace capability of the standard serialization process, is presented. Non-fungible tokens are minted in the blockchain and inherit all the advantages provided by this technology. As blockchain technology is becoming more and more popular, adoption of track and trace will increase tremendously. Focusing on the pharmaceutical industry’s use of track and trace, this paper presents the concepts and architectural elements necessary to support the non-fungible token solution, culminating in the presentation of a use case with a prototypical application.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow, the security concerns associated with this technology become increasingly important. Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are emerging as potential solutions for IoT security due to their decentralized and immutable nature. In this survey paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art research in the use of blockchain and DLTs for IoT security. We begin by introducing the basic concepts of blockchain and DLTs, followed by a discussion of their potential applications in IoT security. We then review the existing literature on the topic, including both academic and industrial research. We categorize the literature into different application areas, such as authentication, access control, and data integrity. Finally, we discuss the open research challenges and potential future directions for the use of blockchain and DLTs in IoT security. This survey paper provides a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the current state-of-the-art research in this important area of IoT security.
Abdulghafour Mohammad, Sergio Vargas, Pavel Čermák
Today’s cars can share data with other cars, automakers, and service providers. Shared data can help improve the driving experience, the performance of the car, and the traffic situations. Among all data-collection techniques, blockchain technology offers an immutable and secure solution to support data collection in the automotive industry. Despite its advantages, collecting auto data with blockchain still faces several challenges. Thus, the purpose of this study was to conduct a review of published articles that have addressed the challenges of adopting blockchain for data collection in the automotive industry. This paper allowed us to answer the predefined research question: “What are the challenges of using blockchain for data collection in the automotive industry as presented in the published literature?” The review included articles published from 2017 to January 2022, and from the screened records, 13 articles were analyzed in full-text form. The founded challenges were categorized into seven categories: connectivity, privacy, security attacks, scalability, performance, costs, and monetizing. This review will help researchers, car manufacturers, and third-party suppliers to assess the applicability of the blockchain for data collection.
In recent years, vaccine safety incidents have occurred frequently. To protect vaccine safety, researchers have proposed to use blockchain to secure the vaccine circulation process. Technically, blockchain has some limitations in solving vaccine and other supply chain problems, such as large on-chain storage consumption and low throughput. To better alleviate these restrictions, we propose an improved, blockchain-based, storage-efficient vaccine safety protection scheme in this work. Specifically, we first model the vaccine circulation process. We then design a system to protect vaccine circulation using blockchain, cloud, and cryptographic mechanisms. The proposed system leverages the cloud to implement the vaccine circulation model. Correspondingly, it uses the blockchain to store circulating data certificates and signatures. We evaluated the proposed conceptual model using a consortium blockchain. The experimental results show that the proposed system is efficient.
Currently, most of the personal health data (PHD) are managed and stored separately by individual medical institutions. When these data need to be shared, they must be transferred to a trusted management center and approved by data owners through the third-party endorsement technology. Therefore, it is difficult for personal health data to be shared and circulated over multiple medical institutions. On the other hand, the use of directly exchanging and sharing the original data has become inconsistent with the data rapid growth of medical institutions because of the need of massive data transferring across agencies. In order to secure sharing and managing the mass personal health data generated by various medical institutions, a federal personal health data management framework (PHDMF, https://hvic.biosino.org/PHDMF) has been developed, which had the following advantages: 1) the blockchain technology was used to establish a data consortium over multiple medical institutions, which could provide a flexible and scalable technical solution for member extension and solve the problem of third-party endorsement during data sharing; 2) using data distributed storage technology, personal health data could be majorly stored in their original medical institutions, and the massive data transferring process was of no further use, which could match up with the data rapid growth of these institutions; 3) the distributed ledger technology was utilized to record the hash value of data, given the anti-tampering feature of the technology, malicious modification of data could be identified by comparing the hash value; 4) the smart contract technology was introduced to manage users' access and operation of data, which made the data transaction process traceable and solved the problem of data provenance; and 5) a trusted computing environment was provided for meta-analysis with statistic information instead of original data, the trusted computing environment could be further applied to more health data, such as genome sequencing data, protein expression data, and metabolic profile data through combining the federated learning and blockchain technology. In summary, the framework provides a convenient, secure, and trusted environment for health data supervision and circulation, which facilitate the consortium establish over medical institutions and help achieve the value of data sharing and mining.
Yeison Isaac LLanten Lucio, Katerine Márceles Villalba, Siler Amador Donado
This article presents the problem regarding the assurance of the information that circulates in the devices that are connected to the internet, due to the multiple threats to which they are exposed, running the risk of losing or leaking information; However, with the passage of time, new technologies are emerging that encourage organizations to maintain continuous improvement of their applications and tools, but at the same time the emergence of new technologies brings with it cybersecurity risks that organizations must face when carrying out an integration with them. Therefore, through the action research methodology, two phases were defined, one of them reviewing Blockchain technologies and the second comparing Blockchain technologies to finally determine the most adaptable technology to a cybersecurity Framework focused on IIoT, capable of managing the integrity of the information and achieving a consensus among all the nodes belonging to a certain network.
The health system in today's real world is significant but difficult and overcrowded. These hurdles can be diminished using improved health record management and blockchain technology. These technologies can handle medical data to provide security by monitoring and maintaining patient records. The processing of medical data and patient records is essential to analyze the earlier prescribed medicines and to understand the severity of diseases. Blockchain technology can improve the security, performance, and transparency of sharing the medical records of the current healthcare system. This paper proposed a novel framework for personal health record (PHR) management using IBM cloud data lake and blockchain platform for an effective healthcare management process. The problem in the blockchain-based healthcare management system can be minimized with the utilization of the proposed technique. Significantly, the traditional blockchain system usually decreases the latency. Therefore, the proposed technique focuses on improving latency and throughput. The result of the proposed system is calculated based on various matrices, such as F1 Score, Recall, and Confusion matrices. Therefore, the proposed work scored high accuracy and provided better results than existing techniques.
Blockchain is the technology which in the last decade has influenced our lifestyles most. Bitcoin is a word used frequently for Blockchain. For example, scalability and protection issues that stands up because of the immoderate numbers of IoT items within the community. The server/client version calls for all devices to be connected and authenticated via the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, shifting the IoT machine into the decentralized course may be the right selection. One of the popular decentralization structures is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management methods that may resolve many of IoT troubles, in particular safety.Many Blockchain still confuse Bitcoin, even if it's not equal. Bitcoin is one of several applications are available in Blockchain technology. First of all we present an outline of blockchain architecture and compare a few popular consensus methods in various blockchains. This study also introduced the entire blockchain ecosystem of all the articles we examined and summed up. Furthermore, analyses and consensus models are conducted on many blockchain platforms. Finally, we analyze key issues which are necessary for the future of blockchain technology in these key fields to be broadly available.
Tooba Faisal, José Antonio Ordóñez Lucena, Diego López, Chonggang Wang · 5 authors
With the growing demand for network connectivity and diversity of network applications, one primary challenge that network service providers are facing is managing the commitments for Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Service providers typically monitor SLAs for management tasks such as improving their service quality, customer billing and future network planning. Network service customers, on their side, monitor services provided to them, to optimize their network usage and apply, when required, penalties related to service failures. In future 6G networks, critical network applications such as remote surgery and connected vehicles will require these SLAs to be more dynamic, flexible, and automated to match their diverse requirements on network services. Moreover, these SLAs should be transparent to all stakeholders to address the trustworthiness on network services and service providers required by critical applications. Currently, there is no standardized method to immutably record and audit SLAs, leading to challenges in aspects such as SLA enforcement and accountability - traits essential for future network applications. This work explores new requirements for future service contracts, that is, on the evolution of SLAs. Based on those new requirements, we propose an end to end layered SLA architecture leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and smart contracts. Our architecture is inheritable by an existing telco-application layered architectural frameworks to support future SLAs. We also discuss some limitations of DLT and smart contracts and provide several directions of future studies.
Abdullah Lakhan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Jan Nedoma, Radek Martinek · 8 authors
These days, the usage of machine-learning-enabled dynamic Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) systems with multiple technologies for digital healthcare applications has been growing progressively in practice. Machine learning plays a vital role in the IoMT system to balance the load between delay and energy. However, the traditional learning models fraud on the data in the distributed IoMT system for healthcare applications are still a critical research problem in practice. The study devises a federated learning-based blockchain-enabled task scheduling (FL-BETS) framework with different dynamic heuristics. The study considers the different healthcare applications that have both hard constraint (e.g., deadline) and resource energy consumption (e.g., soft constraint) during execution on the distributed fog and cloud nodes. The goal of FL-BETS is to identify and ensure the privacy preservation and fraud of data at various levels, such as local fog nodes and remote clouds, with minimum energy consumption and delay, and to satisfy the deadlines of healthcare workloads. The study introduces the mathematical model. In the performance evaluation, FL-BETS outperforms all existing machine learning and blockchain mechanisms in fraud analysis, data validation, energy and delay constraints for healthcare applications.
Nowadays, the number of corona patients is increasing significantly. The relationship between the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and the Internet is struggling to keep up with this number of patients. The transmission of Patient Health Records (PHR) to the care of a patient through Internet plays an important role in the remote monitoring and fast detection of new contaminated patient with coronavirus. Moreover, it has generated significant security and privacy concerns for the global health care system due to tampering of control messages. This paper focuses on the application of blockchain and smart contract mechanisms to solve the shortcomings of the current health application and propose a new security schema based on context-aware CP-ABE. The proposed schema includes context-aware policies to achieve a robust authentication of identity and confidentiality of patient's healthcare data. Therefore, the proposed schema shows promising results in enhancing security and minimizing encryption time in Fog cloud environments based on proxy-fog and reinforcement of security policies.
The application of distributed ledger technologies, including blockchain, is rapidly growing in governance, transport, supply chain, and logistics. Today, blockchain technology is promoted as the heart of Smart Cities. This study reviews the potential of blockchain application in water management systems. We surveyed the literature and organized the previous studies based on three main application topics: Smart Water Systems, Water Quality Monitoring, and Storm Water Management. Also, we addressed technical, organizational, social, and institutional challenges that may hinder the adoption of Blockchain technology. Water management systems need to have a long-term commitment plan, update their organizational policies, and acquire relevant knowledge and expertise before successfully adopting any distributed ledger technology.
5G and beyond systems are being built to be prospective by responding to the different needs of a diverse range of applications, which represents a significant departure from this approach. Owing to its openness, encryption techniques, verifiability, integrity, and decentralized design, blockchain has evolved as an important approach. 5G and Blockchain might transform emerging technology. 5G offers consumers high speeds and QoS, while blockchain ensures peer-to-peer trust and privacy. Blockchain is a revolutionary technology having wide range of applications in various domains like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), Cybersecurity, Wireless networks, 5G and beyond networks, etc. In this paper, the role of Blockchain technology in 5G and beyond networks is discussed. This paper also highlights the various challenges that acts as a hindrance while implementing the Blockchain in 5G and beyond networks. Moreover, the paper also discusses the future aspect of Blockchain in 5G networks.
Hasan Mujtaba Buttar, Waqas Aman, Muhammad Mahboob Ur Rahman, Qammer H. Abbasi
This article considers an Internet-of-Things (IoT) blockchain wireless network consisting of a leader node and various follower nodes which together implement the reliable, replicated, redundant, and fault-tolerant (RAFT) consensus protocol to verify a blockchain transaction, as requested by a blockchain client. Furthermore, two kinds of active attacks, that is, jamming and impersonation, are considered on the IoT blockchain network due to the presence of multipleactivemalicious nodes in the close vicinity. When the IoT network is under a jamming attack, we utilize the stochastic geometry tool to derive the closed-form expressions for the coverage probabilities for both uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) IoT transmissions (which eventually translate to the blockchain transaction success rate). On the other hand, when the IoT network is under an impersonation attack, we propose a novel method that enables a receive IoT node to exploit the pathloss of a transmit IoT node as its fingerprint to implement a binary hypothesis test for transmit node identification. To this end, we also provide the closed-form expressions for the probabilities of false alarms, missed detection, and misclassification. Finally, we present detailed simulation results that indicate the following: 1) the coverage probability (and hence the blockchain transaction success rate) improves as the jammers’ locations move away from the IoT network and 2) the three error probabilities decrease (i.e., chances of corruption of the blockchain ledger data due to false data injection by malicious node decrease) as a function of the quality of the link between the transmit and receive IoT nodes.
Abstract New technological developments, such as 5G networks, smart and interconnected devices, and the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), lead to a new reality in which the secure flow of data is non-negotiable. In this new reality, blockchain technology can play a crucial role, as it has the ability to provide the necessary background for the safe and inviolable operation of systems. Blockchain is a distributed ledger, in which information and data are stored and verified. These blocks of data do not have to be related to financial transactions but may concern any other type of data that needs to be securely recorded and not changed retrospectively. Although the first application of blockchain technology was about digital currency (Bitcoin), its usefulness is not limited to cryptocurrencies or the field of economics. Blockchain, especially in its last stage v3.0, has many applications in various sectors such as data storage, certification of products and services, government, insurance, health, science, and education. This paper focuses on the current and potential educational applications of blockchain and presents how this technology can be used to solve specific education problems. Nowadays, a variety of blockchain applications concerning the issue and storage of certificates and diplomas, the evaluation of learning outcomes, the support and the academic degree management, the protection of intellectual property, the cooperation between students and their professors, learning accreditation, payment for studies, formation of an academic passport (portfolio) or administration of the educational process are implemented in some HEI and institutions. The paper analyzes the features and advantages of blockchain technology, presents some of the current blockchain applications for education, as well as the benefits and challenges of using blockchain technology in the educational sector. Finally, special reference is made to applications related to the field of language learning.
At present, blockchain technology is more and more widely used in the field of food traceability, and good results have been achieved. However, many of the current blockchain technologies and algorithms are not developed for the specific situation of food traceability, resulting in resource waste and low computational efficiency. In view of these problems, this paper analyzes and summarizes the classic distributed consensus mechanism in blockchain technology, focusing on the PBFT (practical Byzantine fault tolerance) consensus mechanism and the existing problems related to the improvement scheme. In order to solve the problem of low efficiency of a consensus algorithm in a food traceability scenario, this paper proposes a blockchain consensus algorithm suitable for the food traceability scenario based on clustering and food credit. In addition, the differences between the improved algorithm and the classical Byzantine consensus algorithm in consensus algorithm time and communication times are analyzed through experiments and simulations. The consensus efficiency of the improved algorithm in this paper is significantly improved, which can greatly reduce the application difficulty of blockchain in food traceability.
Dhanya Therese Jose, Jørgen Holme, Antorweep Chakravorty, Chunming Rong
The demand for electricity is increasing exponentially day by day, especially with the arrival of electric vehicles. In the smart community neighborhood project, electricity should be produced at the household or community level and sold or bought according to the demands. Since the actors can produce, sell, and buy according to the demands, thus the name prosumers. ICT solutions can contribute to this in several ways, such as machine learning for analyzing the household data for customer demand and peak hours for the usage of electricity, blockchain as a trustworthy platform for selling or buying, data hub, and ensuring data security and privacy of prosumers. TOTEM: Token for controlled computation is a framework that allows users to analyze the data without moving the data from the data owner's environment. It also ensures the data security and privacy of the data. Here, in this article, we will show the importance of the TOTEM architecture in the EnergiX project and how the extended version of TOTEM can be efficiently merged with the demands of the current and similar projects.
Diego Pennino, Maurizio Pizzonia, Andrea Vitaletti, Marco Zecchini
In the IoT-based economy, a large number of subjects (companies, public bodies, or private citizens) are willing to buy data or services offered by subjects that provide, operate, or host IoT devices. To support economic transactions in this setting, and to pave the way for the implementation of decentralized algorithmic governance powered by smart contracts, the adoption of the blockchain has been proposed both in scientific literature and in actual projects. The blockchain technology promises a decentralized payment system independent of (and possibly cheaper than) conventional electronic payment systems. However, there are a number of aspects that need to be considered for an effective IoT–blockchain integration. In this review paper, we start from a number of real IoT projects and applications that (may) take advantage of blockchain technology to support economic transactions. We provide a reasoned review of several architectural choices in light of typical requirements of those applications and discuss their impact on transaction throughput, latency, costs, limits on ecosystem growth, and so on. We also provide a survey of additional financial tools that a blockchain can potentially bring to an IoT ecosystem, with their architectural impact. In the end, we observe that there are very few examples of IoT projects that fully exploit the potential of the blockchain. We conclude with a discussion of open problems and future research directions to make blockchain adoption easier and more effective for supporting an IoT economy.