This article investigates computation offloading in blockchain-empowered Internet of Things (IoT), where the task data uploading link from sensors to a base station (BS) is protected by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted physical-layer security (PLS). After receiving task data, the BS allocates computational resources provided by mobile-edge computing (MEC) servers to help sensors perform tasks. Existing blockchain-based computation offloading schemes usually focus on network performance improvements, such as energy consumption minimization (ECM) or latency minimization, and neglect the Gas fee for computation offloading, resulting in the dissatisfaction of high Gas providers. Also, the secrecy rate during the data uploading process cannot be measured by a steady value because of the time-varying characteristics of IRS-based wireless channels, thereby computational resources allocation with a secrecy rate measured before data uploading is inappropriate. In this article, we design a Gas-oriented computation offloading scheme that guarantees a low degree of dissatisfaction of sensors, while reducing energy consumption. Also, we deduce the ergodic secrecy rate of IRS-assisted PLS transmission that can represent the global secrecy performance to allocate computational resources. The simulations show that the proposed scheme has lower energy consumption compared to existing schemes and ensures that the node paying higher Gas gets stronger computational resources.
Alessandra Rizzardi, Sabrina Sicari, Daniele Miorandi, Alberto CoenāPorisini
Abstract Security and privacy of information transmitted among the devices involved in an Internet of Things (IoT) network represent relevant issues in IoT contexts. Guaranteeing effective control and supervising access permissions to IoT applications is a complex task, mainly due to resources' heterogeneity and scalability requirements. The design and development of highly customizable access control policies, along with an efficient mechanism for ensuring that the rules applied by the IoT platform are not tampered with or violated, will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the diffusion of IoTābased solutions. In such a direction, the article proposes the integration of a permissioned blockchain within an honestābutācurious (i.e., not trusted) IoT distributed middleware layer, which aims to guarantee the correct management of access to resources by the interested parties. The result is a robust and lightweight system, able to manage the data produced by IoT devices, support relevant security features, such as integrity and confidentiality, and resist different kinds of attacks. The use of blockchain will ensure the tamperāresistance and synchronization of the distributed system, where various stakeholders own applications and IoT platforms. The methodology and the proposed architecture are validated employing a testābed.
Blockchain technology is a highly regarded technology that possesses a plethora of exciting features. This paper analyzes trends and highlights the potential benefits of blockchain deployment in IoT and healthcare. According to the literature, blockchain technology is mostly utilized for data management operations in healthcare and IoT, specifically to improve data security, which includes data integrity, access control, and privacy preservation. In both areas, six distinct types of data security preservation strategies are applied. Additionally, publications highlight how blockchain and IoT, including health IoT, can be used in an integrative way. Three integration mechanisms were seen to accomplish this goal. These solutions range from fully integrating blockchain into data exchanges between IoT devices to using it solely for metadata storage. The most frequently covered area of IoT is a smart city, where blockchain is utilized to improve real-time data sharing, and electricity trading, and so on. Additionally, it is learned that, despite the numerous benefits of blockchain in healthcare, authors typically use it for drug supply chain management and data management purposes in order to avoid counterfeiting and empower patients with regard to their data, respectively.
Blockchain is now utilized by a diverse spectrum of applications and is proclaimed as a technological innovation that transforms the way that data are stored. This technology has the potential to transform the healthcare sector, especially the prevalent issues of patientās data-privacy and fragmented healthcare data. However, there is no evidence-based effort to develop a readiness assessment framework for blockchain that combines all the different social and economic factors and involves all stakeholders. Based on a systematic literature review, the proposed framework is applied to Portugalās healthcare sector and its applicability is outlined. The findings in this paper show the unique importance of regulators and the government in achieving a globally acceptable regulatory framework for the adoption of blockchain technology in healthcare and other sectors. The business entities and solution providers are ready to leverage the opportunities of blockchain, but the absence of a widely acceptable regulatory framework that protect stakeholdersā interests is slowing down the adoption of blockchain. There are several misconceptions regarding blockchain laws and regulations, which has slowed stakeholder readiness. This paper will be useful as a guideline and knowledge base to reinforce blockchain adoption.
Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Aitizaz Ali, Fahima Hajjej, Muhammad Fermi Pasha Ā· 5 authors
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is gaining importance as most technologies and applications are integrated with the IIoT. Moreover, it consists of several tiny sensors to sense the environment and gather the information. These devices continuously monitor, collect, exchange, analyze, and transfer the captured data to nearby devices or servers using an open channel, i.e., internet. However, such centralized system based on IIoT provides more vulnerabilities to security and privacy in IIoT networks. In order to resolve these issues, we present a blockchain-based deep-learning framework that provides two levels of security and privacy. First a blockchain scheme is designed where each participating entities are registered, verified, and thereafter validated using smart contract based enhanced Proof of Work, to achieve the target of security and privacy. Second, a deep-learning scheme with a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) technique for privacy and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) for intrusion detection is designed. The experimental results are based on the IoT-Botnet and ToN-IoT datasets that are publicly available. The proposed simulations results are compared with the benchmark models and it is validated that the proposed framework outperforms the existing system.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are essential in contemporary healthcare as they facilitate the storage and sharing of personal patient data. Traditional cloud-based EHR systems, though, are afflicted with centralized control, privacy threats, restricted interoperability, and susceptibility to data breaches. To alleviate these challenges, this paper suggests a blockchain-based, patient-centered EHR management system that uses Ethereum smart contracts, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for safe, distributed, and effective handling of health data.The system put forward puts patients at the forefront of EHR access and control, allowing them to grant or withdraw permissions to healthcare providers, insurers, or researchers using fine-grained, attribute-based policies executed through smart contracts. DIDs remove the need for third-party identity providers, providing secure and verifiable user authentication directly on the blockchain. IPFS, on the other hand, provides cost-effective, tamper-proof off-chain storage of medical records, with metadata and access logs stored on-chain to minimize gas usage.Extensive testing on the Ethereum Goerli testnet proves that the system provides greater security, lower storage costs, efficient access control, and better interoperability than conventional models. This method not only solves existing shortcomings in EHR systems but also opens the door to scalable, transparent, and patient-enabled healthcare data management.
With the development of advanced information and communication technology, the traditional centralized cloud architecture cannot satisfy the exploding demand for data exchange in Internet of Vehicle (IoV) systems. Moreover, the traditional centralized architecture of the vehicular network has the potential risk of a single point of failure and lacks autonomy since the system highly relies on a trusted third party (TTP) to provide identity management. Fortunately, the emergence of blockchain technology provides a potential direction to address these problems. However, there are still some problems existing in the construction of an efficient blockchain system in IoV systems, such as the dynamic network topology and limited resources. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical resource scheduling scheme for blockchain-enabled IoV systems that improves the performance of the blockchain-enabled IoV system by efficiently allocating computational resources. The superiority of the proposed method is fully demonstrated by comparing it with existing baseline methods.
Salma Salimi, Jorge PeƱa Queralta, Tomi Westerlund
Trust is increasingly becoming a key consideration in the design of autonomous robotic systems. In industrial applications, security and trust in the system are requirements for widespread adoption. Blockchain technologies have emerged as a potential solution to address identity management and secure data aggregation and control. However, the vast majority of works to date utilize Ethereum and smart contracts that are not scalable or well suited for industrial applications. This paper presents what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first integration of ROS 2 with the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. With a framework that leverages Fabric smart contracts and ROS 2 through a Go application, we delve into the potential of using blockchain for controlling robots, and gathering and processing their data. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework to an inventory management use-case where different robots are used to detect objects of interest in a given area. Designed to meet the requirements of distributed robotic systems, we show that the performance of the robots is not impacted significantly by the blockchain layer. At the same time, we provide examples for developing other applications that integrate Fabric smart contracts with ROS 2. Our results pave the way for further adoption of blockchain technologies in autonomous robotic systems for building trustable data sharing.
The sharing of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) is important to healthcare and medical research. However, institutions are faced with difficulties in privacy protection and efficiently secure data exchange. The main objective of this study is to propose a controllable secure blockchain-based EHRs sharing scheme. For this purpose, blockchain technologies are combined with interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to provide efficient secure EHRs sharing. Firstly, the IPFS-based EHR file system (IEFS) is designed to save and share large-size EHR files among medical institutions. With the high-throughput content-addressed block storage model and appropriate redundant backup of IPFS, IEFS is tamper-resistant and free of a single point of failure. Secondly, the blockchain is used to implement the blockchain-based EHR abstract system (BEAS) to manipulate EHR abstracts access. In BEAS, the EHR file addresses generated by IEFS are encrypted and saved in EHR abstracts for privacy protection. Since EHR abstracts are encrypted by patients' public keys, the sharing of EHR files is under the control of patients. In our experiment, a prototype system is developed to validate the proposed scheme. The experimental results showed that (1) EHRs are securely shared under the control of patients and (2) EHR files are retrieved at an acceptable speed supported by IPFS technology. In this paper, solutions to some important practical issues such as incapacitated patients, encryption key forgetting/missing, and efficient interaction of doctors with EHRs sharing scheme are also seriously discussed.
In todayās scenario, it is essential for the healthcare sector to focus on balancing patient care records with information relevant to completeness, accessibility, and privacy concerns. Advancements in information technology and health infrastructure exponentially bolster transformative changes in the healthcare industry. Incorporation of blockchain along with distributed ledger technology (DLT) owes the potentiality to cater to the interoperability restraints in health IT systems and enables medical researchers, healthcare entities, and healthcare providers to share electronic health data in a secured and well-mannered system. In addition to these, such technologies also propose and offer latest models for health statistics exchange by making the records more secure and efficient. However, successful implementation of blockchain technology and DLT necessitates efficient infrastructure, connectivity, and other factors. Hence, there poses to be several challenges restraining the mainstream usage of blockchain technology in the healthcare sector. The article illustrates different generations of blockchain, issues in healthcare data, and network structures as well as the solutions offered by the sector to cater to such problems. In addition to these, the article also emphasizes on the different application areas of blockchain and DLT in healthcare infrastructure. This article further discusses latest trends and factors driving the need for the incorporation of blockchain and distributed ledger technology in the healthcare sector and the future scenario for the same.
Feng Liu, Chengyi Yang, Jie Yang, Deli Kong Ā· 7 authors
As a distributed storage scheme, the blockchain network lacks storage space has been a long-term concern in this field. At present, there are relatively few research on algorithms and protocols to reduce the storage requirement of blockchain, and the existing research has limitations such as sacrificing fault tolerance performance and raising time cost, which need to be further improved. Facing the above problems, this paper proposes a protocol based on Distributed Image Storage Protocol (DISP), which can effectively improve blockchain storage space and reduces computational costs in the help of InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In order to prove the feasibility of the protocol, we make full use of IPFS and distributed database to design a simulation experiment for blockchain. Through distributed pooling (DP) algorithm in this protocol, we can divide image evidence into recognizable several small files and stored in several nodes. And these files can be restored to lossless original documents again by inverse distributed pooling (IDP) algorithm after authorization. These advantages in performance create conditions for large scale industrial and commercial applications.
Shimaa Abdelnaby AbdelHakeem, Hanan Hussein, HyungWon Kim
After implementing 5G technology, academia and industry started researching 6th generation wireless network technology (6G). 6G is expected to be implemented around the year 2030. It will offer a significant experience for everyone by enabling hyper-connectivity between people and everything. In addition, it is expected to extend mobile communication possibilities where earlier generations could not have developed. Several potential technologies are predicted to serve as the foundation of 6G networks. These include upcoming and current technologies such as post-quantum cryptography, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), enhanced edge computing, molecular communication, THz, visible light communication (VLC), and distributed ledger (DL) technologies such as blockchain. From a security and privacy perspective, these developments need a reconsideration of prior security traditional methods. New novel authentication, encryption, access control, communication, and malicious activity detection must satisfy the higher significant requirements of future networks. In addition, new security approaches are necessary to ensure trustworthiness and privacy. This paper provides insights into the critical problems and difficulties related to the security, privacy, and trust issues of 6G networks. Moreover, the standard technologies and security challenges per each technology are clarified. This paper introduces the 6G security architecture and improvements over the 5G architecture. We also introduce the security issues and challenges of the 6G physical layer. In addition, the AI/ML layers and the proposed security solution in each layer are studied. The paper summarizes the security evolution in legacy mobile networks and concludes with their security problems and the most essential 6G application services and their security requirements. Finally, this paper provides a complete discussion of 6G networks' trustworthiness and solutions.
Jack Huang, Yuan Wei Qi, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Andrew Meads Ā· 5 authors
Abstract In New Zealand, the demand for healthcare services has grown gradually in the last decade, and it is likely to increase further. This had led to issues such as increasing treatment costs and processing time for the patients. To address the growing pressure in the healthcare sector, and its fragmented IT landscape that compounds the problems further, the New Zealand Ministry of Health aims to establish a shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that integrates all the major healthcare organisations such as hospitals, medical centres, and specialists. Due to its characteristics, blockchain technology could be a potential platform for building such largeāscale health systems. Here, MedBloc, a blockchainābased secure EHR system that enables patients and healthcare providers to access and share health records while providing usability, security, and privacy is presented. MedBloc captures a longitudinal view of the patientsā health story and empowers the patients to regulate their own data by allowing them to give or withdraw consent for healthcare providers to access their records. To preserve the patientsā privacy and protect their health data, MedBloc uses an encryption scheme to secure records and smart contracts to enforce access control to prevent unauthorised access.
Chenchen Han, Gwang-Jun Kim Chenchen Han, Osama Alfarraj Gwang-Jun Kim, Amr Tolba Osama Alfarraj Ā· 5 authors
<p>With the rapid development of 6G communication technology, data security of the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a key challenge. This paper first analyzes the security issues and risks of IoT data storage in 6G, and then constructs a blockchain-based zero-trust data storage scheme (ZT-BDS) in 6G edge IoT to ensure data security. Under this framework, an improved scratch-off puzzle based on Proof of Recoverability (PoR) is firstly constructed to realize distributed IoT data storage, which can reduce resource consumption compared with other existing schemes. Secondly, the accumulator is used to replace the Merkle trees to store IoT data in the blockchain. Since the accumulator can provide not only membership proof, but also non-membership proof, the proposed blockchain-based data storage scheme is more secure. Thirdly, PoW is replaced by an improved PoR scheme as the consensus protocol. On the one hand, PoR can verify the integrity of data, which will further enhance the security of IoT data; on the other hand, the proposed PoR is composed of polynomial commitment, which can reduce bandwidth with the aid of the aggregation function of polynomial commitment. Experimental comparisons show that our scheme has better bandwidth and storage capacity.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
During the recent pandemic events and lockdown, most educational institutions have moved into online and distance learning. Certain institutions have been more ready than others to shift into full online learning and teaching mode. However, many technical and security challenges and issues related to the learning management system have been encountered. In this article, we investigate the technical benefits of blockchain, and we propose a secured and trusted online-leaning framework based on blockchain. Our proposal takes advantage of blockchain technology to ensure the expected standard of teaching and fairness of assessment while respecting the schedule of courses and exams. Through blockchainās reward methods, it also motivates both students and teachers to persist in their efforts, even from home.
ZiXiang Nie, YuanZhenTai Long, Senlin Zhang, Yueming Lu
With the in-depth integration of traditional industries and information technology in Internet of things, wireless sensor networks are used more frequently to transmit the data generated from various application scenarios. Structural health monitoring is a scene that requires recurrent data transmission in Internet of things, and the wireless sensor networks in Internet of things not only have storage and communication capabilities, but also have computing capabilities. Therefore, the demand for intelligent and decentralized data exchange between them has increased significantly which brings challenges with respect to low data reliability, chaotic data circulation, provenance tracking, and data accountability investigating, threatening the data security of structural health monitoring in Internet of things utilization. In this article, we propose a controllable data transmission mechanism based on the consortium blockchain to content the requirements of the Internet of things scenario. We identify a version-based, fine-grained, and privacy-protected data structure and propose the corresponding smart contracts for our mechanism to ensure the trusted data transmission. To prove the feasibility of our mechanism, a prototype system is implemented based on the Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source consortium blockchain framework. Our experimental results show in practice the usability and scalability of the approach in this article.
In collaborative social development platforms such as GitHub, forking a repository is a common activity. A variant fork wants to split the development from the original repository and grow towards a different direction. In this preliminary exploratory research, we analyze the possible reasons for creating a variant fork in blockchain-oriented software. By collecting repositories in GitHub, we created a dataset with repositories and their variants, from which we manually analyzed 86 variants. Based on the variants we studied, the main reason to create a variant in blockchain-oriented software is to support a different blockchain platform (65%).
The first special section is dedicated to Edge Consumer Electronics (ECE) that include gadgets or appliances, equipped with contemporary circuitry to carry out domestic tasks. They are designed and used exclusively for communication, entertainment, safety, and home-office endeavors. The abundance of consumer electronics is indebted to the semiconductor and appliance of related software solutions. T
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to create a digital world where any information system can expose, discover, understand and consume data and services for analysis, diagnosis, decision support and task automation in various domains such as healthcare, transportation, energy, industry, agriculture, etc. Faced with this diversity of applications and rapid evolution, infrastructures must be able to achieve high levels of security and confidentiality while being open, sustainable, and agile to adapt to the multiple requirements of applications. To meet these needs, new paradigms are emerging. These include the Software Defined Networks (SDN) paradigm, which offers the ability to dynamically program different applications and devices to provide end-to-end service chains. In parallel, the Blockchain paradigm is increasingly used in the Internet of Things, making distributed transactions between connected objects such as financial transactions or "smart contracts" possible. Although the combination of these two paradigms (Blockchain/SDN) is a major issue for the success of the Internet of Things, paving the way for new business models and management/control of communication networks, there is not yet a specified/formalized architecture allowing the use of the "Blockchain" in SDN. In this research, a new architecture for a system combining blockchain and SDN for IoT security is proposed
Zaffar Ahmed Shaikh, Abdullah Ayub Khan, ŠŠ°ŃŃŠ° ŠŠ°Š¹ŃŠµŠ½Š¾Š²Š°, Gulmira Zambinova Ā· 8 authors
This paper proposes a novel and secure blockchain hyperledger sawtooth-enabled consortium analytical model for smart educational accreditation credential evaluation. Indeed, candidate academic credentials are generated, verified, and validated by the universities and transmitted to the Higher Education Department (HED). The objective is to enable the procedure of credential verification and analyze tamper-proof forged records before validation. For this reason, we designed and created an accreditation analytical model to investigate individual collected credentials from universities and examine candidatesā records of credibility using machine learning techniques and maintain all these aspects of analysis and addresses in the distributed storage with a secure hash-encryption (SHA-256) blockchain consortium network, which runs on a peer-to-peer (P2P) structure. In this proposed analytical model, we deployed a blockchain distributed mechanism to investigate the examiner and analyst processes of accreditation credential protection and storage criteria, which are referred to as chaincodes or smart contracts. These chaincodes automate the distributed credential schedule, generation, verification, validation, and monitoring of the overall model nodesā transactions. The chaincodes include candidate registration with the associated university (candidateReg()), certificate-related accreditation credentials update (CIssuanceTrans()), and every nodeās transactions preservation in the immutable storage (ULedgerAV()) for further investigations. This model simulates the educational benchmark dataset. The result shows the merit of our model. Through extensive simulations, the blockchain-enabled analytical model provides robust performance in terms of credential management and accreditation credibility problems.
Adam Ibrahim Abdi, Fathy Eassa, Kamal Jambi, Khalid Ali Almarhabi Ā· 7 authors
The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its attributes of constrained devices and a distributed environment make it difficult to manage such a huge and growing network of devices on a global scale. Existing traditional access-control systems provide security and management to the IoT system. However, these mechanisms are based on central authority management, which introduces issues such as a single point of failure, low scalability, and a lack of privacy. In order to address these problems, many researchers have proposed using blockchain technology to achieve decentralized access control. However, such models are still faced with problems such as a lack of scalability and high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a light-weight hierarchical blockchain-based multi-chaincode access control to protect the security and privacy of IoT systems. A clustering concept with BC managers enables the extended scalability of the proposed system. The architecture of the proposed solution contains three main components: an Edge Blockchain Manager (EBCM), which is responsible for authenticating and authorizing constrained devices locally; an Aggregated Edge Blockchain Manager (AEBCM), which contains various EBCMs to control different clusters and manage ABAC policies, and a Cloud Consortium Blockchain Manager (CCBCM), which ensures that only authorized users access the resources. In our solution, smart contracts are used to self-enforce decentralized AC policies. We implement a proof of concept for our proposed system using the permissioned Hyperledger Fabric. The simulation results and the security analysis show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Virtual power plant (VPP) composed of a large number of distributed energy resources (DERs) has become a regional multienergy aggregation model to realize the large-scale integration of renewable energy generation into the grid. Due to the characteristics of centralized management, the existing energy operation mode is difficult to simply apply to distributed energy resources transactions. The decentralization, transparency, contract execution automation and traceability of blockchain technology provide a new solution to the aggregation of decentralized resources and the opacity of transactions in VPP. In this paper, the existing problems of virtual power plants are analyzed, and the virtual power plant trading model is designed, which realizes the transparent benefit distribution and message transmission of virtual power plants. The virtual power plant blockchain network based on blockchain technology in this model solves the DERs coordination problem in VPP and the security and efficiency problems in information transmission. Combined with the actual situation of virtual power plant, the blockchain network collaboration mechanism (BNCM), which is convenient to reach agreement, is designed. Compared with the traditional practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm, this mechanism can make DERs reach a consensus quickly. Finally, simulation experiments on the consensus algorithm show that the algorithm can reduce the collaboration time between DERs under the premise of ensuring the same fault tolerance rate and is more suitable for VPP scenarios with a large number of DERs.