Blockchain Papers

Chowdhury Akram Hossain, Mohamad Afendee Mohamed, Md. Saniat Rahman Zishan, Rabiul Ahasan · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ziaur Rahman, Xun Yi, Ibrahim Khalil

Industry 4.0 is all about doing things in a concurrent, secure, and fine-grained manner. Internet of Things edge sensors and their associated data play a predominant role in today’s industry ecosystem. Breaching data or forging source devices after injecting advanced persistent threats (APTs) damages the industry owners’ money and loss of operators’ lives. The existing challenges include APT injection attacks targeting vulnerable edge devices, insecure data transportation, trust inconsistencies among stakeholders, incompliant data storing mechanisms, etc. Edge servers often suffer because of their lightweight computation capacity to stamp out unauthorized data or instructions, which, in essence, makes them exposed to attackers. When attackers target edge servers while transporting data using traditional public-key infrastructure-rendered trusts, consortium blockchain (CBC) offers proven techniques to transfer and maintain those sensitive data securely. With the recent improvement of edge machine learning, edge devices can filter malicious data at their end, which largely motivates us to institute a blockchain and artificial intelligence-aligned APT detection system. The unique contributions of this article include efficient APT detection at the edge and transparent recording of the detection history in an immutable blockchain ledger. In line with that, the certificateless data transfer mechanism boosts trust among collaborators and ensures an economical and sustainable mechanism after eliminating existing certificate authority. Finally, the edge-compliant storage technique facilitates efficient predictive maintenance. The respective experimental outcomes reveal that the proposed technique outperforms the other competing systems and models.

Sushil Kumar Singh, Changhoon Lee, Jong Hyuk Park

No abstract is available for this record.

Abdullah Ayub Khan, Zaffar Ahmed Shaikh, Larisa Belinskaja, Лаура Байтенова · 9 authors

Distributed forecasting of agriculture commodity prices has an attractive research perspective that delivers active breakthrough analysis of the rapid fluctuations in pricing forecasts for participating stakeholders without being manually dispatched lists. The increased use of an efficient forecasting mechanism for the agriculture information management of generated records and processing creates emerging challenges and limitations. These include new government mandates and regulations, the price of land for expansion, forecasting the growing demand for commodities, fluctuations in the global financial market, food security, and bio-based fuels. Building and deploying distributed dynamic scheduling, management, and monitoring systems of agricultural activities for commodity price forecasting and supply chains require a significant secure and efficient approach. Thus, this paper discusses a collaborative approach where two different folds are demonstrated to cover distinct aspects with different objectives. A metaheuristic-enabled genetic algorithm is designed to receive day-to-day agricultural production details and process and analyze forecast pricing from the records by scheduling, managing, and monitoring them in real-time. The blockchain hyperledger sawtooth distributed modular technology provides a secure communication channel between stakeholders, a private network, protects the forecasting ledger, adds and updates commodity prices, and preserves agricultural information and node transactions in the immutable ledger (IPFS). To accomplish this, we design, develop, and deploy two distinct smart contracts to register the system’s actual stakeholders and allow for the addition of node transactions and exchanges. The second smart contract updates the forecasting commodity pricing ledger and distributes it to participating stakeholders while preserving detailed addresses in storage. The simulation results of the proposed collaborative approach deliver an efficient E-agriculture commodity price forecast with an accuracy of 95.3%. It also maintains ledger transparency, integrity, provenance, availability, and secure operational control and access of agricultural activities.

Efthymios Chondrogiannis, Vassiliki Andronikou, Efstathios Karanastasis, Αντώνιος Λίτκε · 5 authors

Blockchains and smart contracts are gaining momentum as enabling technologies for a wide set of applications where data distribution and sharing among decentralized infrastructures is required. In this work, we present a distributed application developed using blockchain technologies that allows individuals and health insurance organizations to come into agreement during the implementation of the healthcare insurance policies in each contract. For this purpose, health standards and semantic web technologies were used for the formal expression of both the insured individual's data and contract terms. Accordingly, a fine-grained data access policy was applied for evaluating contract terms on the basis of relevant data captured in healthcare settings. A prototype was implemented involving the development of several different smart contracts for the Ethereum platform as well as the necessary visual environment for accessing them. The developed system validates various features related to blockchain and smart contract features that are briefly discussed in this work, part of which can be mitigated or resolved through the use of a private permissioned blockchain. The application of well-established techniques for potential malfunctions of external services could also boost the security of the system and prevent it from potential attacks.

Akanksha Saini, Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Navneesh Kaur, Yong Xiang · 5 authors

In recent years, several blockchain-based models have emerged to provide a secure way to store and access sensitive electronic medical records (EMRs) across the healthcare sector. These records are of different priorities and business requirements. From our comprehensive literature review, we observe that the existing models have no provision of prioritizing the EMR transactions. This critically affects the quick and streamline sharing of emergency EMRs in a smart healthcare environment. Furthermore, the lack of prioritization significantly restricts the optimal usage of the blockchain network. Motivated by this, we first propose a lightweight and deterministic method to prioritize the flow of emergency healthcare transactions through the smart contract. We also propose logical stateless transaction models for different entities involved in the system with varying levels of trust. Finally, the performance of the model based on the private Ethereum is verified and it outperforms the existing benchmark model in terms of usefulness in the healthcare setting and computation overhead with the use of a simple prioritizing algorithm. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme in the real-time smart healthcare system.

M. M. Kamruzzaman, Bingxin Yan, Md Nazirul Islam Sarker, Omar Alruwaili · 6 authors

Nowadays, technology has been evolving rapidly. Due to the consequent impact of smart technologies, it becomes a ubiquitous part of life. These technologies have led to the emergence of smart cities that are geographic areas driven by advanced information and communication technologies. In the context of smart cities, IoT, blockchain, and fog computing have been found as the significant drivers of smart initiates. In this recognition, the present study is focused on delineating the impact and potential of blockchain, IoT, and fog computing on healthcare services in the context of smart cities. In pursuit of this objective, the study has conducted a systematic review of literature that is most relevant to the topic of the paper. In order to select the most relevant and credible articles, the researcher has used PRISMA and AMSTAR that have culminated in the 10 most relevant articles for the present study. The findings revealed that IoT, blockchain, and fog computing had become drivers of efficiency in the healthcare services in smart cities. Among the three technologies, IoT has been found to be widely incorporated. However, it is found to be lacking in terms of cost efficiency, data privacy, and interoperability of data. In this recognition, blockchain technology and fog computing have been found to be more relevant to the healthcare sector in smart cities. Blockchain has been presented as a promising technology for ensuring the protection of private data, creating a decentralized database, and improving the interoperability of data while fog computing has been presented as the promising technology for low-cost remote monitoring, reducing latency and increasing efficiency.

Zhijie Sun, Dezhi Han, Dun Li, Xiangsheng Wang · 6 authors

Abstract Medical data involves a large amount of personal information and is highly privacy sensitive. In the age of big data, the increasing informatization of healthcare makes it vital that medical information is stored securely and accurately. However, current medical information is subject to the risk of privacy leakage and difficult to share. To address these issues, this paper proposes a healthcare information security storage solution based on hyperledger fabric and the attribute-based access control framework. The scheme first utilizes attribute-based access control, which allows dynamic and fine-grained access to medical information, and then stores the medical information in the blockchain, which can be secured and tamper-proof by formulating corresponding smart contracts. In addition, this solution also incorporates IPFS technology to relieve the storage pressure of the blockchain. Experiments show that the proposed scheme combining access control of attributes and blockchain technology in this paper can not only ensure the secure storage and integrity of medical information but also has a high throughput when accessing medical information

Sidrah Abdullah, Junaid Arshad, Muhammad Mubashir Khan, Mamoun Alazab · 5 authors

Abstract Healthcare has evolved significantly in recent years primarily due to the advancements in and increasing adoption of technology in healthcare processes such as data collection, storage, diagnostics, and treatment. The emergence of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) has further evolved e-Health by facilitating the development of connected healthcare systems which can significantly improve data connectivity, visibility, and interoperability leading to improved quality of service delivered to patients. However, such technological advancements come with their perils—there are growing concerns with regards to the security and privacy of healthcare data especially when collected, shared, and processed using cutting-edge connected sensor devices affecting the adoption of next-generation e-healthcare systems. In particular, during the front-end and back-end data transfer in health information exchange (HIE) there exist a security risk in term of confidentiality, integrity, authentication and access control of the data due to the limited capabilities of IoT devices involved. In this paper, we investigate the use of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to address such security concerns for emerging healthcare systems. In particular, we use masked authenticated messaging (MAM) over the Tangle to achieve secure data sharing within a healthcare system and provide a proof-of-concept of applying the proposed approach for securing healthcare data in a connected IIoT environment. Further, we have performed the evaluation and analysis of data communication against the metrics of encryption and efficiency in transaction time.

P. Shamili, Muruganantham B.

The upcoming technology in creating the distributed applications for different use cases in real world applications are Blockchain technologies. The application may be private or public depending upon the use cases. Most of the applications are built by using the Ethereum platform in blockchain for use of security purpose. The nodes in the distributed network shares all the data to the other nodes without any modification of the data in the blockchain technology. The transactions done by the nodes were trusted through the digital signatures. Here, no central control or the central system will be there to keep track of other nodes data. In this paper, we built the POA network by using the Ethereum blockchain platform. The network is called the Proof of Authority and its main purpose is to deploy the contracts especially with authority in the Ethereum blockchain platform. We also explained about the ERC20 tokens, the working process of using the POA network and the codes for connecting with the web page.

Sabah Suhail, Saif Ur Rehman Malik, Raja Jurdak, Rasheed Hussain · 6 authors

The complexity of cyberattacks in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) calls for a mechanism that can evaluate critical infrastructures’ operational behaviour and security without affecting the operation of live systems. In this regard, Digital Twins (DTs) provide actionable insights through monitoring, simulating, predicting, and optimizing the state of CPSs. Through the use cases, including system testing and training, detecting system misconfigurations, and security testing, DTs strengthen the security of CPSs throughout the product lifecycle. However, such benefits of DTs depend on an assumption about data integrity and security. Data trustworthiness becomes more critical while integrating multiple components among different DTs owned by various stakeholders to provide an aggregated view of the complex physical system. This article envisions a blockchain-based DT framework as Trusted Twins for Securing Cyber-Physical Systems (TTS-CPS). With the automotive industry as a CPS use case, we demonstrate the viability of the TTS-CPS framework through a proof of concept. To utilize reliable system specification data for building the process knowledge of DTs, we ensure the trustworthiness of data-generating sources through Integrity Checking Mechanisms (ICMs). Additionally, Safety and Security (S&S) rules evaluated during simulation are stored and retrieved from the blockchain, thereby establishing more understanding and confidence in the decisions made by the underlying systems. Finally, we perform formal verification of the TTS-CPS.

Malik Mustafa, Marwan Alshar’e, Deepshikha Bhargava, Rahul Neware · 6 authors

Due to the high amount of electronic health records, hospitals have prioritized data protection. Because it uses parallel computing and is distributed, the security of the cloud cannot be guaranteed. Because of the large number of e-health records, hospitals have made data security a major concern. The cloud's security cannot be guaranteed because it uses parallel processing and is distributed. The blockchain (BC) has been deployed in the cloud to preserve and secure medical data because it is particularly prone to security breaches and attacks such as forgery, manipulation, and privacy leaks. An overview of blockchain (BC) technology in cloud storage to improve healthcare system security can be obtained by reading this paper. First, we will look at the benefits and drawbacks of using a basic cloud storage system. After that, a brief overview of blockchain cloud storage technology will be offered. Many researches have focused on using blockchain technology in healthcare systems as a possible solution to the security concerns in healthcare, resulting in tighter and more advanced security requirements being provided. This survey could lead to a blockchain-based solution for the protection of cloud-outsourced healthcare data. Evaluation and comparison of the simulation tests of the offered blockchain technology-focused studies can demonstrate integrity verification with cloud storage and medical data, data interchange with reduced computational complexity, security, and privacy protection. Because of blockchain and IT, business warfare has emerged, and governments in the Middle East have embraced it. Thus, this research focused on the qualities that influence customers' interest in and approval of blockchain technology in cloud storage for healthcare system security and the aspects that increase people's knowledge of blockchain. One way to better understand how people feel about learning how to use blockchain technology in healthcare is through the United Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). A snowball sampling method was used to select respondents in an online poll to gather data about blockchain technology in Middle Eastern poor countries. A total of 443 randomly selected responses were tested using SPSS. Blockchain adoption has been shown to be influenced by anticipation, effort expectancy, social influence (SI), facilitation factors, personal innovativeness (PInn), and a perception of security risk (PSR). Blockchain adoption and acceptance were found to be influenced by anticipation, effort expectancy, social influence (SI), facilitating conditions, personal innovativeness (PInn), and perceived security risk (PSR) during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as providing an overview of current trends in the field and issues pertaining to significance and compatibility.

Nianqi Jiang, Fenhua Bai, Lin Huang, Zhengyuan An · 5 authors

The Internet of Things that links the cyber and physical worlds brings revolutionary changes to society, however, its security and efficiency problems have not been solved. The Consortium Blockchain + IoT is considered to be an effective solution. The IoT blockchain network’s demand for transaction processing speed is gradually increasing. The throughput problem of the blockchain needs to be solved urgently and the security problem of transaction processing that comes with it. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a reputation-driven dynamic node security sharding consensus model (RDSCM) in the blockchain, which consists of two parts: a reputation-driven node to eliminate PBFT (RE-PBFT) and a reputation-driven node cross reconfiguration sharding scheme (NCRS). The RE-PBFT eliminates abnormal nodes in the consensus network and reduces the probability of abnormal nodes becoming master nodes. NCRS improves the blockchain throughput while ensuring sharding reliability. Finally, the experiment proves that RE-PBFT can identify abnormal nodes and remove them in a short time. NCRS can effectively guarantee the reliability of sharding, and the transaction processing efficiency has been greatly improved after sharding.

Shiyi Lin, Lei Zhang, Jing Li, Li-li Ji · 5 authors

Nowadays, blockchain technology and industry has developed rapidly all over the world, which is inseparable from continuous innovation and improvement on smart contract technology. Therefore, by summarizing the working principle and application research status of blockchain smart contract, this paper analyzes the development and challenges of smart contract. Firstly, we introduce the model and operation principle of blockchain smart contract for the overall architecture, analyze the deployment process of smart contract with Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and EOSIO, and make a comparative analysis from the technical level. And taking Byteball, InterValue and IOTA platforms as examples, we introduce the deployment process and application potential for DAG-based blockchain smart contract. Additionally, we also summarize the application research of smart contract for international and Blockchain Oracle, and discuss its innovative application and development trend in the future. Secondly, we introduce the application status of smart contract with Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric platforms from the aspects of financial transactions, Internet of things, medical applications, and supply chain, and further discuss EOS (enterprise operation system), Blockchain Oracle and other application fields. Furthermore, we introduce the application advantages and challenges to smart contract for industrial Internet from the fields of manufacturing, food industry, industrial Internet of things and industry 4.0. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced by smart contract with technical issues, analyzes the impact on large-scale applications and mining system on the sustainable development of smart contract, and looks forward to the future research direction of blockchain smart contract.

Radhya Sahal, Saeed Hamood Alsamhi, Kenneth N. Brown, Donna O’Shea · 5 authors

Emerging technologies such as digital twins, blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) play a vital role in driving the industrial revolution in all domains, including the healthcare sector. As a result of COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, there is a significant need for medical cyber-physical systems to adopt these emerging technologies to combat COVID-19 paramedic crisis. Also, acquiring secure real-time data exchange and analysis across multiple participants is essential to support the efforts against COVID-19. Therefore, we have introduced a blockchain-based collaborative digital twins framework for decentralized epidemic alerting to combat COVID-19 and any future pandemics. The framework has been proposed to bring together the existing advanced technologies (i.e., blockchain, digital twins, and AI) and then provide a solution to decentralize epidemic alerting to combat COVID-19 outbreaks. Also, we have described how the conceptual framework can be applied in the decentralized COVID-19 pandemic alerting use case.

Mayuresh Sunil Pardeshi, Ruey‐Kai Sheu, Shyan‐Ming Yuan

Authentication is essential for the prevention of various types of attacks in fog/edge computing. Therefore, a novel mode-based hash chain for secure mutual authentication is necessary to address the Internet of Things (IoT) devices' vulnerability, as there have been several years of growing concerns regarding their security. Therefore, a novel model is designed that is stronger and effective against any kind of unauthorized attack, as IoT devices' vulnerability is on the rise due to the mass production of IoT devices (embedded processors, camera, sensors, etc.), which ignore the basic security requirements (passwords, secure communication), making them vulnerable and easily accessible. Furthermore, crackable passwords indicate that the security measures taken are insufficient. As per the recent studies, several applications regarding its requirements are the IoT distributed denial of service attack (IDDOS), micro-cloud, secure university, Secure Industry 4.0, secure government, secure country, etc. The problem statement is formulated as the "design and implementation of dynamically interconnecting fog servers and edge devices using the mode-based hash chain for secure mutual authentication protocol", which is stated to be an NP-complete problem. The hash-chain fog/edge implementation using timestamps, mode-based hash chaining, the zero-knowledge proof property, a distributed database/blockchain, and cryptography techniques can be utilized to establish the connection of smart devices in large numbers securely. The hash-chain fog/edge uses blockchain for identity management only, which is used to store the public keys in distributed ledger form, and all these keys are immutable. In addition, it has no overhead and is highly secure as it performs fewer calculations and requires minimum infrastructure. Therefore, we designed the hash-chain fog/edge (HCFE) protocol, which provides a novel mutual authentication scheme for effective session key agreement (using ZKP properties) with secure protocol communications. The experiment outcomes proved that the hash-chain fog/edge is more efficient at interconnecting various devices and competed favorably in the benchmark comparison.

Aitizaz Ali, Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Fahima Hajjej, Muhammad Fermi Pasha · 8 authors

The IoT refers to the interconnection of things to the physical network that is embedded with software, sensors, and other devices to exchange information from one device to the other. The interconnection of devices means there is the possibility of challenges such as security, trustworthiness, reliability, confidentiality, and so on. To address these issues, we have proposed a novel group theory (GT)-based binary spring search (BSS) algorithm which consists of a hybrid deep neural network approach. The proposed approach effectively detects the intrusion within the IoT network. Initially, the privacy-preserving technology was implemented using a blockchain-based methodology. Security of patient health records (PHR) is the most critical aspect of cryptography over the Internet due to its value and importance, preferably in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Search keywords access mechanism is one of the typical approaches used to access PHR from a database, but it is susceptible to various security vulnerabilities. Although blockchain-enabled healthcare systems provide security, it may lead to some loopholes in the existing state of the art. In literature, blockchain-enabled frameworks have been presented to resolve those issues. However, these methods have primarily focused on data storage and blockchain is used as a database. In this paper, blockchain as a distributed database is proposed with a homomorphic encryption technique to ensure a secure search and keywords-based access to the database. Additionally, the proposed approach provides a secure key revocation mechanism and updates various policies accordingly. As a result, a secure patient healthcare data access scheme is devised, which integrates blockchain and trust chain to fulfill the efficiency and security issues in the current schemes for sharing both types of digital healthcare data. Hence, our proposed approach provides more security, efficiency, and transparency with cost-effectiveness. We performed our simulations based on the blockchain-based tool Hyperledger Fabric and OrigionLab for analysis and evaluation. We compared our proposed results with the benchmark models, respectively. Our comparative analysis justifies that our proposed framework provides better security and searchable mechanism for the healthcare system.

Woei-Jiunn Tsaur, Jen-Chun Chang, Chin‐Ling Chen

Internet of Things (IoT) device security is one of the crucial topics in the field of information security. IoT devices are often protected securely through firmware update. Traditional update methods have their shortcomings, such as bandwidth limitation and being attackers' easy targets. Although many scholars proposed a variety of methods that are based on the blockchain technology to update the firmware, there are still demerits existing in their schemes, including large storage space and centralized stored firmware. In summary, this research proposes a highly secure and efficient protection mechanism that is based on the blockchain technology to improve the above disadvantages. Therefore, this study can reduce the need of storage space and improve system security. The proposed system has good performance in some events, including firmware integrity, security of IoT device connection, system security, and device anonymity. Furthermore, we confirm the high security and practical feasibility of the proposed system by comparing with the existing methods.

Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali

Abstract Internet of Drones (IoD) facilitates the autonomous operations of drones into every application (warfare, surveillance, photography, etc) across the world. The transmission of data (to and fro) related to these applications occur between the drones and the other infrastructure over wireless channels that must abide to the stringent latency restrictions. However, relaying this data to the core cloud infrastructure may lead to a higher round trip delay. Thus, we utilize the cloud close to the ground, i.e., edge computing to realize an edge-envisioned IoD ecosystem. However, as this data is relayed over an open communication channel, it is often prone to different types of attacks due to it wider attack surface. Thus, we need to find a robust solution that can maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data while providing desired services. Blockchain technology is capable to handle these challenges owing to the distributed ledger that store the data immutably. However, the conventional block architecture pose several challenges because of limited computational capabilities of drones. As the size of blockchain increases, the data flow also increases and so does the associated challenges. Hence, to overcome these challenges, in this work, we have proposed a derived blockchain architecture that decouples the data part (or block ledger) from the block header and shifts it to off-chain storage. In our approach, the registration of a new drone is performed to enable legitimate access control thus ensuring identity management and traceability. Further, the interactions happen in the form of transactions of the blockchain. We propose a lightweight consensus mechanism based on the stochastic selection followed by a transaction signing process to ensure that each drone is in control of its block. The proposed scheme also handles the expanding storage requirements with the help of data compression using a shrinking block mechanism. Lastly, the problem of additional delay anticipated due to drone mobility is handled using a multi-level caching mechanism. The proposed work has been validated in a simulated Gazebo environment and the results are promising in terms of different metrics. We have also provided numerical validations in context of complexity, communication overheads and computation costs.

Aitizaz Ali, Muhammad Fermi Pasha, Jehad Ali, Ong Huey Fang · 7 authors

Due to the value and importance of patient health records (PHR), security is the most critical feature of encryption over the Internet. Users that perform keyword searches to gain access to the PHR stored in the database are more susceptible to security risks. Although a blockchain-based healthcare system can guarantee security, present schemes have several flaws. Existing techniques have concentrated exclusively on data storage and have utilized blockchain as a storage database. In this research, we developed a unique deep-learning-based secure search-able blockchain as a distributed database using homomorphic encryption to enable users to securely access data via search. Our suggested study will increasingly include secure key revocation and update policies. An IoT dataset was used in this research to evaluate our suggested access control strategies and compare them to benchmark models. The proposed algorithms are implemented using smart contracts in the hyperledger tool. The suggested strategy is evaluated in comparison to existing ones. Our suggested approach significantly improves security, anonymity, and monitoring of user behavior, resulting in a more efficient blockchain-based IoT system as compared to benchmark models.

Jahangeer Ali, Shabir Ahmad Sofi

No abstract is available for this record.

Lorenzo Gigli, Luca Sciullo, Federico Montori, Alessandro Marzani · 5 authors

Interoperable and secure data management techniques are fundamental for most of large-scale Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems. Indeed, given the relevance of SHM critical measurements, data integrity must be protected against tampering or falsifications. In this paper, we propose a four-layer SHM architecture that allows to build an effective data pipeline from sensors to consumer applications, passing through the cloud. The architecture is built on top of the MODRON platform and exploits the recent advances of the W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard for interoperability. We then discuss how third-party services can take benefit of the W3C WoT architecture to retrieve the SHM critical data and to publish them on the Ethereum Blockchain through an SHM-specific Smart Contract, for data protection and traceability purposes. We test the effectiveness of the Smart Contract implementation in terms of latency and costs under simulated workloads.

Njabulo S. Mtetwa, Paul Tarwireyi, Cecilia Nombuso Sibeko, Adnan M. Abu‐Mahfouz · 5 authors

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way consumers, businesses, and governments interact with the physical and cyber worlds. More often than not, IoT devices are designed for specific functional requirements or use cases without paying too much attention to security. Consequently, attackers usually compromise IoT devices with lax security to retrieve sensitive information such as encryption keys, user passwords, and sensitive URLs. Moreover, expanding IoT use cases and the exponential growth in connected smart devices significantly widen the attack surface. Despite efforts to deal with security problems, the security of IoT devices and the privacy of the data they collect and process are still areas of concern in research. Whenever vulnerabilities are discovered, device manufacturers are expected to release patches or new firmware to fix the vulnerabilities. There is a need to prioritize firmware attacks, because they enable the most high-impact threats that go beyond what is possible with traditional attacks. In IoT, delivering and deploying new firmware securely to affected devices remains a challenge. This study aims to develop a security model that employs Blockchain and the InterPlanentary File System (IPFS) to secure firmware transmission over a low data rate, constrained Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). The proposed security model ensures integrity, confidentiality, availability, and authentication and focuses on resource-constrained low-powered devices. To demonstrate the utility and applicability of the proposed model, a proof of concept was implemented and evaluated using low-powered devices. The experimental results show that the proposed model is feasible for constrained and low-powered LoRaWAN devices.

Andrei Vladyko, Vasiliy Elagin, Anastasia Spirkina, Ammar Muthanna · 5 authors

Vehicular communication is a promising technology that has been announced as a main use-case of the fifth-generation cellular system (5G). Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is the vehicular communication paradigm that enables the communications and interactions between vehicles and other network entities, e.g., road-side units (RSUs). This promising technology faces many challenges related to reliability, availability and security of the exchanged data. To this end, this work aims to solve the scientific problem of building a vehicular network architecture for reliable delivery of correct and uncompromised data within the V2X concept to improve the safety of road users, using blockchain technology and mobile edge computing (MEC). The proposed work provides a formalized mathematical model of the system, taking into account the interconnection of objects and V2X information channels and an energy-efficient offloading algorithm to manage traffic offloading to the MEC server. The main applications of the blockchain and MEC technology in the developed system are discussed. Furthermore, the developed system, with the introduced sub-systems and algorithms, was evaluated over a reliable environment, for different simulation scenarios, and the obtained results are discussed.