With the continuous development of web technology, Web 3.0 has attracted a considerable amount of attention due to its unique decentralized characteristics. The digital economy is an important driver of high-quality economic development and is currently in a rapid development stage. In the digital economy scenario, the centralized nature of the Internet and other characteristics usually bring about security issues such as infringement and privacy leakage. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how to use Web 3.0 technologies to solve the pain points encountered in the development of the digital economy by fully exploring the critical technologies of digital economy and Web 3.0. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of Web 3.0 that should be integrated with the digital economy to better find the entry point to solve the problems by examining the latest advances of Web 3.0 in machine learning, finance, and data management. We hope this research will inspire those who are involved in both academia and industry, and finally help to build a favourable ecology for the digital economy.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of active and passive objects that interact with each other for information exchange. Due to the immense acceptance of the concept, the IoT utility rate has increased exponentially in recent years. Being an open (and sometimes not-physically-observed) network, the issue of data privacy and security becomes a severe concern on account of the presence of untrusted and malicious users on the network. Most of the existing security approaches are centralized in nature, which leads to bottlenecks and obscurity in public verifiability. Due to its functionality, blockchain technology could be a solution to these problems, owing to its distributed immutable ledger that is cryptographically secured. In this research, we intend to address the security issues in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and access control mechanisms in the IoT for a healthcare system where the data files of a particular patient are encrypted and stored on the blockchain storage in a distributed fashion and accessed through smart contracts. We have observed the efficiency and time complexity of IoT based medical health care system with the utilization of kovan, binance smart chain, rinkeby, and matic blockchain networks. The authors propose a secure model for IoT based healthcare systems with the incorporation of the blockchain network.
Pavlos Papadopoulos, William J. Buchanan, Sarwar Sayeed, Nikolaos Pitropakis
Aim: A fish farm is an area where fish are raised and bred for food. Fish farm environments support the care and management of seafood within a controlled environment. Over the past few decades, there has been a remarkable increase in the calorie intake of protein attributed to seafood. Along with this, there are significant opportunities within the fish farming industry for economic development. Determining the fish diseases, monitoring the aquatic organisms, and examining the imbalance in the water element are some key factors that require precise observation to determine the accuracy of the acquired data. Similarly, due to the rapid expansion of aquaculture, new technologies are constantly being implemented in this sector to enhance efficiency. However, the existing approaches have often failed to provide an efficient method of farming fish. Methods: This work has kept aside the traditional approaches and opened up new dimensions to perform accurate analysis by adopting distributed ledger technology. Our work analyses the current state-of-the-art of fish farming and proposes a fish farm ecosystem that relies on a private-by-design architecture based on the Hyperledger Fabric private-permissioned distributed ledger technology. Results: The proposed method puts forward accurate and secure storage of the retrieved data from multiple sensors across the ecosystem so that the adhering entities can exercise their decision based on the acquired data. Conclusion: This study demonstrates a proof-of-concept to signify the efficiency and usability of the future fish farm.
M D Praveen, Shashikumar G. Totad, Mahadev Rashinkar, Ribhav Ostwal · 6 authors
Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology are evolving in today's digital world for faster processing and secure transactions. Most IT industries are migrating their applications to blockchain frameworks because of high security and faster processing operations. Cryptocurrencies and bitcoin applications use Blockchain and distributed ledger technology to perform decentralized transactions. With the current blockchain technology, there is a limitation in storing and processing a large volume of transactions and data, affecting memory and throughput. To overcome this limitation, we propose a methodology to integrate Blockchain with IPFS to enhance the throughput and optimize the memory. As a case study marks card validation application is being developed on the Ethereum framework considering Geth and Parity clients. Blockchain consensus protocol, i.e., proof of work (POW) and proof of stake (POS), are used to build smart contracts and process transactions. InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is integrated with Blockchain to enhance the throughput and performance of the application. The results indicate that Blockchain integrated with IPFS performs better by optimizing the memory and reducing the transaction delay. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed approach reduces the transaction processing cost by 10% and enhances the throughput by 8% compared to the Fileshare and BlockIPFS techniques.
This survey presents a comprehensive study of recent advances in block-chain technologies, focusing on how issues that affecting the enterprise adoption were progressively addressed from the original Bitcoin system to Ethereum, to Solana etc. Key issues preventing the wide adoption are scala-bility and performance, while recent advances in Solana has clearly demon-strated that it is possible to significantly improve on those issues by innovat-ing on data structure, processes and algorithms by consolidating various time-consuming algorithms and security enforcements, and differentiate and balance users and their responsibilities and rights, while maintaining the re-quired security and integrity that blockchain systems inherently offer.
Many security standards and cryptographic solutions exist for different applications such as agriculture, aircraft, banking systems and etc. but a more effective and efficient solution can be given by combining existing technologies with blockchain. This work addresses the problems of previous works such as scalability, immutability, robustness, network latency, auditability, and traceability. Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Blockchain (BC) to tackle the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) spoofing attacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), phishing problems and various security issues. Blockchain is a technology that stores the data using a chain of blocks in an encrypted form with hashing algorithms. It uses the decentralized architecture to store the information that helps users and customers to have transparency on records. The data is stored in a distributed ledger that is tamperproof and immutable. To amalgamate the research done so far, this paper presents a systematic review of ten different applications and tools used in blockchain. The applications include academics and education, agriculture, aircraft, banking, car sharing, e-voting, healthcare, Internet of Things (IoT), Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), and Supplychain (SC). Moreover, this paper presented a taxonomy for these applications and analyzed the implementation of tools used in different domains. Different open issues and challenges and key takeaways of blockchain technology were also highlighted. Hence, this paper helps give a new insight into working with blockchain and deciding on appropriate tools and approaches for a particular application.
Blockchain is a distributed public ledger that keeps track of all transactions that have ever taken place in the system. As a distributed ledger, a consensus mechanism is required to ensure all the transaction functions properly. In order to reach a consensus, it is critical to emphasize the importance of performance and efficiency. The use of the right consensus algorithm will significantly improve the efficiency of a blockchain application. This paper reviewed several types of consensus algorithms used in blockchain and discusses the idea of a new consensus algorithm that can improve the performance of consortium blockchain.
Blockchain is the latest disruptive innovation. It is the underlying technology of cryptocurrency. However, the facts show that most cryptocurrencies are stuck in big issues such as scalability issues, resulting in longer transaction times. A two-layer solution was offered in previous studies to solve the scalability problem, but many issues emerged from this idea. Some of the 2 Layer proposals use the Proof of Work (PoW) protocol model, and some other studies use the Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol model. In this study, the authors propose the Hybrid Lightning Protocol to solve the scalability problem of Blockchain networks by combining the Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols without sharding. The author analyzes and designs the development of the Blockchain protocol based on previous research. This research is a Blockchain protocol model that can achieve a maximum throughput of around 1,668,000 transactions/second on a 2 Gbps Fiber network, which can reduce cryptocurrency volatility and shorten transaction times by solving scalability problems.
Md. Rafiqul Islam, Muhammad Mahbubur Rashid, Mohammed Ataur Rahman, Muslim Har Sani Mohamad · 5 authors
Blockchain already has gained popularity due to its highly secured network and same time enormous computational power consumption has become an undifferentiated debate among the users. A Blockchain network is reliable, secure, transparent, and immutable where the transactions cannot be reversed between sender and receiver. Blockchain technology is not only used for mining cryptocurrency, it has other applications in different sectors like agriculture, education, insurance, etc., but the noticeable concern is still energy consumption. On the other hand, there is a significant impact on the environment due to the use of excessive energy for mining cryptocurrency which releases more carbon dioxide (CO2) in nature. The Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm is used for mining ‘Bitcoin’ which is consumed enormous computational power. However, an alternative solution like Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol has been proposed to use instead of the Proof-of-Work algorithm for mining cryptocurrencies which is capable to reduce the significant amount of energy consumption. Not only that, but the use of renewable energy can also be an alternate option to use the Proof-of-Work algorithm for mining cryptocurrencies which is environment friendly. This paper aims to highlight blockchain technology, the energy consumption and impact on the environment, energy reducing method by using PoS consensus protocol instead of using the PoW algorithm, and discussion with some recommendations.
Usman Khalil, Mueen-Uddin, Owais Ahmed Malik, Saddam Hussain
The mechanisms based on the distributed environment have become an obvious choice for solutions, while they have not been limited only to a specific domain (i.e., crypto-currency). Rather, it has influenced other industries to develop robust privacy and security solutions, such as smart houses, smart electrical grids, smart agriculture, smart health care, smart transportation, etc. These Cyber-Physical Systems heavily depend on IoT-based smart devices that constitute a networked system of devices dependent on each other for the smooth operation of the overall system. Hence, security and privacy have become an integral part of all the architectural frameworks they operate in. The adoption of these architectures, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and Internet of Everything (IoE), has reinforced the need to develop solutions based on a distributed environment. Distributed ledger technology, i.e., Blockchain, has taken the lead and may support the development of solutions with robust privacy and security. We provide an updated review of authentication mechanisms developed on blockchain technology that enforce decentralized architectures. We discuss the security issues regarding the authentication of these IoT-enabled smart devices. We evaluate and analyze the study of the proposed literature schemes that pose authentication challenges in terms of computational costs, communication overheads, and models applied to attain robustness. Hence, lightweight solutions for managing, maintaining, processing, and storing authentication data of IoT-enabled assets are a must. From an integration perspective, cloud computing has provided strong support. In contrast, decentralized ledger technology, i.e., Blockchain, and lightweight cryptosystems are the areas for much more to explore. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges, which present an improvement standpoint to help address the ambiguities.
Shahinaz Kamal Ezzat, Yasmine N. M. Saleh, Ayman Abdel-Hamid
Blockchain interoperability is an innovative feature of blockchain technology that is rapidly gaining momentum in various fields. The mass adoption of enterprise blockchains has not yet been achieved because blockchain networks act as isolated islands that cannot connect or exchange assets and/or information. In addition, the invocation of smart contracts is restricted only to on-chain executions because of the lack of connectivity between the blockchains. This survey paper aims to conduct a comprehensive and thorough literature review regarding blockchain interoperability, with special highlight on blockchain Oracles being state-of-the-art. Oracles have shown potential as an emerging technology that has revolutionized the blockchain ecosystem by acting as agents that fetch external information into the blockchain ecosystem. A detailed comparative discussion of different blockchain interoperability techniques is presented, showing the strengths and weaknesses of each technique. Being overlooked in the literature, the shortcomings of these techniques in comparison to Oracles are identified, addressing how Oracles have succeeded in overcoming many of these limitations. In addition, the literature lacks a focus on the latest market solutions adopting blockchain Oracles, and only a few studies have considered them in detail. This gap has been addressed through an in-depth assessment of the latest market solutions adopting Oracles in the past few years. Finally, design issues trying to achieve the best practices of Oracles, future directions, and identified research gaps are highlighted.
Taras Maksymyuk, Juraj Gazda, Gabriel Bugár, VladimÃr Gazda · 6 authors
The future of networking will be driven by the current emerging trends of combining the physical and virtual realities in cyberspace. Considering the ambient pandemic challenges, the role of virtual and augmented reality will definitely grow over time by transforming into the paradigm of the Metaverse of Things, where each person, thing or other entity will simultaneously exist within multiple synchronized realities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for future metaverse applications composed of multiple synchronized data flows from multiple operators through multiple wearable devices and with different quality requirements. A new service quality model is proposed based on a customizable utility function for each individual data flow. The proposed approach is based on dynamic fine-grained data flow allocation and service selection using non-fungible tokens, which can be traded over the blockchain among users and operators in a decentralized mobile network environment.
Recycling of electronic waste is a rapidly growing global issue that requires proper monitoring and tracing of electronic devices and the business transactions between the stakeholders. The majority of current systems that manage electronic devices throughout their supply chain stages are centralized and lack data transparency, immutability, and security. Specifically, such systems are incapable of handling problems like comprehensive coverage of the life cycle of e-products, access control for maintaining data security, reputation-aware selection of stakeholders, and large amounts of data generated during various stages of the supply chain processes. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based IoT-enabled system for monitoring all post-production business processes, activities, and operations performed on an electronic device. The system is supported by five smart contracts that record the actions of users on the immutable distributed ledger that aid in ensuring that the business processes carried out by the participants are transparent, traceable, and secure. To store large files, such as images of e-waste materials, products, and licenses for stakeholders, we have integrated our system with a distributed storage system. The proposed system is tested on Ethereum blockchain to check the gas consumption of the functions of the smart contracts. The cost and security analysis shows that the proposed system is viable.
Adeel Ahmed, Saima Abdullah, Muhammad Bukhsh, Israr Ahmad · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting important and interconnected technologies of the world, consisting of sensor devices. The internet is smoothly changing from an internet of people towards an Internet of Things, which permits various objects to connect to another wirelessly. The energy consumption of the IoT routing protocol can affect the network life span. In addition, the high volume of data produced by IoT will result in transmission collision, security issues, and energy dissipation due to increased data redundancy because tiny sensors are usually hard to recharge after they are deployed. Generally, to save energy, data aggregation reduces data redundancy at each node by turning some nodes into sleep mode and others into wake mode. Therefore, it is important to group the nodes with high data similarity using the fuzzy matrix. Then, the data received from the member nodes at the Cluster Head (CH) are analyzed using a fuzzy similarity matrix for clustering. In the next step, after clustering, some nodes are chosen from all groups as redundant nodes. The sleep scheduling mechanism is then applied to reduce data redundancy, network traffic jamming, and transmission costs. We have proposed an Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation Mechanism (EEDAM) secured by blockchain, which uses a data aggregation mechanism at the cluster level to save energy. As edge computing is used to provide on-demand trusted services to IoT with minimum delay, blockchain is integrated inside a cloud server, so the edge is validated by the blockchain to provide secure services to IoT. Finally, we performed simulations to calculate the performance of the proposed mechanism and compared it with the conventional energy-efficient algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed structural design can successfully reduce the amount of data, provide proper security to the IoT, and extend the wireless sensor network (WSN).
Manuel Adelin Manolache, Sergiu Manolache, Nicolae Ţăpuş
As the modern world migrates towards an interconnected environment, be it financially, socially, or industrially, the need for distributed systems has become paramount. Emergent paradigms need decentralized solutions to better handle the single point of failure problem, one example is given by the Internet of Things (IoT), in which devices need to be connected to a central hub to function, or the secure decision making process. Blockchain comes with the solution that overcomes some of the shortcomings in existing systems and provides a secure alternative when designing decentralized systems. This paper proposes a decision making system based on the Proof of Authority consensus protocol enabled by the blockchain paradigm.
With the faster maturity and stability of digitization, connectivity and edge technologies, the number of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors is flourishing fast in important junctions such as homes, hotels, hospitals, retail stores, manufacturing floors, railway stations, airports, oil wells, warehouses, etc. However, in this extremely connected world, the security implications for IoT devices are getting worse with the constant rise in malicious cyberattacks. The challenge is how to secure IoT sensors, services and data. The blockchain technology, a prominent distributed ledger technology (DLT), is being pronounced as the way forward for safeguarding IoT devices and data. The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based DLT has the inherent potential to realize the benefits of blockchain with better performance. IOTA is a DAG-based blockchain implementation for the IoT era. The Tangle, the IOTA’s network immutably records the exchange of data and value. It ensures that the information is trustworthy and cannot be tampered with nor destroyed. In this work, we depict a thorough analysis of the existing security studies for IOTA. Then, we identify the gaps and the limitations of these security solution schemes, and finally, propose future security research recommendations that can potentially fill these gaps to secure DLT-enabled IoT devices.
Industry 4.0 have witnessed a paradigm shift from cyber-physical systems (CPS) that aims at massive automation, towards a more customer-driven approach. The shift has been attributed to the design of hyper-cognitive systems, integration of virtual and extended reality, digital machinery prototyping and twin designs, trusted machine boundaries, collaborative robots, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based supply chains. This new wave, termed Industry 5.0, is expected to leverage massive production with user-centric customization outside the scope of Industry 4.0 ecosystems. Industry 5.0 is expected to assist diverse industrial verticals like healthcare, smart farming, drones, smart grids, and supply chain production ecosystems. However, data is shared among multiple heterogeneous networks, spanning different authoritative domains. Thus, trusted and secured data transfer is crucial to synergize and secure the industrial perimeters. Blockchain (BC) is a preferred choice as a security enabler to Industry 5.0 ecosystems owing to its inherent property of immutability, chronology, and auditability in industrial systems. Limited works are proposed that present the vision and holistic view of BC-assisted Industry 5.0 applications. The article presents a first-of-its-kind survey on BC as a security enabler in Industry 5.0. Based on a descriptive survey methodology and research questions, we presented the key drivers, and potential applications, and propose an architectural vision of BC-based Industry 5.0 in diverse applicative verticals. The survey intends to present solutions that would assist industry practitioners, academicians, and researchers to drive novel BC-assisted solutions in Industry 5.0 verticals.
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Asif Ali Laghari, Zaffar Ahmed Shaikh, Zdzisława Dacko-Pikiewicz · 5 authors
With the rapid enhancement in the design and development of the Internet of Things creates a new research interest in the adaptation in industrial domains. It is due to the impact of distributed emerging technology and topology of industrial Internet of Things and the security-related resource constraints of industrial 5.0. This conducts new paradigm along with critical challenges to the existing information preservation, node transactions and communication, transmission, trust and privacy, and security protection related problems. These critical aspects pose serious limitations and issues for the industry to provide industrial data integrity, information exchange reliability, provenance, and trustworthiness for the overall activities and service delivery prospects. In addition, the intersection of blockchain and industrial IoT has gained more consideration and research interest. However, there is an emerging limitation between the inadequate performance of industrial IoT and connected nodes, and the high resource requirement of permissioned private blockchain ledger has not yet been tackled with the complete solution. Due to the introductions of NuCypher Re-Encryption infrastructure, hashing tree and allocation, and deployment of blockchain proof-of-work required more computational power as well. This paper is divided into three different folds; first, we studied various related literature of blockchain-enabling industrial Internet of Things and its critical implementation challenging aspects along with the solution. Secondly, we proposed a blockchain hyperledger sawtooth-enabled framework. This framework provides a secure and trusted execution environment, in which service delivery mechanisms and protocols are designed with an acknowledgment, including the immutable ledger storage security, along with the peer-to-peer network on-chain and off-chain communication of industrial activities. Thirdly, we design pseudo-chain codes and consensus protocols to provide smooth industrial node streamline transactions and broadcast content. The proposed multiple proof-of-work investigated and simulated using Hyperledger Sawtooth-enabled docker for testing to exchange information between connected devices of industrial Internet of Things within the limited usage of resource constraints.
The growth of the popularization of blockchain technology has caused new concepts to emerge. Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is one of these concepts introduced based on blockchain technology in 2017. As newly-emerged concepts, NFTs have rapidly become a popular technology in industry and academic research. NFTs currently have various applications in the industry, which are reviewed in the present study. They have also attracted a broad spectrum of research. Metaverse is another exciting blockchain-based technology that enables people to connect with digital avatars in a virtual universe. The importance of this study is to identify new applications of NFTs in the Metaverse making NFTs more applicable. Assisting with identity management and ownership right of digital assets are examples of NFT applications in the Metaverse that are explained in this study in detail. Ultimately, this study presents some future directions of NFT applications in industry and academic research.