With the rapid advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), the typical application of wireless body area networks (WBANs) based smart healthcare has drawn wide attention from all sectors of society. To alleviate the pressing challenges, such as resource limitations, low-latency service provision, mass data processing, rigid security demands, and the lack of a central entity, the advanced solutions of fog computing, software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain are leveraged in this work. On the basis of these solutions, a task offloading strategy with a centralized low-latency, secure and reliable decision-making algorithm having powerful emergency handling capacity (LSRDM-EH) is designed to facilitate the resource-constrained edge devices for task offloading. Additionally, to well ensure the security of the entire network, a comprehensive blockchain-based two-layer and multidimensional security strategy is proposed. Furthermore, to tackle the inherent time-inefficiency problem of blockchain, we propose a blockchain sharding scheme to reduce system time latency. Extensive simulation has been conducted to validate the performance of the proposed measures, and numerical results verify the superiority of our methods with lower time-latency, higher reliability and security.
Muhammad Ibrahim, Faisal Jamil, Y.Y. Lee, Do‐Hyeun Kim
In recent times, the evolution of blockchain technology has got huge attention from the research community due to its versatile applications and unique security features. The IoT has shown wide adoption in various applications including smart cities, healthcare, trade, business, etc. Among these applications, fitness applications have been widely considered for smart fitness systems. The users of the fitness system are increasing at a high rate thus the gym providers are constantly extending the fitness facilities. Thus, scheduling such a huge number of requests for fitness exercise is a big challenge. Secondly, the user fitness data is critical thus securing the user fitness data from unauthorized access is also challenging. To overcome these issues, this work proposed a blockchain-based load-balanced task scheduling approach. A thorough analysis has been performed to investigate the applications of IoT in the fitness industry and various scheduling approaches. The proposed scheduling approach aims to schedule the requests of the fitness users in a load-balanced way that maximize the acceptance rate of the users’ requests and improve resource utilization. The performance of the proposed task scheduling approach is compared with the state-of-the-art approaches concerning the average resource utilization and task rejection ratio. The obtained results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheduling approach. For investigating the performance of the blockchain, various experiments are performed using the Hyperledger Caliper concerning latency, throughput, resource utilization. The Solo approach has shown an improvement of 32% and 26% in throughput as compared to Raft and Solo-Raft approaches respectively. The obtained results assert that the proposed architecture is applicable for resource-constrained IoT applications and is extensible for different IoT applications.
Mesfer AI Duhayyim, Fahd N. Al‐Wesabi, Radwa Marzouk, Abdalla Ibrahim Abdalla Musa · 8 authors
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a breakthrough technology in the transfer of medical data via a communication system. Wearable sensor devices collect patient data and transfer them through mobile internet, that is, the IoMT. Recently, the shift in paradigm from manual data storage to electronic health recording on fog, edge, and cloud computing has been noted. These advanced computing technologies have facilitated medical services with minimum cost and available conditions. However, the IoMT raises a high concern on network security and patient data privacy in the health care system. The main issue is the transmission of health data with high security in the fog computing model. In today's market, the best solution is blockchain technology. This technology provides high-end security and authentication in storing and transferring data. In this research, a blockchain-based fog computing model is proposed for the IoMT. The proposed technique embeds a block chain with the yet another consensus (YAC) protocol building security infrastructure into fog computing for storing and transferring IoMT data in the network. YAC is a consensus protocol that authenticates the input data in the block chain. In this scenario, the patients and their family members are allowed to access the data. The empirical outcome of the proposed technique indicates high reliability and security against dangerous threats. The major advantages of using the blockchain model are high transparency, good traceability, and high processing speed. The technique also exhibits high reliability and efficiency in accessing data with secure transmission. The proposed technique achieves 95% reliability in transferring a large number of files up to 10,000.
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has emerged as an integral part of the smart health monitoring system in the present world. The smart health monitoring deals with not only for emergency and hospital services but also for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The industry 5.0 and 5/6G has allowed the development of cost-efficient sensors and devices which can collect a wide range of human biological data and transfer it through wireless network communication in real time. This led to real-time monitoring of patient data through multiple IoMT devices from remote locations. The IoMT network registers a large number of patients and devices every day, along with the generation of huge amount of big data or health data. This patient data should retain data privacy and data security on the IoMT network to avoid any misuse. To attain such data security and privacy of the patient and IoMT devices, a three-level/tier network integrated with blockchain and interplanetary file system (IPFS) has been proposed. The proposed network is making the best use of IPFS and blockchain technology for security and data exchange in a three-level healthcare network. The present framework has been evaluated for various network activities for validating the scalability of the network. The network was found to be efficient in handling complex data with the capability of scalability.
The development of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) has brought many advantages to facilitate the deployment of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). However, without proper protection, VANETs can be vulnerable to severe cyber-attacks. This paper explores the threats to the VANETs and proposes a security scheme for VANETs with a Blockchain (VNB). Furthermore, the proposed VNB with Ethereum was developed. With a graphical user interface, experiments were conducted. For ad hoc communications, a vehicle can randomly select another vehicle, and VNB will authenticate the selected vehicle with the Blockchain and Trusted Authority (TA). Preliminary test results successfully proved that Blockchain can be the key technology to mitigate the security threats to VANETs.
Bitcoin's attack in finance has caused a new wind to blow in the stock market and with the emergence of many new crypto currencies, the crypto currency market has become a new financial area. Although Blockchain technology is the technological infrastructure of Bitcoin, awareness is not as high as Bitcoin. Despite it was found in 1992, its first use was in the shadow of Bitcoin, influenced by the fact that it was with Bitcoin in 2008. However, due to the features that it provides; Without Blockchain technology, the Bitcoin system would not work. As the dazzling offer of Bitcoin; through the decentralized structure, buyers and sellers can meet directly on a platform and make their purchases securely, without involvement of any third party. Verification in the system can only be done by approving by more than 50% of the participants. Thus, besides of no need for a central authority, it became almost impossible for any cyber attack to be successful. The continued success of Blockchain technology is vital for Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies survival. Beside of all these advantages, there are some issues that need to be addressed for Blockchain technology. These can be listed as throughput, latency in processing, size and bandwidth, some security vulnerabilities, resource waste for adding a new block to chains, usability, and privacy. In this article, we will discuss these issues that need to be addressed for Blockchain technology.
Israa Al Barazanchi, Aparna Murthy, Ahmad AbdulQadir Al Rababah, Ghadeer Khader · 8 authors
Blockchain innovation has picked up expanding consideration from investigating and industry over the later a long time. It permits actualizing in its environment the smart-contracts innovation which is utilized to robotize and execute deals between clients. Blockchain is proposed nowadays as the unused specialized foundation for a few sorts of IT applications. Blockchain would aid avoid the duplication of information because it right now does with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Since of the numerous hundreds of thousands of servers putting away the Bitcoin record, it’s impossible to assault and alter. An aggressor would need to change the record of 51 percent of all the servers, at the precise same time. The budgetary fetched of such an assault would distantly exceed the potential picks up. The same cannot be said for our private data that lives on single servers possessed by Google and Amazon. In this paper, we outline major Blockchain technology that based as solutions for IOT security. We survey and categorize prevalent security issues with respect to IoT data privacy, in expansion to conventions utilized for organizing, communication, and administration. We diagram security necessities for IoT together with the existing scenarios for using blockchain in IoT applications.
Manuel Valentin, Claus Pahl, Nabil El Ioini, Hamid R. Barzegar
Recent developments in distributed ledger technologies have created a whole new set of possibilities in the way of managing trust, security, privacy and traceability in computer-based transactions, principles which are increasingly gaining importance in the world of IoT. Currently, IoT devices are generally based on centralized, client-server systems, where digital service providers have complete control over user data and information generated by their devices. In this paper we present the development of a decentralized access and management system for IoT devices, where operations on these devices, such as the installation and management of apps are handled by a blockchain-based identification and record system. The system prototype consists of a smartphone application acting as a management hub for the whole system, an IoT device API implementation for allowing secure access to management and data functionalities, and a set of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, where all necessary information for the functioning of the system is stored. The system allows app developers to provide their apps as Docker containers for IoT devices without the need to publish them on a centralized app store, and a regular user can subscribe to and access the available applications by paying in cryptocurrency without revealing any private information to the system. A cost and performance evaluation have been performed to assess the feasibility of the proposed solution.
The demand for the digital monitoring of environmental ecosystems is high and growing rapidly as a means of protecting the public and managing the environment. However, before data, algorithms, and models can be mobilized at scale, there are considerable concerns associated with privacy and security that can negatively affect the adoption of technology within this domain. In this paper, we propose the advancement of electronic environmental monitoring through the capability provided by the blockchain. The blockchain’s use of a distributed ledger as its underlying infrastructure is an attractive approach to counter these privacy and security issues, although its performance and ability to manage sensor data must be assessed. We focus on a new distributed ledger technology for the IoT, called IOTA, that is based on a directed acyclic graph. IOTA overcomes the current limitations of the blockchain and offers a data communication protocol called masked authenticated messaging for secure data sharing among Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We show how the application layer employing the data communication protocol, MAM, can support the secure transmission, storage, and retrieval of encrypted environmental sensor data by using an immutable distributed ledger such as that shown in IOTA. Finally, we evaluate, compare, and analyze the performance of the MAM protocol against a non-protocol approach.
In institutes of higher learning, most of the time course material development and delivery follow a centralized model which is fully lecturer-controlled. In this model, engaging students as partners in learning is a challenging problem as: 1) students are usually hesitant to contribute due to the fear of getting it wrong, 2) not much incentive for them to put in the extra effort, and 3) current online learning systems lack adequate facilities to support seamless and anonymous interactions between students. In this work, we propose EtherLearn, a blockchain based peer-learning system to distribute the control of how course material and formative assessments could be developed and delivered over the set of stakeholders in the particular course. EtherLearn leverages features of the rising blockchain technology, e.g., decentralization, anonymity, transparency and security to address the aforementioned concerns in university learning environments. To this end, we have successfully implemented a proof of concept for EtherLearn based on the Ethereum blockchain network. We have also conducted preliminary evaluations to demonstrate that it can be useful in decentralizing learning resource creation and student sharing in an encouraging teaching and learning environment.
The current micro-teaching process is readily online, and it is functional anywhere and anytime ubiquitously. All or most teaching and learning activities are accessible in centralized storage. However, centralized storage has inherent problems, such as a single point of failure with many possible data breaches, much duplication of data stored repeatedly in one location, and the lack of trust in third parties for data stored in centralized storage. Further issues include the high cost and low performance of the online systems that hinder the quality of the education process. In this paper, we propose a new framework Education Exchange Storage Protocol (EESP). EESP aims to improve the efficiency of the decentralized storage ecosystem in micro-teaching, coupled with blockchain technology acting as a control layer. Blockchain empowers the decentralized system by bringing together the most incompatible unstructured entities and integrate them. The decentralized storage system is armed with a blockchain smart contract that acts as a control layer, featuring impregnable security, immutability, trace-ability, and transparency. The EESP framework aims to elevate teaching and learning through blockchain decentralized storage systems in a transformational way, including but not limited to things like micro-credential, massive open online courses, and gamification, all in a single immersive learning platform. Finally, we tested and evaluated this framework using the truffle simulator, and the results demonstrate that the EESP model significantly improves performance.
Blockchain-based electronic health system growth is hindered by privacy, confidentiality, and security. By protecting against them, this research aims to develop cybersecurity measurement approaches to ensure the security and privacy of patient information using blockchain technology in healthcare. Blockchains need huge resources to store big data. This paper presents an innovative solution, namely patient-centric healthcare data management (PCHDM). It comprises the following: (i) in an on-chain health record database, hashes of health records are stored as health record chains in Hyperledger fabric, and (ii) off-chain solutions that encrypt actual health data and store it securely over the interplanetary file system (IPFS) which is the decentralized cloud storage system that ensures scalability, confidentiality, and resolves the problem of blockchain data storage. A security smart contract hosted through container technology with Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus ensures patient privacy by verifying patient preferences before sharing health records. The Distributed Ledger technology performance is tested under hyper ledger caliper benchmarks in terms of transaction latency, resource utilization, and transaction per second. The model provides stakeholders with increased confidence in collaborating and sharing their health records.
This systematic review investigates consumer trust in blockchain applications and makes recommendations for future research. The review targeted papers focusing on blockchain applications, collecting data from a consumer perspective, and examining trust as an outcome variable. We excluded non-peer-reviewed papers written before 2008 or in languages other than English. Our search in 5 databases yielded 704 studies. 29 studies were retained for the full-text review and 5 studies were included after conflict resolution. The small number of studies retained for analysis highlights the need for further empirical research on consumer trust in blockchain technology. While blockchain remained a mysterious term for most consumers, trust was the main factor determining the use of blockchain applications. Additionally, interface design, service, and information quality, together with the platform's ability to allow consumers to investigate products using blockchain applications. Trust remains the central issue for blockchain as trust in this “trustless” system appears to be a prerequisite for actual use, creating a “trust paradox”. This systematic review on consumer trust in blockchain technology is the first to provide a preliminary synthesis of consumers' needs and expectations for blockchain developers and provides important directions for future research on blockchain applications.
The popularity of drones has increased their deployment in a wide range of applications like commercial delivery, industrial systems, monitoring, surveillance, and surveys. The facility of fast deployment and cost effectiveness make drones a potential choice for an aerial base station to serve user equipments (UEs) in a defined area. Drones are equipped with night vision cameras, advanced sensors, and GPS receivers, which make them able to capture data and either analyze it to discover new patterns or transmit it to the remote cloud for storage and processing. Furthermore, the drones data relaying system helps to extend the service coverage area to provide reliable communication connection to isolated UEs. However, the deployment of drones at remote locations relies only on GPS, and these systems are prone to various attacks that can lead to signal blockage. Data integrity and privacy are important issues that must be addressed before the deployment of drones in commercial sectors. Therefore, in this article, we propose a blockchain-based security approach for drone-to-everything communications wherein the location of drones is tracked based on the segment division of area under deployment. Moreover, we design a miner node selection algorithm that uses computational resources, battery status, and time of flight of a drone as parameters to select the miner node. The security evaluation of the proposed framework clearly shows the viability of blockchain in drone deployments across remote sites.
Abstract In the process of multi-cloud storage data migration, data integrity is vulnerable to corruption, but the existing data integrity verification schemes for data migration across clouds are not highly reliable. To address this problem, a blockchain-based data integrity verification scheme for migration across clouds is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, a blockchain network is used instead of a third-party auditor. For each migration, a multi-cloud broker will send an integrity verification request to blockchain at three different times, and a smart contract will verify the data integrity according to the RSA-based homomorphic verification tags. Then, the security of the scheme is analyzed. Finally, simulation experiments and tests are conducted on Ethereum, and the results show the feasibility of the scheme.
Marina Liu, William Yeoh, Frank Jiang, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
Blockchain has transitioned beyond the hype to reality, as evidenced by the amount of research it has attracted and by its commercial applications. One popular application of blockchain is in cybersecurity, which is the focus of this paper. Specifically, we performed a systematic literature review of blockchain use cases for cybersecurity, while focusing on articles published over the past decade. Based on our analysis of 111 articles, we developed a classification framework using the thematic analysis approach. This classification framework is designed to offer readers a comprehensive perspective of the potential of blockchain to enhance cybersecurity in different contexts. The findings have implications for research and practice.
Dragoş Vicoveanu, Oana Geman, Carina Balcoș, Marius Prelipceanu
Abstract The recent use of digital Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in the healthcare domain can surpass the existing limitations in the centralized IT systems, such as the lack of security, access control or immutability of the electronic health information. If we discuss about clinical information, this innovative informatics advance gives back the control to the data owner. In decentralized environments, smart contracts allow trustable agreements grounded by irreversible transactions, which permit transparency and traceability. Moreover, smart contracts are the living heart of the decentralized applications that run on DTL. In this work, our attention is focused on medical equipments that helps health staff to diagnose and treat patients keeping much of their clinical data taken in dynamics. Hence, we propose a smart contract-based decentralized application framework for the management of devices, targeting also medical services, meant to facilitate the interaction of the involved entities. Our testing environment is the Ethereum platform, extensively used recently in the healthcare domain, being itself a smart operating system that allows decentralized applications to run on it.
The paper aims to clarify the relationship between Internet-of-Things devices and Ethereum blockchain. It proposes the arrangement to ensure information transmission among parties in an open system of IoT must be secure using Ethereum. The accompanying joining strategy utilized terminal gadgets as system innovation and Ethereum blockchain stage that delivered back-end, which guarantees high security, accessibility, and protection, supplanting conventional back-end frameworks. The following issues should be considered to prevent the malicious hub from attacking, resist distributed denial-of-service attacks, and prevent firmware backdoor access. This paper proposed a system in which the Peer-to-Peer authentication model, where every IoT node in the system must be authenticated and verified by the proposed framework. The paper provides empirical insights into IoT nodes manufactured in bulk, and they are remaining with their default username and password.
Spectrum sensing is the key technology of cognitive radio. In this article, we apply blockchain technology in spectrum sensing process and propose a related algorithm based on reputation. The algorithm builds a system model based on smart contract in blockchain and applies blockchain asymmetric encryption algorithm and digital signature technology in the process of secondary users’ transmitting local judgments to the secondary user base station. The algorithm can resist spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attack launched by malicious users. This article comprehensively considers the channel error rate, detection probability, secondary user base station budget and remaining energy of the secondary users (SUs) and then establishes the SU’s utility function as well as the game model. By solving the Nash equilibrium, the SU determines whether it uploads sensing data. Finally, the SU base station selects registered SUs by calculating and updating their reputation, obtaining the final judgment by voting rule. With simulations, we prove that the algorithm proposed in this article increases the accuracy and security of spectrum sensing and can effectively resist SSDF attack.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing trend in technology that interconnects millions of physical devices from any location anytime. Currently, IoT devices have become an integral part of human lives, as such organizations are deeply concerned with its security and technical issues. Blockchain system comprises a distributed digital ledger which is shared among community of users on the Internet; validated and recorded transactions in the ledger which cannot be altered or removed. We presented the challenges of IoT devices and how blockchain can be used to alleviate these problems. An outline of how to integrate blockchain with IoT was tackled, highlighting the challenges of IoT and how blockchain can remedy the issues. It was concluded that blockchain has the capability to curb the challenges posed by IoT devices.
Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), as an extension of cloud computing, provides storage resources at the network edge to enable low-latency data retrieval for users. Due to limited physical sizes and constrained storage resources, individual edge servers cannot store a large amount of data when operating independently. They often need to offload data to other edge servers to serve users collaboratively. Operated by different edge infrastructure providers, edge servers usually work in a distrusted environment. Incentive and trust are the two main challenges in facilitating collaborative edge storage. This article proposes CSEdge, a novel decentralized system that tackles these challenges to enable collaborative edge storage based on blockchain. On CSEdge, edge servers can submit data offloading requests for others to contend for. Winners are selected based on their reputations. They will store the offloaded data and receive rewards for successfully finishing data offloading tasks. Via a distributed consensus, their performance will be recorded on blockchain for future reputation evaluation. A prototype of CSEdge is built on Hyperledger Sawtooth and experimentally evaluated against a baseline system and two start-of-the-art systems in a simulated MEC environment. The results demonstrate that CSEdge can effectively and efficiently facilitate collaborative edge storage among edge servers.
Priyanka Bothra, Raja Karmakar, Sanjukta Bhattacharya, Sayantani De
In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), massive computing devices surrounding us operate and interact with each other to provide several significant services in industries, medical as well as in daily life activities at home, office, education sectors, and so on. The participating devices in an IoT network usually have resource constraints and the devices are prone to different cyber attacks, leading to the loopholes in the security and authentication. As a revolutionized and innovated technology, blockchain, that is applied in cryptocurrency, market prediction, etc., uses a distributed ledger that records transactions securely and efficiently. To utilize the great potential of blockchain, both industries and academia have paid a significant attention to integrate it with the IoT, as reported by several existing literature. On the other hand, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is able to embed intelligence in a system, and thus the AI can be integrated with IoT devices in order to automatically cope with different environments according to the demands. Furthermore, both blockchain and AI can be integrated with the IoT to design an automated secure and robust IoT model, as mentioned by numerous existing works. In this survey, we present a discussion on the IoT, blockchain, and AI, along with the descriptions of several research works that apply blockchain and AI in the IoT. In this direction, we point out strengths and limitations of the related existing researches. We also discuss different open challenges to exploit the full capacities of blockchain and AI in designing an IoT-based model. Therefore, the highlighted challenging issues can open the door for the development of future IoT models which will be intelligent and secure based on the integration of blockchain and AI with the IoT.
Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Service Level Agreements (SLAs) assessment constitutes the de facto area of interest and applications in the public cloud infrastructure. However, the domination of colossal corporations tends to monopolize the way metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measured and determined, leading to governed environments where the clientele is unable to obtain accurate and unbiased assessment of SLAs. Leaning toward SLA self-assessment, this paper provides a fair SLA consensus approach with innate transparency and privacy by leveraging permissioned blockchains that are equipped with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). The SLA assessment intelligence is performed inside enclaved smart contracts isolated from the on-chain entities views. The result constitutes a permissioned blockchain ecosystem where the IaaS and their clientele commonly agree on all the respective SLA monitoring and computation rules beforehand, as defined in any SLA assessment process, while the SLA consensus scheme constantly audits the SLA metrics based on these pre-approved regulations.
Audit logs are a critical component in today’s enterprise business systems as they provide several benefits such as records transparency and integrity and security of sensitive information by creating a layer of evidential support. However, current implementations are vulnerable to attacks on data integrity or availability. This paper presents a Blockchain-based audit trail mechanism that leverages the security features of Blockchain to enable secure and reliable audit trails and to address the aforementioned vulnerabilities. The architecture design and specific implementation are described in detail, resulting in a real prototype of a reliable, secure, and user-friendly audit trail mechanism.