Blockchain Papers

Bassem Sellami, Akram Hakiri, Sadok Ben Yahia

No abstract is available for this record.

Anichur Rahman, Antonio Montieri, Dipanjali Kundu, Md. Razaul Karim · 8 authors

Abstract Blockchain (BC) and software-defined networking (SDN) are leading technologies which have recently found applications in several network-related scenarios and have consequently experienced a growing interest in the research community. Indeed, current networks connect a massive number of objects over the Internet and in this complex scenario, to ensure security, privacy, confidentiality, and programmability, the utilization of BC and SDN have been successfully proposed. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey regarding these two recent research trends and review the related state-of-the-art literature. We first describe the main features of each technology and discuss their most common and used variants. Furthermore, we envision the integration of such technologies to jointly take advantage of these latter efficiently. Indeed, we consider their group-wise utilization—named BC–SDN—based on the need for stronger security and privacy. Additionally, we cover the application fields of these technologies both individually and combined. Finally, we discuss the open issues of reviewed research and describe potential directions for future avenues regarding the integration of BC and SDN. To summarize, the contribution of the present survey spans from an overview of the literature background on BC and SDN to the discussion of the benefits and limitations of BC–SDN integration in different fields, which also raises open challenges and possible future avenues examined herein. To the best of our knowledge, compared to existing surveys, this is the first work that analyzes the aforementioned aspects in light of a broad BC–SDN integration, with a specific focus on security and privacy issues in actual utilization scenarios.

João Paulo de Brito Gonçalves, Gustavo Alochio, Rodolfo da Silva Villaça, Roberta Lima Gomes

The fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are expected to provide various services compared to the 4G and previous generations of networks. The Quality of Service requirements can be quite different in terms of latency, bandwidth, reliability, and availability. 5G technology allows the fragmentation of the network into small pieces, known as network slices. This network slicing is done by specific tools and the configuration must be protected from attacks that may be performed by malicious users. Thus in this paper, a solution to protect and prevent these failures from happening is addressed. For this solution to be carried out, a study was conducted on the Blockchain technology, as well as the use of Oracles in order to implement an integrity verification system, a system capable of assuring 5G network slices' configuration integrity through a complete architecture involving Blockchain, Smart Contracts and Oracles.

A. Sumathi, Anchal Ahalawat, Abijoy Rameshkumar

The advancement in technology with the internet commences the new era of communication by allowing people to communicate through text, audio and video calling, images and video clips and various other applications. The applications of internet paved the way to a technology called Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is interpreted as communication between components, (e.g., sensors and actuators) through the internet designed for application-oriented assistance. IoT is simple and user friendly which attracted the people to adapt the technology. Despite the immense benefits of the IoT device, it is vulnerable.This results in the devices to undergo various attacks. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack challenges the security in IoT devices. Therefore, this paper proposes the integrated SDN-Blockchain architecture to provide the secure connection for IoT devices. Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology is used in optimizing the network management, enabling a dynamic and efficient network configuration programming thereby optimizing the performance and monitoring the network. SDN transforms computer network by segregating control plane and data plane. Blockchain is represented as collection of blocks which are linked together as a back traced list.The previous block hash is used to connect the blocks together in the chain. The characteristics of Blockchain include decentralization, peer-to-peer connectivity, and immutable ledgers.

Jesus A. Alonso-Lupez, Luis Alberto Martínez Hernández, Sandra Arteaga, Ana Lucila Sandoval Orozco · 7 authors

Security is one of the main concerns when designing future 6G networks. Most of the components of service chains are software-based and their security must be ensured. In this work we propose a system that will check the level of trust of 6G services following 3 complementary approaches: attestation, generation of proofs of transit and usage of smart contracts whose execution will be published via Distributed Ledger Technology in order to enable their traceability. The service orchestration function will use reinforcement learning to formulate optimised service orchestration decisions. Services will be specified in a declarative model, following a privacy-aware flavour of intent-based networking. The proposed architecture will take into account privacy of every stakeholder: final users, service providers and infrastructure providers.

Prashanth Podili, Sumanth Reddy Cherupally, Srinivas Boga, Kotaro Kataoka

No abstract is available for this record.

Authors unavailable

The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks technologies support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines, promising drastic improvements in terms of low latency, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages that 5G will bring about, there are still major challenges to be addressed, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, and above all, network privacy and security vulnerabilities. On paper, Distributed Ledger Technologies provide a framework to effectively handle most challenges in 5G networks. The panel provides a forum to discuss recent developments in 5G services, focusing on the potential of key 5G technologies, including edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and M2M communications,

Zohaib Latif, Choonhwa Lee, Kashif Sharif, Sumi Helal

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained tremendous attention and exponential growth in every domain of life. However, these devices face many challenges due to the limited resources in terms of storage and computation. Collaborative Edge Computing (CEC) is an emerging paradigm that solves these issues where multiple edge devices share computational resources to collaborate and satisfy user requirements. The fundamental issues in CEC are to make an offloading decision while considering the flow scheduling and balancing the load over multiple edge devices. Moreover, the efficient resource allocation of edge nodes is challenging, particularly when IoT devices are more vulnerable and become resource-hungry. The combination of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Blockchain (BC) can play a vital role in solving the issues mentioned above. This paper presents a token-based resource management mechanism asSDBlockEdgeby integrating these two technologies. The programming abstractions and global view of the SDN can help offload decision and flow scheduling, whereas the smart contract mechanism of BC can help control the abnormal behavior of IoT devices. We design the Resource Management Controller (RMC), which collaborates with the SDN controller to keep the record of available resources. It helps for offloading decisions and balancing the load over edge servers, whereas the SDN controller helps consider the less loaded path, while offloading reduces the task completion time. Moreover, the resources are allocated against tokens, and smart contracts are used to pay the cost of these resources. The proposed approach is implemented in Mininet_WiFi and Containernet, where docker hosts act as edge nodes with different IoT devices. The results after the extensive simulation show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Dongxiao Liu, Cheng Huang, Liang Xue, Jiahui Hou · 8 authors

Network function virtualization is a key enabling technology in future wireless networks for flexible and efficient sharing of network resources. Due to the increasing heterogeneity of network resource providers, a blockchain-based distributed architecture is a promising solution to enable reliable and transparent virtualized network function (VNF) management. However, since on-chain storage and computation are costive, it becomes a challenging task to achieve efficient VNF management with blockchain. In this paper, we first introduce a consortium blockchain for collaborative VNF management among network resource providers. Then, we propose an authenticated VNF dictionary that can be stored as a succinct authenticator on blockchain to support rich VNF query functionalities and efficient verifications of query results. Moreover, we design a dictionary pruning strategy to securely generate a compact authenticator for a given query, which reduces unnecessary memory accesses of the original dictionary when VNF queries are represented as arithmetic circuits. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments with a consortium blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate that our pruning strategy is efficient for both on-chain and off-chain VNF management.

Shiva Kazemi Taskou, Mehdi Rasti, Pedro H. J. Nardelli

Many of the key enabling technologies of the fifth-generation (5G), such as network slicing, spectrum sharing, and federated learning, rely on a centralized authority. This may lead to pitfalls in terms of security or single point of failure. Distributed ledger technology, specifically blockchain, is currently employed by different applications related to the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G to address the drawbacks of centralized systems. For this reason, mobile blockchain networks (MBNs) have recently attracted a great deal of attention. To add a transaction to the blockchain in MBNs, mobile or IoT users must perform various tasks like encryption, decryption, and mining. These tasks require energy and processing power, which impose limitations on mobile and IoT users' performance because they are usually battery powered and have a low processing power. One possible solution is to perform the tasks virtually on commodity servers provided by mobile edge computing (MEC) or cloud computing. To do so, all tasks needed to add a transaction to the blockchain can be treated as virtual blockchain functions that can be executed on commodity servers. We introduce a blockchain virtualization framework called blockchain function virtualization (BFV), through which all blockchain functions can be performed virtually by MEC or cloud computing. Furthermore, we describe applications of the BFV framework and resource allocation challenges brought by the BFV framework in mobile networks. In addition, to illustrate the advantages of BFV, we define an optimization problem to simultaneously minimize the energy consumption cost and maximize miners' rewards. Finally, simulation results show the performance of the proposed framework in terms of total energy consumption, transaction confirmation rate, and miners' average profit.

Randhir Kumar, Prabhat Kumar, Abhinav Kumar, A. Antony Franklin · 5 authors

The softwarized infrastructure of Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things (SDIIoT) offers a cost-effective solution to improve flexibility and reliability in network management but faces several critical challenges. First, th Majority of SDIIoT entities operate over wireless channel, which expose them to a variety of attacks (e.g., man-in-the-middle, replay, and impersonation attacks) and also the centralized nature of SDN controller is prone to single point attacks. Second, network traffic in the SDIIoT is associated with large scale, high dimension and redundant data, all of which present significant hurdles in the development of efficient flow analyzer. In this regard, we present a novel blockchain and Deep Learning (DL) integrated framework for protecting confidential information and hunting cyber threats against SDIIoT and their network traffic. First the blockchain module is proposed to securely transmit industrial data from IIoT sensors to controllers of SDN via forwarding nodes (i.e., OpenFLow switches) using Clique Proof-of-Authority (C-PoA) consensus mechanism. A novel flow analyzer based on DL architecture named LSTMSCAE-AGRU is designed by combining Long Short-Term Memory Stacked Contractive AutoEncoder (LSTMSCAE) with Attention-based Gated Recurrent Unit (AGRU) at the control plane. The latter first extracts low-dimensional features in an unsupervised manner, which is then fed to AGRU for hunting anomalous switch requests. The proposed framework can withstand a variety of well-known cyber threats and mitigate the single point of controller failure problem in SDIIoT.

Tharaka Hewa, Pawani Porambage, Ivana Kovacevic, Nisita Weerasinghe · 7 authors

The novel concept of factory-as-a-service (FaaS) allows the agility of adapting the manufacturing process by identifying the industry’s supply chain and user requirements. To cater to FaaS, flexibility in networking and cloud services is a must. 5G network slice broker (NSB) is a third-party mediator that caters to networking resource demand from clients to the service providers. Thus, this article introduces a secure blockchain-based NSB to facilitate FaaS. The proposed secure NSB (SNSB) provides secure, cognitive, and distributed network services for resource allocation and security service level agreement (SSLA) formation with coordination of slice managers and SSLA managers. In SNSB, we introduce a federated slice selection algorithm with Stackelberg game model and reinforcement learning algorithm to compute the real time and the optimal unit price and demand level. We provide an extensive implementation and performance evaluation of SNSB using the slice manager and a custom SSLA manager.

Praveen Gorla, Vinay Chamola

The advancement of Fifth-generation networks has enabled service-specific resource provisioning through Network slicing. Moving forward, Beyond 5G (B5G) is the key enabling factor for the next generation of computing networks catering to the needs of seamless connectivity with ultra-reliable performance and security. But the deployment of such systems to provide various services through dynamic network slicing needs network densification, leading to increased operational cost. This requirement has bid to enable infrastructure sharing between multiple operators and HetNets through Blockchain as a promising solution with secure and distributed ledger-based operations. This work presents a comprehensive simulation environment providing blockchain integration with B5G networks. In particular, this work identifies key challenges to creating such a simulation environment and handles several operational details, including spectrum sharing, network slicing and dealing with orphan blocks. In the end, we have presented the evaluation of the simulator on 5G blockchain-based spectrum sharing. Furthermore, this work can facilitate further research on blockchain in B5G networks and help in providing a common framework for operators in analyzing such operations on a large scale.

Fabian Kurtz, Robin Wiebusch, Dennis Overbeck, Christian Wietfeld

The energy grid is facing a paradigm shift away from traditionally centralized electricity generation towards dis-tributed renewable energy resources. These so-called Smart Grids (SGs) require a mechanism for balancing power consumption and generation. In this context, Blockchain (BC)-based Smart Contracts (SCs) have emerged as a means to facilitate distrib-uted transactions without requiring trust among the involved parties. Yet, resulting communication traffic loads need to be considered. Here, 5G network slicing promises to enable the coexistence of such mission critical services on a single shared physical communication infrastructure. Nevertheless, challenges in terms of latencies and resource efficiency exist. As static slicing mechanisms can be inefficient, we propose a predictive Machine Learning (ML)-driven approach to Resource Block (RB) scheduling by harnessing the Configured Grant (CG) mechanism in the 5G uplink. The developed solution is evaluated on the particularly challenging example of an energy grid driven by SCs. Based on an energy model derived from a real-world setup, we generate corresponding SC communication traffic. For this, predictive 5G slice radio resource allocation is employed to demonstrate significant improvements in terms of latency and spectrum usage efficiency. Thus, ML-enabled 5G network slicing for mission critical SCs is evaluated within large-scalable SGs.

Yasheng Zhang, Chengcheng Li, Ning Chen, Peiying Zhang

Through the programmable control of the network, the distributed and discrete service equipment is managed uniformly, and the software-defined network (SDN) effectively improves the overall management and control capabilities of the centralized management model. Each service node in SDN is connected by the service function chain (SFC) and completes network services in a specified order. However, there are still the following challenges in service request orchestration of SDN: (1) The tightly coupled characteristic of SFC bring management problems, e.g., deployment difficulties, service collisions, and poor scalability, etc., to frequent user service requests. (2) The complicated technologies in SDN, e.g., interference of wireless communication, cause potential safety hazards between service nodes, which may cause devastating effects on the controller. Correspondingly, we propose the following solutions: (1) Meaningfully transform the service request orchestration in SDN into the Microservice Management problem, and further combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to provide a flexible, autonomous, and scalable intelligent service orchestration model. (2) Combine the Diffie-Hellman algorithm to establish a shared key for the communication node, and combine the characteristics of the distributed ledger in the consortium blockchain, e.g., immutable, privacy, credibility, and high security, etc., for identity authentication to further improve the security of the shared key. Eventually, we have proved through theory and practice that the proposed algorithm can provide efficient intelligent request orchestration extremely safely in SDN.

Shivani Gaba, Ishan Budhiraja, Aaisha Makkar, Deepak Garg

As there are many portable devices such as mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and these devices are not secured due to mobility and other factors, attacks are the biggest threat on these devices, and security is the biggest concern. Different researchers used to research security and attacks, but they faced some latency, cost, and system failures. Over the years, blockchain has been used in various application areas to improve reliability, information protection, and frameworks. Even the blockchain structure is robust; even after this; blockchain is not resistant to cyber-attacks. As we have an idea about Ethereum is that it is a blockchain-based software-based platform with intelligent functionalities. One of the successful attacks on Ethereum has uncovered security propensity. As there are so many benefits as Software Defined Networking (SDN) is concerned, in Software Defined Networking (SDN) data packet routes via a single firewall which makes IDS more secure. This paper will detect security attacks on the blockchain using a machine learning approach and Software Defined Networks. This paper will detect security attacks on the blockchain using a machine learning approach and Software Defined Networks. This paper discusses an anomaly-based recognition method centered on an encoder-decoder prototype, and it is skilled via collective facts obtained by observing blockchain actions.

Zuguang LI, Wei Wang, Jia Guo, Youwen Zhu · 6 authors

Space-air-ground integrated network is capable of providing seamless and ubiquitous services to cater for the increasing wireless communication demands of emerging applications. However, how to efficiently manage the heterogeneous resources and protect the privacy of connected devices is a very challenging issue, especially under the highly dynamic network topology and multiple trustless network operators. In this paper, we investigate blockchain-empowered dynamic spectrum management by reaping the advantages of blockchain and software defined network (SDN), where operators are incentive to share their resources in a common resourced pool. We first propose a blockchain enabled spectrum management framework for space-air-ground integrated network, with inter-slice spectrum sharing and intra-slice spectrum allocation. Specifically, the inter-slice spectrum sharing is realized through a consortium blockchain formed by the upper-tier SDN controllers, and then a graph coloring based channel assignment algorithm is proposed to manage the intra-slice spectrum assignment. A bilateral confirmation protocol and a consensus mechanism are also proposed for the consortium blockchain. The simulation results prove that our proposed consensus algorithm takes less time than practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm to reach a consensus, and the proposed channel assignment algorithm significantly improves the spectrum utilization and outperforms the baseline algorithm in both simulation and real-world scenarios.

Hanwen Zhang, Supeng Leng, Yunkai Wei, Jianhua He

Due to the forecasted fast increasing cellular traffic and the already highly congested licensed spectrum, it is critical to exploit and utilize the unlicensed spectrum resources for the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks. A challenging problem is the coexistence of 5G and other networks with fair, reliable, and efficient sharing of the unlicensed spectrum. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-enhanced distributed spectrum sharing scheme for coexisting multiple operators and multiple WiFi APs. We design a novel lightweight and efficient consensus mechanism, named Proof of Strategy (PoG). In this consensus mechanism, the problem of spectrum sharing is used as a consensus puzzle, and the part of the unlicensed spectrum is used as the ‘fee’ of miners. With such a design, the computing overhead of the consensus process is expected to be reduced significantly. We develop a non-cooperative game to analyze the behavior of the miners and obtain a symmetric Bayesian Nash equilibrium under the uniform distribution of mining cost estimation. It can be found mathematically and experimentally that the strategy of the winner tends to maximize the system revenue by sharing the unlicensed spectrum resource. Furthermore, to reduce the impact of heavy interactions on system throughput, the operation of WiFi APs in the proposed scheme can be adaptively switched between ‘contention mode’ and ‘blockchain mode’ according to the network traffic load. The dynamic behavior is constructed as an evolutionary game, and the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium points are proved by theoretical analysis. Simulations demonstrated the fairness and effectiveness of the proposed blockchain-based scheme and the mode switching method for distributed spectrum sharing by heterogeneous wireless networks.

Shanqing Jiang, Lin Yang, Xianming Gao, Yuyang Zhou · 8 authors

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enhances the flexibility and programmability of networks by separating control plane and data plane. The logically centralized control mechanism makes the control plane vulnerable in both single and multiple controller scenarios. Malicious third parties can exploit vulnerabilities of reactive forwarding mode to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against SDN controllers. Unfortunately, existing DoS/DDoS solutions under single controller can not afford effective performance under multiple controllers due to the absence of cooperative detection and mitigation. To solve the above problem, we propose a blockchain-based SDN-targeted DDoS defense framework (BSD-Guard) that can provide cooperative detection and mitigation mechanism to protect SDN controllers. BSD-Guard introduces a blockchain-based secure middle plane between control plane and data plane. The secure middle plane calculates the suspect rate of new flows based on the collected packets’ information and reports suspect lists to blockchain for immutably storing and sharing. Besides, the smart contract deployed on blockchain in advance constitutes collaborative defense strategies based on the suspect lists reported from multiple SDN domains. When receiving defense strategies, the secure middle plane converts them to specific flow table actions and installs actions into relevant switches. The experimental results indicate that BSD-Guard can efficiently detect DoS/DDoS attacks in multiple controllers scenario and issue precise defensive strategies near the source of attack by identifying the attack path.

P.G. Giardina G. Bernini

This document presents the final design of the 5GZORRO high-level architecture, which targets the achievement and implementation of the innovative 5G networks and services vision described above. More specifically, this deliverable is intended as a self-contained document, which merges the original content of deliverables D2.2 and D2.3 (that present the initial and the updated 5GZORRO high-level architecture respectively) and further improves them to align the 5GZORRO architecture functionalities with the feedback from the platform implementation undergoing in WP3 and WP4. With this document, the goal is to have a single source of information for the 5GZORRO high-level architecture, which includes the whole set of services offered, functionalities supported, and operational workflows implemented.<br> In practice, in alignment with the original approach proposed and described in D2.2 and D2.3, the architecture follows a principle of service-based architecture, similar to the 5G Service-based architecture defined in 3GPP and in the ETSI Zero touch network and Service Management. Integrating SDN/NFV and Cloud native orchestration technologies with a Permissioned Distributed Ledger infrastructure, the 5GZORRO architecture offers services for:<br> • cross-domain network slicing,<br> • resource and service offering via marketplaces,<br> • discovery, intelligent selection and trading of resources and Services via Smart Contracts<br> • zero-touch network slice and service lifecycle management<br> • cross-stakeholder e-license management<br> • SLA monitoring &amp; breach prediction<br> • security and trust across multiple domains.<br> The realization of these services is made possible through the interaction of various functions for slice orchestration, network intelligence and analytics, security and trust, management of virtualized resources, all executed for multi-domain and single domain scopes. Moreover, 5GZORRO leverages many state-of-the-art technologies and standards for virtualization, NFV, Cloud Native platforms and services, zero touch, SDN, distributed ledgers, data lakes, which have been extensively reviewed to summarise the specific positioning of the 5GZORRO innovative proposition.

Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty, Abdul Rahman, Ravi Mukkamala · 5 authors

5G network slicing enables IoT networks to connect billions of heterogeneous objects providing high quality of service, high network capacity, and enhanced system throughput. Despite all these advantages, there are some major challenges to be addressed including decentralization, transparency, data interoperability, network privacy and security, and network slice orchestration, data provenance, and management. Blockchain technologies have the potential to offer innovative solutions to overcome these challenges. However, in the context of 5G enabled scalable IoT applications, integrating 5G with blockchain platforms could pose challenges to 5G’s goals such as high transaction throughput, high scalability, and real-time transaction processing, sharding-based consensus, network slice management and provenance. In this paper, "Moose," a blockchain platform, to overcome these challenges is proposed. It supports sharding based consensus in the blockchain network. It integrates a network slice orchestration library with smart contracts to manage and schedule network slices. As a use-case, Moose is integrated with a 5G-supported IoT device identity monitoring system on a network sliced environment. The performance results from the implemented system indicate that the proposed system indeed overcomes the aforementioned challenges.

Tooba Faisal, José Antonio Ordóñez Lucena, Diego López, Chonggang Wang · 5 authors

With the growing demand for network connectivity and diversity of network applications, one primary challenge that network service providers are facing is managing the commitments for Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Service providers typically monitor SLAs for management tasks such as improving their service quality, customer billing and future network planning. Network service customers, on their side, monitor services provided to them, to optimize their network usage and apply, when required, penalties related to service failures. In future 6G networks, critical network applications such as remote surgery and connected vehicles will require these SLAs to be more dynamic, flexible, and automated to match their diverse requirements on network services. Moreover, these SLAs should be transparent to all stakeholders to address the trustworthiness on network services and service providers required by critical applications. Currently, there is no standardized method to immutably record and audit SLAs, leading to challenges in aspects such as SLA enforcement and accountability - traits essential for future network applications. This work explores new requirements for future service contracts, that is, on the evolution of SLAs. Based on those new requirements, we propose an end to end layered SLA architecture leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and smart contracts. Our architecture is inheritable by an existing telco-application layered architectural frameworks to support future SLAs. We also discuss some limitations of DLT and smart contracts and provide several directions of future studies.

Emilio C. Piesciorovsky, Raymond Borges Hink, Aaron Werth, Gary Hahn · 7 authors

The electrical substation-grid testbed was created to integrate the GOOSE and/or DNP (Distributed Network Protocol) messages with time synchronized sources and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The objective was to study the impact of faults and cyber-events at an electrical substation with inside (protective relays) and outside (power meters) substation devices. The electrical substation-grid testbed was based on the design of a 34.5/ 12.47 kV electrical substation (sectionalized bus configuration) with two power transformers, connected to radial power lines and load feeders. The electrical substation-grid testbed was installed at 252 lab space (Advanced Power System Protection), Grid Research Integration and Deployment Center (GRID-C), Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This testbed was created for Task 5, DarkNet project.The electrical substation-grid testbed was created to simulate fault and/or cyber events that could potentially result in damage to the electrical infrastructure. In addition, tests were run that are usually not allowed to be performed in an operational electrical power grid, because these test scenarios could trip breakers and/or generate fault situations that could potentially damage equipment. The number of tests performed in the electrical substation-grid testbed were executed in a better way than in a real electrical substation and/or power grid, because multiple tests could be run in a short period of time, and complex permits, and safety/ schedule restrictions like in a real electrical substation environment were not needed.The electrical substation-grid testbed was created using real measurement, communication, and protection devices that are used by electrical utilities, to have same conditions that we could observe in a real power grid or electrical substation. The electrical substation-grid testbed was based on using a real time simulator and expansion box with amplifiers that were wired to electrical substation-grid devices. This hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) was provided by protective relays, power meters, ethernet switches, remote terminal units, synchronized timing network clock, DLT devices, workstations, and servers.This report includes the design, installation, and assessment of the electrical substation-grid testbed that was similar to an operational electrical substation, integrating the power system protection, communication, and control systems. The results for the electrical substation-grid testbed were based on:• verifying the analog signals for protective relays and power meters, • observing the synchronized time source frame at devices, • authenticating the GOOSE (IEC 61850) and DNP messages from power meters and protective relays, and • verifying the trip conditions of protective relays at fault tests with the power system fault event detection, using DLT devices.For future work, the electrical substation-grid testbed with protective relays and power meters, using DLT and synchronized time source from DarkNet, will be used to study the impact of cyber-events at inside and outside substation devices. Advanced algorithms for detecting cyber-events produced by non-desired protective relay settings will be studied, to improve the detection and reliability of protection, control, and communication systems at power grids.

Amjad Alsirhani, Muhammad Ali Khan, Abdullah Alomari, Sauda Maryam · 8 authors

Blockchain-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) envisions a world with rapid development and implementations to change our everyday lives based on smart devices. These devices are attached to the internet that can communicate with each other without human interference. A well-known wireless network in blockchain-enabled IoT frameworks is the Low Power and Lossy Network (LLN) that uses a novel protocol known as Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) to provide effective and energy-efficient routing. LLNs that run on RPL are inherently prone to multiple Denial of Service (DoS) attacks due to the low cost, shared medium, and resource-constrained nature of blockchain-enabled IoT devices. A Spam DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) attack is one of the novel attacks that drains the energy source of legitimate nodes and ends up causing the legitimate nodes to suffer from DoS. To address this problem, a mitigation scheme named DIS Spam Attack Mitigation (DISAM) is proposed. The proposed scheme effectively mitigates the effects of the Spam DIS attack on the network’s performance. The experimental results show that DISAM detects and mitigates the attack quickly and efficiently.