Md. Shahjalal, Md. Mainul Islam, Md Morshed Alam, Yeong Min Jang
Low-power, low-cost, and long-range connectivity for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks are the key stipulations, nowadays. However, implementing a cost-effective, flexible, and feasible system considering server and networking security is still an open challenge. In this article, a complete end-to-end long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) system has been demonstrated by implementing blockchain-based secure distributed data management, which is applicable in various secure IIoT applications. Dynamic data collected by multiple LoRa sensors are encrypted in a LoRa server, and the encrypted content is automatically stored in the InterPlanetary file system (IPFS) to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. To achieve data consistency, the content IDs collected from the IPFS are stored in the quorum blockchain with consortium setup using a smart contract. The consortium network is maintained by the Raft consensus algorithm employing seven nodes. The design architecture of the hardware used for both LoRa transmitting node and gateway has been described in comprehensive manners. The performance of the LoRaWAN system is analyzed by the received signal strength indicator, the communications range, and packet loss rate metrics in both line-of-sight and nonline-of-sight test systems. The data management scheme is implemented in Python, and the performance is evaluated in terms of transaction time and block size.
Jon J. Williams, Hannah Hong, Larry Crosby, James D. Potter · 7 authors
The future of military combat brings a comprehensive suite of interconnected physical objects that are embedded with sensors, processing capabilities, and software that will exchange data in real time over both public facing internet services and dedicated military communications networks. New interconnected devices could include anything from combat gear embedded with biometric wearables, sensors for collection of imagery, audio, video, electromagnetic signals, chemical and biological agents, smart guns, and other military equipment that will advance that state of interconnected military arsenal. Adding to this evolving complexity will be new processing accelerators, distributed cloud environments, next generation cellular towers, distributed applications, sensing devices, and crowed-sourced intelligence we hope to leverage from the commercial sector. Predictive battlefield analytics and robust security strategies must be implemented for this ecosystem to be successful and not present a “weak link” for our adversary to exploit. Decentralization, low power consumption, and security are also vital to an Internet of Things (IoT) network architecture operating on the battlefield. In this investigative study, a hierarchical approach is explored. Principles of Zero-Trust which assume there is no implicit trust granted to assets based solely on their physical or network location are explored to ensure the robustness and security of the ecosystem. We explore a theoretical IoT network design using LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Networks) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that is secure and decentralized while meeting low power requirements. To achieve this in a military operational environment, a private blockchain will be explored that has been developed by the Linux Foundation called the Hyperledger Fabric. This private blockchain based ecosystem provides a modular enterprise distributed framework with plug-and-play capabilities, decentralization, scalability, immutability, and a tailorable consensus mechanism. Integrating these capabilities will enable a more secure ecosystem of bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, and mobility.[1]
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 & 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.
Over the past several years, the adoption of HealthCare Monitoring Systems (HCS) in health centers and organizations like hospitals or eldery homes growth significantly. The adoption of such systems is revolutionized by a propelling advancements in IoT and Blockchain technologies. Owing to technological advancement in IoT sensors market, innovations in HCS to monitor patients health status have motivated many countries to strength their efforts to support their citizens with such care delivery systems under the directives of a physician who has access to patient's data. Nevertheless, secure data sharing is a principal patient's concern to be comfort to use such systems. Current HCS are not able to provide reassuring security policies. For that, one of our focus in this work, is to provide security countermeasures, likewise cost-efficient solution for HCS by integrating storage model based on Blockchain and Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS). Blockchain technology is an emerging solution in pharmaceutical industry and starts to take place for HCS and allows HealthCare providers to track connected devices and control access to shared data, hence protecting patients' privacy. Furthermore, the addition of Edge and Fog computing has improved HCS to react in real-time and enhance their reliability. A variety of communication protocols can connect sensor devices to edge/Fog layer and the best choice will depend upon connectivity requirements: range, bandwidth, power, interoperability, security, and reliability. Instead, systems efficiency would decline and hurt if communication protocol is inconsistent. LoRa (Long Range) communications technology is emerging as the leader among Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) entering the IoT domain benefiting from many features such as long-range distances and low power consumption. This work proposes LoRaChainCare, an architecture model for HCS which combines the technologies Blockchain, Fog/Edge computing, and the LoRa communication protocol. A real implementation of LoRaChainCare system is presented and evaluated in terms of cost, run time and power consumption.
Interoperable and secure data management techniques are fundamental for most of large-scale Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems. Indeed, given the relevance of SHM critical measurements, data integrity must be protected against tampering or falsifications. In this paper, we propose a four-layer SHM architecture that allows to build an effective data pipeline from sensors to consumer applications, passing through the cloud. The architecture is built on top of the MODRON platform and exploits the recent advances of the W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard for interoperability. We then discuss how third-party services can take benefit of the W3C WoT architecture to retrieve the SHM critical data and to publish them on the Ethereum Blockchain through an SHM-specific Smart Contract, for data protection and traceability purposes. We test the effectiveness of the Smart Contract implementation in terms of latency and costs under simulated workloads.
Njabulo S. Mtetwa, Paul Tarwireyi, Cecilia Nombuso Sibeko, Adnan M. Abu‐Mahfouz · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way consumers, businesses, and governments interact with the physical and cyber worlds. More often than not, IoT devices are designed for specific functional requirements or use cases without paying too much attention to security. Consequently, attackers usually compromise IoT devices with lax security to retrieve sensitive information such as encryption keys, user passwords, and sensitive URLs. Moreover, expanding IoT use cases and the exponential growth in connected smart devices significantly widen the attack surface. Despite efforts to deal with security problems, the security of IoT devices and the privacy of the data they collect and process are still areas of concern in research. Whenever vulnerabilities are discovered, device manufacturers are expected to release patches or new firmware to fix the vulnerabilities. There is a need to prioritize firmware attacks, because they enable the most high-impact threats that go beyond what is possible with traditional attacks. In IoT, delivering and deploying new firmware securely to affected devices remains a challenge. This study aims to develop a security model that employs Blockchain and the InterPlanentary File System (IPFS) to secure firmware transmission over a low data rate, constrained Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN). The proposed security model ensures integrity, confidentiality, availability, and authentication and focuses on resource-constrained low-powered devices. To demonstrate the utility and applicability of the proposed model, a proof of concept was implemented and evaluated using low-powered devices. The experimental results show that the proposed model is feasible for constrained and low-powered LoRaWAN devices.
Victor Pasknel de Alencar Ribeiro, Raimir Holanda Filho, Alex Ramos, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is a new type of wireless technology that offers long range communication for devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN is one of the main technologies currently available to enable LPWAN environments. In the LoRaWAN architecture, the Join Server is a key component and is responsible for security tasks, such as authentication and key management. However, the Join Server acts as a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) since all encryption keys are stored centrally. Then, this paper presents a secure and fault-tolerant architecture to increase the levels of security and availability in LoRaWAN. A permissioned blockchain and smart contracts are used to replace the Join Server and solve the SPOF problem. A working prototype was created using open-source tools in order to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed architecture. Additionally, the performance of a blockchain network was analyzed in a cloud environment under multiple workloads and fault-tolerance experiments were performed to evaluate the impact of network failures. The results show a trade-off between availability and performance when choosing the number of blockchain peers in small scenarios. However, this behavior is reversed in large scenarios where the performance of multiple peers is best suited.
Distributed ledger technology is becoming popular these days because of its high confidentiality, decentralization, and nontampering. It is suitable for replacing centralized security disadvantaged point transfer systems. Low‐power wide area network (LPWAN) is capable for long‐range communication with low‐power consumption. The iconic features like wide area coverage and long battery‐powered duration make it best to combine with large‐scale IoT application deployment. In both industry and academic field, such combination of LPWAN and point transfer system is highly attended. However, the ledger management system generates too much data that low‐bandwidth network such as LPWAN can hardly handle; meanwhile, the processing power’s requirement for small IoT devices is challenging. Towards addressing these issues, we design a packet transmission optimizing mechanism for a ledger‐based point transfer system (LPTS) in LPWAN to reduce overall data traffic and build a simulator to evaluate its performance. Moreover, we have implemented the system and evaluated in field experiment.
Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is a long-range low-power wireless communication network. Its features, such as wide network coverage and low power consumption of terminals, make it suitable for large-scale deployment of IoT applications. The points transfer system, especially points transfer system in LPWAN, as a typical third-party payment application, is being closely attended by both industry and academia. Recent studies have shown that distributed ledger technology, because ofits characteristics such as high confidentiality, non-tampering, and decentralization, is a good solution to problems such as low-security performance due to centralized storage for a points transfer system. However, the distributed ledger will generate a large amount of data traffic in recording the transactions of network participants, which is a challenge for resource-constrained IoT devices. To address these issues, we propose an optimized packet transmission mechanism for a ledger-based points transfer system in LPWAN. Simulation results show that our proposed mechanism can well reduce the packet transmission ofthe whole system and meet the requirements of LPWAN. Moreover, we update the reader with information about distributed ledger and standardization-related activities in this paper.
Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is an Internet of things (IoT) network layer technology that has emerged in recent years for long-range and low-power communication needs in IoT. Its low-bandwidth, low-power, long-range and mass-connected IoT application features can be well applied to the points transfer system. However, the traditional centralized points transfer system faces many problems such as centralization, high computational requirement of nodes, and low robustness which are difficult to be widely used. In order to solve these problems, we propose a distributed ledger-based points transfer system in LPWAN and analyze the system robustness from the disaster management aspect. The simulation results show that our proposed system can still have strong robustness under extreme disaster situations and ensure the safe and efficient operation of the whole system.
Alexandru A. Maftei, Partemie-Marian Mutescu, Valentin Popa, Adrian I. Petrariu · 5 authors
Blockchain technology has been seen as a holy grail, being able to solve many of the security and privacy problems related to the growing numbers of interconnected IoT sensors that needs data protection. Gradually, this innovative technology began to be addressed in other industries having an ever-increasing penetration. In this paper, the blockchain technology is integrated into an Internet of Things healthcare application, where a medical wearable device is used for human body health parameters acquisition. Collected data are secured and transmitted using LoRa (long range) technology. The proposed blockchain architecture uses Ethereum technology due to the use of smart contracts technology. From the obtained result, the proposed architecture ensures a high level of performance and security, allowing patients to have control over shared data securely, but also having the assurance that shared data will not be tampered with.
India is a country of vast diversification in all respect, but the common fact among all this is that about 80% of our population depends on agriculture and its allied activities for their livelihood. As per a recent government report, more than 50% of unskilled workforces have been engaged in this sector and contribute to roughly 16-20% towards Gross Domestic Product, strengthening the national economy. Unfortunately, our agricultural practice has been following primitive practices and failed to adopt modern-day skills, which helps in good productivity and increases resilience and sustainability with socio-economic benefits. Indian farmer needs to be trained and better equipped to handle ever-growing threats due to globalization, unregulated Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) and MNCs in this sector. Hence the need of the hour is to introduce new agricultural education reforms, technology transfer and prioritization of trans disciplinary science and applied research at a high priority. This shall prove beneficial in minimizing the gap of professional expertise in the agro-market. Researchers and the scientific community have been making efforts in designing, developing and adopting new paradigm changes in agri-education in the country. The government of India has taken significant measures with immediate attention to revolutionizing the effectiveness of advanced training in flourishing agricultural infrastructure. The author has made a novel investigation to assess the present scenario, potential challenge, scope of progress, forthcoming possibilities and finally discussed next-generation technologies which can successively change the course conventional of education and literacy in agro-farming with the huge opportunity of employment generation through entrepreneurship.
This article reviews the 6G global landscape and the most relevant private and public initiatives, with US$ billions of investments in next generation information and communication (ICT) systems and application services. Then, it presents the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) technology roadmap towards 6G and 5G New Radio (NR) releases. This is followed by an introduction to the latest shift in paradigm “from Internet of Things (IoT) to Internet of Intelligence (IoI)”, which paves the way towards 6G wireless. The new system is anticipated to provide pervasive connectivity to functions with the ability to represent knowledge, process knowledge, and make decisions, with or without human intervention. Beyond that, the paper discusses the new carrier frequency bands above 110 GHz; and innovative fundamental enabling technologies, such as integrated semantic communication and sensing, low earth orbiting satellites, quantum key distribution, post quantum cryptography, and distributed ledger technology; and portrays a network vision for 6G wireless, looking to 2030 and beyond. Conclusions are drawn on 6G prospects, the needs of security by design for 6G; as well as the potential of 6G for securely connecting pervasive intelligence and preserving privacy; and new research directions to cater for new use categories and requirements.
Jesús Sánchez-Gómez, Rafael Marín-Pérez, Mirko Ross, Antonio Fernando Skarmeta Gomez
IoT applications have recently proliferated due to their applicability in several fields, as well as the growing number of enabler technologies. For this reason, the landscape presents vast deployments formed by end-devices with heterogeneous capabilities or requirements. Low-power wide-area communication technologies have partially filled the gap for low-bandwidth low-cost IoT devices that are placed in vast coverage areas without a power-grid or cellular signal. However, these technologies seldom offer interoperable solutions to manage security-related tasks, such as monitoring cybersecurity attacks or firmware update distribution. Thus, there is a need for a human-centric platform that enables trust-worthy management of large heterogeneous IoT networks. In this work, we present a solution that enables trust monitoring and firmware update distribution employing novel open standardization efforts designed for constrained devices. The presented solution leverages on LO-CoAP-EAP, a novel lightweight bootstrapping protocol, LoRaWAN, a widespread long-range communication technology, SCHC, an IPv6 header compression and fragmentation mechanism, OSCORE, an end-to-end application-layer protection, IPFS a peer-to-peer decentralized storage solution, as well as a Hyperledger, a distributed ledger technology for secure validation of the distributed contents.
Sustainable smart agriculture with increase in signal to interference or signal to noise ratio (SIR/SNR) for selection of best relay is discussed in a wireless blockchain based network. The overall communication throughput (OCT), power splitting relaying (PSR), time switching relaying (TSR) and transmission success rate (TRS) are also derived during the selection of best relay performance with and without interference. The performance of OCT, PSR, TSR and TRS increases with the increase in the number of potential relay nodes as seen in the results of derivation. The accuracy of the theoretical values are validated by numerical simulations.
Currently, The Internet of Things (IoT), as an essential infrastructure and new technology, has been applied in a wide range of fields. The fact that many devices in IoT are battery-operated makes the energy-saving network protocols necessary. Therefore, the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is getting popular for its long range and low power consumption. To facilitate LoRaWAN key management, this study proposes a new secure architecture that can enhance the availability and security based on the permissioned blockchain and a new Join Request that shortens the network access time and shares the pressure of JS(Join Server). In addition, this study also puts up with a new approach to update the root key, solving the problem that the root key remains unchanged through the device's life. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we put forward a workable prototype using open-source tools. Moreover, Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) is used to verify the security, and the performance analysis shows the superiority of our scheme in delay and execution time. All results demonstrate that our scheme is lightweight, efficient and secure.
For several industrial applications, a sole data owner may lack sufficient training samples to train effective machine learning based models. As such, we propose a federated learning (FL) based approach to promote privacy-preserving collaborative machine learning for applications in smart industries. In our system model, a model owner initiates an FL task involving a group of workers, i.e., data owners, to perform model training on their locally stored data before transmitting the model updates for aggregation. There exists a tradeoff between service latency, i.e., the time taken for the training request to be completed, and age of information (AoI), i.e., the time elapsed between data aggregation from the deployed industrial Internet of Things devices to completion of the FL-based training. On one hand, if the data are collected only upon the model owner's request, the AoI is low. On the other hand, the service latency incurred is more significant. Furthermore, given that different training tasks may have varying AoI requirements, we propose a contract-theoretic task-aware incentive scheme that can be calibrated based on the weighted preferences of the model owner toward AoI and service latency. The performance evaluation validates the incentive compatibility of our contract amid information asymmetry, and shows the flexibility of our proposed scheme toward satisfying varying preferences of AoI and service latency.
Njabulo S. Mtetwa, Nombuso Sibeko, Paul Tarwireyi, Adnan M. Abu‐Mahfouz
LoRa WAn is one of the LPWAN technologies that has become popular in both industries and research. LoRaWAN aims to provide long-range communication and empowers low-powered devices to last for years in the field. LoRaWAN relies on the symmetric cryptography to provide end-to-end encryption. Even though LoRaWAN relies on symmetric cryptography, there are recent works that try to enhance security of LoRaWAN by incorporating technologies like Blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized peer-to-peer network that provides tamperproof and immutability of data. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based firmware update mechanism to enhance firmware update in LoRaWAN as well as managing the update process. This mechanism aims to provide updates by ensuring authenticity, and integrity of the firmware. The mechanism focuses more on devices that are too constrained in resources, hence for that purpose we evaluated the cost involved in some cryptographic operations taken to ensure security during firmware updates. We conclude that the approach is feasible for constrained devices in LoRaWAN network by evaluating the memory usage of the cryptographic operation used by the end device.
Eryk Schiller, Elfat Esati, Sina Rafati Niya, Burkhard Stiller
This work develops an integration of Blockchains (BC) with the Internet-of-Things (IoT) using a highly constrained TelosB IoT platform based on the MSP430 processor family and CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio interfaces. The system is evaluated in an indoor office environment focusing on overhead and energy efficiency of BC transaction (TX) transmissions.
The sixth generation (6G) networks are expected to provide a fully connected world with terrestrial wireless and satellite communications integration. The design concept of 6G networks is to leverage artificial intelligence (Ai) to promote the intelligent and agile development of network services. intelligent services inevitably involve the processing of large amounts of data, such as storage, computing, and analysis, such that the data may be vulnerable to tampering or contamination by attackers. in this article, we propose a blockchain-based data security scheme for Ai applications in 6G networks. Specifically, we first introduce the 6G architecture (i.e., a space-air-ground-underwater integrated network). Then we discuss two Ai-enabled applications, indoor positioning and autonomous vehicle, in the context of 6G. Through a case study of an indoor navigation system, we demonstrate the effectiveness of blockchain in data security. The integration of Ai and blockchain is developed to evaluate and optimize the quality of intelligent service. Finally, we discuss several open issues about data security in the upcoming 6G networks.
Lu Hou, Kan Zheng, Zhiming Liu, Xiaojun Xu · 5 authors
Efficiency and security have become critical issues during the development of the long-range (LoRa) system for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. The centralized work method in the LoRa system, where all packages are processed and kept in the central cloud, cannot well exploit the resources in LoRa gateways and also makes it vulnerable to security risks, such as data falsification or data loss. On the other hand, the blockchain has the potential to provide a decentralized and secure infrastructure for the LoRa system. However, there are significant challenges in deploying blockchain at LoRa gateways with limited edge computing abilities. This article proposes a design and implementation of the blockchain-enabled LoRa system with edge computing by using the open-source Hyperledger Fabric, which is called as HyperLoRa. According to different features of LoRa data, a blockchain network with multiple ledgers is designed, each of which stores a specific kind of LoRa data. LoRa gateways can participate in the operations of the blockchain and share the ledger that keep the time-critical network data with small size. Then, the edge computing abilities of LoRa gateways are utilized to handle the join procedure and application packages processing. Furthermore, a HyperLoRa prototype is implemented on embedded hardware, which demonstrates the feasibility of deploying the blockchain into LoRa gateways with limited computing and storage resources. Finally, various experiments are conducted to evaluate the performances of the proposed LoRa system.
Victor Pasknel de Alencar Ribeiro, Raimir Holanda Filho, Alex Ramos, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is one of the enabling technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), and focuses on providing long distance connectivity for a vast amount of smart devices. Currently, LoRa is one of the leading LPWAN solutions available for public use. In LPWANs, especially in LoRa, security is a major concern due to the resource constraints of the devices, the sensitivity level of the transmitted data, the large amount of connected devices, among other reasons. This paper studies the key management mechanism of LoRaWAN environments. A secure architecture for key management based on smart contracts and permissioned blockchain to enhance security and availability in LoRaWAN networks is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed blockchain-based LoRaWAN architecture, a working prototype has been created using open-source tools and commodity hardware. Performance analysis shows that the prototype presents similar execution time and latency values, when compared to a traditional system, especially for small and medium-sized LoRaWAN networks. We also discuss why the proposed solution can be used in environments with a large number of end-devices.
More and more Internet of Things (IoT) devices are deployed around the world, due to the convenience and extra functionality they enable. This growth, while great for the industry as a whole, has come at a price with respect to ensuring and maintaining security and privacy. Having that in mind, one of the most common solutions to the IoT security problem is to update the devices frequently. Recently, LoRa Alliance has released a new specification (FUOTA) on how to perform firmware updates using LoRa technology. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to securely update the firmware of the IoT devices using the LoRa communication protocol. As a first step, we perform an evaluation of the firmware update procedure using different network sizes and different firmware sizes. The evaluation shows that there is a need to use more gateways that will collaborate to increase the reliability and the performance of the firmware update process.
Miguel Pincheira, Massimo Vecchio, Raffaele Giaffreda, Salil S. Kanhere
We propose a technological framework based on the combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchains aiming at incentivizing and rewarding more sustainable water management practices in agriculture. In this context, current IoT-based precision agriculture deployments prefer energy efficiency, which generally translates into power-and-resource-constrained sensing devices. For this reason, often, system integrators of this sector feel the need to interpose third-party hardware intermediaries (e.g., IoT gateways) between sensing devices and blockchain endpoints, so augmenting infrastructural costs and reducing the trustworthiness of the data acquired from the field. In this paper, we present a software architecture specifically designed for a trustless water management system where constrained IoT devices can directly transact sensed data on a public blockchain network. We deploy the proposed solution on off-the-shelf hardware devices and undertake a thorough benchmarking in terms of memory, program size, communication overheads and power consumption. Our results show that, in general, typical IoT devices can be used to directly interact with a blockchain, without severe burden. More specifically, these devices only incur an additional 6% of the energy consumed for their typical interactions with a gateway.