To mitigate the scalability problem of decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the payment channel, which allows two parties to perform secure coin transfers without involving the blockchain, has been proposed. The payment channel increases the transaction throughput of two parties to a level that is only limited by their network bandwidth. Recent proposals focus on extending the two-party payment channel to the N-party payment hub. Unfortunately, none of them can achieve efficiency, flexibility in the absence of a trusted third-party. In this paper, we propose Garou, a secure N-party payment hub that allows multiple parties to perform secure off-chain coin transfers. Except in the case of disputes, participants within the payment hub can make concurrent and direct coin transfers with each other without the involvement of the blockchain or any third-party intermediaries. This allows Garou to achieve both high-performance and flexibility. If all participants keep online, Garou guarantees all honest users’ balance security against strong adversarial capabilities. To demonstrate the feasibility of the Garou protocol, we develop a proof of concept prototype for the Ethereum network. Experimental evaluations show that, with 300 participants and without disputes, that the maximum transaction throughput of Garou is$20{ \times }$higher than that of state-of-the-art payment hubs.
Increased adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in multiple domain areas continuously increases the volume of data and transactions from the IoT devices. The IoT systems are vulnerable to more attacks because of increased adoptions and technology adoptions. Protecting the data and providing security to the data and transactions is one of the critical issues for the effective quality of service (QoS) in the IoT environments. An adaptable IoT framework is proposed based on the research approach of 'ADOPT' that leverages the blockchain technology and features considering security as one of the QoS parameters. In the proposed model of a three-layer IoT architecture with an application layer, network layer, and perception layer, the blockchain features are adopted for the resource-constrained IoT environment. In the perception layer, the model uses a local and temporary memory to maintain the local chain, which is managed based on the memory size and time constraints. The application layer nodes manage the synchronization of the data from the corresponding local chain at the edge node. The implementation of the proposed model uses Ethereum, an open-source public blockchain, and using mobile devices as an edge node. The results are verified for security factors like access, authorizations, confidentiality, and computing resources.
Abstract With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) field, more and more data are generated by IoT devices and transferred over the network. However, a large amount of IoT data is sensitive, and the leakage of such data is a privacy breach. The security of sensitive IoT data is a big issue, as the data is shared over an insecure network channel. Current solutions include symmetric encryption and access controls to secure the data transfer, but they have some drawbacks such as a single point of failure. Blockchain is a promising distributed ledger technology that can prevent the malicious tampering of data, offering reliable data storage. This paper proposes a distributed access control system based on blockchain technology to secure IoT data. The proposed mechanism is based on fog computing and the concept of the alliance chain. This method uses mixed linear and nonlinear spatiotemporal chaotic systems (MLNCML) and the least significant bit (LSB) to encrypt the IoT data on an edge node and then upload the encrypted data to the cloud. The proposed mechanism can solve the problem of a single point of failure of access control by providing the dynamic and fine-grained access control for IoT data. The experimental results of this method demonstrated that it can protect the privacy of IoT data efficiently.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is an emerging technology that has shaken the financial sector, and which is already perceived as having an impact. A blockchain is a network of many interconnected nodes, both trustworthy and malicious, which can reach a consensus and generate valid data. The resulting information is packed into a block and permanently saved on the network in a tamper-proof way. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of blockchain for securely storing data in a vehicular-based network. Our approach can work for storing data such as traffic events and user reputation. The proposed solution has two interconnected components: the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) blockchain and the reputation system. The paper presents synthetic tests which validate the use cases of the solution: users reporting speeds and alerts behind which we see a fair reputation system penalising the (wrong/false) users.
Hany F. Atlam, Muhammad Ajmal Azad, Ahmed G. Alzahrani, Gary Wills
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new technology that enables both virtual and physical objects to be connected and communicate with each other, and produce new digitized services that improve our quality of life. The IoT system provides several advantages, however, the current centralized architecture introduces numerous issues involving a single point of failure, security, privacy, transparency, and data integrity. These challenges are an obstacle in the way of the future developments of IoT applications. Moving the IoT into one of the distributed ledger technologies may be the correct choice to resolve these issues. Among the common and popular types of distributed ledger technologies is the blockchain. Integrating the IoT with blockchain technology can bring countless benefits. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive discussion of integrating the IoT system with blockchain technology. After providing the basics of the IoT system and blockchain technology, a thorough review of integrating the blockchain with the IoT system is presented by highlighting benefits of the integration and how the blockchain can resolve the issues of the IoT system. Then, the blockchain as a service for the IoT is presented to show how various features of blockchain technology can be implemented as a service for various IoT applications. This is followed by discussing the impact of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) on both IoT and blockchain. In the end, future research directions of IoT with blockchain are presented.
A prime requirement for health organizations is the protection and distribution of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) because they store all the sensitive health information about the patients. However, Peruvian private health organizations have problems in security and interoperability of the EMR because most of them have centralized outsourced systems. New Technology Architectures are develop using Blockchain, offering complete control and availability of their medical record to the patient. However, the architectures found in the literature are not designed for Peruvian private health organization needs. In this paper, the proposal is a technology architecture based on Blockchain for the EMR management in Peruvian private health organizations. It considers Peruvian law and international regulations for the EMR management, providing transaction logs, and off-chain technology to efficiently store medical images. The results obtained in a medical clinic through a proof of concept show that private health organizations have low security and efficiency in their EMR management processes, suggesting an opportunity to develop a technology solution for EMR management.
Mohammed Misbhauddin, Abdulaziz AlAbdulatheam, Mohammed Aloufi, Hussien Al-Hajji · 5 authors
Electronic Health Record is a digital version of a patient's medical history maintained by a healthcare provider over the course of their visits. Unfortunately, medical records of one patient is fragmented across many hospitals, private clinics, labs, pharmacies and personal health records from wearables. Healthcare providers hesitate to share “proprietary” data. This is where the blockchain technology comes in use. Moreover, blockchain opens the opportunity to record patients' records as blocks, encrypt and make it impossible (immutable) to proceed with any changes for the information stored. The main goal would be to take advantage of the blockchain technology provide immutability, data integrity where each record is privately encrypted and publicly viewed. Nevertheless, the overall cost to store information in a practical blockchain itself is very expensive. This is where a decentralized P2P network that can store the data off-the-chain would assist in storing the actual content of each medical record and only the identifier is sent and stored on the blockchain. Any individual would be able to publicly view the medical record, however, only patients possess the private key and hence share it with desired individuals e.g. physicians or any medical practitioner. In this paper, we propose an architecture that can be used to develop scalable blockchain applications using an off-chain solution that will allow physicians, lab technicians and patients to manage the medical records in a secure manner.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), allowing direct wireless communications between industrial machines and people, is the key component of Industry 4.0. By grouping several IIoT devices (IIoT-Ds) into IIoT groups (IIoT-Gs), the IIoT-Ds within one group can share information and deter malicious users from accessing the network by modifying the access control list (ACL) in IIoT-Ds. In an IIoT-G, several IIoT-Ds jointly manage the access control of IIoT sensors. The security of ACL is protected by blockchains deployed in IIoT-Ds. Even secured by blockchains, a blockchain-based IIoT-G (B-IIoT-G) still cannot secure correct access control in a system with more than half of the blockchain-based IIoT-Ds (B-IIoT-Ds) from spreading wrong authorization information. In this article, we propose a B-IIoT-G with trust evaluation for each B-IIoT-D to evaluate the weight in voting for final decisions of authorization. By designing a new voting mechanism with trust evaluation for the access control in B-IIoT-G, the system has a higher probability of making correct authorization even with malicious B-IIoT-Ds. Simulation results have demonstrated that the mechanism with trust evaluation can still make, with a high probability, correct authorization even with more than half of the B-IIoT-Ds in B-IIoT-G being malicious.
Mustufa Haider Abidi, Hisham Alkhalefah, Usama Umer, Muneer Khan Mohammed
Currently, the furious competitiveness in global markets and speedy improvements in information technology lead to shorter product life cycles, lesser transportation capabilities, and increased demands as well. In most business scenarios, the supply chain network is becoming one of the most vital focusing areas. In the supply chain network, blockchain technology is a promising solution for secure information sharing. However, it is a bit critical in maintaining security at each level of the blockchain and hence the public–private–key cryptography is more commonly preferred. This study intends to construct a new privacy preservation model in the field of supply chain networks based on blockchain technology by undergoing three major phases, namely, (a) data sanitization, (b) key generation, and (c) restoration. Further, the sensitive fields in the original data are selected during the data sanitization phase, and in the key generation phase; the optimal key is generated to hide the selected sensitive fields. The hidden data with the secured key is transferred from the source (manufacturer) to destination (vendor) in the supply chain network via the blockchain. The restoration process takes place in the receiver side with the help of the same key. Among all these data flow methods, the optimal key selection is the critical issue that needs to be overridden to make the data transmission secured. As a novelty, a new optimization algorithm referred to as Whale with New Crosspoint-based Update (WNU), which is the advanced version of Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), is developed here to select the optimal key. Finally, the proposed WNU model is analyzed in terms of Hiding Failure (HF) rate, Information Preservation (IP) Rate, and False Rule generation (FR), and Degree of Modification (DM). The proposed secured information sharing in supply chain management (SCM) with blockchain technology will be validated by comparing it over the traditional models in terms of security as well.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Le Yang, Meng Li, Pengbo Si, Ruizhe Yang · 6 authors
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged with the developments of various communication technologies. In order to guarantee the security and privacy of massive IIoT data, blockchain is widely considered as a promising technology and applied into IIoT. However, there are still several issues in the existing blockchain-enabled IIoT: 1) unbearable energy consumption for computation tasks; 2) poor efficiency of consensus mechanism in blockchain; and 3) serious computation overhead of network systems. To handle the above issues and challenges, in this article, we integrate mobile-edge computing (MEC) into blockchain-enabled IIoT systems to promote the computation capability of IIoT devices and improve the efficiency of the consensus process. Meanwhile, the weighted system cost, including the energy consumption and the computation overhead, are jointly considered. Moreover, we propose an optimization framework for blockchain-enabled IIoT systems to decrease consumption, and formulate the proposed problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). The master controller, offloading decision, block size, and computing server can be dynamically selected and adjusted to optimize the devices energy allocation and reduce the weighted system cost. Accordingly, due to the high-dynamic and large-dimensional characteristics, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is introduced to solve the formulated problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve system performance significantly compared to other existing schemes.
Lam Duc Nguyen, Israel Leyva‐Mayorga, Amari N. Lewis, Petar Popovski
Mobile devices with embedded sensors for data collection and environmental sensing create a basis for a cost-effective approach for data trading. For example, these data can be related to pollution and gas emissions, which can be used to check the compliance with national and international regulations. The current approach for IoT data trading relies on a centralized third-party entity to negotiate between data consumers and data providers, which is inefficient and insecure on a large scale. In comparison, a decentralized approach based on distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enables data trading while ensuring trust, security, and privacy. However, due to the lack of understanding of the communication efficiency between sellers and buyers, there is still a significant gap in benchmarking the data trading protocols in IoT environments. Motivated by this knowledge gap, we introduce a model for DLT-based IoT data trading over the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) system, intended to support massive environmental sensing. We characterize the communication efficiency of three basic DLT-based IoT data trading protocols via NB-IoT connectivity in terms of latency and energy consumption. The model and analyses of these protocols provide a benchmark for IoT data trading applications.
Xiaobin Xu, Hui Zhao, Haipeng Yao, Shangguang Wang
With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), more and more applications focus on the detection of unmanned areas. With the assistance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), IoT devices are able to access the network via aerial base stations. These UAV-assisted IoT applications still face security and energy challenges. The open environment of IoT applications makes the application easy to encounter external invasion. Limited energy of UAV results in the limited lifetime of network access. To address these challenges, researches on IoT security and energy efficiency are becoming hotspots. Nevertheless, in the UAV continuous coverage scenario, there is still an enormous potential to improve the security and efficiency of data collection in IoT applications. In this article, blockchain is introduced into the scene of UAV-assisted IoT, and a data collection system considering security and energy efficiency is proposed. In this system, UAV, as an edge data collection node, provides a long-term network access for IoT devices through regular cruises with recharging. By forwarding data and recording transactions, UAVs get charging coins as rewards. UAVs use charging coins to exchange charging time. UAV swarm builds distributed ledgers based on blockchain to resist the invasion of malicious UAV. In order to reduce energy consumption, this article designs an adaptive linear prediction algorithm. Through this algorithm, IoT devices upload prediction model instead of original data to greatly reduce in-network transmissions. Simulation results show that the proposed system can effectively improve the security and efficiency of data collection.
Conventional access control models such as RBAC and ABAC have been inefficient for IoT systems due to the raised security concerns. Blockchain technology has been effective to provide decentralized solutions for maintaining data, addressing the challenges of auditability, privacy, and scalability as well as eliminating a single point of failure problem in recent years IoT access control management. This work presents a review of access control frameworks using blockchain technology for IoT devices.
Mohammad Tabrez Quasim, Alaa Abd Elhamid Radwan, Goram Mufareh M Alshmrani, Mohammad Meraj
In terms of access, data processing, monitoring and healthcare, the world's health systems experience significant transformations. The advances in data capturing and connected technology are expected to produce about 2314 exabytes of health care data for 2020 [1]. Cyber criminals put a lot of effort for gaining access of healthcare knowledge. This challenge is expected to carry the cybersecurity market to about 27.1 billion dollars in the year 2026 [2]. The blockchain technology will help to form a centralized repository for data collection in clinical experiments. This article suggests a secure system using blockchain to make sure the protection of electronic healthcare records (EHR). The framework includes sensors, Interne of things, databases and other computing resources. This framework for securing EHR will improve the security, privacy of EHR as compared to traditional healthcare system.
Blockchain technology has triggered a new round of technological innovation and industrial change. Promoting the deep integration of blockchain technology and smart water conservancy has become an essential part of the digital transformation of the Chinese smart water conservancy industry. On the basis of the analysis of the framework of the smart water conservancy system and the technology infrastructure model of the blockchain, a conceptual model of a smart water conservancy information sharing platform is established. The platform has four-in-one and multicentralized participants including government departments, water conservancy enterprises, the public, and third-party maintenance, and the design of “alliance chain + private chain” dual chain smart contract. Moreover, the multidimensional scenarios of smart water conservancy innovation applications incorporating blockchain platform technology are addressed. Then, the water rights trading market is taken as an example to propose an innovative development path with consensus mechanisms, smart contracts, asymmetric encryption, and information source tracing. Although there may be some questions and challenges related to smart water conservancy and blockchain technology, this paper can provide a reference for the sustainable development of the smart water conservancy industry due to its fundamental societal contributions.
Since its emergence, blockchain technology has received great attention because of its advantages in terms of decentralization, transparency, traceability, and the ability to be tamper proof. These advantages help blockchain become a better option for fields, such as digital currency and information storage. Specifically, consortium blockchain is preferred by researchers because it provides a certain degree of access control and a supervisory mechanism. However, in real-world applications, blockchain platforms pervasively show bottlenecks, such as ultrahigh energy consumption, time inefficiency, low transaction throughput, vulnerability to targeted attacks, and poor fairness of user profits, which seriously influence the performance of this technology and thus hinder its development and adoption. In this article, we try to enhance the performance of blockchain platforms by optimizing the quality of its core module, known as the consensus algorithm. To do so, we introduce proof of assets and proof of reputation to design a voting-based decentralized consensus (VDC) algorithm for consortium blockchain. Combined with the verifiable random function (VRF), VDC realizes better fairness of user profits and time efficiency with acceptable energy consumption and without sacrificing security. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a faster consensus process and better user fairness than existing algorithms while still maintaining a negligible energy cost and adequate security.
In recent times, Blockchain has become one of the most influential technology. Numerous industry projects are developed and are under the development phase for enhancing blockchain technology in every way possible and making it applicable to various application-domains. Since the inception of Ethereum, many blockchain platforms have been developed using different types of technologies. Blockchain platforms, from its security perspective, don't interact with the outside world and acts as an independent and standalone ledger. But blockchain technology can not meet the needs of today's world if different ledgers don't interact with each other and with the legacy systems. Hence, Blockchain platforms should be able to communicate with each other and provide services to each other. Researchers and developers around the world are already working to achieve blockchain interoperability. In this paper, we survey interoperability solutions provided for blockchain platforms, both by industry people and the research community.
Oct 8, 2020·Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing
Proof of Capacity (PoC) is an eco-friendly alternative to Proof of Work for consensus in blockchains since it determines mining rights based on miners' storage rather than computation. In PoC, for every block, a miner executes hashing on part of his dedicated storage. The miner that comes up with the smallest hash value among all miners will win the block. PoC has yet to be applied to mobile applications, due to the storage limitation of mobile devices. Storage offloading can be a viable solution that allows miners to offload mining all files to a cloud storage. In each mining round, a miner can decide whether to mine on his local device or by a cloud virtual machine (VM). Self-mining requires no extra cost but it incurs download delay, which will reduce the chance of winning. Cloud-mining experiences no delay but it brings cost on VMs. This delay-cost tradeoff challenges each miner to determine a ratio between self-mining and cloud-mining to maximize his utility. We model interactions among miners as a non-cooperative game and formulate a Nash equilibrium problem to investigate the effects of offloading on miners' utilities. We analyze the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium and propose a distributed algorithm to achieve the equilibrium in a uniform-delay setting. Further, we extend our results to non-uniform delays since miners may choose different network settings, e.g. 5G, 4G, or 3G. Both numerical evaluation and testbed experiments on Burstcoin are conducted to show the feasibility of storage offloading and to validate the proposed models and theoretical results.
Manzoor Ahmed Hashmani, Aisha Zahid Junejo, Abdullah Alabdulatif, Syed Hasan Adil
Block-chain is one of the latest trends of tech world. The technology was introduced with Bitcoin and is being highly experimented for various cryptocurrencies ever since. However, with recent advancements in the technology, the research community and industries have started focusing on its applicability in other various areas such as healthcare, business, logistics, education and many more. Consequently, the research carried out in this paper investigates the use of Block-chain technology in education sector. Over the years, the use of technology in education have helped in improving the accessibility and quality of education using touch screens, Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, e-classrooms etc. However, there are certain areas in education that need further consideration such as keeping track of students and student related records and transcripts, reduction in manual and paperwork and more. This is where Block-chain is predicted to play a significant role. In this paper, the potential applications of Block-chain for tracing and tracking in education sector are discussed. The discussion is done by first presenting the existing issues in education sector. Further, using the tracking and tracing ability of the Block-chain, few solutions to the existing problems have been proposed. The proposal of solutions is followed by the challenges of integration of Block-chain technology in education sector. Finally, the paper concludes stating that Block-chain has a huge potential in revolutionizing the education sector if the existing challenges are overcome through research and experimentation.