Elizabeth Nathania Witanto, Yustus Eko Oktian, Sang-Gon Lee, Jin-Heung Lee
As the usage growth rate of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is increasing, various issues related to these devices need attention. One of them is the distribution of the IoT firmware update. The IoT devices’ software development does not end when the manufacturer sells the devices to the market. It still needs to be kept updated to prevent cyber-attacks. The commonly used firmware update process, over-the-air (OTA), mostly happens in a centralized way, in which the IoT devices directly download the firmware update from the manufacturer’s server. This central architecture makes the manufacturer’s server vulnerable to single-point-of-failure and latency issues that can delay critical patches from being applied to vulnerable devices. The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) is one organization contributing to providing interoperability services for IoT devices. In one of their subject areas, they provide a firmware update protocol for IoT devices. However, their firmware update process does not ensure the integrity and security of the patches. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based OCF firmware update for IoT devices. Specifically, we introduce two types of firmware update protocol, direct and peer-to-peer updates, integrated into OCF firmware update specifications. In the direct scenario, the device, through the IoT gateway, can download the new firmware update from the manufacturer’s server. Meanwhile, in the peer-to-peer scheme, the device can query the update from the nearby gateways. We implemented our protocol using Raspberry Pi hardware and Ethereum-based blockchain with the smart contracts to record metadata of the manufacturer’s firmware updates. We evaluated the proposed system’s performance by measuring the average throughput, the latency, and the firmware update distribution’s duration. The analysis results indicate that our proposal can deliver firmware updates in a reasonable duration, with the peer-to-peer version having a faster completion time than the direct one.
With the features of decentralization and trustlessness and through distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission, and encryption algorithms, blockchain has shed new light on the security and protection of medical data, and it can resolve the contradiction between data sharing and privacy protection with proper security strategies. In this paper, we integrate the strengths of both blockchain and cloud computing and build the privacy protection scheme for medical data based on blockchain and cloud computing. This scheme introduces cloud computing and provides services to blockchain nodes with cloud server computing; meanwhile, it collects, analyzes, processes, and maintains medical data in the identity authentication interface and solves the insufficient computing abilities of some nodes in blockchain so as to verify the authenticity and reliability of data. The simulation experiment proves that the proposed scheme is effective. It can achieve the secure protection and integrity verification of medical data and address the problems of high computing complexity, data sharing, and privacy protection.
Nikola Todorović, Marko Vještica, Vladimir Dimitrieski, Miroslav Zarić · 6 authors
In recent years, Industry 4.0 has promoted the enhanced horizontal integration of value chain participants, aiming to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Cross-Organizational Business Processes. In this paper, we discuss transparency and data privacy challenges that occur with the introduction of a high level of horizontal integration. Private, permissioned Distributed Ledger Technology systems and smart contracts can be used to address these challenges and enhance the integration of business processes across the entire value chain. To make this possible, we propose a creation of a Model-Driven Software Development approach based on a Domain-Specific Modeling Language that would enable automatic generation of smart contracts. Generated smart contracts could then be used by collaborating parties to supervise the state of production and contract fulfillment in a trustworthy and secure way.
The Internet of Things (IoT) as a concept is fascinating and exciting, with an exponential growth just beginning. The IoT global market is expected to grow from 170 billion USD in 2017 to 560 billion USD by 2022. Though many experts have pegged IoT as the next industrial revolution, two of the major challenging aspects of IoT since the early days are having a secure privacy-safe ecosystem encompassing all building blocks of IoT architecture and solve the scalability problem as the number of devices increases. In recent years, Distributed Ledgers have often been referred to as the solution for both privacy and security problems. One form of distributed ledger is the Blockchain system. The aim of this paper consists of reviewing the most recent Blockchain architectures, comparing the most interesting and popular consensus algorithms, and evaluating the convergence between Blockchain and IoT by illustrating some of the main interesting projects in this research field. Furthermore, the paper provides a vision of a disruptive research topic that the authors are investigating: the use of AI algorithms to be applied to IoT devices belonging to a Blockchain architecture. This obviously requires that the devices be provided with adequate computational capacity and that can efficiently optimize their energy consumption.
Mohammad Dabbagh, Mohsen Kakavand, Mohammad Tahir, Angela Amphawan
Recent years have witnessed a sizeable growth of Blockchain applications in enterprises. Blockchain is transforming the traditional approach of storing and managing data in a single location into a decentralized ledger. Although many industries are keen on adopting Blockchain technology for enhanced transaction transparency, the performance of the current Blockchain platforms is still perplexing to stakeholders. Therefore, this research aims to conduct an empirical study to evaluate the performance of two prominent Blockchain platforms, Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. The performance evaluation is based on measuring four metrics including success rate, average latency, throughput, and resource consumption. The experimental results of executing 100 transactions show that Hyperledger Fabric generally surpasses Ethereum against the four performance metrics. The presented results in this research would assist practitioners in their decision-making process of adopting the ideal Blockchain platform into their IT systems based on application requirements.
The growing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), typically referred to as drones, poses new challenges on how to manage their operations in various internet of things (IoT) use cases such as surveillance and monitoring, weather prediction, agriculture, etc. The latter includes a massive number of devices that sometimes produce invalid messages due to lack of energy or system shutdown and needs to be autonomously monitored with drones in rural areas. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based platform for managing drone IoT operations while maintaining trust and security. The test-bed consists of IoT devices, a drone and blockchain-enabled gateways through which drones are controlled to replace malfunctioning devices. The latter are detected using Z-score observation algorithm which launches a smart contract and sends the drone with clear operation order. The results obtained in realistic agriculture use case highlight the utility of our proposition in decreasing signaling and operation time, improving the percentage of successful maintenance operations and providing trust and security when managing drones in an autonomous manner.
Blockchain applications in vehicular networks can offer many advantages, including decentralization and improved security. However, most of the consensus algorithms in blockchain are difficult to be implemented in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) without the help of edge computing services. For example, the connectivity in VANET only remains for a short period of time, which is not sufficient for highly time-consuming consensus algorithms, e.g., Proof of Work, running on mobile-edge nodes (vehicles). Other consensus algorithms also have some drawbacks, e.g., Proof of Stake (PoS) is biased toward nodes with a higher amount of stakes and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) is not highly secure against malicious nodes. For these reasons, we propose a voting blockchain based on the Proof-of-Quality-Factor (PoQF) consensus algorithm, where the threshold number of votes is controlled by edge computing servers. Specifically, PoQF includes voting for message validation and a competitive relay selection process based on the probabilistic prediction of channel quality between the transmitter and receiver. The performance bounds of failure and latency in message validation are obtained. This article also analyzes the throughput of block generation, as well as the asymptotic latency, security, and communication complexity of PoQF. An incentive distribution mechanism to reward honest nodes and punish malicious nodes is further presented and its effectiveness against the collusion of nodes is proved using the game theory. Simulation results show that PoQF reduces failure in validation by 11% and 15% as compared to PoS and PoET, respectively, and is 68 ms faster than PoET.
Xiantao Jiang, F. Richard Yu, Tian Song, Victor C. M. Leung
Video surveillance in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) is in the rapid growth stage, where video analytics is a potential technology to improve the safety of the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles (IoAV). However, massive video data transmission and computation-intensive video analytics bring an overwhelming burden for vehicular networks. Moreover, owing to the unstable network connection, the video data are not always reliable, which makes data sharing a lack of security and scalability in IoAV. In this work, we first propose a video analytics framework, where the multiaccess edge computing (MEC) and blockchain technologies are integrated into IoAV to optimize the transaction throughput of the blockchain system as well as reducing the latency of the MEC system. Furthermore, based on deep reinforcement learning, the joint optimization problem is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), and the asynchronous advantage actor–critic (A3C) algorithm is adopted to solve this problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach can fast converge and significantly improve the performance of blockchain-enabled IoAV with MEC.
Blockchain-powered edge computing (BEC) is a promising extension to strengthen the security and the trustworthiness among collaborative edge clouds for delivering computation-intensive and delay-sensitive services in the environments of IoT and 5G. A fundamental challenge is how to respond to the maximum number of IoT requests at the network edge instead of the remote cloud. Although some work has been done to consider service provisioning and request scheduling in collaborative edge clouds, they assume that a single service is used to respond to each request. This assumption, however, is not practical to meet the demand of emerging IoT applications. In reality, the request needs to call a set of services with a chain-based structure. To tackle this challenge, in this article, we first propose a chain-based service request model for emerging IoT applications and further study the joint service provisioning and request scheduling problem for chain-based service requests at the network edge. We characterize this problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) model and prove the NP-hardness of this joint optimization problem. Furthermore, we prove that the related problem is of approximate submodularity with an approximation ratio guarantee. Finally, a novel two-stage optimization (TSO) scheme is proposed, and the results of extensive experiments show the efficiency and the effectiveness of the TSO scheme.
Riccardo Bonazzi, Francesco Cimmino, Jean-Luc Beuchat, Fanny Vérolet
In this paper, we describe an ongoing project to assess the liquidity risk of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in a network. In doing so we try to mimic the tracing applications that have been done to Covid-19. We built a simple artefact under the shape of a method called LUC (Liquidity for Unstructured Collaborations) to (1) collect data that has been encrypted by using multiple keys, (2) store the data in a shared ledger and (3) extract the required information concerning the credit risk of each user while respecting the conditions for the zero-knowledge proof. We see this solution as well-adapted for firms performing unstructured collaboration and we see our service as complementary concerning a trusted company, in the same way, the Covid-19 tracing application collects weak signals and then send patients to doctors for official testing.
Critical infrastructure systems are vital to underpin the functioning of a society and economy. Due to the ever-increasing number of Internet-connected Internet-of-Things (IoT)/Industrial IoT (IIoT), and the high volume of data generated and collected, security and scalability are becoming burning concerns for critical infrastructures in industry 4.0. The blockchain technology is essentially a distributed and secure ledger that records all the transactions into a hierarchically expanding chain of blocks. Edge computing brings the cloud capabilities closer to the computation tasks. The convergence of blockchain and edge computing paradigms can overcome the existing security and scalability issues. In this article, we first introduce the IoT/IIoT critical infrastructure in industry 4.0, and then we briefly present the blockchain and edge computing paradigms. After that, we show how the convergence of these two paradigms can enable secure and scalable critical infrastructures. Then, we provide a survey on the state of the art for security and privacy and scalability of IoT/IIoT critical infrastructures. A list of potential research challenges and open issues in this area is also provided, which can be used as useful resources to guide future research.
The development of eHealth systems has brought great convenience to people's life. Researchers have been combining new technologies to make eHealth systems work better for patients. The Blockchain-based eHealth system becomes popular because of its unique distributed tamper-resistant and privacy-preserving features. However, due to the security issues of the blockchain system, there are many security risks in eHealth systems utilizing the blockchain technology. i.e. 51% attacks can destroy blockchain-based systems. Besides, trivial transactions and frequent calls of smart contracts in the blockchain system bring additional costs and security risks to blockchain-based eHealth systems. Worse still, electronic medical records (EMRs) are controlled by medical institutions rather than patients, which causes privacy leakage issues. In this paper, we propose a medical data Sharing and Privacy-preserving eHealth system based on blockChain technology (SPChain). We combine RepuCoin with the SNARKs-based chameleon hash function to resist underlying blockchain attacks, and design a new chain structure to make microblocks contribute to the weight of blockchain. The system allows patients to share their EMRs among different medical institutions in a privacy-preserving way. Besides, authorized medical institutions can label wrong EMRs with the patients' permissions in the case of misdiagnosis. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed system can provide a strong security guarantee with a high efficiency.
Siddharth M. Nair, Varsha Ramesh, Amit Kumar Tyagi
The major issues and challenges in blockchain over internet of things are security, privacy, and usability. Confidentiality, authentication, and control are the challenges faced in security issue. Hence, this chapter will discuss the challenges and opportunities from the prospective of security and privacy of data in blockchain (with respect to security and privacy community point of view). Furthermore, the authors will provide some future trends that blockchain technology may adapt in the near future (in brief).
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Although the data trading platform has accelerated the flow of data, the current data trading platform still has many problems. According to the characteristics of the blockchain technology, from the aspects of the attack behavior in the blockchain and the security application of the blockchain technology in power transactions, this paper studies the security of the blockchain. Moreover, this article focuses on the privacy protection of the ciphertext strategy in the CP-ABE scheme, and protects the privacy information of the access strategy by designing appropriate ciphertext and key structures and access structure forms. In addition, the system efficiency is improved by computing outsourcing, and solutions to problems in outsourcing computing are proposed. Meanwhile, two efficient and flexible support policy hidden multi-authorization center access control schemes are constructed. Finally, this study analyzes the performance of the model through controlled experiments. The research results show that this scheme has excellent performance.
To support the increasing computation-intensive applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing is introduced to provide mobile devices computing resources for performing low-latency tasks. Therefore, how to design an effective and secure computing resource allocation mechanism is attracting increasing attention. A lot of works have been done to design an effective computational resource market for IoT, but the problems of vulnerability and inefficiency still exist. In this article, we propose a two-level Stackelberg game-based computing resource trading mechanism for mobile IoT devices with a credit-based payment approach, which is implemented by smart contracts on blockchain. In our model, the Stackelberg game consists of two levels, i.e., leader-level and user-level. In the leader-level, the computing service provider (CSP) and its agent constitute a composite leader. The agent purchases computing resource from CSP on credit and acts as a broker among leader-level and user-level reselling these computing resources to users. In the user-level, every user experiences social externality, which means users are interdependent. The leader-level subgame makes credit payment easier by making loaning and trading become a joint credit payment. The user-level subgame makes the market more active and closer to reality by introducing social externality. Besides, smart contracts can prevent malicious behaviors such as delay payment. We also conduct equilibrium analysis and prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium in our Stackelberg game-based model. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments to evaluate the cost of smart contracts and the performance of each entity with the proposed pricing mechanism.
There are many critical applications working with blockchain-based technology including the financial sector, healthcare, and supply chain management. The fundamental application of blockchain is Bitcoin, which was primarily designed for the financial value transfer. Owing to the feature of decentralized storage structure, immutability, integrity, availability, and reliability of transactions, the blockchain has become the need of the current industry like VANET. However, presently, not much work has been done in order to mitigate the redundancy in the distributed ledger. Hence, the authors arrive at the intelligible conclusion to detect a similar transaction that can mitigate the redundancy of transaction in a distributed ledger. In this chapter, they are addressing two main challenges in blockchain technology: firstly, how to minimize the storage size of blockchain distributed ledger and, secondly, detecting the similar transaction in the distributed ledger to mitigate the redundancy. To detect similar transaction from the distributed ledger they have applied the average hash technique.
Raja Wasim Ahmad, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Ibrar Yaqoob · 6 authors
The year 2020 has witnessed the emergence of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that has rapidly spread and adversely affected the global economy, health, and human lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of existing healthcare systems regarding its inadequacy to timely and efficiently handle public health emergencies. A large portion of today’s healthcare systems are centralized and fall short in providing necessary information security and privacy, data immutability, transparency, and traceability features to detect frauds related to COVID-19 vaccination certification, anti-body testing, and medical supplies. Blockchain technology can assist to combat the COVID-19 pandemic by assuring safe and reliable medical supplies, accurate identification of virus hot spots, and establishing data provenance to verify the genuine personal protective equipment that is decentralized, trustworthy, traceable, and transparent. In this paper, we discuss the potential blockchain applications for the COVID-19 pandemic. We present the high-level design of three blockchain-based systems to enable the governments and medical professionals to efficiently handle health emergencies caused by COVID-19. We discuss the important ongoing blockchain-based research projects to demonstrate the adoption of blockchain technology for the COVID-19. Finally, we identify and discuss future research challenges along with their key causes and guidelines.