Mohd Azeem Faizi Noor, Saba Khanum, Taushif Anwar, Manzoor Ansari
Blockchain, the technology behind most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin and Ethereum, has attracted wide attention recently. It is the most emerging technology that has changed the financial and non-financial transaction system. It is omnipresent. Currently, this technology is enforcing banks, industries, and countries to adopt it in their financial, industrial, and government section. Earlier, it solved the centralize and double-spending problems successfully. In this chapter, the authors present a study of blockchain security issues and its challenges as well. They divided the whole chapter into two parts. The primer part covers a holistic overview of blockchain followed by the later section that argues about basic operations, 51% attack, scalability issue, Fork, Sharding, Lightening, etc. Finally, they mention an intro about its adaptation (financial or non-financial) in our 24/7 life and collaboration with fields like IoT.
Leili Soltanisehat, Reza Alizadeh, Haijing Hao, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
Blockchain can be used to build a peer-to-peer, secure, and smart transaction system. As a horizontal technology that has changed several fields of industry, blockchain has tremendous potential to transform healthcare systems as well. In this article, a systematic review is conducted to critically evaluate 64 articles on blockchain-based healthcare systems, published between 2016 and January 2020 in 21 conferences, 33 journals, and ten online sources. The aim of this article is to answer three main questions. First, what are the applications of blockchain in the healthcare systems, and what are the structures and challenges of applying blockchain to a specific healthcare domain? Second, what are the technical, temporal, and spatial aspects of the currently developed blockchain applications for different healthcare domain? Third, what are the future research directions in designing and implementing blockchain-based healthcare systems? Statistical facts about the technical aspects of these 64 articles show that most of the proposed blockchain-based healthcare systems use private blockchain and Ethereum platforms; furthermore, the majority of the authors are affiliated with research institutions in the USA and China. We also discuss potential future research directions, e.g., integrating the blockchain in artificial intelligence based solutions, cloud-computing-based solutions, and parallel blockchain architecture.
N. Deepa, Quoc‐Viet Pham, Dinh C. Nguyen, Sweta Bhattacharya · 9 authors
Big data has generated strong interest in various scientific and engineering domains over the last few years. Despite many advantages and applications, there are many challenges in big data to be tackled for better quality of service, e.g., big data analytics, big data management, and big data privacy and security. Blockchain with its decentralization and security nature has the great potential to improve big data services and applications. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on blockchain for big data, focusing on up-to-date approaches, opportunities, and future directions. First, we present a brief overview of blockchain and big data as well as the motivation behind their integration. Next, we survey various blockchain services for big data, including blockchain for secure big data acquisition, data storage, data analytics, and data privacy preservation. Then, we review the state-of-the-art studies on the use of blockchain for big data applications in different vertical domains such as smart city, smart healthcare, smart transportation, and smart grid. For a better understanding, some representative blockchain-big data projects are also presented and analyzed. Finally, challenges and future directions are discussed to further drive research in this promising area.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving from a stovepipe architecture to a collaborative and shared converged architecture. In the future, it will become a network development trend to construct a network-based virtual operating platform by virtualizing the IoT infrastructure to support different IoT services. The trust issues encountered during resource aggregation in heterogeneous networks and state measurements limit the applicability of the virtual network operating platform. In this article, we propose a framework for an endogenous trusted network to support virtual network operation, provide shared services externally, allocate resources internally, and implement artificial-intelligence-driven customization services for trusted virtual resources for the IoT. We use the consortium blockchain to establish the endogenous trusted framework for heterogeneous networks through software-defined networking and network function virtualization. In this framework, we design a mechanism for on-chain and off-chain collaborative resource allocation. The framework integrates time prediction algorithms and resource allocation algorithms to predict resource demand and allocate resources to achieve customization and dynamic adjustment. The application of this framework in specific scenarios is described using application examples.
Charles Tim Batista Garrocho, Mateus Silva, Célio Márcio Soares Ferreira, Carlos Frederico Marcelo da Cunha Cavalcanti · 5 authors
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is expected to attract significant investments for industry. In this new environment, blockchain presents immediate potential in applications of the IIoT, offering several benefits to industrial cyberphysical systems.
With the rapid development of network technology, online education becomes indispensable to the whole education system, which has been paid an increasing attention to by various education institutions, but the management of online learning process, certificates or other data is still far from perfection. To solve these problems, the paper proposes to use the blockchain technology in online education, which is conducive to the management of educational resources, student data, certification of students' achievements and students' employment. By means of public blockchains and private blockchains, the learning users, education institutions, education regulators and the talent markets can make direct communication with each other as different nodes on the blockchain, which can promote the healthy development of online education.
Cloud computing has been exploited in managing large-scale IoT systems. IoT cloud servers usually handle a large number of requests from various IoT devices. Due to the fluctuant and heavy workload, the servers require the cloud to provide high scalability, stable performance, low price and necessary functionalities. However, traditional clouds usually offer computing service with the abstraction of virtual machine (VM), which can hardly meet these requirements. Meanwhile, different cloud vendors provide different performance stabilities and price models, which fluctuate according to the dynamic workload. A single cloud cannot satisfy all the requirements of the IoT scenario well. The JointCloud computing model empowers the cooperation among multiple public clouds. However, it is still difficult to dynamically schedule the workload on different clouds based on the VM abstraction. This paper introduces HCloud, a trusted JointCloud platform for IoT systems using serverless computing model. HCloud allows an IoT server to be implemented with multiple serverless functions and schedules these functions on different clouds based on a schedule policy. The policy is specified by the client and includes the required functionalities, execution resources, latency, price and so on. HCloud collects the status of each cloud and dispatches serverless functions to the most suitable cloud based on the schedule policy. By leveraging the blockchain technology, we further enforce that our system can neither fake the cloud status nor wrongly dispatch the target functions. We have implemented a prototype of HCloud and evaluated it by simulating multiple cloud providers. The evaluation results show that HCloud can greatly improve the performance of serverless workloads with negligible costs.
Shwetha Ramachandran, O Obu Kiruthika, Aishwariyavalli Ramasamy, R. Vanaja · 5 authors
Blockchain technology has been applied extensively in the fields of finance (as cryptocurrency), supply chain, real estate and has persistently promising scope for implementation in newer, broader ways. Blockchain not only focuses on making data easily accessible to its users over a peer-to-peer network but also ensures the security of data using encryption mechanisms. With monumental advances in healthcare technology in the past decade, the storage, access, and management of electronic medical data have become cumbersome. Electronic Health Record (EHR) handling demands privacy as well as improved accessibility. Blockchain technology provides an opportunity to find the balance between both the security and easy accessibility aspects of the EHRs. Furthermore, storing the EHRs on Blockchain will ensure that the transactions carried out on the EHRs are transparent and the EHRs are not subject to unauthorized modification. In this paper, we aim to review existing Blockchain-based paradigms for the management of Electronic Health Records and assess plausible directions for the scope of Blockchain in the future of management of medical data.
Antonio Bordonaro, Alessandra De Paola, Giuseppe Lo Re, Marco Morana
The main goal of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is to support users in their daily activities by satisfying and anticipating their needs. To achieve such goal, AmI systems rely on physical infrastructures made of heterogenous sensing devices which interact in order to exchange information and perform monitoring tasks. In such a scenario, a full achievement of AmI vision would also require the capability of the system to autonomously check the status of the infrastructure and supervise its maintenance. To this aim, in this paper, we extend some previous works in order to allow the self-management of AmI devices enabling them to directly interact with maintenance service providers. In particular, the combination of smart contracts and blockchains enables AmI systems to autonomously communicate with untrusted entities and complete secure transactions without the brokering of a trusted third party. The proposed approach has been adopted to design a sample AmI application capable of managing requests from faulty devices in a Smart home.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is one of the most trending topics in the present world. It has numerous benefits and its potentiality is unfolding gradually. The implementation of IIoT in mission and safety-critical systems has shown its significance. Since it deals with important and sensitive information, an extensive study is required to address the susceptibility of it towards security issues. Therefore, there have been many proposals to use certificateless signature scheme, machine learning approaches, public key encryption as well as blockchain to improve the security of IIoT. It is important to note that blockchain is playing a significant role in the IIoT technology where the important characteristics of blockchain, immutability, decentralization, tamper-proof, have made a profound impact on the security vulnerabilities of IIoT. Taking this into account, this paper proposes a permissioned blockchain for IIoT that addresses and guarantees to ensure and improve the security vulnerabilities and susceptibility of IIoT towards cyber threats. The permissioned blockchain enabled IIoT ensures a secure medium for device communication, data sharing, and access control. This paper also discusses the security issues of IIoT and presents a comprehensive analysis of some of the proposed blockchain based solutions to improve IIoT security challenges. It addresses the benefits of a permissioned blockchain enabled IIoT over a public blockchain as well as presents a future direction for the upcoming integration of blockchain with IIoT and other industries.
Eugenio Balistri, Francesco Casellato, Carlo Giannelli, Cesare Stefanelli
The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) together with its spread in industrial environments have changed pro-duction lines, by dramatically fostering the dynamicity of data sharing and the openness of machines. However, the increased flexibility and openness of the industrial environment (also pushed by the adoption of Edge devices) must not negatively affect the security and safety of production lines and its opera-tional processes. In fact, opening industrial environments towards the Internet and increasing interactions among machines may represent a security threat, if not properly managed. The paper originally proposes the adoption of the Blockchain to securely store in distributed ledgers topology information and access rules, with the primary goal of maximizing the cyber-resiliency of industrial networks. In this manner, it is possible to store and query topology information and security access rules in a completely distributed manner, ensuring data availability even in case a centralized control point is temporarily down or the network partitioned. Moreover, Blockchain consensus algorithms can be used to foster a participative validation of topology information, to reciprocally ensure the identity of interacting machines/nodes, to securely distribute topology information and commands in a privacy-preserving manner, and to trace any past modification in a non-repudiable manner.
Meng Li, F. Richard Yu, Pengbo Si, Ruizhe Yang · 6 authors
Recently, the development of the internet of Things (ioT) provides plenty of opportunities and challenges in various fields. As an essential part of ioT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications open a novel way that machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) are connected and communicated without any human intervention. However, when ioT infrastructures are destroyed, network services will be disrupted. Then it is difficult for the MTCDs located in remote areas to restore communication by themselves immediately. To cope with these problems, in this article, we introduce some promising technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), blockchain and mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure data transmission, security and reliability in damaged M2M communications networks. Meanwhile, we propose a joint optimization framework to maximize both data computation capacity and throughput of blockchain systems, and formulate it as a Markov decision process (MDP). in order to solve the dynamic and complicated optimization problem, dueling deep Q-network (DQN) is adopted, so that the optimal selection and decision can be made to achieve maximum system rewards. Simulation results with different system parameters show that our proposed framework can improve the system performance effectively compared to the existing schemes. Finally, open research issues and challenges are discussed for UAV-assisted M2M communications.
This paper is to improve the performance of Hy-perledger Fabric that is one of the private blockchain open-source projects. The decentralization of data management, which has recently become important, is realized as a blockchain. Blockchain is a technology used in various fields such as data verification, storage, and banking, but performance is one of the important problems and is always mentioned. This is because a transaction must be agreed quickly and recorded in the ledger so that it can be used smoothly in systems that generate tens of thousands of transactions per second, such as banking and card use. Hyperledger fabric sends transactions generated by clients to peer nodes on the network. The transactions are hashed with the previous block in the distributed ledger. Peer nodes collect transactions received from multiple clients and execute chain code for verification, which is then sent to the orderer node and made into blocks. The block created at this time compares hash values to several peer nodes to verify the integrity of the data after verifying the block. Orderer node collects the transactions and is ordering them into the block. In this paper, we proposed to improve the performance of the hyperledger fabric by reducing network latency and the number of transfers by batch processing the process of sending and receiving chain code messages in the process of delivering transactions generated by clients for verification. The results of the performance are expressed in transactions per second(TPS), with the experiment showing that send rate(TPS) nearly doubling to 2302→4244, and throughput(TPS) increasing by about 1.5 times to 1677→2244. As a result of the experiment, send rate and throughput increased by a large margin, the batch processing of chain code messages can perform much higher performance.
Mohammad Iqbal Saryuddin Assaqty, Ying Gao, Xiping Hu, Zhaolong Ning · 7 authors
Automation in smart manufacturing depends on many parties in the supply chain and distribution networks. A smart manufacturer needs to track the location and state of materials from its suppliers and products to its customers/distributors to manage the corresponding production schedule. The need for such information can be fulfilled by the use of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices installed at each respective party. However, even though all parties may trust one another, they have confidential data produced by the IIoT devices that are not allowed to be shared with other parties, or only allowed to be exchanged with certain parties. Even though the data are not confidential, they may still be required to share partial data based on the needs of each party. On the other hand, all parties have their independent systems that differ from each other, which leads to complex integration. Regarding those situations, a private-blockchain-based IIoT is promising to bridge the need for product and material tracking information exchange between parties while maintaining the respective confidentiality.
Smart Grids and Industry 4.0 (I4.0) are neither a dream nor a near-future thing anymore, rather it is happening now. The integration of more and more embedded systems and IoT devices is pushing smart grids and I4.0 forward at a breakneck speed. To cope up with this, the modification of age-old SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in terms of decentralization, near-real-time operation, security, and privacy is necessary. In this context, blockchain technology has the potential of providing not only these essential features of the data acquisition process of future SCADA systems but also many other useful add-ons. On the other side, it is evident that various type of security breach tends to take place more during any economic turmoil. These can cause even more serious devastation to the global economy and human life. Thus, it is necessary to make our industries robust, automated, and resilient with secured and immutable data acquiring systems. This paper deals with the implementation scopes of blockchain in the data acquisition part of SCADA systems in the area of the smart grid and I4.0. There are several consensus mechanisms to support blockchain integration in the field of cryptocurrencies, vehicular networks, healthcare systems, e-commerce, etc. But little attention has been paid to developing efficient and easy-to-implement consensus mechanisms in the field of blockchain-enabled SCADA systems. From this perspective, a novel consensus mechanism, which we call PoRCH (Proof of Random Count in Hashes), with a customized mining node selection scheme has been proposed in this paper. Also, a small-scale prototype of a blockchain-enabled data acquisition system has been developed. The performance evaluation of the implemented prototype shows the benefits of blockchain technology.
Diogo Serranito, André Vasconcelos, Sérgio Guerreiro, Miguel Correia
Human resource contracting processes depend on trustworthy qualifications (diplomas or certificates) that may be counterfeit or falsified and are hard to verify manually. This paper leverages blockchain technology and smart contracts, to enforce a decentralized verification solution for higher education certificates, e.g., university diplomas. The solution allows Higher-Education Institutions (HEI) to register the certificates they issue in the blockchain, and recruiting organizations to check the authenticity and integrity of these certificates. The solution is implemented through five major components: i) the consortium smart contract, ii) the HEI smart contract, iii) the HEI client, iv) the recruiter app, and v) the consortium app. A prototype of the implementation is tested in a real blockchain (a testnet) and the challenges raised with the experiment are identified and discussed with a main focus on the decentralization mechanism performance.
Due to the recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge-Fog-Cloud Computing technologies, the Smart Public Safety (SPS) system has become a more realistic solution for seamless public safety services that are enabled by integrating machine learning (ML) into heterogeneous edge computing networks. While SPS facilitates convenient exchanges of surveillance data streams among device owners and third-party applications, the existing monolithic service-oriented architecture (SOA) is unable to provide scalable and extensible services in a large-scale heterogeneous network environment. Moreover, traditional security solutions rely on a centralized trusted third-party authority, which not only can be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure, but it also incurs privacy concerns on improperly use of private information. Inspired by blockchain and microservices technologies, this paper proposed a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Smart Public Safety (BlendSPS) system. Leveraging the hybrid blockchain fabric, a microservices based security mechanism is implemented to enable decentralized security architecture, and it supports immutability, auditability, and traceability for secure data sharing and operations among participants of the SPS system. An extensive experimental study verified the feasibility of the proposed BlendSPS that possesses security and privacy proprieties with limited overhead on IoT based edge networks.
Minho Jo, Kai Hu, F. Richard Yu, Li Sun · 6 authors
The three articles in this special section focus are devoted to sharing state-of-the-art research on private blockchain in industrial IoT (Internet of Things). A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger with a chain network of blocks recording historical transactions. A transaction is a record of action. A transaction inside the block will be of: sensing/saving data, assembling parts, depositing money, processing a business deal, ordering/ delivering a product part, notarizing a paperwork, and so on. Blockchains are categorized into two types, public blockchain and private blockchain. Private blockchains have been more in the spotlight in industry recently because they are much faster, cheaper, and privacy-oriented compared to the public blockchain. We expect that private blockchains will be much more widely implemented soon.
With the spread of novel coronavirus, global health concerns have increased as it has flattened the curve of mortality worldwide. To handle such a containment of disease, multi-swarm Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with 5G can be used to reduce human intervention with major benefits of high bandwidth, ultra-low-latency, and reliability. Multi-swarm UAVs sends a huge amount of data to ground stations with real-time connection density of 107/km2, which is a bottleneck on 5G networks; data security is another issue in sharing sensitive data. Motivated by these issues, in this article, we propose a blockchain-envisioned softwarized multi-swarming UAV communication scheme based on a 6G network with intelligent connectivity, Terahertz (THz) frequency bands, and virtualization of link and physical-level protocols. Softwarization makes the communication infrastructure flexible, agile, and easily configurable, and the potential of blockchain supports data security. Results show that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of processing delay, packet loss reduction, and throughput compared to exiting 4G/5G-based systems.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can provide efficient and effective solutions for the development of smart cities. They have been widely used in civilian and military applications, such as data acquisition, data dissemination, audio and video surveillance, aerial photography, crop surveys, and real-time medical care. The network communication and security challenges in UAV networks are explored by research organizations across the globe, but still, many challenges remain unsolved like sensitive and end-user-related applications. Moreover, traditional UAV communication is not adequate to deal with the high mobility and dynamic features of UAV. So, there is a need for an efficient and secure network of UAV as they have been widely used in hostile environments. Motivated from the aforementioned facts, in this article, we present a broad survey on the architecture, requirements, and use cases of 6G technology. It also presents a solution taxonomy based on the applications of UAV communication. Based on the findings from the survey, we present a blockchain-envisioned security solution and 6G-enabled network connectivity in UAV communication. A summary of future research directions for the integration of blockchain and 6G technology in UAV communications is also presented. Then, we present a case study of a blockchain-envisioned UAV communication using 6G networks to secure Industry 4.0 applications.
Due to increasing popularity in distributed ledger systems and the increasing demand of a stable model of a blockchain, fitting both for the development of IoT (Internet of Things) and DApps(Decentralized Applications), the current generation of blockchain needs to solve its main problems ranging from scalability to security and to bring improvements, in order to fit the real-world needs of society nowadays. One of many solutions brought by current prospective blockchains is a form of governance through different types of nodes, usually equipped with more computational resources, that have a more important significance in the network. In this paper, we tried to showcase the applicability of democratic governance in the blockchain ecosystem through the use of supernodes, in order to solve some of the current dilemmas. Despite the multitude of the use-cases, we will focus on four that show great potential in improving the blockchain technology, by outlining both their positive and negative points. Besides that, current blockchains that have a form of governance will be analyzed by examining the use-cases of the supernodes as well as the benefits and negative aspects they give to the ecosystem.
Bin Cao, Xuesong Wang, Weizheng Zhang, Houbing Song · 5 authors
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has developed rapidly in recent years. Private blockchains with decentralization, flexible rules, and good privacy protection can be applied in the IIoT to process the massive data and tackle the security problem. However, the scalability of blockchain places a restriction on IIoT. Accordingly, this article proposes an improved algorithm based on Two_Arch2 to improve the scalability and decentralization while reducing the latency and cost of the blockchain. By integrating the private blockchain theory to IIoT and simultaneously considering the above four objectives, a many-objective blockchain-enabled IIoT model is constructed. Then an improved Two_Arch2 algorithm is utilized to solve the model. Experimental results show that the improved algorithm can effectively optimize four indicators of the model.