M. Poongodi, Mounir Hamdi, V Vijayakumar, Bharat S. Rawal · 5 authors
we have become too dependent on technology owing to which the quantity of e-waste produced at the end of their life cycle has increased at a rapid pace. In later centuries, there would be an equivalent amount of carbon footprint by the smartphone sector as to that of transportation industry. The approximate estimation of the total carbon footprint while taking the other existing abundant electronic gadgets is enormous. Considering the growing volume of e-waste, the possibilities of these non-biodegradable elements contaminating the atmosphere are towering. The e-waste generated in all these recent years is being taken seriously by various nations and effective steps are being taken to overcome this challenge. To overcome this challenge, an effective e-waste management technique by means of blockchain in the 5G scenario is proposed. The proposed solution tracks the e-waste produced and motivates people by providing incentives to them for channelizing the e-waste via agencies managed by the government that effectively dispose the waste in an environmentfriendly way. Henceforth, a partnership model is proposed for the implementation of this method which leads to increase in jobs as well as proper organization of unplanned setup that is with a large amount of prospective potential.
Ethereum is the largest blockchain platform that supports smart contracts. Users deploy smart contracts by publishing the smart contract's bytecode to the blockchain. Since the data in the blockchain cannot be modified, even if these contracts contain bugs, it is not possible to patch deployed smart contracts with code updates. Moreover, there is currently neither a comprehensive classification framework for Ethereum smart contract bugs, nor detailed criteria for detecting bugs in smart contracts, making it difficult for developers to fully understand the negative effects of bugs and design new approaches to detect bugs. In this paper, to fill the gap, we first collect as many smart contract bugs as possible from multiple sources and divide these bugs into 9 categories by extending the IEEE Standard Classification for Software Anomalies. Then, we design the criteria for detecting each kind of bugs, and construct a dataset of smart contracts covering all kinds of bugs. With our framework and dataset, developers can learn smart contract bugs and develop new tools to detect and locate bugs in smart contracts. Moreover, we evaluate the state-of-the-art tools for smart contract analysis with our dataset and obtain some interesting findings: 1) Mythril, Slither and Remix are the most worthwhile combination of analysis tools. 2) There are still 10 kinds of bugs that cannot be detected by any analysis tool.
Seung Chul Lee, Jaehyun Lee, Seng-Phil Hong, Jae‐Hoon Kim
Internet of Things (IoT) networks composed of a large number of sensors and actuators generate a huge volume of data and control commands, which should be enforced by strong data reliability. The end-to-end data reliability of IoT networks is an essential industrial enabler. Blockchain technology can provide strong data reliability and integrity within IoT networks. We designed a lightweight end-to-end blockchain network that applies to common IoT applications. Its enhanced modular architecture and lightweight consensus mechanism guarantee its practical applicability for general IoT applications. In addition, the proposed blockchain network is highly software compatible because it adopts the Hyperledger development environment. Directly embedding the proposed blockchain middleware platform in small computing devices proves its practicability.
Recent years have shown a great interest of public in buying and selling of crypto/digital currency. With hundreds of digital currencies in financial market, bitcoin remains the most widely used, adapted, and accepted currency around the world. However, the critics of bitcoin still consider it a threat to modern day power usage. This paper discusses the important pitfalls, pros, and cons related to bitcoin's energy consumption. The paper begins by highlighting the flexibilities cryptocurrency can bring to online money transfers compared to traditional 'fiat' architecture. Then, the focus of the paper entirely remains on listing various facts related to bitcoin's energy utilization including a brief description of several emerging approaches for energy optimization. This paper is concluded by revealing key current challenges associated to bitcoin's energy usage.
Sudip Maitra, Venkata P. Yanambaka, Deepak Puthal, Ahmed Abdelgawad · 5 authors
Abstract The modern era of information and technology leverages connectivity and information sharing for enhancing applications and reducing human intervention. The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) in almost all aspects of modern life raises major challenges of security and privacy in health care services and the pharmaceutical industry. Blockchain has emerged as a secure technology in a trustless network without central governance. The inherent attributes it provides can solve the security and privacy challenges related to IoT and extend its capabilities. However, traditional instances of Blockchain are not suited for the IoT environment for reasons such as computationally expensive consensus process. Proof of authentication is a lightweight consensus algorithm that can be implemented in the IoT environment. This paper presents an IoT‐friendly Blockchain scheme implemented to evaluate the feasibility of medical supply and drug transportation to aid security and mitigate privacy issues which are fault‐tolerant, transparent, and traceable. The proof of concept implementation on portable single board computer demonstrates proof of authentication consensus algorithm executed with block validation and block addition in 30 and 40 ms while consuming 45 and 60mJ, respectively. Additionally, the network performance of the proposed architecture was presented and evaluated in the application context.
There is a growing interest from both the academia and industry to employ distributed ledger technology in the Internet-of-Things domain for addressing security-related and performance challenges. Distributed ledger technology enables non-trusted entities to communicate and reach consensus in a fully distributed manner through a cryptographically secure and immutable ledger. However, significant challenges arise mainly related to transaction processing speed and user privacy. This work explores the interplay between Internet-of-Things and distributed ledger technology, analysing the fundamental characteristics of this technology and discussing the related benefits and challenges.
Muhammad Tahir, Muhammad Sardaraz, Shakoor Muhammad, Muhammad Saud Khan
Blockchain and IoT are being deployed at a large scale in various fields including healthcare for applications such as secure storage, transactions, and process automation. IoT devices are resource-constrained, have no capability of security and self-protection, and can easily be hacked or compromised. Furthermore, Blockchain is an emerging technology with immutability features which provide secure management, authentication, and guaranteed access control to IoT devices. IoT is a cloud-based internet service in which processing and collection of user’s data are accomplished remotely. Smart healthcare also requires the facility to provide the diagnosis of patients located remotely. The smart health framework faces critical issues such as data security, costs, memory, scalability, trust, and transparency between different platforms. Therefore, it is important to handle data integrity and privacy as the user’s authenticity is in question due to an open internet environment. Several techniques are available that primarily focus on resolving security issues i.e., forgery, timing, denial of service and stolen smartcard attacks, etc. Blockchain technology follows the rules of absolute privacy to identify the users associated with transactions. The motivation behind the use of Blockchain in health informatics is the removal of the centralized third party, immutability, improved data sharing, enhanced security, and reduced overhead costs in distributed applications. Healthcare informatics has some specific requirements associated with the security and privacy along with the additional legal requirements. This paper presents a novel authentication and authorization framework for Blockchain-enabled IoT networks using a probabilistic model. The proposed framework makes use of random numbers in the authentication process which is further connected through joint conditional probability. Hence, it establishes a secure connection among IoT devices for further data acquisition. The proposed model is validated and evaluated through extensive simulations using the AVISPA tool and the Cooja simulator, respectively. Experimental results analyses show that the proposed framework provides robust mutual authenticity, enhanced access control, and lowers both the communication and computational overhead cost as compared to others.
The growing blockchain technology proves promising opportunities for enhancing the industrialized system and the Internet of Things (IoT) by given that idleness, storage space, and encryption for applications.Over the last few years, many new applications have started to emerge in industrial IoT, and blockchain technologies have attracted the attention of many researchers in academic and industrial.Decentralized security and privacy system based in Blockchain provide an enormous lift to the infrastructure of the IoT.In a smart home, Blockchain technology serves as the perfect gatekeeper for all communication packages.Authentication of identity is required before the terminal accesses the service to prevent access to unauthorized.The fact that trustworthy third parties are introduced destroys not only the independence and flexibility of the IoT system but also source problems such as a breakdown position and unilateral control dangers.A dynamic trust-right method was developed to advance the blockchain output and decrease the no. of authenticated communication in new blocks.A review and verification solutions based on the blockchain technology of the state of the art identity organizations.This article describes a decentralized model of identity verification that can guarantee autonomy and security initiative.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Fabio Antonelli
Abstract Within internet of things (IoT) research, there is a growing interest in leveraging the decentralization properties of blockchains, towards developing IoT authentication and authorization mechanisms that do not inherently require centralized third-party intermediaries. This paper presents a framework for sharing IoT data in a decentralized and private-by-design manner in exchange for monetary services. The framework is built on a tiered blockchain architecture, along with InterPlanetary File System for IoT data storage and transfer. The goal is to enable IoT data users to exercise fine-grained control on how much data they share with entities authenticated through blockchains. To highlight how the framework would be used in real-life scenarios, this paper presents two use cases, namely an IoT data marketplace and a decentralized connected vehicle insurance. These examples showcase how the proposed framework can be used for varying smart contract-based applications involving exchanges of IoT data and cryptocurrency. Following the discussion about the use cases, the paper outlines a detailed security analysis performed on the proposed framework, based on multiple attack scenarios. Finally, it presents and discusses extensive evaluations, in terms of various performance metrics obtained from a real-world implementation.
In this paper, we describe valid and invalid bitcoin transactions. Bitcoin is one of the most widespread currencies in the network, which can be used to perform purchases and transactions among nodes. Because of its digital feature, it can undergo some problems and attacks such as double spending (DS), Denial of Service(DoS), packet sniffing and so on. One of the most common challenges is double spending. DS implies spending a balance of given cryptocurrency more than once, viably making a difference between the spending record and the sum of available cryptocurrency. It is suggested that it can be prevented by including Timestamp server, which adds precise time data that is never repetitive. In this paper, the given solution was implemented using Java platform. The experiment results show the progress in preventing DS of bitcoin as soon as we connected the TSA server.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We are experiencing an unprecedented healthcare crisis caused by newly discovered coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The outbreaks of COVID-19 reveal the frailties of existing healthcare systems. Therefore, the digital transformation of healthcare systems becomes an inevitable trend. During this process, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays a crucial role, while intrinsic vulnerabilities of security and privacy deter the wide adoption of IoMT. In this article, we present a blockchain-enabled IoMT to address the security and privacy concerns of IoMT systems. We also discuss the solutions brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT to COVID-19 from five different perspectives. Moreover, we outline the open challenges and future directions of blockchain-enabled IoMT.
Attracted by the inherent security and privacy protection of the blockchain, incorporating blockchain into Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely studied in these years. However, the mining process requires high computational power, which prevents IoT devices from directly participating in blockchain construction. For this reason, edge computing service is introduced to help build the IoT blockchain, where IoT devices could purchase computational resources from the edge servers. In this paper, we consider the case that IoT devices also have other tasks that need the help of edge servers, such as data analysis and data storage. The profits they can get from these tasks is closely related to the amounts of resources they purchased from the edge servers. In this scenario, IoT devices will allocate their limited budgets to purchase different resources from different edge servers, such that their profits can be maximized. Moreover, edge servers will set "best" prices such that they can get the biggest benefits. Accordingly, there raise a pricing and budget allocation problem between edge servers and IoT devices. We model the interaction between edge servers and IoT devices as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game, whose objective is to reach the Stackelberg Equilibrium (SE). We prove the existence and uniqueness of the SE point, and design efficient algorithms to reach the SE point. In the end, we verify our model and algorithms by performing extensive simulations, and the results show the correctness and effectiveness of our designs.
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been ruling the sensing world since the time of its emergence. With the advancement of the sensor technology, the battery constraints of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are drawing a huge research attention of the researchers. The limited battery constraints can be dealt if the routing algorithms implied to sensor network are energy efficient. As the sensor nodes communicate in the wireless medium, the security of the sensor nodes becomes imperative to consider. Therefore, to affirm security issues, the Blockchain technology can be introduced at the Cluster head levels of cluster-based routing algorithm. Consequently, the leisure information about each node can be used to authenticate the data. In this paper, we have presented a study of blockchain technology pertaining to WSNs. It will help the readers to select the suitable method for their research work from the reported studies encapsulated in this paper.
Due to the rapid development of IoT systems and applications, a large amount of sensors' data has been generated. Processing and analyzing these data provide users with better applications in diversity. However, current wireless sensing nodes still have a significant issue of power consumption. As the application requirements usually have bounded-error tolerance in IoT systems, our previous research proposed bounded-error data compression to extend the lifetime of IoT system. Meanwhile, the IoT data storing and sharing often rely on the third party service providers. It created another issues of data privacy. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a bounded-error IoT (BIoT) data privacy protection scheme via blockchain smart contract to provide secure data storing and sharing. BIoT not only extends the lifetime of IoT systems, but also provides different levels of service quality in privacy protection according to the agreement of the rights and payment in smart contract. Experimental results demonstrate that BIoT can prolong the IoT system lifetime with data privacy protection.
Blockchains help to build trust among a decentralized network of unknown and untrusted peers who need to agree on a common protocol and trust the correctness and compatibility of the corresponding software implementations. The software engineering discipline cannot ignore this trend, as it fundamentally affects the way software is designed, developed, deployed, and delivered.1 As with the emergence of the Internet, software smart contracts for solving new classes of real-world problems, as opposed to introducing blockchains everywhere, where they may be unnecessary, or provide an inefficient and environmentally unsound solution.4
Y Supreet, Patil Mahesh Vasudev, H. Pavitra, Mouna Naravani · 5 authors
Blockchain, one of the modern technologies, has received significant attention recently. The blockchain is an immutable ledger which records the transaction in a decentralized manner that ensures high security. Blockchain-based applications are popular in numerous fields like financial services, cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity, supply chain, health care, E-Governance, asset management, Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. In order to validate a transaction within a ledger, blockchain uses the concept of consensus. Consensus guarantees fault tolerance, reliability and high security of the blockchain systems. The most widely used consensus algorithms in the modern blockchains are the Proof of Work (PoW), the Proof of Stake (PoS), the Proof of Activity(PoA) and the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance(PBFT). In this work, we conduct a performance evaluation of these four consensus algorithms using Naive implementation of a blockchain network. We also conduct experiments with two popular consensus mechanisms in Ethereum platform. We study the characteristics of transaction and query latencies by varying the number of complexity and transactions. Finally, we present the conclusion on the performance consensus algorithms.
The proliferation of the IoT in connected society is rapidly expanding into vertical industry sectors due to the ever-increasing ties amongst businesses and economies. As the number of IoT nodes utilized in a network increases, decentralized network infrastructure, and security provisioning mechanisms, primarily enabled by blockchain-based technologies, become more beneficial. However, blockchain-based IoT networks experience transaction throughput degradation due to the platform's cryptographically-based security features, where negotiating with ledger maintainers for faster processing is a must. Existing transaction processing schemes are mainly geared towards digital currency applications. In overcoming these challenges, a novel feeless transaction processing algorithm is proposed for non-cryptocurrency blockchain-based IoT networks. The proposed algorithm enables ledger maintainers in achieving desired processing throughputs for select transactions found in a miner's transaction pool. A utility function is designed to select transactions from miners' transaction pools to form blocks that add a desired operational value for achieving pre-determined production outputs over blockchain-based networks. Furthermore, the proposed scheme will utilize an aging process to increase the likelihood of selecting transactions with larger miners' transaction pool residence times. The simulation and implementation results show that the proposed methodologies increase the processing throughput of desired transactions while preventing transaction processing starvation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques