Jianhong Zhang, Qijia Zhang, Shenglong Ji, Wenle Bai
As an emergent-architecture, mobile edge computing shifts cloud service to the edge of networks. It can satisfy several desirable characteristics for IoT systems. To reduce communication pressure from IoT devices, data aggregation is a good candidate. However, data processing in MEC may suffer from many challenges, such as unverifiability of aggregated data, privacy-violation and fault-tolerance. To address these challenges, we propose PVF-DA: privacy-preserving, verifiable and fault-tolerant data aggregation in MEC based on aggregator-oblivious encryption and zero-knowledge-proof. The proposed scheme can not only provide privacy protection of the reported data, but also resist the collusion between MEC server and corrupted IoT devices. Furthermore, the proposed scheme has two outstanding features: verifiability and strong fault-tolerance. Verifiability can make IoT device to verify whether the reported sensing data is correctly aggregated. Strong fault-tolerance makes the aggregator to compute an aggregate even if one or several IoTs fail to report their data. Finally, the detailed security proofs are shown that the proposed scheme can achieve security and privacy-preservation properties in MEC.
In this paper, we will present a new model of distributed ledger-based IoT network, in which we combined Hyperledger Sawtooth as blockchain with Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) as a distributed storage system. The combination of these two types of distributed ledger technologies can allow more efficient data storage than in other blockchain implementations. This work was initiated by the automotive manufacturer Renault based on the idea of a new ecosystem of smart vehicles containing IoT devices. We will focus on an accident use case. After the accident, the cars send their data to a dedicated smart contract. We will also describe furthermore our implementation, the characteristics of Hyperledger Sawtooth and IPFS and finally, we demonstrate the realistic feasibility of this implementation by latency measurements.
In general, Cloud storage is considered as a distributed model. Here, the data is usually stored on remote servers to properly maintain, back up and make it accessible to clients over a network, whenever required. Cloud storage providers keep the data and processes to oversee it on capacity servers based on secure virtualization methods. A security framework is proposed for auditing the cloud data, which makes use of the proposed blockchain technology. This ensures to efficiently maintain the data integrity. The blockchain structure inspects the mutation of operational information and thereby ensures the data security. Usually, the data auditing scheme is widely used in a Third Party Auditor (TPA), which is a centralized entity that the client is forced to trust, even if the credibility is not guaranteed. To avoid the participation of TPA, a decentralised scheme is suggested, where it uses a smart contract for auditing the cloud data. The working of smart contracts is based on blockchain. Ethereum is used to deploy a smart contract thereby eliminating the need of a foreign source in the data auditing process.
Edge computing is a promising paradigm to expand the capability of Internet of Things (IoT) devices by computation offloading. To establish a distributed ledger to provide a secure and trusted environment for the resource allocation between edge servers and IoT devices, the emerging blockchain technology has attracted a lot of attention recently. However, in practice, edge resource allocation in IoT devices often involves multi-layer structures, which poses a challenge due to information incompleteness among different layers. Moreover, how to design a suitable and efficient blockchain framework for hierarchical resource allocation markets is a critical issue. In this paper, we apply blockchain to propose a secure and efficient hierarchical resource allocation framework for edge computing. First, we study the edge computing resource allocation problem in the hierarchical market of IoT devices, in which the IoT devices beyond the coverage of Access Points can participate in the resource allocation through middlemen. To solve the problem, a smart contract-based hierarchical auction mechanism is developed. The edge computing resources allocated in the top market can be continually reallocated to the sub-markets based on the mechanism, which then leads an efficient solution that maximizes the social welfare of the whole participants. Moreover, the mechanism is implemented as a smart contract in the blockchain, which enforces the rule of the hierarchical auction in a non-deniable and automated manner. Finally, the extensive simulations demonstrate the correctness and performance of the proposed mechanism.
Security and traceability of smart sensor data in centrally organized IoT-architectures require a third party of trust. In order to overcome this issue, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) apply consensus mechanisms. Current approaches suggest DLT-based IoT-architectures which are static and only provide limited data precision in specific applications. Thus, they rely on custom tokens and additional technologies such as SQL databases. In addition, the design of the applied smart contracts (sc) allow unauthorized access. In contrast, in this paper an adaptable, scalable and purely DLT-based IoT-architecture for secure and decentral software services is proposed. It employs sc for the secure and decentralized interaction between users, software services and IoT devices, such as smart sensors. Thereby, sc are adjustable and their access is controlled by an address comparison of authorized wallets. Finally, a case-study on a sc based software service for an industrial smart temperature sensor demonstrates applicability and benefits of the proposed approach.
Purpose The continuous presence and intensity of the Internet of things (IoT) in our lives and the risk of security breaches in traditional transactional and financial platforms are the major cause of personal and organizational data losses. Blockchain emerges as a promised technology to ensure higher levels of data encryption and security. Thus, this study aims to develop a systematic literature review analyzing the previous literature and to purpose of a framework to better understand the process of blockchain security. Design/methodology/approach The 75 articles reviewed were obtained through the Scopus database and a bibliographic-coupling analysis was developed to identify the main themes of this research area, via VOSviewer software. Findings The results enable the categorization of the existing literature revealing four clusters: 1) feasibility, 2) fintech and cryptocurrency, 3) data trust and share and 4) applicability. Blockchain technology is still in its early stage of development and counting on researchers in security and cryptography to take it further to new highs, to allow its applicability to different areas and in long-term scenarios. Originality/value This systematic literature creates a base to reduce the blockchain security literature gap. In addition, it provides a framework that enables the scientific community to access the main subjects discussed and the articulation between concepts. Furthermore, it enhances the state-of-the-art literature on blockchain security and proposes a future research agenda.
James R. Clavin, Sisi Duan, Haibin Zhang, Vandana P. Janeja · 8 authors
Blockchain is the technology used by developers of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, to enable exchange of financial “coins” between participants in the absence of a trusted third party to ensure the transaction, such as is typically done by governments. Blockchain has evolved to become a generic approach to store and process data in a highly decentralized and secure way. In this article, we review blockchain concepts and use cases, and discuss the challenges in using them from a governmental viewpoint. We begin with reviewing the categories of blockchains, the underlying mechanisms, and why blockchains can achieve their security goals. We then review existing known governmental use cases by regions. To show both technical and deployment details of blockchain adoption, we study a few representative use cases in the domains of healthcare and energy infrastructures. Finally, the review of both technical details and use cases helps us summarize the adoption and technical challenges of blockchains.
Moayad Aloqaily, Ouns Bouachir, Azzedine Boukerche, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi
Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are designed to meet various end-user quality of service (QoS) requirements through high data rates (typically of gigabits per second) and low latencies. Coupled with fog and mobile edge computing, 5G can achieve high data rates, enabling complex autonomous smart city services such as the large deployment of self-driving vehicles and large-scale artificial-intelligence-enabled industrial manufacturing. However, to meet the exponentially growing number of connected IoT devices and irregular data and service requests in both low- and high-density locations, the process of enacting traditional cells supported through fixed and costly base stations requires rethought to enable on-demand mobile access points in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for diversified smart city scenarios. This article envisions a 5G network environment that is supported by blockchain-enabled UAVs to meet dynamic user demands with network access supply. The solution enables decentralized service delivery (drones as a service) and routing to and from end users in a reliable and secure manner. Both public and private blockchains are deployed within the UAVs, supported by fog and cloud computing devices and data centers to provide a wide range of complex authenticated service and data availability. Particular attention is paid to comparing data delivery success rates and message exchange in the proposed solution against traditional UAV-supported cellular networks. Challenges and future research are also discussed with highlights on emerging technologies such as federated learning.
This is a data descriptor paper for a set of the battery output data measurements during the turned on display discharge process caused by the execution of modern mobile blockchain projects on Android devices. The measurements were executed for Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Activity (PoA) consensus algorithms. In this descriptor, we give examples of Samsung Galaxy S9 operation while a broader range of measurements is available in the dataset. Examples provide the data about battery output current, output voltage, temperature, and status. We also show the measurements obtained utilizing short-range (IEEE 802.11n) and cellular (LTE) networks. This paper describes the proposed dataset and the method employed to gather the data. To provide a further understanding of the dataset’s nature, an analysis of the collected data is also briefly presented. This dataset may be of interest to both researchers from information security and human–computer interaction fields and industrial distributed ledger/blockchain developers.
Nowadays, blockchain is developing as a secure and trustworthy platform for secure information sharing in areas of application like banking, supply chain management, food industry, energy, the Internet, and medical services. Besides, the blockchain can be described in a decentralized manner as an immutable ledger for recording data entries. Furthermore, this new technology has been developed to interrupt a variety of data-driven fields, including the health sector. However, blockchain refers to the distributed ledger technology, which constitutes an innovation in the information recording and sharing without a trusted third party. In this paper, blockchain and Distributed Ledger-based Improved Biomedical Security system (BDL-IBS) has been proposed to enhance the privacy and data security across healthcare applications. Further, our goal is to make it possible for patients to use the data to support their care and to provide strong consent systems for sharing data among different organizations and applications, since this includes managing and accessing a high amount of medical information, and this technology can maintain data to ensure reliability. Finally, results show that new blockchain-based digital platforms allow for fast, easy, and seamless interactions between data suppliers to enhance privacy and data security, including for patients themselves.
Pervasive edge computing (PEC) is an emerging paradigm for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and software-defined networks (SDN) offer lower latency services, and massive intelligent devices connectivity for the IIoT. However, the PEC has some issues with data security, and privacy while PEC devices sharing data among edges. What's more, the centralized SDN suffers from single point of attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) from IIoT devices, and has the challenge of data leakage. In this article, we use blockchain, and proxy reencryption (PRE) technologies to tackle these challenges. The blockchain authorizes all devices in the network to improve their credibility, and authenticity. In addition, a blockchain-based data sharing framework that combines a PRE scheme is introduced for secure device-to-device communication in PEC environments. A series of smart contracts are designed for flexible operations of searching, and updating records on the blockchain. The experiments reveal that our design is highly efficient, and has high performance.
T. Rama Reddy, P. V. G. D. Prasad Reddy, Rayudu Srinivas, Ch. V. Raghavendran · 6 authors
Abstract Education acts as a soul in the overall societal development, in one way or the other. Aspirants, who gain their degrees genuinely, will help society with their knowledge and skills. But, on the other side of the coin, the problem of fake certificates is alarming and worrying. It has been prevalent in different forms from paper-based dummy certificates to replicas backed with database tampering and has increased to astronomic levels in this digital era. In this regard, an overlay mechanism using blockchain technology is proposed to store the genuine certificates in digital form and verify them firmly whenever needed without delay. The proposed system makes sure that the certificates, once verified, can be present online in an immutable form for further reference and provides a tamper-proof concealment to the existing certification system. To confirm the credibility of the proposed method, a prototype of blockchain-based credential securing and verification system is developed in ethereum test network. The implementation and test results show that it is a secure and feasible solution to online credential management system.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Retinal Imaging and Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A distributed charging system based on the Internet of Things can provide important supports to ensure the safe and sustainable operation of electric vehicles (EVs). Usually, drivers prefer to use local charging piles by querying the remote cloud server. Frequent communication with the cloud server will not only produce an unnecessary communication overhead but also increase the latency of response. More seriously, the cloud-based centralized management mode is vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which usually leads to privacy leakage. However, previous studies seldom focus on the privacy issue of the charging system for EVs. In this article, a decentralized and privacy-preserving charging scheme for EVs is proposed, which is based on blockchain and fog computing. In this scheme, fog computing is introduced to provide local computing with low latency. Specifically, a fog computing network, which is composed of fog computing nodes (FCNs), is used to provide localized services. Besides, a flexible consortium blockchain architecture is proposed. The blockchain system is deployed on the distributed FCNs, providing a decentralized and secure storage environment. By combining mutual authentication, smart contract, and blockchain-based storage, the security of privacy in the charging process can be ensured. The theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme.
Abdeljalil Beniiche, Amin Ebrahimzadeh, Martin Maier
Today’s Internet powered by decentralised blockchain technology is bringing us a true peer-to-peer platform that has the potential to go far beyond digital currencies. A blockchain technology of particular interest is Ethereum, which provides capabilities that Bitcoin lacked, to enable new models of distributed ownership and help realise future techno-social systems such as the Tactile Internet, the next evolutionary leap of the Internet of Things (IoT), by adding a new dimension to human-to-machine interaction. After explaining the commonalities and specific differences between Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains, we first provide an up-to-date survey on how Ethereum can be used for realising the emerging blockchain IoT (B-IoT), briefly reviewing recent progress and open challenges. We then elaborate on how specific Ethereum blockchain technologies may be leveraged to realise future techno-social systems, notably the Tactile Internet, which at present is yet unclear in many ways how it would work. Towards this end, we explore the salient features that set Ethereum apart from other blockchains, including its symbiosis with other emerging key technologies such as artificial intelligence and robots as well as decentralised edge computing solutions, to let new hybrid forms of collaboration emerge among individuals benefitting from automation at the centre and humans at the edges.
The concepts of nodes, computation, decentralisation, and distribution nature are held in common by blockchain and fog computing. In addition, both technologies are designated, in different research, to fulfil Internet of Things (IoT) requirements where blockchain is a key enabler to cope with security and privacy issues and fog computing is a key enabler to cope with computation, storage, and networking services. This chapter discusses the integration of blockchain with fog computing with the objective of securely sharing data and by preventing unauthorised users to access data. Blockchain technology has redefined the concept of a traditional database and changed the way of controlling transactions carried out between different parties in the network. It offers a distributed ledgers which keep track of all transactions committed and where the control is performed by all the nodes interested in participating in the blockchain network.
IoT-enabled applications, such as cloud manufacturing, guided water quality or air quality analysis, energy-conscious societal applications, and smart agricultural economics, are designed using a blend of high-end computing technologies, such as cloud, edge, and fog. Smart cities and governmental authorities keep a keen eye out for implementing IoT applications in an automated/decentralized approach with enhanced security measures so that tens of thousands of users, including entrepreneurs, are benefited. Existing IoT architectures are prone to energy inefficiency or resource underutilization problems due to the avoidance of apt technologies, such as serverless computing. This article proposes to set forth a serverless blockchain-enabled IoT architecture for societal applications. It explores the existing IoT architectures and pinpoints the advantages of applying serverless blockchains on IoT architectures. In addition, the proposed IoT architecture is illustrated with a specific use case of IoT societal applications namely air quality monitoring for smart cities (AQMS). This article discloses how air quality sensor data from defective industries were securely transacted to blockchain networks surpassing from the three levels of computing namely edge, fog, and cloud while utilizing serverless and server-oriented functions. In addition, this article exposes a list of the most potent serverless functions that assist AQMS IoT societal applications in detail. The IoT architecture, discussed in this article, will enable innovations and research works for IoT developers and researchers.
Santiago Figueroa-Lorenzo, Jon Goya, Javier Añorga, Iñigo Adín · 6 authors
The European Union is moving toward the “smart” era having as one of the key topics the smart mobility. What is more, the European union (EU) is moving toward Mobility as a Service (MaaS). The key concept behind MaaS is the capability to offer both the traveler's mobility and goods' transport solutions based on travel needs. For example, unique payment methods, intermodal tickets, passenger services, freight transport services, etc. The introduction of new services implies the integration of many Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors. At this point, security gains a key role in the railway sector. Considering an environment where sensor data are monitored from sensor events, and alarms are detected and emitted when events contain an anomaly, this document proposes the development of an alarms collection system, which ensures both traceability and privacy of these alarms. This system is based on Ethereum blockchain events-log, as an efficient storage mechanism, which guarantees that any railway entity can participate in the network, ensuring both entity security and information privacy.
Agriculture is a vital area for the sustenance of mankind engulfing manufacturing, security, traceability, and sustainable resource management. With the resources receding expeditiously, it is of utmost significance to innovate techniques that help in the subsistence of agriculture. The growth of Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain technology as two rapidly emerging fields can ameliorate the state of food chain today. This paper provides a rigorous literature review to inspect the state-of-the-art development of the schemes that provide information security using blockchain technology. After identifying the core requirements in smart agriculture, a generalized blockchain-based security architecture has been proposed. A detailed cost analysis has been conducted on the studied schemes. A meticulous comparative analysis uncovered the drawbacks in existing research. Furthermore, detailed analysis of the literature has also revealed the security goals towards which the research has been directed and helped to identify new avenues for future research using artificial intelligence.
Anushree Tandon, Amandeep Dhir, A.K.M. Najmul Islam, Matti Mäntymäki
This study presents a systematic literature review (SLR) of research on blockchain applications in the healthcare domain. The review incorporated 42 articles presenting state-of-the-art knowledge on current implications and gaps pertaining to the use of blockchain technology for improving healthcare processes. The SLR findings indicate that blockchain is being used to develop novel and advanced interventions to improve the prevalent standards of handling, sharing, and processing of medical data and personal health records. The application of blockchain technology is undergoing a conceptual evolution in the healthcare industry where it has added significant value through improved efficiency, access control, technological advancement, privacy protection, and security of data management processes. The findings also suggest that the extant limitations primarily pertain to model performance, as well as the constraints and costs associated with implementation. An integrated framework is presented to address potential areas wherein future researchers can contribute significant value, including addressing concerns regarding regulatory compliance, system architecture, and data protection. Finally, the SLR suggests that future research can facilitate the widespread deployment of blockchain applications to address critical issues related to medical diagnostics, legal compliance, avoiding fraud, and improving patient care in cases of remote monitoring or emergencies.
The utilisation of blockchain has moved beyond digital currency to other fields such as health, the Internet of Things, and education. In this paper, we present a systematic mapping study to collect and analyse relevant research on blockchain technology related to the higher education field. The paper concentrates on two main themes. First, it examines state of the art in blockchain-based applications that have been developed for educational purposes. Second, it summarises the challenges and research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies.