Proliferation of IoT devices in society demands a renewed focus on securing the use and maintenance of such systems. IoT-based systems will have a great impact on society and therefore such systems must have guaranteed resilience. We introduce cryptographic-based building blocks that strive to ensure that distributed IoT networks remain in a healthy condition throughout their lifecycle. Our presented solution utilizes deterministic and interlinked smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain to enforce secured management and maintenance for hardened IoT devices. A key issue investigated is the protocol development for securing IoT device deployments and means for communicating securely with devices. By supporting values of openness, automation, and provenance, we can introduce novel means that reduce the threats of surveillance and theft, while also improving operator accountability and trust in IoT technology.
Undoubtedly, the supply chain management (SCM) system is an important part of many organizations worldwide; over time, the technologies used to manage a supply chain ecosystem have, therefore, a great impact on businesses' effectiveness. Among others, numerous developments have been made that targeted to have robust supply chain systems to efficiently manage the growing demands of various supplies, considering the underlying requirements and main challenges such as scalability, specifically privacy and security, of various business networks. Internet of things (IoT) comes with a solution to manage a complex, scalable supply chain system, but to provide and attain enough security during information exchange, along with keeping the privacy of its users, is the great inherent challenge of IoT. To fulfill these limitations, this study designs and models a scaled IoT-based supply chain (IoT-SC) system, comprising several operations and participants, and deploys mechanisms to leverage the security, mainly confidentially, integrity, authentication (CIA), and a digital signature scheme to leverage potentially secured non-repudiation security service for the worst-case scenario, and to leverage privacy to keep users sensitive personal and location information protected against adversarial entities to the IoT-SC system. Indeed, a scaled IoT-SC system certainly opens new challenges to manage privacy and security while communicating. Therefore, in the IoT-SC system, each transaction writes from edge computing nodes to the IoT-SC controller is thoroughly examined to ensure the proposed solutions in bi-directional communication, and their robustness against adversarial behaviors. Future research works, employing blockchain and its integrations, are detailed as paces to accelerate the privacy and security of the IoT-SC system, for example, migrating IoT-centric computing to an immutable, decentralized platform.
R. Kalaipriya, S. Devadharshini, R. Rajmohan, M. Pavithra · 5 authors
This paper exhibits a Blockchain-based design for our current Electronic Health Records (EHR) frameworks. Electronic Health Records commonly comprise extremely penetrating and precarious records associated with patients. It needs to track all the events that occurred in the records to achieve data integrity for secure transactions. To solve these problems, we proposed two smart agreements, classified contracts, and user record associated contracts. The classified contract involves organizing the records in a distributed ledger format with secured interventions of Doctors and healthcare providers. The user record associated contracts validate the transactions requested by the concerned miners. We evaluate the proposed architecture by realizing the Ethereum framework, which includes Remix environment, Metamask wallet, and Solidity language. Compared to conventional EHR frameworks, the suggested structure with the employment of the Blockchain has improved efficiency and security for storing electronic health records.
High levels of scalability and reliability are needed to support the massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. In particular, blockchains can be effectively used to safely manage data from large-scale IoT networks. However, current blockchain systems have low transactions per second (TPS) rates and scalability limitations that make them unsuitable. To solve the above issues, this article proposes a deep Q network shard-based blockchain (DQNSB) scheme that dynamically finds the optimal throughput configuration. In this article, a novel analysis of sharded blockchain latency and security-level characterization is provided. Using the analysis equations, the DQNSB scheme estimates the level of maliciousness and adapts the blockchain parameters to enhance the security level considering the amount of malicious attacks on the consensus process. To achieve this purpose, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are trained to find the optimal system parameters in response to the network status, and adaptively optimizes the system throughput and security level. The simulation results show that the proposed DQNSB scheme provides a much higher TPS than the existing DRL-enabled blockchain technology while maintaining a high security level.
Jiabin Bao, Debiao He, Min Luo, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
As our fossil fuel reserves are rapidly depleting, there has been an increased focus to explore the utility of renewable energy (e.g., solar energy and wind energy) in replacing fossil fuel. One resulting trend is the energy market gradually shifting toward a distributed market, where renewable energy can be traded, partly evidenced by the number of blockchain-based solutions designed for the (distributed) energy sector. The interest in blockchain is also due to blockchain's underpinning characteristics such as anonymity, decentralized, and transparency. Therefore, in this article, we perform a comprehensive review of how blockchain technology has been, and can be, deployed in energy applications, ranging from energy management to peer-to-peer trading to electric vehicle-related applications to carbon emissions trading, and others. We also study the existing architectures and solutions, and existing and emerging security and privacy challenges, as well as exploring other potential applications of blockchain in the energy sector.
A blockchain consists of an ordered list with nodes and links where the nodes store information and are connected through links called chains. This technology supports the availability of a publicly maintained ledger of transactions, first gaining mainstream attraction with cryptocurrencies. A myriad of other applications have emerged ever since. There has been a steady growth in the number of research studies conducted in this field; as such, there is a need to review the research in this field. This paper conducts an extensive review on 76 journal publications in the field of blockchain from 2016 to 2018 available in Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) database. The aim of this paper is to present scholars and practitioners with a detailed overview of the available research in the field of blockchain. The selected papers have been grouped into 14 categories. The contents of papers in each category are summarized and future research direction for each category is outlined. This overview indicates that the research in blockchain is becoming more prominent and requires more effort in developing new methodologies and framework to integrate blockchain. It is the need of today’s growing business that ventures into new technologies like cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT).
The invention of blockchain as the niche technology for cryptocurrencies has an opportunity to be used in other application domains as well. This is promoted due to privacy and security offered by blockchains. The blockchain uses a consensus mechanism for accepting any new information. Conventional consensus mechanisms used in the blockchain need high computational power that restricts its usage in resource constrained systems. This paper, focuses on the survey of different consensus methods available for the blockchain. An IoT system consists of a number of interconnected sensors/actuators, such systems have limited resources including compute, storage and energy. This survey aims to study on the consensus methods which are relevant for the IoT networks.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising platform to secure and manage large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) due to its separated control and data plane functionality as well as programmability in the network. The original design of SDN faces single point of failure, and therefore several decentralized SDN architectures for IoT were proposed. However, practical SDN may be deployed by various networking operators, which incurs the conflict between data security of different networking operators and cooperative network management among them. Existing schemes cannot well support the cooperative network management among multiple controllers and meanwhile guarantee data security. To tackle this problem, we propose a blockchain based SDN framework for IoT called BS-IoT. BS-IoT introduces blockchain into SDN to support secure and cooperative network management. Besides, we leverage blockchain sharding for better efficiency and improve it with secure multi-party computation (SMPC) to make it suitable for decentralized SDN management with data security. The security analysis illustrate the security and effectiveness of our scheme.
Blockchain is a method in which a confirmation of a transaction is kept by means of a crypto-currency. The record is maintained transversely, linking several computers in a peer to peer network. Contracts, transactions, and the records of them define the economic system of a country. They set boundaries and provide security to the assets. Considering the features of blockchain such as immutability and maintaining the footage of transaction details, this paper highlights the usage of blockchain technology with farmer's portal that keep the footage of selling and buying information of crops. The proposed solution uses the python as a programming language in integration with the blockchain system that will benefit the farmers or vendors and individuals by preserving the contract of trade. An interface for the farmers is designed using a python programming language in addition with blockchain technology, which is used to store the information related to seller, buyer, selling and buying an item and total value transacted.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Filipe Lautert, Daniel Fernando Pigatto, Luiz Gomes-Jr
Data provenance tracks the origin of information with the goal of improving trust among interested parties. Data provenance is an important requirement for a range of applications such as food safety, supply chains, and tracking of epidemic outbreaks. Many of these applications are inherently distributed and require high levels of privacy and trust.Fog computing and Blockchains are recent technological solutions that were born from advancements in cloud and distributed computing. Fog focuses on bringing the cloud closer to the edge user while Blockchain provides transparency without the need for a trusted centralized entity. Both can be complimentary as Fog spreads the data and computer storage while the Blockchain can keep it consistent and trustworthy. These technologies can be used to improve several aspects in a Data provenance context.In this paper we describe an architecture that allows the tracking of data provenance in a wide-area distributed fog. While we employ blockchains to provide transparency, localized Fogs have control over what is made public on the cloud. The architecture proposed in this paper enables fast and reliable data provenance for clients executing in the Fog using software services that keep the information consistent across all interested parties in the cloud. Any information in the system is associated with a proof of authenticity, but authors have control over the eventual publication of the information.Our proposal was built upon the well established provenance model W3C Prov, which simplifies adoption of the framework.We developed an application consisting of a client and web services that is able to store and share provenance information using open standards in a blockchain. The relate work, architecture and tests for the proposal are presented showing performance improvements when Fog is used when compared to a solution that only runs in the cloud.
In agriculture, farmers are the most important entity. For supporting farmers in increasing productivity and efficiency, the government offers subsidies, loans, insurances, and so on. This paper explores the usage of Blockchain technology for securing farmer's data in the Indian scenario. The farmer needs to register through the multiple official registration systems for availing different schemes and information provided by the country. The personnel and crop-based details of each farmer are collected at the time of registration. The filing also helps in providing better services to farmers like connecting farmers and traders to ensure a fair price for quality crops, advice to farmers of agricultural practices and location. In this paper, a blockchain-based farmer's data securing system is proposed to provide data provenance and transparency of the information entered in the system. While registering, the data is collected, and it is verified. A single verified record of farmers accessed by various government agriculture departments were designed using the Hyperledger fabric framework.
Intelligent Vehicular Network (IVN) is a communication environment, where Intelligent vehicles communicate and share the information within the network. In an IVN, all vehicles are connected to the internet and vehicles ease to communicate information with other vehicles. IVN aims to improve safety and efficiency by sharing data with only nearby vehicles. The greatest challenge in IVN is trusted data circulation with reliable intelligent vehicles without affecting any personal information of Intelligent vehicles. In this article, we endeavor to resolve above mentioned issue by proposing an effective tri-Blockchain based communication network. We have introduced three blockchain servers, namely Public, Special and Supreme Blockchain server. The public blockchain server and special blockchain server show dynamic features whereas supreme blockchain server features are static for all the time. Our Tri-Blockchain servers provide a greater extent of reliable and quick response during emergency scenario. We have verified our proposal with an accidental USECASE scenario.
Lucas Leme, Arthur Medeiros, Gautam Srivastava, Jorge Crichigno · 5 authors
The current livestock industry in certain parts of the world still runs on archaic infrastructure. Using dated systems built on inefficient database structures are not ideal moving into the next millennial as the central point of failure. A lack of data sharing and data transfer also limits the methods by which cattle farmers can operate. In this paper, we examine the use of a novel infrastructure that is in line with the current push of many industries to move into the age of Internet of Things. We propose an efficient, secure, decentralized, and distributed system that can modernize the way the cattle industry runs in dominantly rural settings. Motivated by a use case in Brazil, we propose the use of cloud storage ad blockchain connectivity being used to monitor the overall health of livestock through their natural lives. We also describe a system that can easily transfer livestock from one organization to another through blockchain for ease of buying/selling procedures that are quite common for cattle framers.
Software defined networking (SDN) is the promising technology for the future network with the advantage of isolating the control plane form the data plane. Through SDN, physical network resources can be softwarized and virtualized easily. In future network scenarios, end users usually have customized resource demands, modeled as virtual network requests (VNRs). Hence, these VNRs need to be allocated and implemented efficiently, called as virtual network embedding (VNE). As one of the key issues in SDN, secure softwarized and virtualized resource allocation, especially in certain network scenarios with high security requirements, calls for significant attention in the literature. In this paper, we research the virtual network embedding for secure SDN, using the blockchain technology. VNE problem model for secure SDN is firstly presented. Then, it is the security model for SDN. Next, we propose our blockchain-based VNE algorithm for secure SDN. Aiming at validating our blockchain-based algorithm efficiency, we execute the experiment evaluation. Experiment results show that our blockchain-based algorithm performs better than its counterpart without blockchain technology, in terms of fault tolerant performance.
Sudip Misra, Pallav Kumar Deb, Nidhi Pathak, Anandarup Mukherjee
Software-Defined Network (SDN) is vital in simplifying the dynamic network characteristics and device management. However, the centralized architecture of SDN opens the scope for malicious attacks on the controllers. To mitigate such attacks in real-time, we propose an SDN architecture for resource-constrained devices in a fog-enabled IoT environment using a private blockchain (pBC) network. We exploit the decentralized nature of pBC for enabling resource-constrained SDN controllers towards transparently setting flow rules for fog nodes and other devices in the network. In case the miners identify faulty flow rules, pBC allows the SDN devices/fog nodes to retract back to an earlier flow rule while raising a flag against the alleged controller. Additionally, since data in pBC are accessible by all the candidates having the same genesis file, they are readily available to malicious users. Towards this, we further propose encrypting the data before inserting them into the blocks, which helps in securing the data from undesired users. Through the extensive deployment of our proposed fusion, we observe CPU usage of 30% among the devices and latencies in the range of milliseconds, which presents the feasibility of our system with minimum delay. We also observe a reduction in energy consumption by more than 90%, compared to traditional SDN.
The unprecedented growth of the smart home industry brings increasing amount of IoT devices into people's home. The transmission of data and execution of commands across connected network were meant to bring security, comfort and accessibility. However, the inter-connectivity and complexity of smart home systems leads to higher vulnerability to cyberattacks, network congestion and information leaks. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of existing centralized approaches. Then we propose a blockchain-enabled solution to help build a secure smart home system. We demonstrate the design architecture and implementation methods as a proof of concept. We believe that the proposed blockchain-enabled solution can improve security while offering intelligent control of smart home systems.
Exploring the unique blockchain-internet of things (IoT) framework may be an attractive structure for enhancing communications efficiency in the 5G networks. The wireless communication would have been the largest research area that allows users to communicate with each other. Nowadays, high-speed, smart, efficient with many technologies, such as low power consumption, and so on, appear to be available to communicate with each other in today's globe. Throughout this framework, the expansion of fog features is enabled for physical objects within IoT. Several of the challenging issues in the field of wireless communications would be to build a new blockchain-based virtualization system across the IoT architecture. The main purpose of this framework is to connect blockchain technology to the IoT and fogging or maintains the IoT cryptography secured when transactions occurred. This strengthens blockchain and fog to build an effective IoT communication system. The recommended method is an important estimation of the extensive work.
Door locks connected to the internet, also known as smart locks, offer more convenience and security to control access to a place if compared to conventional locks that use physical keys or with those that use keypads. For instance, smart locks are managed remotely and even if someone once had access permission at some point, they cannot copy the key to attempt unauthorized access later. Those benefits, however, might be compromised due to the centralized system architecture offered by locks’ vendors and manufacturers which allow users to control their devices - someone could gain access over the user’s device and data.\nThis work explores how a permissionless blockchain – the public network of the Ethereum blockchain - can be leveraged to build a convenient and secure smart lock system, while giving the device owners full control over their devices by eliminating the central authority. It proposes an architecture and discusses in-depth the required components and other factors that must be taken into consideration while designing and implementing the system. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept application based on people that rent their places using hospitality services like Airbnb is implemented. The system allows hosts to remotely manage guests' permissions, delegate management rights to others, and allow guests to use a feature that blocks the owner’s permission to unlock the device during their stay.\nThe proof-of-concept is evaluated regarding its functionalities, how long they take to be processed by the blockchain, and how much they cost to be executed. Among the findings are: (i) the proposed architecture and implementation were capable of delivering the expected behaviors for the smart lock functionalities; (ii) the delay associated with using the Ethereum blockchain are reasonable and fit the application use cases; (iii) besides the one-time-only operation to deploy the smart contract in the blockchain, the cost yielded for all other actions stayed below CAD 0.40, which is believed to be feasible considering the application context.
Shuchi Juyal, Sachin Sharma, Aditya Harbola, Amal Shankar Shukla
Remote patient monitoring is a system that focuses on patients care and attention with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). The technology makes it easier to track distance, but also to diagnose and provide critical attention and service on demand so that billions of people are safer and more safe. Skincare monitoring is one of the growing fields of medical care which requires IoT monitoring, because there is an increasing number of patients, but cures are restricted to the number of available dermatologists. The IoT-based skin monitoring system produces and store volumes of private medical data at the cloud from which the skin experts can access it at remote locations. Such large-scale data are highly vulnerable and otherwise have catastrophic results for privacy and security mechanisms. Medical organizations currently do not concentrate much on maintaining safety and privacy, which are of major importance in the field. This paper provides an IoT based skin surveillance system based on a blockchain data protection and safety mechanism. A secure data transmission mechanism for IoT devices used in a distributed architecture is proposed. Privacy is assured through a unique key to identify each user when he registers. The principle of blockchain also addresses security issues through the generation of hash functions on every transaction variable. We use blockchain consortiums that meet our criteria in a decentralized environment for controlled access. The solutions proposed allow IoT based skin surveillance systems to privately and securely store and share medical data over the network without disturbance.
This report intends to play out a precise audit to survey and establish the practicality of blockchain for implementing healthcare service records effectively. Traditional health records are both localized and expensive to operate; they can be improved upon by using blockchain based electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs are just electronic versions of a patient's whole clinical history. EHRs, when stored on blockchain, has some serious advantages when compared to their traditional centrally stored counterparts. The patient's medical records will be stored on a distributed network. An ethereum based decentralized application (DApp) can be incorporated to record and update medical information securely in real time using smart contracts. A decentralized application on a private blockchain network will ensure the integrity of data records and improve interoperability of the system by providing permanent access to essential details like patient's medical track record, prescription history, laboratory/ clinical reports etc. The application uses the efficiency and security of blockchain technology to solve the challenges faced by the healthcare domain.
Ran Zhang, F. Richard Yu, Jiang Liu, Renchao Xie · 5 authors
D2D caching assists mobile edge caching in offloading inter-domain traffic by sharing cached items with nearby users, while its performance relies heavily on caching nodes' sharing willingness. In this article, a Blockchain-based CDM is proposed as an incentive mechanism for the distributed caching system. Under given incentive mechanisms, both D2D and mobile edge caching nodes' willingness is guaranteed by satisfying their expected reward for cache sharing. Besides, for the distributed CDM, content delivery related transactions are executed by smart contracts. To achieve consensus on the transactions and prevent frauds, a consensus protocol among the SCENE is necessary. The pPBFT protocol is proposed to minimize the latency of reaching consensus while guaranteeing its confidence level. We build the model of cache sharing and transaction execution consensus, and we further formulate cache placement and SCENE selection as Markov Decision Process problems. Considering the complexity and dynamics of the problems, a deep reinforcement learning approach is adopted to solve the problems. Simulation results show that, compared to conventional solutions, the proposed schemes achieve efficient traffic offloading, and significantly improve the transaction execution consensus speed.
Bhabendu Kumar Mohanta, Utkalika Satapathy, Meenu Rani Dey, Soumyashree S. Panda · 5 authors
Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) are reshaping the way of interaction with the physical world. Moreover, the true potential of CPS will be realized when a decentralized approach will be taken into account. Blockchain is an up-and-coming technology which can establish trust in CPS, where participants do not trust each other. Blockchain applications eliminate the middle man to provide trust and making the processes more efficient & cheaper. It's decentralized nature and cryptographic algorithm make it immune to attack and becomes a secure technology. When the data is stored on the blockchain it becomes immutable, ensuring trust in data. Nevertheless, this does not guarantee the trustworthiness of the device which is generating the data. We propose a blockchain-based signature storage solution to ensure trust among the participants which is further applicable to a diverse range of blockchain-based CPS applications. We have implemented our system using the Ethereum network and Docker Tools. Our proposed solution guarantees security properties i.e. device identification, authentication, integrity, and non-repudiation. Also, it reduces the storage space and storage cost than the traditional usage of blockchain in CPS.