Ying Gao, Yijian Chen, Hongliang Lin, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Software-defined networks offer lower latency service and massive intelligent devices connectivity for the Internet of Things(IoT). As one of the pivotal applications in the IoT, smart community provides smart services for residents through the SDN technique. However, the centralized SDN suffers from single point of attacks such as DDoS from IoT devices and has the issue of data leakage. In this paper, we use blockchain and proxy re-encryption(PRE) technologies to tackle these challenges. The blockchain authorizes all devices in the network to improve their credibility and authenticity. What's more, a blockchain-based data sharing framework that combines a PRE scheme is introduced for secure device-to-device communication in smart communities. 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.
It is very important to improve the operation and management efficiency of data and network for the construction of smart cities. The current trust infrastructure in smart cities shows obvious shortcomings, accordingly, this paper proposed the idea of applying blockchain to smart city systems and as their trust infrastructure. The research method is: firstly, the network architecture and data architecture of smart cities were proposed, and the database was classified as a shared database, authorized access database or private database. Secondly, the overall architecture model of the blockchain in a smart city system was constructed, and the blockchain was classified as a public blockchain, consortium blockchain or private blockchain. Thirdly, the realization principle of the cross-blockchain interoperability of different blockchains, the construction principle of dynamic smart blockchains, and the selection method of blockchain authentication nodes were designed, and the supervision method and supervision content of blockchain system operation were discussed. The research result is: took the smart transportation subsystem as an object, through algorithms, the operation principle of the blockchain was constructed. This research can provide a reference for the construction of trust infrastructure in smart cities and can promote the application research progress of blockchain technology.
With our increasing reliance on technology, the amount of e-waste generated after their life cycle ends is increasing at an exponential rate. Going by this rate, we'll have an equivalent amount of carbon footprint as the transportation industry, only by the smartphone segment by 2035. We can imagine the total carbon footprint if we extend this to all the other numerous electronic gadgets we use. With the increasing volume of e-waste, the chances of these toxic non-biodegradable elements polluting the environment are astronomical. This problem is being addressed by various nations and laws to regulate the waste have been passed in recent years. The Indian Government has placed E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rules in 2011 which forms a part of the Environment Protection Act to ensure coherent disposal of e-waste. However, a rather large percentage of e-waste in India is still not regulated and it runs vastly by unorganized sectors. We provide a solution to the above problem by proposing an efficient e-waste management technique by using blockchain in the 5G scenario. Our solution keeps track of the e-waste generated and we provide an incentive-based system where users are encouraged to channelize their e-waste through government regulated agencies which efficiently dispose of them in an environment-friendly manner. We propose a public-private partnership (PPP) model for implementing this, which can generate thousands of jobs by organizing this unregulated sector with huge underlying potential.
Mohammad Tabrez Quasim, Fahad Algarni, Alaa Abd Elhamid Radwan, Goram Mufareh M Alshmrani
The world's healthcare systems are experiencing major transition in access, data management, control and disease treatment. With the advancements in data capturing and connected technology the amount of healthcare data is projected approximately 2314 exabyte for year 2020[10]. The cyber criminals are putting lots of efforts, time and resources to exploit and monetize healthcare data. With this threat, the growth of cybersecurity market in healthcare industry is expected to reach USD 27.10 billion by 2026[11]. The blockchain can help in creating a single database to collect data during clinical trials and allow patients' data security. In this paper we propose a secure framework which is based on blockchain to ensure the security of healthcare data. The proposed framework considers wearable sensors, Internet of things (IoT) devices, and computational power. The framework improves the security, privacy and efficiency of the data in the conventional healthcare system.
In a BlockChain environment, during validation process or address lookup user personal information may be disclosed or hacked. To prevent this loophole, a Financial Wallet system with authentication and data protection is implemented. In this system, to avoid the disclosure of personal data and to limit the third party intermediaries a BlockChain with Zero knowledge proof is incorporated. To this implementation AES cryptography method is used to secure data. To make it more confidential NFC cards are used to authenticate user instead of passwords.
Blockchain secures a variety of IoT circumstance, when information or system validation information is placed on a blockchain, personal data might be spilled through the affirmation of working system. This paper observes a Zero-Knowledge proof for an awesome meter framework to illustrate the effectiveness of uncovered information as an instance. This research work has pondered a way to enhance the obscurity of blockchain for safety insurance. [2] In addition to that, device Near-field communication (NFC) generation is used as a mobile platform application. The fundamental idea of this research is to provide a secure service to a consumer through mobile application using the near field communication card and Zero knowledge authentication system.
Pavitra Haveri, U.B. Rashmi, D. G. Narayan, K. Nagaratna · 5 authors
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies are the most popular and the earliest applications of Blockchain. A Blockchain is a public ledger that is distributed and decentralized and it is used to carry out transactions online across the entire network of computer systems. It is a recent technology adopted for data security. The non-modifiable property of the blockchain helps to overcome the problem of document forgery. According to researches, about one million students graduate each year and the document issuing authorities have seemed to be compromised for the security credentials of student data. Due to a lack of effective anti-forge mechanism, forged documents often get unnoticed. The use of physical copies of documents creates a huge overhead as it involves manual verification, paper storage, and manual auditing. Various agencies fail to verify the authenticity of the documents and create loopholes. In this paper, in an attempt to solve the above problem, we design a multi-node private blockchain network using the Ethereum framework and create an off-chain storage i.e. private Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to store the documents. We also evaluate the performance of Ethereum blockchain by analysing the impact of various parameters such as varying difficulty level, load, network size, and consensus algorithms.
Blockchain is an immutable database which is decentralized and distributed. This blockchain is shared by all the nodes in the network and every node has the same state. The transactions in this open distributed ledger are verified and confirmed with the help of consensus algorithms. The transactions, once executed and entered, can never be changed or erased. Bitcoin, the first usecase of blockchain, as a digital money, is based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol. PoW has worked tremendously well and can be useful for many industries. The opportunities are high in this innovative technology, and evolution in this area is just a beginning. This paper has described blockchain technology, the underlying concepts of blockchain and the implementation of Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm along with its performance analysis.
Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali
The Internet of Drones (IoD) is an environment, which facilitates the autonomous and hybrid (semi-autonomous) operations of drones. Due to this advantage, the drones have paved their way into every segment (almost) across the world. Whatever be the application (warfare, surveillance, photography, rescue, delivery, etc), the transmission of data (to and fro) occur between the drones and the other infrastructure over wireless channels. While on the move, this data (operational or service-related) is vulnerable to several security risks and attacks. Hence, the maintenance of the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data is the primary goal in the IoD environment. Recently, the blockchain, a distributed ledger-based technology is being popularly adapted to store the data immutably, making it a possible solution to handle the above-raised issues. But, there are several challenges with conventional blockchain architecture, which make it difficult to adapt it in its current form. Firstly, the blockchain works by building trust in the trust-less environment by using a consensus mechanism. Secondly, the blockchain inherently involves a large number of network communication operations to synchronize the peer-to-peer network. Even more, the bigger the blockchain grows, the more is the data flowing across the network and so does the challenges. Therefore, to overcome these problems, ODOB: One Drone One Block-based Lightweight Blockchain Architecture for IoD is proposed. ODOB decouples the data part (or block ledger) from the block header to form a distributed architecture. This architecture couple the drones with an individual amendable block (each drone can access only their own block), thereby making it simple, trustworthy, and lightweight. ODOB is evaluated for several parameters and the results obtained favor the proposed architecture.
Conventional certificate verification, whether paper-based or backed by a centralized digital registry, remains exposed to forgery, single points of failure, and slow manual cross-checking between issuers, holders, and verifiers. This paper presents a decentralized, blockchain-based framework for issuing, storing, and verifying academic and professional certificates that addresses these weaknesses without placing the full document on-chain. Each certificate is reduced to a SHA-256 hash, signed with the issuing institution's RSA private key, and recorded through an Ethereum smart contract, while the original file is retained off-chain on IPFS and referenced by its Content Identifier. Only institutions that pass a unanimous, vote-based onboarding process administered by a validator consortium are permitted to issue certificates, which constrains the system to a trusted-issuer model while preserving decentralization across the validator set. A hash-mapped Bloom Filter sits in front of the blockchain query path and performs a fast probabilistic existence check, allowing forged or non-existent certificates to be rejected before an on-chain lookup is triggered. A prototype was implemented with Solidity smart contracts on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, a Node.js/Web3.js application layer, and a React.js frontend with MetaMask-based authentication. Evaluation on the testnet shows that the Bloom Filter pre-check lowers the average lookup time for invalid certificates by roughly 87%, keeps verification of valid certificates under two seconds end-to-end, holds the false-positive rate below 0.5% for up to 50,000 stored certificate hashes, and reduces the gas cost of issuing a certificate to approximately 4.57 USD. These results indicate that combining consortium governance, cryptographic hashing, and probabilistic filtering yields a certificate validation pipeline that is simultaneously tamper-resistant, low-cost, and fast enough for real-time institutional use.
With the development of information technology, big data has had a positive impact on the development of various industries. However, the continued growth of data has led to difficulties in data sharing. Blockchain, with its information sharing characteristics and decentralized management principles, is expected to become the new engine for building a future data sharing platform. Blockchain-based data sharing is useful for recording user transactions and sharing of multi-platform data. However, this technology not only has challenges in information storage, but also risks in third-party transactions. In this article, we propose a big data sharing and transaction framework based on blockchain. This framework uses the blockchain decentralization and openness idea to establish a big data transaction platform for multiple users. For the problem of distributed secure storage of big data in the blockchain, we propose a data-tamperproof mechanism that introduces a cryptographic algorithm to prevent transaction data from being tampered with during user storage. The purpose of this article is to ensure transaction security and data reliability when trading in the blockchain.
Muhammad Habib ur Rehman, Khaled Salah, Ernesto Damiani, Davor Svetinović
Federated learning (FL) is the collaborative machine learning (ML) technique whereby the devices collectively train and update a shared ML model while preserving their personal datasets. FL systems solve the problems of communication-efficiency, bandwidth-optimization, and privacy-preservation. Despite the potential benefits of FL, one centralized shared ML model across all the devices produce coarse-grained predictions which, in essence, are not required in many application areas involving personalized prediction services. In this paper, we present a novel concept of fine-grained FL to decentralize the shared ML models on the edge servers. We then present a formal extended definition of fine-grained FL process in mobile edge computing systems. In addition, we define the core requirements of fine-grained FL systems including personalization, decentralization, fine-grained FL, incentive mechanisms, trust, activity monitoring, heterogeneity and context-awareness, model synchronization, and communication and bandwidth-efficiency. Moreover, we present the concept of blockchain-based reputation-aware fine-grained FL in order to ensure trustworthy collaborative training in mobile edge computing systems. Finally, we perform the qualitative comparison of proposed approach with state-of-the-art related work and found some promising initial results.
IoT has proven valuable in many industries such as Supply Chain, Shipping and Transportation providing updates on the status of shipments in real time. This has resulted in a large amount of data created by IoT devices that require real time processing. Blockchain has also emerged as a trusted common data storage among multiple participants in IoT systems. However, it is essential to verify the authenticity of data before they go in to the blockchain. Some IoT data must be also encrypted in a secure manner. In this paper, we propose a method to collect sensor data from IoT devices and use blockchain to store and retrieve the collected data in a secure and decentralized fashion. A testbed private blockchain system with Ethereum and Raspberry Pi has been developed to test the feasibility and performance of blockchain-based secure IoT system. We employ private PKI for key management and TPM for storing keys, signing, verifying and encrypting data in a trusted way. We describe the structure of the testbed, decentralized storage system based on Ethereum Swarm and IPFS, TPM configuration processes, smart contract codes, and detailed operation sequences. Performance has been measured with 5000 test transactions in 8 different configurations. The result shows that Ethereum blockchain with Swarm can offer about 9 transactions per second. Encryption and decryption is shown to reduce the performance slightly to about 8 transactions per second. The proposed system can provide a secure IoT Blockchain platform for small industrial applications at low cost.
Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy · 5 authors
Software development is a very broad activity that captures the entire life cycle of a software, which includes designing, programming, maintenance and so on. In this study, we focus on the maintenance-related concerns of the post-deployment of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executed programs that run on a blockchain. They cannot be modified once deployed and hence they bring unique maintenance challenges compared to conventional software. According to the definition of ISO/IEC 14764, there are four kinds of software maintenance, i.e., corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance. This study aims to answer (i) What kinds of issues will smart contract developers encounter for corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance after they are deployed to the Ethereum? (ii) What are the current maintenance-related methods used for smart contracts? To obtain the answers to these research questions, we first conducted a systematic literature review to analyze 131 smart contract related research papers published from 2014 to 2020. Since the Ethereum ecosystem is fast-growing, some results from previous publications might be out-of-date and there may be a gap between academia and industry. To address this, we performed an online survey of smart contract developers on Github to validate our findings and received 165 useful responses. Based on the survey feedback and literature review, we present the first empirical study on smart contract maintenance-related concerns. Our study can help smart contract developers better maintain their smart contract-based projects, and we highlight some key future research directions to improve the Ethereum ecosystem.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies have gained prevalence in various areas including Smart Vehicles, Smart Buildings, and Smart Health. Especially on these domains, the use of IoT involves certain challenges around security, privacy and trust, which can be characterized as sensitive issues. Blockchain technologies have emerged as the potential solution to address these issues. However, Blockchain can be inefficient in terms of both performance and cost due to high bandwidth overhead and delays. In this paper, we have examined four different popular Blockchain platforms (Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and BigchainDB) to identify what are the overheads around the use of Blockchain and to study whether there is a single optimal solution with respect to time and computation overheads, or if there are trade-offs between the four platforms for IoT applications.
The scope of the existing distributed ledger technologies is divergent in terms of technological features, as well as in their acceptance among the user and developer communities. In this paper, we propose a set of diverse criteria for the evaluation of a distributed ledger ecosystem, which does not focus only on the technological aspects of viable solutions. They also consider decentralized application development perspective and sustainability of its use. We provide a brief overview of some of the alternative distributed ledger ecosystems for the development and deployment of business and IoT decentralized applications. The set of investigated technologies and networks includes Ethereum, Hyperledger, Hedera Hashgraph, EOS, Corda, IOTA, and Multichain.
Computing and communication are getting increasingly ubiquitous with the inclusion of sophisticated devices like electric vehicles, smart phones and other house hold appliances. Due to the constant evolution in Internet of Things (IoT), the process of collaboration of these devices at a mass scale in order to provide improved and better services to the society. Traditional mechanisms which are used to sustain privacy and security become incapable from achieving the same for IoT systems having distributed or decentralized topology. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), an emerging digital technology, consists of different kinds of decentralized data structures to ensure immutability by linking blocks using cryptographic measures. DLT has the ability to ensure privacy, security and distributed or decentralized computations with adhering to the constraints of IoT nodes. This study is motivated due to the lack of an in-depth analysis on how the characteristics of DLT can be exploited to secure IoT systems. So, an in depth overview of DLT along with some of the existing solutions to meet security requirements of IoT systems employing DLT have been provided in this paper. With respect to integrating DLT with IoT, this article also highlights the different challenges.
Currently, technologies are developing very quickly and the need for information security is constantly increasing. In this connection, Blockchain technology is becoming in demand, which allows us to keep information safety and integrity. In addition, the technology enables the creation of a decentralized environment where transactions and data are take place without any third party organization. We proposed a decentralized web resource based on the Ethereum platform for managing student credits. The decentralized application (Dapp), will process, manage and control tokens, which represent credits that students gain for completed certain courses. The credit system is a first step towards a more transparent and technologically advanced form which could be used by universities and students to manage credits. The novelty of this scientific research is the creation of a web-based information resource based on Blockchain technology. Thanks to this resource, it becomes possible to track students' grades and receive reliable information about higher education. This completely eliminates the possibility of making changes to existing records.
D. Dharani, Kiran Kumari, S Aishwarya, G. M. Sangavi · 5 authors
Nearly every organization needs solution to handle sensitive data. Though there are different systems to store and transmit electronic records, users often deal with missing or tampered information when they distribute it in a public network. When the data is distributed, the traceability and governance of it throughout the globe is impractical. The evolving world of Data Security demands healthcare industry to have an infrastructure in place to deal with patient records. Regardless of the nature of present and future security risks, Blockchain Technology will play a vital role to maintain the originality of the digital data. Blockchain stores data in a decentralized, distributed ledger for achieving immutability and transparency. The system analyses a case study which aims at maintaining Healthcare records in Blockchain ledger to facilitate secure storage of the patient’s details. For efficient prediction of diabetes the Blockchain and machine learning algorithms are integrated. The various other applications of combining Blockchain technology with machine learning algorithms are Smart city applications, Forensic information storage systems, Energy data management systems, banking and finance management systems.
Mohammad Saeid Safaei, Shamsollah Ghanbari, Zhanat Umarova, Zhalgasbek Iztayev
IoT is one of the most important and profitable projects proposed by Kevin Ashton since 1999. One of the most critical issues in maintaining communication between things and protecting the data is the security issue of IoT. So far, different strategies have been made to maintain safe security. In this paper, we provide a Five-Layers model by adding two security layers based on BlockChain. We show that blockchain smart contracts are a solution to enhance IoT security and prevent infiltration into the network.
Abstract Blockchain-based cloud application (BCP) is an emerging cloud application architecture. By moving trust-critical functions onto blockchain, BCP offers unprecedented function transparency and data integrity. Ethereum is by far the most popular blockchain platform chosen for BCP. In Ethereum, special programs named smart contracts are often used to implement key components for BCP. By design, users can send transactions to smart contracts, which will automatically lead to code execution and state modification. However, unlike regular programs, smart contracts are restricted in execution by gas limit, i.e., a form of runtime resource. If a transaction uses up all available gas, an out of gas exception () will trigger, reverting state until right before that transaction.In this work, we study the out of gas exceptions (or gas exceptions in short) on Ethereum empirically for the very first time. In particular, we collect exception transactions using an instrumented Ethereum client. By investigation, we found gas exceptions stand out in terms of both occurrences and losses. Moreover, we focused on individual contracts and transactions, aiming at discovering and identifying common causing factors triggering these exceptions. At last, we also investigate existing tools in preventing gas exceptions. Our results suggest further research and study in this direction.
Configuring intelligent manufacturing systems (IMSs) is significant for manufacturing enterprises to take a step toward Industry 4.0. However, most current IMS is configured based on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with a centralized architecture, which results in poor flexibility to handle manufacturing disturbances and limits capacity to support security solutions. To solve the above issues, this article combines IIoT with the permissioned blockchain and proposes a novel manufacturing blockchain of things (MBCoT) architecture for the configuration of a secure, traceable, and decentralized IMS. Then, hardware infrastructures and software-defined components of MBCoT are designed to provide an insight into the industrial implementation of IMS. Furthermore, the consensus-oriented transaction logic of MBCoT is presented based on a crash fault-tolerant protocol, which empowers MBCoT with a strong but resource-efficient encryption mechanism to support the autonomous manufacturing process. Finally, the implementation of an MBCoT prototype system and its application examples justify that the proposed approach is practical and sound. The evaluation experiment demonstrates that MBCoT equips IMS with a secure, traceable, stable, and decentralized operating environment while achieving competitive throughput and latency performance.
Sujit Biswas, Kashif Sharif, Fan Li, Saraju P. Mohanty
Blockchain as a distributed ledger technology can be very effective in providing access control and big data management in health-care systems. Because implementing or migrating to a pure blockchain solution is an extremely challenging task, several design and implementation dynamics should be considered.