Abdelhakim Baouya, Salim Chehida, Saddek Bensalem, Marius Bozga
The expected exponential growth of IoT devices in future years arises management issues to be resolved. Cloud computing may not be adequate for a massive scale while fog computing brings the ability to manage the distribution of controllability and manageability. Besides, such decentralized architecture is not sufficient to handle sensitive transactions, blockchain-based technology has raised hypes in implementing applications in trust-less environments. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture for scalable control of IoT devices. Moreover, smart contracts are developed to facilitate the ledger update process. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture is capable of providing trust on-demand changes with a negligible effect on IoT resources.
Blockchain technology is attracting the interest of the Internet of Things (IoT) domain as a decentralized platform for a trusted record of information. Thus, an increasing number of architectures have been proposed for integrating both technologies. However, few of them have focused on the sensing elements of the IoT systems, which are typically low-cost and resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose an architecture that integrates blockchain at the sensor level, creating a chain of trust from the source of the data. To evaluate our proposal, we develop a cross-platform library for constrained IoT devices and deploy a full-fledged utilities management showcase using off-the-shelf hardware. From a device perspective, we measure the overhead that our architecture introduces in the system, in terms of memory and program space footprint, processing time, and power consumption. From the application perspective, we quantify the additional cost and delay incurred by using a public blockchain. Our results show that even constrained 8-bit devices with a 16-MHz AVR CPU can support the proposed solution. Moreover, the cost of maintaining a transparent record of daily resource consumption on the blockchain can be less than 1 USD a month.
In this paper we propose a blockchain-based cross-domain authentication strategy. This strategy uses the cosmos network model to enable mobile devices to reliably access external domain networks when moving across domains. Our test results prove the feasibility of this strategy and have better performance than other cross-domain authentication schemes.
Furqan Jameel, Muhammad Nabeel, Muhammad Ali Jamshed, Riku Jäntti
Blockchain is a special type of data structure in which data, usually termed as transactions, is linked together using cryptographic techniques. Because of these modular features, the applications of blockchain are being investigated in myriad domains such as cybersecurity, finance, transportation, and Internet-of-things (IoT). Although the applications of blockchain in IoT networks have much potential, many research challenges need the attention of researchers from both academia and industry. One of the open research challenges is the frequent occurrence of forking events in blockchain-based IoT networks. The forking of a blockchain can not only lead to potential security attacks but also poses excessive overhead in the largescale IoT networks. To tackle this inefficiency of blockchain-based IoT networks, this paper employs deep learning to minimize forking by reducing the transmission delays. Specifically, a deep neural network is used to reduce the transmission delay by improving the transmission rate. The deep learning approach is also compared with other benchmark techniques to show the superiority of the proposed method. We anticipate that this foundational work on blockchain-based IoT networks would pave the way for researchers to upscale the study into real-world implementations.
Cloud of Things (CoT) refers to an IoT solution consuming the cloud services of a single cloud vendor. In this article, we have introduced the concept of a MultiCoT (http://www.MultiCoT.com) solution which refers to the collaborative execution of an IoT solution by multiple cloud vendors. Cloudlets and ad-hoc clouds are the extensions of centralized cloud services, closer to the user, in the form of fog and edge computing layers respectively and the Osmotic Computing (OC) serves as a glue by accomplishing the seamless compute sharing across these layers. The OC can also be integrated within a MultiCoT solution for extending it across three computational layers of cloud, fog and edge. However, this can only be achieved after establishing enough trust among all the vendors that are working in collaboration to simultaneously serve a particular MultiCoT solution. Blockchain has been already proven for establishing trust and supporting reliable interactions among independently operating entities. Hence, it can be used for establishing trust among the multiple cloud vendors serving a single MultiCoT solution. In this article, we have presented the importance of using the proactive Blockchain-enabled Osmotic Manager (B-OM) for improving the reliability of OC. We have also highlighted the blockchain features that can improve the reliability of OC by establishing trust among the independently operating vendors of a MultiCoT solution, followed by the challenges associated with the integration of blockchain and OC along with the future research directions for achieving the proposed integration.
The past decade has seen a huge growth not only in the Internet of Things (IoT) but also in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) from both academia and industry. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) combine a variety of sensors, IoT devices, control units, gateways, etc. Therefore, the software of the different sensors and IoT devices needs to be updated to the latest version by the Software Vendors. This paper proposes a blockchain-based identity and trust management framework for the IoV ecosystem, that aims to provide secure software updates. The proposed framework consists of two processes: the identification and registration of the entities of the ecosystem, and the authentication of the entities which relies on established W3C standards for defining verifiable credential presentation, verification, and revocation. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach in a case study.
Blockchain technology has become a catchword in the recent technological era. It is used in industry as well as by researchers. Blockchain technology concept was used first time in bitcoin application and now its application areas are expanding through all directions in the digital world. Blockchain technology has characteristics as transparency, decentralization, persistency, auditability. There are pros and cons of these characteristics. Based on the advantages, the various domains are adopting the blockchain technology for the development of applications. Different industries and governments are developing their projects using blockchain technology to fulfil their goals as they are getting solutions to their problems through this technology. For developing the applications, various platforms are introduced. These development platforms support by various feature and there is an add-on in that features as per requirements come up. Toward the end of the discussion, the paper is enlightening the challenges in blockchain technology. As the demand of the technology increases, the issues are raising and attackers are attracting to break the system and find out the loopholes in that. The report mentioned the challenges with examples which will be pointing towards various areas of the research.
Since the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices became smart and autonomous. Their exponentially increasing number and their use in many application domains result in a huge potential of cybersecurity threats. Taking into account the evolution of the IoT, security and interoperability are the main challenges, to ensure the reliability of the information. The blockchain technology provides a new approach to handle the trust in a decentralized network. However, current blockchain implementations cannot be used in the IoT domain because of their huge need for computing power and storage utilization. This paper provides a lightweight distributed ledger protocol dedicated to the IoT application, reducing the computing power and storage utilization, handling the scalability and ensuring the reliability of the information.
Yang Gao, Wenjun Wu, Haixiang Nan, Yang Sun · 5 authors
Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) has developed rapidly. To deal with the security problems in some of the IoT applications, blockchain has aroused lots of attention in both academia and industry. In this paper, we consider the mobile blockchain supporting IoT applications, and the mobile edge computing (MEC) is deployed at the Small-cell Base Station (SBS) as a supplement to enhance the computation ability of IoT devices. To encourage the participation of the SBS in the mobile blockchain networks, the long-term revenue of the SBS is considered. The task scheduling problem maximizing the long-term mining reward and minimizing the resource cost of the SBS is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). To achieve an efficient intelligent strategy, the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based solution named policy gradient based computing tasks scheduling (PG-CTS) algorithm is proposed. The policy mapping from the system state to the task scheduling decision is represented by a deep neural network. The episodic simulations are built and the REINFORCE algorithm with baseline is used to train the policy network. According to the training results, the PG-CTS method is about 10% better than the second-best method greedy. The generalization ability of PG-CTS is proved theoretically, and the testing results also show that the PG-CTS method has better performance over the other three strategies, greedy, first-in-first-out (FIFO) and random in different environments.
Teng Zhang, Ren Yucheng, Cao Xiaodong, Kang Xie · 5 authors
Abstract In order to promote the synergistic interaction between source network and storage, and enhance the load control capability, the adjustable load measurement technology based on blockchain has become the focus of research at home and abroad. This paper reviews the current research status of block chain technology and its application in declaration and issuance, market supervision, market settlement, load measurement, enhancing mutual trust of market transactions and information security. Distributed ledger from block chain under containerized edge service engine, improved directed and acyclic chart distributed ledger structure and adjustable load execution score three based on distributed ledger data. In this respect, the key and difficult points of technology are summarized. Combined with the current situation of power development demand, power market, electricity price mode, demand response, the possible problems and development trend of adjustable load measurement technology based on block chain are discussed in detail.
The blockchain technology firstly presented by Haber and Stornetta in the year 1990, and first time blockchain technology used in Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The blockchain technology is truly decentralized technology. In blockchain technology, every block has consisted three main parts that is data, hash block, and the previous hash block. Hash is controls the uniqueness of each block and it is unique for each block. Each block also contains the hash of the previous block; thus, the blocks are connected to each other. A blockchain can divided into three categories public blockchain, consortium blockchain and private blockchain. The proposed paper provided the comparative and analytical review on the blockchain consensus algorithms.
In healthcare sector, the move towards Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems has been accelerating in parallel with the increased adoption of IoT and smart devices. This is driven by the anticipated advantages for patients and healthcare providers. The integration of EHR and IoT makes it highly heterogenous in terms of devices, network standard, platforms, types data, connectivity, etc., and introduces security, patient and data privacy, and trust challenges. To address such challenges, this paper proposes an architecture that combines biometric-based blockchain technology with the EHR system. This integration ensures the integrity of data to control the access to the patient's Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) that are synchronized and exchanged, using Blockchain Technology, between distributed healthcare providers. More specifically, this paper describes a mechanism that enables the recovery of patient's access control on their EHRs securely without compromising their privacy and identity. A biometric-based blockchain EHR system (BBEHR) is proposed to uniquely identify patients, enable them to control access to their EHRs, and ensure recoverable access to their EHRs. The system takes into account the security and privacy requirements of Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance, and it overcomes the challenges of using secret keys to control access to EHRs, in the cases of lost secret keys and the need for emergency access to EHRs without the presence of secret keys.
AI and Blockchain are two disruptive technologies that have the potential to change business models and impact the society. Their integration can lead to Decentralized AI, which enables analysis, decisions and self-learning on trusted and shared data stored on the Blockchain. Autonomous agents in a multi agent environment can collaborate, act and take decisions. Decentralized AI can help improve system performance by processing relevant data, as well as perform parallel processing across nodes based on different objectives. This paper reviews concepts of Blockchain, AI, power of combining these two technologies, and different platforms providing these capabilities.
Abstract Blockchain technology and Internet of Things technology are two new technologies formed in the current transmission of information technology. In the implementation of its technical control, it can scientifically control the information sharing work and realize the artificial adjustment of the transmission control of the Internet of Things technology. In this paper, research on the Internet of Things data sharing model based on block chain with a view to provide guidance to the security of Things data sharing technology under the block chain. In this paper, Hyperledger Fabric block chain platform-based platform, proposed a block-based chain of IOT data sharing model, security and data privacy is an enhancement, obtained by the performance of the test model. Throughput is maximized when the write transaction sending frequency is 100 TPS and the query transaction sending frequency is 250 TPS. The maximum write throughput is 60 TPS, which is better than Bitcoin and Ethereum on the public chain, which proves the feasibility of the model implementation. This model can achieve storage and sharing without the help of a third-party centralized organization, and directly establish trust between participants, which can ensure the safe sharing of data.
Sudip Maitra, Venkata P. Yanambaka, Ahmed Abdelgawad, Deepak Puthal · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the network of interconnected smart physical objects that collect and exchange information for enabling smart applications and services. IoT devices are often battery powered and lack computational resources and as a consequence, traditional measures of providing security is not feasible in IoT systems which leads to major security vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology has proven to be a secure medium of transaction in trustless public networks and has the potential to resolve the security vulnerabilities intrinsic to IoT systems. However, reaching consensus throughout a blockchain network is computationally demanding and requires large amount of energy. Moreover, typical transactions in blockchain based applications are slow, compounding the issues in adopting blockchain technology in IoT systems. In this work, a lightweight consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh), was implemented on resource-constrained IoT edge nodes and evaluated in terms of latency and energy consumption. The implemented consensus algorithm reduces latency in block validation to 29.35 ms and energy consumption to 44.31 mJ for each transaction, demonstrating promise and potential, to feasibly implement blockchain technology in IoT systems.
G Pazhev, Gr. Spasov, Mitko Shopov, Galidiya Petrova
Abstract The paper presents an implementation of a smart home architecture with two gateways based on collaboration of blockchain technology and Internet of Things (IoT) Message oriented middleware (MOM) architecture for management of internal home appliances. A basic overview of IoT MOM, MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transfer) protocol and blockchain architectures is made and the key characteristics and consensus algorithms are presented. Some challenges and the Ethereum smart contracts concept of the blockchain technology are discussed.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Wilson S. Melo, Raphael C. S. Machado, Daniel Peters, Mahbuba Moni
Public-Key Infrastructures are elementary building blocks to implement digital signatures (i.e., digital notarization) and, hence, ensure information integrity, authenticity, and nonrepudiation. This feature is a promising alternative to improve the reliability of smart meters. However, conventional PKIs can be too expensive in scenarios that consist of a significant number of meters. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based PKI, describing how to tailor this solution to deal with specific aspects related to smart meter protection. We also implement our proposal as a smart contract with the Hyperledger Fabric platform. The results show our solution's feasibility and provide a reliable model to manage digital certificates for a wide diversity of smart devices.
The integration of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based technologies with the existing industrial manufacturing processes help to improve on-site safety of workers, reduce downtime of machines, improve productivity rate, and minimize near-miss incidents and casualties. However, a prior intimation of the various safety-related information may minimize the probability of accidents on the factory floor and casualty rates. Typically, the safety-as-a-service (Safe-aaS) infrastructure provides customized safety-related decisions to the registered end-users. However, there exist certain problems associated with the privacy of the information provided by the end-users during registration, decision parameters requested by the end-users, and data sensed by the sensor nodes. In this work, we provide an architecture of Blockchain integration into the Safe-aaS infrastructure. Additionally, we discuss the implementation and management of the Blockchain-enabled Safe-aaS architecture. Extensive analytical results demonstrate that the profit of the safety service provider (SSP) improves with the adoption of blockchain technology into the Safe-aaS architecture. On the other hand, the overall throughput in our proposed architecture follows an increasing trend, with the increase in the number of decisions successfully delivered. Additionally, the throughput decreases with the increase in the number of registered end-users.
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) has brought an array of different services, from smart health-care, to smart transportation, all the way to smart cities. For a truly connected environment, different sectors need to collaborate. One use case of such overlap is between smart grids and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) giving rise to Electric Vehicles and their charging infrastructure. Being such a lucrative opportunity for investors and the research community, many efforts have been made toward providing the end-user with an extraordinary Quality of Service (QoS). However, given the current protocols and deployment of the Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, some key challenges still need to be addressed. In particular, we identify two main EV challenges: (1) vulnerable charging stations and EVs, and (2) non-optimal charging schedules. With these issues in mind, we evaluate the integration of Blockchain and AI with the EV charging infrastructure. Specifically, we discuss the current AI and Blockchain charging solutions available in the market. In addition, we propose a couple of use cases where both technologies complement each other for a secure, efficient and decentralized charging ecosystem. This article serves as starting point for stakeholders and policymakers to help identify potential directions and implementations of better charging systems for EVs.
Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Moayad Aloqaily, Azzedine Boukerche, Yaser Jaraweh
Diversified Internet of Things services are becoming more complex and strictly user-defined. Traditional cloud solutions proved to be both costly in terms of resources and time efficiency. To overcome such a burden, researchers developed fog solutions for faster service responsiveness. Fog-to-Fog communication and cooperation was then introduced to compose services on-the-go for user-specific requests with the aid of mobile edge devices. This paper introduces a blockchain-based decentralized service composition solution for complex multimedia service delivery to cloud subscribers. The proposed work dynamically creates user-defined services without requiring any intermediary service or network provider entities to authenticate and deliver composite services. The composition process uses a reinforcement learning technique to construct secure and reliable composition paths. Participants are rewarded by cloud and fog entities for solving complex composition processes. Simulation results conducted on the system show that by adapting the proposed technique, fog and cloud entities require less resources and reduced power usage with increased service delivery success rates to cloud subscribers.
Blockchain Technology is used to develop applications more easily and maintain the information as safe and secure. This work is aimed towards developing a recruitment process supported by blockchain technology. Currently, a manual system is used to recruit employees; Manual recruitment is a time consuming, costlier non-secure process. Selection and recruiting the candidates is a vital process for an organization. The proposed method uses blockchain technology for the recruitment process. The entered candidate details are verified by the college, organization for the last workplaces, and law enforcement. Based on the approval, the candidate data is stored in a block with its transaction hash value. The transaction hash consists of the unique predefined fixed-length text of the block and it secures the data from tampering. SHA-256 is one of the hashing algorithms to develop a transaction hash. Once the candidate information is stored in the blockchain, the recruiters read the candidate data from the blockchain and select the validated candidate for the recruitment process. It ensures that they are retrieving the valid details of candidates and can proceed for the further recruitment process. The technology uses a Smart contract under the Ethereum platform to provide security for the recruitment application and tested using the Ganache tool.
With the development of Internet of Things (IoT), the IoT data security issues have raised great attention of academics and industry. However, due to the IoT essential characteristics of decentralization and distribution, traditional centralized architecture suffers from security and scalability challenges. The blockchain technology has been widely applied in industrial domains such as finance and logistics because of its key features of decentralization, data traceability, immutability and auditability which will greatly benefit the IoT system. In this paper, the foundamental of blockchain technology is summerized and the blockchain-based data protection architecture for IoT is proposed. The data transmission, storage and sharing schemes are detailed discussed and evaluated. The result indicates that the implement of blockchain technology will prevent typical attacks and bring benefit to data security of IoT.
The rapid increase in the number of mobile devices across the globe has brought a new challenge to the forefront, one of mobile traffic management. The ever-increasing number of mobile devices leads to the generation of a large amount of data and computationally intensive applications, which contributes heavily to cellular network congestion. To solve this issue, we propose a mobile data offloading scheme based on a distributed ledger technology (DLT). Existing mobile data offloading schemes based on DLT employ conventional blockchain to set up a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of mobile users. Although these schemes have gained ground in improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) for end-users, they lack efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, generic blockchain does not provide timestamp ordering of events, which is necessary to ensure the computation of delay-sensitive tasks. To overcome these challenges, we propose the use of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) data structure for mobile data offloading. Finally, to ensure time and cost optimality, a game-theoretic approach has been proposed in this paper.
Blockchain is a emerging technology with decentralized infrastructure. This technology is used in almost all the domains including finance, energy, cloud computing, messaging and many more. Blockchain plays a important role in military message passing which ensures security of messages by avoiding changes made to data that is stored in blocks. Consortium blockchain requires the permission where each and every user are authorized users. The main issue is Distributed Consensus in the current system of PoW algorithm. So here the consortium blockchain technology is proposed on “MESSAGE PASSING TECHNOLOGY” in military messaging system called HPBC. This algorithm will works well on asynchronous network which in turn gives the results in high performance and analysis evaluation.