Tharindu Ranathunga, Ramona Marfievici, Alan McGibney, Susan Rea
An IoT eco-system includes IoT network components, network services and network participants such as organizations, consumers, governments, and businesses. Due to its diversity and scale, trustworthiness is a critical concern to be considered during architectural design and the operational phase of these eco-systems. To do this, security, privacy, reliability, resilience and safety must be assured. However, existing solutions partially address these requirements using centralized approaches that come with challenges such as a single point of failure, scalability, and dependence on a third party. In this context, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts, due to its intrinsic properties of transparency, immutability, and underlying secure-by-design architecture, allows distributed, decentralized, automated workflows, which can be incorporated to automate the management of the next generation IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for IoT eco-systems providing seamless integration between IoT and DLT to create a decentralized trusted architecture, which ensures trustworthiness of IoT eco-systems at design time and a trust reputation model based on the architecture to protect it during the run-time. Furthermore, we have presented the initial steps towards the implementation of this framework.
Mahmudul Hassan Ashik, Mirza Mohd Shahriar Maswood, Abdullah G. Alharbi
Ethereum is a blockchain-based distributed network and has been a successful platform to host decentralized applications. On the other hand, fog computing has emerged as one of the most demanding field for research as it brings the services of cloud to the edge of the network, i.e. closer to the IoT devices. To satisfy the QoS requirement of latency sensitive applications, the concept of fog computing is introduced in order to implement the idea of smart home, city etc. Though the fog nodes can support latency sensitive applications, but their computational capacity is low which leads to more vulnerability against known attacks. But Ethereum has paved the way to develop smart contracts to implement any logic written in it upon calling. The usage of smart contracts in securing the fog node can be effective as it runs in a blockchain enabled network which makes the smart contract immutable and secured against modification. This creates a scope of using smart contract's logic to ensure the security of fog nodes and IoT devices which they earnestly require. This also eliminates the necessity of public-private key pair and other authentication systems used in fog-cloud architecture. In our work, we modified the conventional fog-cloud architecture by introducing blockchain-based fog layer to ensure better security and privacy for both fog layer and IoT devices.
Today, management and orchestration are considered prime components of the new network management layer. Multi-domain orchestration has helped in simplifying infrastructural operations and enables better scaling and faster deployment of network services. However, resource provisioning considering network optimization and fulfillment of multi-constraint quality of service (QoS) is still a major concern. In this article, an architecture comprising multi-domain edge orchestration (MDEO) entrusted by blockchain designed to solve the problem of multi-constraint QoS is proposed. A dynamic end-to-end (E2E) network slicing algorithm is devised to execute at the MDEO to enable multi-tenant on-demand network infrastructure provisioning isolation and security. The algorithm first calculates an optimum network slice topology and then instantiates the involved virtual network functions. Based on multi-constraint QoS, it fulfills the E2E slice request. Blockchain is deployed to ensure trustworthiness between different telecom operators, introduce transparency and to automate the fulfillment of service-level agreements through smart contracts. In addition, an experimental simulation of the system is performed and the burst and response times of the proposed framework are analyzed using different distributions. The data in both cases demonstrates a lognormal distributed behavior.
Patrícia R. Sousa, João S. Resende, Rolando Martins, Luís Antunes
Purpose The aim of this paper is to evaluate the use of blockchain for identity management (IdM) in the context of the Internet of things (IoT) while focusing on privacy-preserving approaches and its applications to healthcare scenarios. Design/methodology/approach The paper describes the most relevant IdM systems focusing on privacy preserving with or without blockchain and evaluates them against ten selected features grouped into three categories: privacy, usability and IoT. Then, it is important to analyze whether blockchain should be used in all scenarios, according to the importance of each feature for different use cases. Findings Based on analysis of existing systems, Sovrin is the IdM system that covers more features and is based on blockchain. For each of the evaluated use cases, Sovrin and UniquID were the chosen systems. Research limitations/implications This paper opens new lines of research for IdM systems in IoT, including challenges related to device identity definition, privacy preserving and new security mechanisms. Originality/value This paper contributes to the ongoing research in IdM systems for IoT. The adequacy of blockchain is not only analyzed considering the technology; instead the authors analyze its application to real environments considering the required features for each use case.
Jiejun Hu, Martin J. Reed, Mays Al-Naday, Nikolaos Thomos
The Internet of Things (IoT) connected by Software Defined Networking (SDN) promises to bring great benefits to cyber-physical systems. However, the increased attack surface offered by the growing number of connected vulnerable devices and complex nature of SDN control plane applications could overturn the huge benefits of such a system. This paper addresses the vulnerability of some unspecified security flaw in the SDN control plane application (such as a zero-day software vulnerability) which can be exploited to insert malicious flow rules in the switch that do not match network policies. Specifically, we propose a blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) based framework that supports switch flow verification and insertion; and additionally provides straightforward deployment of blockchain technology within an existing SDN infrastructure. While use of an external BaaS brings straightforward deployment, it obscures knowledge of the blockchain agents who are responsible for flow conformance testing through a smart blockchain contract, leading to potential exploitation. Thus, we design a strategy to prevent the blockchain agents from acting arbitrarily, as this would result in what is termed a "moral hazard". We achieve this by developing a novel mathematical model of the fair reward scheme based on game theory. To understand the performance of our system, we evaluate our model using a Matlab based simulation framework. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm balances the needs of the blockchain agents to maximise the overall social welfare, i.e. the sum of profits across all parties.
Miao Du, Kun Wang, Yinqiu Liu, Kai Qian · 7 authors
Deploying blockchain in IoT is an effective way to address traditional security issues. However, existing approaches have two major limitations: since the blockchain itself is subject to attacks, including selfish mining, double spending, and distributed denial of service attacks, IoT smart devices are also vulnerable once hackers successfully invade blockchain systems; due to the heterogeneity and resource limitations of IoT devices, the deployment of the existing blockchain systems in the IoT scenario cannot reflect strong adaptability and meet IoT service requirements. In this article, we introduce Spacechain, a secure and high-performance blockchain system with three-dimensional ledger architecture, to enable blockchain open in IoT. Specifically, we first design a three-dimensional architecture with novel data structures to deal with the heterogeneity and scalability of IoT networks. Then, we propose the Three-Dimensional Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (3D-GHOST) consensus mechanism for Spacechain to improve security and network performance. Additionally, we conduct detailed security analysis and extensive experimental verification to demonstrate the performance of Spacechain.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Dynamic Access Control in IoT (Internet of Things) through monitoring user behavior is a procedure that defines access control theory. Usually, an institution provides services to a user who owns a specific role that was issued by another institution. Such access control methods are possible in man-to-man communications only, but not in computer networks, because it is hard to establish security and limit spiteful actions through the users with high-risk values. High-risk values are caused by the users who do the tasks which they are not intended to do. In this paper, we bring forward a technique to limit malicious activities by monitoring user behavior using smart contracts. This proposed technique uses blockchain based technology and smart contracts for trust and the confirmation of user's possession. We described the substructure, containing two main parts: smart contract and an authentication arrangement protocol.
B. Saiharsha, R. S. Sanjay Tharagesh, S. V. Nikish Kumar, N. Harini
Food and education are a necessity in our lives, where a part of the people still hasn't had a square meal for the day and almost a quarter of them are illiterate. The Mid-Day Meal Scheme provided the right platform for the underprivileged children for their education as well as their daily nutrition and wellbeing. But later some unethical individuals started using this scheme for their personal gains. Findings reveal that although monitoring mechanisms are present, they are manually driven which gives space for fraudulent activities and malpractices. The proposed concept aims at an automated system that requires minimal intervention and increased scalability and security levels. These features are achieved through the means of blockchain and biometrics, which provide immutability and high levels of security. This solution is cloud-based, requiring minimal human intervention. Thus, it makes traceability and accountability easy.
Saqib Hakak, Wazir Zada Khan, Gulshan Amin Gilkar, Noman Haider · 6 authors
The inefficient disposal of industrial waste causes water and soil pollution; thus, to protect the health of different ecosystems, industrial wastewater management is essential. Wastewater treatment's aim is to clean and protect water and to extract pollutants and remove toxicants before the remaining water is discharged into the environment. Currently, the disposal of industrial wastewater is an important topic because of the serious threat of wastewater to aquatic life and surrounding environment. Therefore, wastewater must be effectively treated and safely discharged into water bodies. In this study, for industrial wastewater management, we aim to use blockchain technology. Thus, we propose a conceptual architecture based on blockchain and present three case studies. Subsequently, we discussed requirements for incorporating blockchain into wastewater management. Finally, we demonstrated directions for future work.
As the basis of the most existing blockchain networks, Proof of Work (PoW) consensus protocol highly relies on the computational resources, and thus causing a huge waste of energy. Proof of Stake (PoS) is the alternative to relieve the PoW dilemma. However, it is also under threat, i.e., discouragement attack, which is a way to bring down the blockchain networks without any effective defense against it. To prevent the discouragement attack, the founders of Ethereum argue that the system should set a withdraw delay instead of allowing the validators entry/exit quickly. But how to determine the delay is still an open question. In this paper, we adopt the cyber insurance idea and propose the insurance contract to help determine the withdraw delay, as well as the insurance claim to relieve the loss of victims. Specifically, instead of requiring the insurance premium from the validators, the cyber insurer first signs the contract with the blockchain representative (e.g., beacon chain). Then the blockchain representative would sign a series of contracts with the validators. By such design, the validators can obtain the insurance claim without paying the premium, while the blockchain networks can keep the validators staying online to resist the discouragement attack. Finally, through the simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed model is capable of providing adaptive insurance contracts for the different validators and keeping the profits of the blockchain network and the cyber insurer.
Gino Carrozzo, Muhammad Shuaib Siddiqui, August Betzler, José Bonnet · 7 authors
The 5G network solutions currently standardised and deployed do not yet enable the full potential of pervasive networking and computing envisioned in 5G initial visions: network services and slices with different QoS profiles do not span multiple operators; security, trust and automation is limited. The evolution of 5G towards a truly production-level stage needs to heavily rely on automated end-to-end network operations, use of distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) for cognitive network orchestration and management and minimal manual interventions (zero-touch automation). All these elements are key to implement highly pervasive network infrastructures. Moreover, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can be adopted to implement distributed security and trust through Smart Contracts among multiple non-trusted parties. In this paper, we propose an initial concept of a zero-touch security and trust architecture for ubiquitous computing and connectivity in 5G networks. Our architecture aims at cross-domain security & trust orchestration mechanisms by coupling DLTs with AI-driven operations and service lifecycle automation in multi-tenant and multi-stakeholder environments. Three representative use cases are identified through which we will validate the work which will be validated in the test facilities at 5GBarcelona and 5TONIC/Madrid.
Edge computing is becoming pervasive in our daily lives with emerging smart devices and the development of communication technology. Resource-rich smart devices and high-density supportive networks make data transactions prevalent over edge environments. To ensure such transactions are unmodifiable and undeniable, blockchain technology is introduced into edge environments. In this paper, we propose a hybrid blockchain system in edge environments to enhance the security for transactions and determine the incentive for miners. We propose a Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) hybrid consensus blockchain system utilizing the heterogeneity of devices to adapt to the characteristic of edge environments. We raise the incentive assignment problem that gives the corresponding PoW miner when a new block generates. We further formulate it into a two-stage Stackelberg game. We propose an algorithm and prove that it can obtain the global optimal results for the incentive that the miner will receive for a new block. Numerical simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can give reasonable incentive to miners under different system parameters in edge blockchain systems.
Weikang Liu, Bin Cao, Lei Zhang, Mugen Peng · 5 authors
Keeping patients' sensitive information secured and untampered in the e-Health system is of paramount importance. Emerging as a promising technology to build a secure and reliable distributed ledger, blockchain can protect data from being falsified, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. However, with limited computational resources, medical IoT devices do not have efficient ability to fulfill the functionalities as a full node in wireless blockchain network (WBN). Facing this dilemma, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) brings us dawn and hope through offloading the high resource demanding blockchain functionalities at the IoT devices to the MEC. However, aiming to maximize the mining profit, most of existing offloading strategies have ignored the other needs of wireless devices, e.g., faster transaction writing. In this paper, according to different needs, blockchain nodes are firstly divided into two categories. One is blockchain users whose needs are faster transaction uploading, the other is blockchain miners whose goals are maximum revenue. Then, to maximize both the utilities of blockchain users and blockchain miners, a Stackelberg game is introduced to formulate the interaction between them. From the simulation results, this game is proved to converge to a unique optimal equilibrium.
In this paper, we study the business ecosystem around 5G network slice brokering, where a dynamic mechanism conducts multiple trades among resource providers and the network operators, to dynamically provision slices (e.g., in the order of minutes). Then we address a significant and realistic scenario, where there is a lack of trust between market players. This typically occurs when the central slice broker has conflicting interests (e.g., being simultaneously infrastructure provider and virtual operator). We propose a distributed market design, lever-aging smart contracts technology, where the brokering mechanism is operated and validated by all of the parties involved. In addition, we use blockchain technology to enable a manipulation-proof record-keeping system, where a record is accepted into the ledger only when all the parties have reached a consensus to do so. We deploy a realistic blockchain application/network hosted on the cloud-based Hyperledger Fabric framework. Finally, we investigate the performance of the blockchain-based slice brokering market in terms of transaction latency, throughput and computing intensity. Our results show that the proposed market could support 100 auction transactions per second with a latency below one second, which would add no considerable delay even to a highly dynamic slicing market mechanism.
Omar Ait Oualhaj, Amr Mohamed, Mohsen Guizani, Aiman Erbad
The blockchain is a storage technology and transmission of information, transparent, secure, and operating without central control. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized trust management and cooperation model where data is shared via blockchain and we explore the revenue distribution under different consensus schemes. To reduce the power calculation with respect to the control mechanism, our proposal adopts the possibility of Proof on Trust (PoT) and Proof of proof-of-stake based trust to replace the proof of work (PoW) scheme, to carry out the mining and storage of new data blocks. To detect nodes with malicious behavior to provide false system information, the trust updating algorithm is proposed..
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has recently seen an exponentially rise with the number of IoT devices been connected increasing in billions, but with such rapid demand and growth, IoT still faces few issues like data security, privacy, data integrity, authentication. The Distributed Ledger Technology like Blockchain also opens a wide range of opportunities, and it proves to be one solution for overcoming multiple issues. This paper highlights the use of Blockchain technology in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) and its practical limitations. The paper focuses on a new distributed ledger technology based on Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG) approach called IOTA, its working and features are discussed in detail. IOTA technology can overcome the practical limitations of classical Blockchain, and the implementation of IOTA for secure transferring of IoT sensor data is also discussed.
Samson Kahsay Gebresilassie, Joseph Rafferty, Philip Morrow, Liming Chen · 6 authors
The growth of Internet use due to the emergence of new paradigms including social media and the Internet of Things (IoT) has presented several challenges. Within the IoT paradigm, there are several domain-specific challenges, among which security is crucial. Billions of devices in the IoT ecosystem have the responsibility of generating, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data. This data may connect with organizations, services, billions of people and other devices. This high level of interconnectivity creates a complex and heterogeneous network which is challenging to adequately secure the IoT system. IoT devices are smart, diverse, portable, interoperable, often autonomous and deployed in distributed topology. Properly managing the identities of these IoT devices plays a critical role in achieving the security of the overall IoT ecosystem. Notably, existing identity management systems fail to satisfy the requirements of identity management for IoT devices. We present a novel solution for IoT devices identity management based on self-sovereign identity and underpinned by proven security offered by distributed ledger technology. This novel approach provides a secure, portable, decentralized, persistent, unique, interoperable, self-owned and self-controlled identity for IoT devices. A Device's identity with all its relationships in the IoT system are securely managed throughout its entire lifecycle.
Ahmad Hammoud, Hani Sami, Azzam Mourad, Hadi Otrok · 6 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) is turning into an undeniably developing point of discussion in both research and industrial fields. A key area that is witnessing a quick development in the utilization of IoT devices is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which allows information exchange among vehicles and infrastructures. Notably, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted for solving challenging vehicular problems and managing the IoV infrastructure. Despite the advantages AI carries for IoV, its deployment can be negatively affected by lacking computation resources and processing unreliable data. On the other hand, Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer network architecture that can be employed to empower security and resist against undesirable data modification. However, integrating both technologies (i.e., AI and Blockchain) exhausts, even more, the IoV infrastructure. Therefore, we present in this paper an overview discussing the AI and Blockchain approaches and models for IoV and propose a new Vehicular Edge Computing based architecture embedding both technologies and overcoming the aforementioned limitations. We then discuss the main challenges and give notice to the concerned parties and stakeholders about promising directions that arise from enabling the three technologies for providing smart, secure, and efficient IoV.
Telesurgery (TS) with 5G-enabled Tactile Internet (TI) has enormous potential to deliver real-time ultra-responsive surgical services remotely with high quality and accuracy. It is quite beneficial for society in the prospect of highly precise surgical diagnosis. However, the existing TS systems have security, privacy, latency, and blockchain (BC) storage cost issues, which restricts its applicability in surgical procedures across the world in the near future. To mitigate the above-mentioned issues, in this paper, we propose an approach named AaYusH (Ethereum smart contract (ESC) and IPFS-based TS system). The security and privacy issues in AaYusH can be resolved through ESC, whereas storage cost issues with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. Moreover, we present a real-time SC written in Solidity and deployed in Truffle suite. We test the security bugs of AaYusH in MyThril open-source tool and detect no issues. Finally, we evaluate the performance of AaYusH in context to latency and data storage cost, and it outperforms as compared to the traditional telesurgery system.
Mamoona Humayun, N. Z. Jhanjhi, Bushra Hamid, Ghufran Ahmed
Transportation and logistics management play a vital role in the development of a country. With the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, smart transportation is becoming a reality. However, these abundant connected IoT devices are vulnerable to security attacks. Recently, Blockchain has emerged as one of the most widely accepted technologies for trusted, secure and decentralized intelligent transportation systems. This research study aims to contribute to the field of logistics and transportation by exploring the potential of IoT and Blockchain technology in smart logistics and transportation. We propose a layered framework, namely BCTLF, for smart logistics and transportation that integrates IoT and Blockchain to provide an intelligent logistics and transportation system. Finally, we present two real-life IoT and Blockchain-based case studies to highlight the contribution of IoT and Blockchain in logistics and transportation.
Dayadi Lakshmaiah, L. Koteswara Rao, R. Yadgiri Rao, I. Satya Narayana · 5 authors
Data security for IOT devices is very import aspect these days as the world is moving towards digitalization. Consider a smart energy meter which provides a way to monitor the energy consumption at home, data security in such smart meter reading is very important. If the Power reading signals are tampered, then it may cause serious economic loss for the authorities. The personal information infringement of user can occur at the database and may fall in the hands of unethical persons. In order to address these issues in this paper we propose to use a permissioned blockchain network. Blockchain maintains time stamped ledger records that are very hard to tamper. Every transaction is recorded and distributed across many participant nodes, these records are immutable because they have blocks of data which are linked to each other with strong cryptographic hash. The blockchain network is built using hyperledger fabric, where all the participant nodes are registered and only registered nodes involve in consensus process of transaction. In fabric, MSP (membership service provider) identifies the identity of the participant nodes through X.509 digital certificates issued by certificate authority. Along with creation of blockchain network for the application, a mobile client, a web client, an Arduino client and web server is created. The Arduino client is the hardware module that has an energy meter (SDM120) measuring the energy consumption of the user and sends this information serially to NODEMCU. NODEMCU POSTs the read energy details to the web server at particular api, web server POSTs the details to the Blockchain Network, where transactions undergoes consensus to add this information to blockchain ledger. Now data is decentralized and every peer node has the local copy of ledger. The updated information can be queried and seen on the web Client and Mobile client user interfaces. Anonymity-enhanced blockchain has been implemented to avoid the disclosure of personal information or data. Also performance analysis of the application is carried out for number of sequential requests and concurrent requests from many users using different tools.
Blockchain is an immutable type of distributed ledger that is capable of storing data without relying on a third party. Blockchain technology has attracted significant interest in research areas, including its application in the smart grid for cybersecurity. Although significant efforts have been devoted to utilizing blockchain in the smart grid for cybersecurity, there is a lack of comprehensive survey on blockchain in the smart grid for cybersecurity in both application and technological perspectives. To fill this gap, we conducted a comprehensive survey on blockchain for smart gird cybersecurity. This conducted survey presents the latest insights of ideas, architectures, and techniques of implementation that are relevant to blockchain's application in the smart grid for cybersecurity. This article aims at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts specific to blockchain for cybersecurity in the smart grid.