Victor Pasknel de Alencar Ribeiro, Raimir Holanda Filho, Alex Ramos, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is one of the enabling technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), and focuses on providing long distance connectivity for a vast amount of smart devices. Currently, LoRa is one of the leading LPWAN solutions available for public use. In LPWANs, especially in LoRa, security is a major concern due to the resource constraints of the devices, the sensitivity level of the transmitted data, the large amount of connected devices, among other reasons. This paper studies the key management mechanism of LoRaWAN environments. A secure architecture for key management based on smart contracts and permissioned blockchain to enhance security and availability in LoRaWAN networks is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed blockchain-based LoRaWAN architecture, a working prototype has been created using open-source tools and commodity hardware. Performance analysis shows that the prototype presents similar execution time and latency values, when compared to a traditional system, especially for small and medium-sized LoRaWAN networks. We also discuss why the proposed solution can be used in environments with a large number of end-devices.
Sean Tan, Sourav S. Bhowmick, Huey Eng Chua, Xiaokui Xiao
Smart contracts enable developers to run instructions on blockchains (eg. Ethereum) and have broad range of real-world applications. Solidity is the most popular high-level smart contract programming language on Ethereum. Coding in such language, however, demands a user to be proficient in contract programming and debugging to construct smart contracts correctly. In practice, such expectation makes it harder for non-programmers to take advantage of smart contracts. In this demonstration, we present a novel visual smart contract construction system on Ethereum called latte to make smart contract development accessible to non-programmers. Specifically, it allows a user to construct a contract without writing Solidity code by manipulating visual objects in a direct manipulation-based interface. Furthermore, latte interactively guides users and makes them aware of the cost (in units of Gas) of visual actions undertaken by them during contract construction.
Federation of services, as a 5G networks concept, aims to provide orchestration of services across multiple administrative domains. In this paper, we are exploring a solution of applying distributed ledger technologies, precisely the combination of blockchain and smart contracts, to enable highly secure, private, fast and distributed interaction between administrative domains in the federation process. Along with the designed solution, we developed an experimental prototype that requires simple one‐time setup and fast simultaneous registration time for multiple administrative domains. Obtained results show single service federation times (without considering the deployment time) of around 5 seconds.
Rafael Belchior, André Vasconcelos, Sérgio Guerreiro, Miguel Correia
Blockchain interoperability is emerging as one of the crucial features of blockchain technology, but the knowledge necessary for achieving it is fragmented. This fact makes it challenging for academics and the industry to seamlessly achieve interoperability among blockchains. Given the novelty and potential of this new domain, we conduct a literature review on blockchain interoperability, by collecting 262 papers, and 70 grey literature documents, constituting a corpus of 332 documents. From those 332 documents, we systematically analyzed and discussed 80 documents, including both peer-reviewed papers and grey literature. Our review classifies studies in three categories: Cryptocurrency-directed interoperability approaches, Blockchain Engines, and Blockchain Connectors. Each category is further divided into sub-categories based on defined criteria. We discuss not only studies within each category and subcategory but also across categories, providing a holistic overview of blockchain interoperability, paving the way for systematic research in this domain. Our findings show that blockchain interoperability has a much broader spectrum than cryptocurrencies. The present survey leverages an interesting approach: we systematically contacted the authors of grey literature papers and industry solutions to obtain an updated view of their work. Finally, this paper discusses supporting technologies, standards, use cases, open challenges, and provides several future research directions.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising technology to provide product traceability for industrial systems. By using sensing and networking techniques, an IoT-enabled industrial system enables its participants to efficiently track products and record their status during production process. Current industrial IoT systems lack a unified product data sharing service, which prevents the participants from acquiring trusted traceability of products. Using emerging blockchain technology to build such a service is a promising direction. However, directly storing product data on blockchain incurs in efficiency and privacy issues in data management due to its distributed infrastructure. In response, we propose Cpds, a compressed and private data sharing framework, that provides efficient and private data management for product data stored on the blockchain. Cpds devises two new mechanisms to store compressed and policy-enforced product data on the blockchain. As a result, multiple industrial participants can efficiently share product data with fine-grained access control in a distributed environment without relying on a trusted intermediary. We conduct extensive empirical studies and demonstrate the feasibility of Cpds in improving the efficiency and security protection of product data storage on the blockchain.
Humans have used prosthetics for a long time, especially to recover lost abilities such as eyesight with glasses. We foresee a near future where more and more human organs and parts will be augmented by implants with computing, storing, and communicating capabilities. Unfortunately, those distributed augmented parts may be attacked, for example, by viruses, and they might have difficulties reaching consensus on the real state of the body's health and which actions to take to try to recover. We propose to use Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) such as a private blockchain based on practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm to reach body health consensus between those major, augmented body parts. In doing so, given the BFT algorithm formal guaranties, the augmented body can still rely on a correct body health state if less than one-third of the body parts fail.
Dimitris Geneiatakis, Yannis Soupionis, Gary Steri, Ioannis Kounelis · 6 authors
With the continuous development of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, new use cases apart from cryptocurrencies have come into the spotlight. In this article, we evaluate whether an e-government service could be a suitable candidate for a blockchain transformation. We selected as a reference test system an existing cross-border e-government service that is used for supporting goods exchanges across the European Union. We show how such an indicative paradigm can be transformed into a blockchain system. In order to do so, we deployed it in an emulated architecture for evaluating its performance under various realistic conditions. Our results show that the deployed system is able to meet the requirements, both in terms of throughput and transaction speed. Moreover, it shows clear advantages in terms of usability and synchronization between all entities.
Shengjing Sun, Xiaochen Zheng, Javier Villalba-Díez, Joaquín Ordieres‐Meré
Information-intensive transformation is vital to realize the Industry 4.0 paradigm, where processes, systems, and people are in a connected environment. Current factories must combine different sources of knowledge with different technological layers. Taking into account data interconnection and information transparency, it is necessary to enhance the existing frameworks. This paper proposes an extension to an existing framework, which enables access to knowledge about the different data sources available, including data from operators. To develop the interoperability principle, a specific proposal to provide a (public and encrypted) data management solution to ensure information transparency is presented, which enables semantic data treatment and provides an appropriate context to allow data fusion. This proposal is designed also considering the Privacy by Design option. As a proof of application case, an implementation was carried out regarding the logistics of the delivery of industrial components in the construction sector, where different stakeholders may benefit from shared knowledge under the proposed architecture.
Ouns Bouachir, Moayad Aloqaily, Lewis Tseng, Azzedine Boukerche
Blockchain has revolutionized how transactions are conducted by ensuring secure and auditable peer-to-peer coordination. This is due to both the development of decentralization, and the promotion of trust among peers. Blockchain and fog computing are currently being evaluated as potential support for software and a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from banking practices and digital transactions to cyber-physical systems. These systems are designed to work in highly complex, sometimes even adversarial, environments, and to synchronize heterogeneous machines and manufacturing facilities in cyber computational space, and address critical challenges such as computational complexity, security, trust, and data management. Coupling blockchain with fog computing technologies has the potential to identify and overcome these issues. Thus, this paper presents the knowledge of blockchain and fog computing required to improve cyber-physical systems in terms of quality-of-service, data storage, computing and security.
Francesco Girardi, Gaetano De Gennaro, Lucio Colizzi, Vito Nicola Convertini
New types of patient health records aim to help physicians shift from a medical practice, often based on their personal experience, towards one of evidence based medicine, thus improving the communication among patients and care providers and increasing the availability of personal medical information. These new records, allowing patients and care providers to share medical data and clinical information, and access them whenever they need, can be considered enabling Ambient Assisted Living technologies. Furthermore, new personal disease monitoring tools support specialists in their tasks, as an example allowing acquisition, transmission and analysis of medical images. The growing interest around these new technologies poses serious questions regarding data integrity and transaction security. The huge amount of sensitive data stored in these new records surely attracts the interest of malicious hackers, therefore it is necessary to guarantee the integrity and the maximum security of servers and transactions. Blockchain technology can be an important turning point in the development of personal health records. This paper discusses some issues regarding the management and protection of health data exchanged through new medical or diagnostic devices.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Due to the rapid development of the internet of Things (ioT), a massive number of devices are connected to the internet. For these distributed devices in ioT networks, how to ensure their security and privacy becomes a significant challenge. Blockchain technology provides a promising solution to protect the data integrity, provenance, privacy, and consistency for ioT networks. in blockchains, communication is a prerequisite for participants, which are distributed in the system, to reach consensus. However, in ioT networks, most of the devices communicate through wireless links, which are not always reliable. Hence, the communication reliability of ioT devices influences the system security. in this article, we rethink the roles of communication and computing in blockchains by accounting for communication reliability. We analyze the trade-off between communication reliability and computing power in blockchain security, and present a lower bound to the computing power that is needed to conduct an attack with a given communication reliability. Simulation results show that adversarial nodes can succeed in tampering with a block with less computing power by hindering the propagation of blocks from other nodes.
Srđan Vujičić, Nermin Hasanspahić, Maro Car, Leo Čampara
In recent years, many industries have adopted technology and digital systems to automate, expedite and secure specific processes. Stakeholders in maritime transport continue to exchange physical documents in order to conduct business. The monitoring of supply chain goods, communication among employees, environmental sustainability and longevity control, along with time framing, all create challenges to many industries. Everyday onboard work, such as cargo operations, navigation and various types of inspections in shipping, still requires paper documents and logs that need to be signed (and stamped). The conversion of traditional paper contracts into smart contracts, which can be digitalized and read through automation, provides a new wave of collaboration between eco systems across the shipping industry. Various data collected and stored on board ships could be used for scientific purposes. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) could be used to collect all those data and improve shipping operations by process expediting. It could eliminate the need to fill in various documents and logs and make operations safer and more environmentally friendly. Information about various important procedures onboard ships could be shared among all interested stakeholders. This paper considers the possible application of distributed ledger technology as an aid for the control of overboard discharge of wastewater from commercial ships. The intended outcome is that it could help protect the environment by sending data to relevant stakeholders in real time, thus providing information regarding the best discharge areas. The use of a structured communal data transference would ensure a consistent and accurate way to transmit data to all interested parties, and would eliminate the need to fill in various paper forms and logs. Wastewater overboard discharges would be properly monitored, recorded and measured, as distributed ledger technology would prevent any possibility of illegal actions and falsification of documents, thus ensuring environmental sustainability.
As a new promising distributed technology, blockchains have been widely applied since its inception. Its decentralization feature reduces the reliance on the trusted authorities and third parties. It can well solve the problem of data being tampered and increase data sharing. However, a blockchain system faces various security and trust issues, such as attacks against consensus mechanisms and propagation processes, which may make it store malicious information or delay data propagation. The work discusses the basic architecture of blockchains as well as its potential security and trust issues at data, network, consensus, smart contract, and application layers. Then, the related literature work is analyzed in terms of the issues at these layers. Some open issues are presented and discussed.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) raises the issue of resisting selfish edge attackers that use less computation resources than promised to process offloading tasks or provide faked computation results. In this paper, we present a blockchain based trust mechanism to help MEC address selfish edge attacks and faked service record attacks. This mechanism evaluates the computational performance of the edge devices and broadcasts such information to the neighboring edge devices and mobile devices. By building a reputation assignment method for the edge devices, the edge reputation system chooses the miner of the blockchain, which applies the joint Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol to append a block recording the new service reputations onto the MEC blockchain. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based edge central processing unit (CPU) allocation algorithm without knowing the mobile service generation model and the network model in the dynamic edge computing process and a deep RL version to further improve the computational performance. The security performance is analyzed and the performance bound of the edge utility is provided. Experimental results show that this framework suppresses the selfish edge attacks, decreases the response latency and saves the energy compared with a benchmark MEC scheme.
One of the alternatives to proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocols is proof-of- stake (PoS) protocols, which address its energy and cost related issues. But they suffer from the nothing-at-stake problem; validators (PoS miners) are bound to lose nothing if they support multiple blockchain forks. Tendermint, a PoS protocol, handles this problem by forcing validators to bond their stake and then seizing a cheater’s stake when caught signing multiple competing blocks. The seized stake is then evenly distributed amongst the rest of validators. However, as the number of validators increases, the benefit in finding a cheater compared to the cost of monitoring validators reduces, weakening the system’s defense against the problem. Previous work on TontineCoin addresses this problem by utilizing the concept of tontines. A tontine is an investment scheme in which each participant receives a portion of benefits based on their share. As the number of participants in a tontine decreases, individual benefit increases, which acts as a motivation for participants to eliminate each other. Utilizing this feature in TontineCoin ensures that validators (participants of a tontine) are highly motivated to monitor each other, thus strengthening the system against the nothing-at-stake problem. This project implements a prototype of Tendermint using the Spartan Gold codebase and develops TontineCoin based on it. This implementation is the first implementation of the protocol, and simulates and contrasts five different normal operations in both the Tendermint and TontineCoin models. It also simulates and discusses how a nothing-at-stake attack is handled in TontineCoin compared to Tendermint.
Today, the entire world is facing incredible health and economic challenges due to the rapid spread of the life threatening novel Coronavirus Disease - 2019 (COVID-19). In the prevailing situation when a vaccine is many months away, the way forward seems to be a controlled exit from the lockdown - where, infected/exposed people are strictly quarantined and recovered/unexposed people are allowed to carry on with their day to day business activities. However, appropriate physical distancing norms will have to be strictly followed for such relaxations. Therefore, mechanisms are required that will assist people in following the social and physical distancing norms in public places. In this paper, we propose an anonymity preserving blockchain based framework that allows people, through use of their smart phones and other communication devices, to protect themselves from infections as they conduct their daily business activities.
Edge computing draws a lot of recent research interests because of the performance improvement by offloading many workloads from the remote data center to nearby edge nodes. Nonetheless, one open challenge of this emerging paradigm lies in the potential security issues on edge nodes and end devices, e.g., sensors and controllers. This paper proposes a cooperative protocol, namely DEAN, across edge nodes to prevent data manipulation, and to allow fair data sharing with quick recovery under resource constraints of limited storage, computing, and network capacity. Specifically, DEAN leverages a parallel mechanism equipped with three independent core components, effectively achieving low resource consumption while allowing secured parallel block processing on edge nodes. We have implemented a system prototype based on DEAN and experimentally verified its effectiveness with a comparison with three popular blockchain implementations: Ethereum, Parity, and Hyperledger Fabric. Experimental results show that the system prototype exhibits high resilience to arbitrary failures: the percentile of trusty nodes is much higher than the required 50\% in most cases. Performance-wise, DEAN-based blockchain implementation outperforms the state-of-the-art blockchain systems with up to $25\times$ higher throughput and $18\times$ lower latency on 1,000 nodes.
Andrew Cullen, Pietro Ferraro, William H. Sanders, Luigi Vigneri · 5 authors
In the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, devices need a platform to transact\nseamlessly without a trusted intermediary. Although Distributed Ledger\nTechnologies (DLTs) could provide such a platform, blockchains, such as\nBitcoin, were not designed with IoT networks in mind, hence are often\nunsuitable for such applications: they offer poor transaction throughput and\nconfirmation times, put stress on constrained computing and storage resources,\nand require high transaction fees. In this work, we consider a class of\nIoT-friendly DLTs based on directed acyclic graphs, rather than a blockchain,\nand with a reputation system in the place of Proof of Work (PoW). However,\nwithout PoW, implementation of these DLTs requires an access control algorithm\nto manage the rate at which nodes can add new transactions to the ledger. We\nmodel the access control problem and present an algorithm that is fair,\nefficient and secure. Our algorithm represents a new design paradigm for DLTs\nin which concepts from networking are applied to the DLT setting for the first\ntime. For example, our algorithm uses distributed rate setting which is similar\nin nature to transmission control used in the Internet. However, our solution\nfeatures novel adaptations to cope with the adversarial environment of DLTs in\nwhich no individual agent can be trusted. Our algorithm guarantees utilisation\nof resources, consistency, fairness, and resilience against attackers. All of\nthis is achieved efficiently and with regard for the limitations of IoT\ndevices. We perform extensive simulations to validate these claims.\n
In 2015, the United Nations (UN) member states identified 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be fulfilled by 2030. SDGs are an urgent global call for action to provide a blueprint for shared prosperity in a sustainable world. At a European level, in December 2019, the European Green Deal was presented, a roadmap to implement the UN 2030 agenda with a commitment to a growth strategy that will turn environmental challenges into opportunities across all policy areas. To achieve these SDGs, blockchain is one of the key enabling technologies that can help to create sustainable and secure solutions, since it is able to deliver accountability, transparency, traceability, and cyber-resilience, as well as to provide a higher operational efficiency in global partnerships. This chapter overviews the potential of blockchain to face sustainability challenges by describing several relevant applications. Finally, different open challenges and recommendations are enumerated with the aim of guiding all the stakeholders committed to the development of cyber-resilient and high-impact sustainable solutions.
Alma E. Guerrero-Sánchez, Edgar A. Rivas-Araiza, Jose L. Gonzalez-Cordoba, Manuel Toledano‐Ayala · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm allows the connection and exchange of information between millions of smart devices. This paradigm grows and develops exponentially as do the risks and attacks on IoT infrastructures. Security, privacy, reliability, and autonomy are the most important requirements in IoT Systems. If these issues are not guaranteed, the IoT system could be susceptible to malicious users and malicious use. In centralized IoT systems, attacks and risks are greater, especially when data is transmitted between devices and shared with other organizations. To avoid these types of situations, this work presents a decentralized system that guarantees the autonomy and security of an IoT system. The proposed methodology helps to protect data integrity and availability based on the security advantages provided by blockchain and the use of cryptographic tools. The accuracy of the proposed methodology was measured on a temperature and humidity sensing IoT-based Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The obtained results prove that the proposal fulfils the main requirements of an IoT system. It is autonomous, secure to share and send information between devices and users, has privacy, it is reliable, and the information is available in the infrastructure. Furthermore, this research demonstrates that the proposal is less susceptible to the most frequent attacks against IoT systems, such as linking attack, man in the middle, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
We present a novel game-theoretic, Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) and deep learning (DL) framework to represent interactions of miners in public and consortium blockchains with mobile edge computing (MEC). Within the framework, we formulate a stochastic game played by miners under incomplete information. Each miner can offload its block operations to one of the base stations (BSs) equipped with the MEC server. The miners select their offloading BSs and block processing rates simultaneously and independently, without informing other miners about their actions. As such, no miner knows the past and current actions of others and, hence, constructs its belief about these actions. Accordingly, we devise a Bayesian RL algorithm based on the partially-observable Markov decision process for miner's decision making that allows each miner to dynamically adjust its strategy and update its beliefs through repeated interactions with each other and with the mobile environment. We also propose a novel unsupervised Bayesian deep learning algorithm where the uncertainties about unobservable states are approximated with Bayesian neural networks. We show that the proposed Bayesian RL and DL algorithms converge to the stable states where the miners' actions and beliefs form the perfect Bayesian equilibrium (PBE) and myopic PBE, respectively.