Atakan Aral, Rafael Brundo Uriarte, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne, Ivona Brandić
Blockchain-based decentralized multi-cloud has the potential to reduce cloud infrastructure costs and to enable geographically distributed providers of any size to monetize their computational resources. In this context, guarantees that the computational results are delivered within the promised time and budget must be provided despite the limited information available about the location and ownership of resources. Providers might claim to execute the services to get compensated for the computation even though returning incomplete or incorrect results. In this paper, we define a model to predict provider reliability, that is, the probability of failure-free execution of computational tasks and correctness of the computed outputs, by extracting the potential dependencies between providers from historical log traces. This model can then be utilized in the definition of provider reputation or the scheduling of new services. Indeed, we propose a probabilistic scheduler that chooses the providers that meet the reliability constraints among others. Finally, we validate the proposed solutions with real traces from a decentralized cloud provider and hint at the benefits of predicting reliability in this context.
The world was invaded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shook the whole world and only technology has made it possible to preserve the minimum subsistence of many areas, including the healthcare field. In developing countries, many have applied the technology through centralized health systems. Unfortunately, this solution cannot be generalized everywhere in countries where a well- defined health organization is lacking. So in countries where the patient has difficulty using the technology. Not to mention issues such as attacks that can endanger critical patient records and their privacy by revealing their medical secrets. Several challenges concern the management of medical record, and among the solutions that promise to solve many problems concerning this critical point is the blockchain, through its decentralized form and its security mechanisms. This article examines the benefits and opportunities of applying blockchain in healthcare, specifically in developing countries, focusing on security and privacy issues. It presents use cases via blockchain-based solutions for managing medical records. Finally, it presents a discussion of the different challenges and problems to be solved for the implementation of this solution in developing countries.
The Internet of Things (IoT) started as one of the main driving forces of Industry 4.0. Having had its initial phase with results clearly visible still today, we are now beginning to witness the maturity at which this technology can reach. This sophistication of IoT will be made possible with the help of other emerging technologies. Among these technologies is Blockchain. This technology is the ideal candidate to counter the flaws of IoT, among which there is security. This paper proposes a functional infrastructure model that employs IoT smart sensor nodes to monitor environmental parameters such as temperature and pressure. On top of this base architecture a Blockchain network is deployed to mitigate the native vulnerabilities of IoT and to ensure that data collected is decentralized, accessible, transparent, lightweight and scalable.
This paper presents a novel approach to securing IoT devices by leveraging DDoS Open Threat Signaling (DOTS) architecture on a Blockchain framework. Like many areas of the information technology domain, IoT sensors are also prone to attacks but on a larger scale. There are millions of devices being connected to a central domain to provide different types of services. Since these low-powered IoT devices have constrained technical requirements with less computational capabilities, they lack the capacity to judge their behavior as benign or malignant. IoT relies heavily on the higher level of intelligent nodes to decide on their status. An IoT Controller/Edge server handles the registration and the limited management of devices. Since traditional security is unable to protect the IoT environment sufficiently, we present a Blockchain-based DDoS detection approach to secure and mitigate such attacks in the IoT environment. Our test setup includes dataset from four sensors over two months. These values were tested using a threshold calculation against the variation of temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind direction on that day to find out whether an IoT sensor is under a DDoS attack. Our results show how DOTS can help in detection of attack when mapped on IoT edge computing.
Nelson Bore, Andrew Kinai, Peninah Waweru, Isaac Wambugu · 8 authors
Farm records hold the static, temporal, and longitudinal details of the farms. For small-scale farming, the ability to accurately capture these records plays a critical role in formalizing and digitizing the agriculture industry. A trusted exchange of these records could unlock critical insights to different stakeholders across the value chain. Recently, there has been increasing attention on digitizing small scale farming with the goal of increasing farm-level transparency and visibility, access to credit, etc. using these farm records. However, most solutions proposed so far have the shortcoming of providing granular and trusted small-scale farm digitization. To address these challenges, we present a system, called AG-Wallet System(AGWS), which leverages blockchain to formalize the interactions and data flow in small-scale farming ecosystem. Utilizing instrumentation of farm tractors, we demonstrate the ability to utilize farm activities to create trusted electronic field records (EFR). Using AGWS, we processed over one hundred thousand small-scale farm-level activity events for which we also performed automated farm boundary detection of several farms.
Laura De Santis, Vincenzo Paciello, Antonio Pietrosanto
Nowadays, with the further development of telecommunication, IoT technology has become a concrete reality of everyday life. However, the widespread adoption of such technologies is sharply limited by Trust concerns for IoT devices, in terms of reliability, traceability, integrity, and privacy of the data. The lack of digital traceability increases the market time for IoT environment adoption. Contemporary Blockchain has been identified as one of the most promising technology to grant data security and reliability. The recent developments of such technologies have led to the possibility to build a shared, distributed, trustful, and autonomous infrastructure system making it hopeful for IoT systems. The constrained resources of low-level devices used in the IoT networks represent a significant hindrance to the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies. Different kind of light protocols for IoT communication and secure authentication has been proposed to this end; some of this requires the slightest effort for resources integration. In this paper, an audit system for metrological traceability in a distributed measurement system is proposed. The system is based on Blockchain technology and Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) access security protocol.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
There is exponential growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) research but still it faces potential privacy and security challenges. For safe and secure transaction blockchain technology is the best-known for powering cryptocurrencies, for making secure and safe transactions from a person to another. Blockchain is a technology that is booming for a decade and many areas must go under improvisation despite its numerous advancements. The proposed system predominantly focuses on providing security to the blockchain system using various mechanisms. the proposed model consists of the financial transaction-based system which works on the RFID technology. The data obtained from the system can be only accessed by the clients who are authorized hence providing the first level of security by providing authentication to the valid client using M2M authentication. Once the user is authenticated, he can then have access to the transaction system. The transaction data that is stored in the local system is guarded by using blockchain technology by using hashing. The hash generated is again guarded by dividing and keeping the hash in two different places. Experiment results indicate that the application of various security mechanisms for the proposed scheme does indeed improve the privacy of the generated hash, authentication speed while also satisfying requirements of data security.
May 1, 2020·2020 IEEE 6th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
Lately there has been an increase in the number of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications ranging from recommendation systems to face to speech recognition. At the helm of the advent of deep learning is the proliferation of data from diverse data sources ranging from Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to self-driving automobiles. Tapping into this unlimited reservoir of information presents the problem of finding quality data out of a myriad of irrelevant ones, which to this day, has been a significant issue in data science with a direct ramification of this being the inability to generate quality ML models for useful predictive analysis. Edge computing has been deemed a solution to some of issues such as privacy, security, data silos and latency, as it ventures to bring cloud computing services closer to end-nodes. A new form of edge computing known as edge-AI attempts to bring ML, AI, and predictive analytics services closer to the data source (end devices). In this paper, we investigate an approach to bring edge-AI to end-nodes through a shared machine learning model powered by the blockchain technology and a federated learning framework called iFLBC edge. Our approach addresses the issue of the scarcity of relevant data by devising a mechanism known as the Proof of Common Interest (PoCI) to sieve out relevant data from irrelevant ones. The relevant data is trained on a model, which is then aggregated along with other models to generate a shared model that is stored on the blockchain. The aggregated model is downloaded by members of the network which they can utilize for the provision of edge intelligence to end-users. This way, AI can be more ubiquitous as members of the iFLBC network can provide intelligence services to end-users.
Monolithic blockchain architectures employed in Bitcoin and other major alt-coins are inherently non-scalable. In recent past, some hierarchical approaches have been explored to shard the decentralized blockchain to improve scalability. However, there is no discussion in the literature about how to determine an optimal shard size to maximize performance and how the presence of malicious or faulty nodes can impact on choosing an optimal shard size. To address these issues, this paper presents a sharding scheme and validation protocols for a hierarchical blockchain architecture named OptiShard. The hierarchy divides the network nodes into multiple disjoint shards and the majority of transactions are distributed among these shards in non-overlapped fashion. Optimal shard size is determined based on two parameters: performance and correctness of transaction validation in the presence of malicious or faulty nodes. OptiShard provides guaranteed majority of good shards, subject to a maximum allowable threshold of faulty nodes, by choosing the right shard size. It also provides a mechanism for identifying faulty shards and discarding all their transactions through the overlapping of a small fraction of transactions across all the shards. Experimental results performed on up to 800 Amazon EC2 nodes conform to the theoretical performance analyses and exhibit the impact of sharding the network on performance.
Payam Rahimi, Nasir D. Khan, Chrysostomos Chrysostomou, Vasos Vassiliou · 5 authors
In this work, we present an authentication mechanism based on Blockchain to provide a secure communication for wireless communications assisted UAV sensing system for maritime IoT critical applications, by deploying a private Blockchain network that is connected to a fusion center (FC) in the terrestrial area. The received packets would be validated by the FC, based on the stored IDs on the Blockchain, to avoid intrusion into the network. We further analyze the effect of Blockchain on the network performance in terms of delay and throughput to demonstrate the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed authentication mechanism.
Advanced privacy preservation approaches are used to be protecting sensitive and important data of various application areas like Communication systems, Healthcare, Education and Financial Sector. In the Healthcare area, the important and sensitive task is a medical certificate that acts as medical evidence of a person which helps for many purposes. Deception in issuance as well as in verification of medical certificates has existed for a long time in health care centers due to lack of reliable mechanisms. In the issue of medical evidence to a person, needs to consider a method which has advanced features like transparency, immutable, reliable and decentralized properties. Hence, in this paper, blockchain technology is used to design and develop a model with advanced features for reducing forgery in medical pieces of evidence. In this approach, a regulatory body will authorize the Health care centers (Hospitals) for issuing medical certificates to the required persons in a decentralized approach. Here smart contract system helps to verify the certificate authenticity from any authorized one in the world. The main strength of the paper gives the Blockchain-based model as a solution to the issue related to proof of a certificate of medical evidence.
Tomás Robles, Borja Bordel, Ramón Alcarria, Diego Sánchez-de-Rivera
Users are each day more aware of their privacy and data protection. Although this problem is transversal to every digital service, it is especially relevant when critical and personal information is managed, as in eHealth and well-being services. During the last years, many different innovative services in this area have been proposed. However, data management challenges are still in need of a solution. In general, data are directly sent to services but no trustworthy instruments to recover these data or remove them from services are available. In this scheme, services become the users’ data owners although users keep the rights to access, modify, and be forgotten. Nevertheless, the adequate implementation of these rights is not guaranteed, as services use the received data with commercial purposes. In order to address and solve this situation, we propose a new trustworthy personal data protection mechanism for well-being services, based on privacy-by-design technologies. This new mechanism is based on Blockchain networks and indirection functions and tokens. Blockchain networks execute transparent smart contracts, where users’ rights are codified, and store the users’ personal data which are never sent or given to external services. Besides, permissions and privacy restrictions designed by users to be applied to their data and services consuming them are also implemented in these smart contracts. Finally, an experimental validation is also described to evaluate the Quality of Experience (in terms of user satisfaction) and Quality of Service (in terms of processing delay) compared to traditional service provision solutions.
Klitos Christodoulou, Panayiotis Christodoulou, Z. Zinonos, Elias G. Carayannis · 5 authors
The COVID-19 pandemic is stress-testing existing health information exchange systems. There exists an increasing demand for sharing patient information and efficiently responding to patient medial data requests. Current health information technologies lack data fluidity, especially for remotely sharing medical data beyond their protected, local data storage. This paper presents a blockchain-based data-sharing framework that leverages the properties of immutability and decentralization to ensure a secure, user-centric approach for accessing and controlling access to sensitive medical data. The proposed framework builds its foundations on a peer-to-peer network fueled by the distributed InterPlanetary File System combined with on-chain tagging, and on the use of cryptographic generation techniques for enabling a secure way of sharing medical data. The flow of information is orchestrated by a smart-contract deployed on a blockchain-based protocol to ensure traceability and data integrity. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated with the implementation of the framework over a pilot study.
Daily lots of data is exchanged and loaded on a cloud into different sectors one of which is the health sector. Data exchanged between the patient and doctors need to be secured to gain patients' trust. Blockchain is a mechanism invented to secure data in a more advanced way. Blockchain stores data into chunks that make it hard to decode, which will help provide an extra layer of security. Hash chain is the most reliable part of the blockchain that will help keep the data unreadable. This data can be secured by using a blockchain mechanism at the backend of any hospital website to store the reports of the patients and maintain a two-way authentication for doctor's access to the reports. Using the concepts of dividing data into chunks and establishing an inter-link between each chunk is one of the aspects of blockchain which is implemented on the hospital generated data to inherit blockchain mechanism. In this paper, we have discussed the benefits of using this mechanism to secure patients' reports and how it increases trust in the stored data.
The Blockchain technology brings a rapid growth in the industry, It emphasizes the service to lead the complexity of software and malicious attack in the network. This technology is used to monitor the highly vulnerable services and it is used to increase the complexity of the warehouse data. It assures the security and consistency of data, The warehouse data has been replicated the availability and the enhancement of security in the services. This technology originated from internet sector as a decentralized, distributed ledger for data transaction. Nowadays, it is visualised as a backbone or frame work for decentralized data processing in open source network. Blockchain uses variety of consensus protocol which is reliable for nodes and communication resources that is used for data consistency. Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm has been proposed for computational cost and security also for consensus efficiency. This paper deals by proposing practical byzantine fault tolerance on edge computing networks paves away for reducing storage overhead also security purpose on edge devices. The proposed model is simulated in the constrain environment and the results are discussed. It shows that the proposed method has increase the availability and security of the stored data.
More and more Internet of Things (IoT) devices are deployed around the world, due to the convenience and extra functionality they enable. This growth, while great for the industry as a whole, has come at a price with respect to ensuring and maintaining security and privacy. Having that in mind, one of the most common solutions to the IoT security problem is to update the devices frequently. Recently, LoRa Alliance has released a new specification (FUOTA) on how to perform firmware updates using LoRa technology. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to securely update the firmware of the IoT devices using the LoRa communication protocol. As a first step, we perform an evaluation of the firmware update procedure using different network sizes and different firmware sizes. The evaluation shows that there is a need to use more gateways that will collaborate to increase the reliability and the performance of the firmware update process.
The fast growing of blockchain technologies has inspired an exceptionally broad set of new social applications due to its special features. The most two popular blockchains (Bitcoin and Ethereum) are Proof-of-Work (PoW) based. However, the randomness of the block produce time (BPT) greatly affects the performance, user experience, and even the security of a blockchain. Mining difficulty controls the stability of the BPT. However, the current difficulty control algorithm in Ethereum has two problems. First, the difficulty control algorithm cannot track the network hashrate fast enough. Thus, the BPT has a large variance and cannot converge to the target BPT on time. The second problem is that the target BPT cannot be flexibly set to any given value by adjusting the difficulty. To mitigate these two problems, we propose a linear predictor based difficulty control algorithm. Based on the relationship among the hashrate, the difficulty, and the BPT, the prediction based difficulty control algorithm has much better stability and flexibility on BPT. It is also shown that the proposed prediction based algorithm outperforms the existing Ethereum one in the real situation.
Smart vehicles determine and take various actions with state information with little or no human intervention. More information can be gathered when they can connect to and communicate with other vehicles and their environments, improving safe self-driving. This paper proposes a blockchain-based information sharing that verifies the shared data and the sharing process using a public blockchain, Ethereum. To protect the privacy of the shared information, cryptography and secure protocols are additionally applied to the blockchain technology.
Cybersecurity certification is a core notion to support the mitigation of cybersecurity risks of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). At the European Union (EU) level, the Cybersecurity Act establishes a common cybersecurity certification framework supporting the coexistence of different certification schemes across Member States. However, its realization needs to be sustained by technical approaches to enable ICT stakeholders from different sectors or countries to exchange cybersecurity information and evaluate the up-to-date security level of an ICT system throughout their lifecycle. Toward this end, we propose a blockchain-based platform using a novel interledger design, where ledgers associated with ICT artifacts, cybersecurity certificates, and vulnerabilities are interconnected. The main purpose is to leverage the advantages of blockchain in terms of distributed trust, transparency, and accountability, while at the same time coping with scalability, performance, and interoperability requirements. We analyze the impact of our platform in the current EU legislation and provide insights for its deployment.
The world is being transformed by the onset of new high speed 5G Technologies that open the possibility of IoT networks at scale. This demands delivery guarantees and coordinated distributed communications that are resistant to damage and can self-heal under adversity. The speed of change is increasing with increased automation, artificial intelligence, information from multiple sources, integrated systems of systems and emerging quantum technologies. Current distributed consensus checking mechanisms are computationally intensive and fail to scale along with these changes because of the complexity of proof of work calculations or the unnecessary need to bind in domain specific elements such as cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, these mechanisms are brittle in that small changes in messages can cause restarts or failure of integrity checks, or they introduce domain specific elements (e.g. monetary design that has little to do with integrity). We propose distributed ledgers as a pure technology coupled with a strong proof protocol for exchanges, called "Proof of Integrity" without any need for cryptocurrencies or other domain specific elements. Proof of Integrity provides distributed data guarantees and operational continuity through adversity or breakdowns while creating a reliable and trustworthy layer for the application specificity of domain specific elements.
Eder J. Scheid, Patrick Widmer, Bruno Rodrigues, Muriel Figueredo Franco · 5 authors
In the last years, cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular along with their underlying distributed ledger technology, referred to as a Blockchain (BC). Nowadays, a wide variety of BC implementations are available. However, the selection of a suitable implementation for a particular application or use case is complex because it requires a technical understanding of the underlying BC implementation aspects. Therefore, this paper proposes a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) to extends existing BC selection solutions to abstract underlying implementation details. The approach allows the specification abstract high-level policies, referred to as intents, in an English-based language. The approach is inspired by previous approaches from the network management field. Moreover, a state machine-based refinement technique is proposed to refine these intents into low-level BC selection policies. The results of the performance evaluation of the prototype implementation show that the refinement process presents a minimal overhead. In addition, the perceived intuitiveness of the CNL by users was assessed in a survey. The results of the survey suggest that technical and non-technical individuals benefit from an intentbased approach equally.
Henry C. Nunes, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Avelin F. Zorzo, Regio A. Michelin · 5 authors
Currently, blockchain proposals are being adopted to solve security issues, such as data integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation. To improve certain aspects, e.g., energy consumption and latency, of traditional blockchains, different architectures, algorithms, and data management methods have been recently proposed. For example, appendable-block blockchain uses a different data structure designed to reduce latency in block and transaction insertion. It is especially applicable in domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), where both latency and energy are key concerns. However, the lack of some features available to other blockchains, such as Smart Contracts, limits the application of this model. To solve this, in this work, we propose the use of Smart Contracts in appendable-block blockchain through a new model called context-based appendable-block blockchain. This model also allows the execution of multiple smart contracts in parallel, featuring high performance in parallel computing scenarios. Furthermore, we present an implementation for the context-based appendable-block blockchain using an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Finally, we execute this implementation in four different testbed. The results demonstrated a performance improvement for parallel processing of smart contracts when using the proposed model.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Since then, a number of protocols based on the Nakamoto consensus have been proposed to improve the blockchain throughput while maintaining a similar level of security. In addition to bitcoin, this work also studies the Prism protocol proposed by Bagaria, Kannan, Tse, Fanti, and Viswanath in 2018. The liveness and consistency properties of the bitcoin and the Prism backbone protocols have been established by assuming either explicitly or implicitly that the blockchains have finite lifespan. While the lifespan can be arbitrarily large, it is unsatisfying for the security guarantee to be dependent on this parameter. In addition, most analyses also assume lockstep synchrony, where by the end of each round all honest miners have complete information about all blocks published until then. This paper presents a streamlined and strengthened analysis of the liveness and consistency of bitcoin and Prism protocols without the finite lifespan assumption. Also, we use the non-lockstep synchronous model which assumes the block propagation delays to be heterogeneous, arbitrary, and upper bounded by some constant. A probabilistic guarantee is also provided for a transaction to become permanent in the final ledger of all honest miners. In lieu of order optimal results, these properties take the form of explicit bounds, which provide improved design references for public transaction ledger protocols.
Markus Luecking, Christian Fries, Robin Lamberti, Wilhelm Stork
Today, Internet of Things (IoT) devices mostly operate in enclosed, proprietary environments. To unfold the full potential of IoT applications, a unifying and permissionless environment is crucial. All IoT devices, even unknown to each other, would be able to trade services and assets across various domains. In order to realize those applications, uniquely resolvable identities are essential. However, quantifiable trust in identities and their authentication are not trivially provided in such an environment due to the absence of a trusted authority. This research presents a new identity and trust framework for IoT devices, based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). IoT devices assign identities to themselves, which are managed publicly and decentralized on the DLT's network as Self Sovereign Identities (SSI). In addition to the Identity Management System (IdMS), the framework provides a Web of Trust (WoT) approach to enable automatic trust rating of arbitrary identities. For the framework we used the IOTA Tangle to access and store data, achieving high scalability and low computational overhead. To demonstrate the feasibility of our framework, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation and evaluate the set objectives for real world applicability as well as the vulnerability against common threats in IdMSs and WoTs.