Blockchain Papers

Léo Mendiboure, Mohamed Aymen Chalouf, Francine Krief

No abstract is available for this record.

Mehrdad Salimitari, Mainak Chatterjee, Yaser P. Fallah

The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other areas are its inherent security mechanisms and immunity to data manipulation attacks. A blockchain relies on a consensus method for agreeing on any new data. Most of the consensus methods which are currently used for the blockchain of different cryptocurrencies require high computational power and thus are not suitable for resource-constrained systems. In this article, we survey the various blockchain-based consensus methods that are applicable to resource-constrained IoT devices and networks. In a typical IoT network, there exist several devices with limited computational and communication capabilities. Most often, these devices cannot perform intensive computations and are starved for bandwidth. Therefore, we discuss the possible measures that can be taken to reduce the computational power and convergence time for the underlying consensus methods. We also talk about some of the alternatives to the public blockchain, such as private blockchain and tangle, along with their potential adoption for IoT networks. Furthermore, we review the existing consensus methods that have been implemented and explore the possibility of utilizing them to realize a blockchainbased IoT network. Some of the open research challenges including AI-enabled blockchains are also put forward.

Ms. Taiyaba, Muhammad Azeem Akbar, Bushra Qureshi, Muhammad Shafiq · 6 authors

Vehicle to everything (V2X) is the new and revolutional phenomena of the recent era. In V2X environment, the data security of data and information is the most significant parameter, as the information is shared on the shared network. To secure the information in V2X environment; the blockchain technology can play a critical role as it consists of the powerful data encryption and decryption algorithms. To implement the characteristics of blockchain in V2X environment, the practitioners face various challenges. The key aim of this study is to develop a hypothetical framework that renders the impact of challenging factors on the implementation of blockchain in V2X paradigm. We have conducted systematic literature review approach and identified the 10 challenges that are critical to address for the successful implementation of blockchain technology in V2X network. We believe that the findings of this study serves as knowledge base for the researchers and practitioners to develop the effective strategies for the successful implementation of blockchain characteristics in V2X environment.

Sivaganesan D.

The ground work for establishing the industrial 4.0 age involves the tiered architectures that are made up of multiple planes encompassed with the physical things that are embedded with internet capabilities. This infrastructure enables an incorporation of the various functions that are necessary in a manufacturing industry to enhance the efficiency of the industry, and contrivance a highly supple and a self-organizing industry that is smart. On the other hand it becomes essential to preserve the information's safely as many internet enabled devices are utilized and more networks are formed for the proper incorporation of the various activities taking place. Since the conventional methods are inadequate the block chain method was most preferred due to its transparency and highly reliable and expedient services. To further structure a tamper proof network the blockchain is built with the smart contract laid on the system providing the impermeable authenticity on the industrial data transferred by securing the information's against the authentication that is anonymous. The performance of the system is validated to on the basis of security provided on the transactions made, and the cost spent on the proposed design

Shaik Vaseem Akram, Praveen Kumar Malik, Rajesh Singh, Gehlot Anita · 5 authors

Abstract Our society is becoming “smarter” and more interconnected, as evidenced by technological trends such as smart farming, smart healthcare, supply chain and logistics, and smart city and nation. Security and privacy are two major key considerations in these smart applications, such as blockchain‐based security solutions for Industry 4.0‐based applications (the focus of this study). In this study, we present a systematic review of existing blockchain‐based solutions, particularly for Industry 4.0‐based applications. We present the merits and demerits of various state‐of‐the‐art approaches. We also highlight the challenges of the blockchain with the scope of interoperability and governance so that this gives a clear understanding to researchers and professionals.

Lam Duc Nguyen, Israel Leyva‐Mayorga, Petar Popovski

Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are playing a major role in building security and trust in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, IoT deployments with a large number of devices, such as in environment monitoring applications, generate and send massive amounts of data. This would generate vast number of transactions that must be processed within the distributed ledger. In this work, we first demonstrate that the Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain fails to scale in a sizable IoT connectivity infrastructure. To solve this problem, we present a lightweight distributed ledger scheme to integrate PoW blockchain into IoT. In our scheme, we classify transactions into two types: 1) global transactions, which must be processed by global blockchain nodes and 2) local transactions, which can be processed locally by entities called witnesses. Performance evaluation demonstrates that our proposed scheme improves the scalability of integrated blockchain and IoT monitoring systems by processing a fraction of the transactions, inversely proportional to the number of witnesses, locally. Hence, reducing the number of global transactions.

N. Padmapriya, T. Ananth Kumar, R. Rajmohan, M. Pavithra · 5 authors

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The cars we drive are rapidly transforming. Connected vehicles in the context of the Advanced Driver Assistance System or Autonomous Vehicles are about to change the way we drive cars. Connected Vehicles are futuristic vehicles that can interact with other vehicles for passing on information such as, mapping and localization, information about road traffic and driving behaviour. However, such vehicles, particularly the autonomous ones, are prone to a variety of attacks including cyber-attacks. These malicious attacks can intrude a vehicle that not only endangers the vehicles safety, but also the life of passengers and the nearby environment. Thus, identifying and eliminating these attacks for providing a secure communication environment is of great need. Also, all the existing methods for vehicular communication rely on a centralized server which itself invite massive cyber-security threats. These threats and challenges can be addressed by using the Blockchain (BC) technology, where each transaction is logged in a decentralized immutable BC ledger. In this work, we show how BC can facilitate communication between connected vehicles to send and receive information while assuring the security of all the vehicles participating in the BC network. First, we developed an application for the blockchain based less-complex Proof-of-Work consensus method that allows the vehicles to transfer information in a secured manner. Second, we demonstrate the working of the application using raspberry pi board that act as vehicles mounted with sensors and two computers that act as blockchain network. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain based vehicular communication and the integration of the blockchain with VANET as well.</div></div>

Ziyu Wang, Nanqing Luo, Pan Zhou

No abstract is available for this record.

Lam Duc Nguyen, Anders E. Kalør, Israel Leyva‐Mayorga, Petar Popovski

The data collected from Internet of Things (IoT) devices on various emissions or pollution, can have a significant economic value for the stakeholders. This makes it prone to abuse or tampering and brings forward the need to integrate IoT with a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to collect, store, and protect the IoT data. However, DLT brings an additional overhead to the frugal IoT connectivity and symmetrizes the IoT traffic, thus changing the usual assumption that IoT is uplink-oriented. We have implemented a platform that integrates DLTs with a monitoring system based on narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). We evaluate the performance and discuss the tradeoffs in two use cases: data authorization and real-time monitoring.

Dinh C. Nguyen, Ming Ding, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Aruna Seneviratne

The beginning of 2020 has seen the emergence of coronavirus outbreak caused by a novel virus called SARS-CoV-2. The sudden explosion and uncontrolled worldwide spread of COVID-19 show the limitations of existing healthcare systems to timely handle public health emergencies. In such contexts, innovative technologies such as blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have emerged as promising solutions for fighting coronavirus epidemic. On the one hand, blockchain can combat pandemics by enabling early detection of outbreaks, protecting user privacy, and ensuring reliable medical supply chain during the outbreak tracking. On the other hand, AI provides intelligent solutions for identifying symptoms caused by coronavirus for treatments and supporting drug manufacturing. Motivated by these, in this paper we present an extensive survey on the use of blockchain and AI for combating coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemics based on the rapidly emerging literature. First, we introduce a new conceptual architecture which integrates blockchain and AI specific for COVID-19 fighting. Particularly, we highlight the key solutions that blockchain and AI can provide to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Then, we survey the latest research efforts on the use of blockchain and AI for COVID-19 fighting in a wide range of applications. The newly emerging projects and use cases enabled by these technologies to deal with coronavirus pandemic are also presented. Finally, we point out challenges and future directions that motivate more research efforts to deal with future coronavirus-like epidemics.

Nachiket Tapas, Francesco Longo, Giovanni Merlino, Antonio Puliafito

No abstract is available for this record.

Enrique Fynn, Alysson Bessani, Fernando Pedone

Blockchain systems have received much attention and promise to revolutionize many services. Yet, despite their popularity, current blockchain systems exist in isolation, that is, they cannot share information. While interoperability is crucial for blockchain to reach widespread adoption, it is difficult to achieve due to differences among existing blockchain technologies. This paper presents a technique to allow blockchain interoperability. The core idea is to provide a primitive operation to developers so that contracts and objects can switch from one blockchain to another, without breaking consistency and violating key blockchain properties. To validate our ideas, we implemented our protocol in two popular blockchain clients that use the Ethereum virtual machine. We discuss how to build applications using the proposed protocol and show examples of applications based on real use cases that can move across blockchains. To analyze the system performance we use a real trace from one of the most popular Ethereum applications and replay it in a multi-blockchain environment.

Óscar Delgado Ben Mohatar, Julián Fiérrez, Aythami Morales Moreno, Rubén Tolosana

The world is becoming more interconnected every day. With the high technological evolution and the increasing deployment of it in our society, scenarios based on the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered a reality nowadays. However, and before some predictions become true (around 75 billion devices are expected to be interconnected in the next few years), many efforts must be carried out in terms of scalability and security. In this study we propose and evaluate a new approach based on the incorporation of Blockchain into current IoT scenarios. The main contributions of this study are as follows: i) an in-depth analysis of the different possibilities for the integration of Blockchain into IoT scenarios, focusing on the limited processing capabilities and storage space of most IoT devices, and the economic cost and performance of current Blockchain technologies; ii) a new method based on a novel module named BIoT Gateway that allows both unidirectional and bidirectional communications with IoT devices on real scenarios, allowing to exchange any kind of data; and iii) the proposed method has been fully implemented and validated on two different real-life IoT scenarios, extracting very interesting findings in terms of economic cost and execution time. The source code of our implementation is publicly available in the Ethereum testnet.

Yaqin Wu, Pengxin Song, Fuxin Wang

Blockchain is a new technology for processing complex and disordered information with respect to business and other industrial applications. This work is aimed at studying the consensus algorithm of blockchain to improve the performance of blockchain. Despite their advantages, the proof of stake (POS) algorithm and the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm have high latency, low throughput, and poor scalability. In this paper, a blockchain hybrid consensus algorithm which combines advantages of the POS and PBFT algorithms is proposed, and the algorithm is divided into two stages: sortition and witness. The proposed algorithm reduces the number of consensus nodes to a constant value by verifiable pseudorandom sortition and performs transaction witness between nodes. The algorithm is improved and optimized from three dimensions: throughput, latency, and scalability. The experimental results show that the improved hybrid consensus algorithm is significantly superior to the previous single algorithms for its excellent scalability, high throughput, and low latency.

Derrick Bonyuet

Blockchain has become very popular as the underlying technology powering Bitcoin. However, the benefits behind this technology further surpass just supporting cryptocurrencies. Blockchain can be defined as a digital ledger that allows to capture transactions conducted among several parties on real-time and serves as a decentralized database where each participant keeps an identical copy of the ledger. The appeal behind blockchain resides on its peer-to-peer network infrastructure along cryptographic capabilities. This combination enables users to conduct transactions without a trusted third-party intermediary. Benefits in accounting are even more promising as blockchain will provide a triple entry accounting system where all transactions are immutable and have been time stamped, recorded on real-time and encrypted The purpose of this paper is to review extant research on this technology and assess the impact of blockchain in the audit profession, including new risks, change in procedures and additional opportunities.

Faisal Jamil, Shabir Ahmad, Naeem Iqbal, Do‐Hyeun Kim

Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhancethe healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technologyhave revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturizedhealthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcaresystem. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoringstatus both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing moredata to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharingpersonal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interactionwith and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meetthese requirements because they have inconsistent security policies and access control structures.The new solutions should be directed towards improving data access, and should be managed bythe government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data formedical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceuticalindustry and benefits from unique features such as privacy and transparency of data. In this paper,we propose a novel platform for monitoring patient vital signs using smart contracts based onblockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which isan enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. Thisapproach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, andglobal access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkitis used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system isevaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization usinga standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed systemoutperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.

Seyed Mojtaba Hosseini Bamakan, Amirhossein Motavali, Alireza Babaei Bondarti

No abstract is available for this record.

Intan Permatasari, Meryam Essaid, Hyeonwoo Kim, Hongtaek Ju

A good archive management system must consider information security aspects, such as availability, confidentiality, and integrity. The Cilegon E-Archive (CEA) system is a centralized system for managing the lifecycle of archives. The existing CEA system has several problems, including a single point of failure, low data availability, and difficulty in proving the originality of files. This paper introduces a prototype for a new CEA system that integrates IPFS and the Ethereum private network. In addition, CEA DApp is developed as an interface for users in interacting with CEA system, and its functionality is managed by a smart contract. The results show that the conducted improvements into the CEA system highly improved the system security in terms of preventing archival forgeries.

Shulai Zhang, Xiaoli Ma

Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides insights for difficulty adjustment rules for PoW based blockchains. The proposed algorithm consists a two-layer neural network. It has low memory cost, meanwhile satisfying the fast-updating and low volatility requirements for difficulty adjustment. Real data from Ethereum are used in the simulations to prove that the proposed algorithm has better performance for the control of the block difficulty.

B. Saravana Balaji, P. Raja, Anand Nayyar, Sanjeevikumar Padmanaban · 5 authors

Blockchain technology is increasingly used worldwide to enhance the performance and profit of any environment through its defining characteristics, such as security, auditability, immutability, and inconspicuousness. Owing to these characteristics, the blockchain can be used in various non-financial operations of some domains, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and distributed computing. However, implementing blockchain technology in IoT is not always a feasible solution because blockchain deployment is costly, it has limited extensibility and provides irregular bandwidth and latency. In this regard, a simple size extensible (SSE) blockchain has been proposed to provide an optimal solution for IoT environments by satisfying the needs of the IoT environment as well as ensuring end-to-end security. The implementation of the proposed blockchain develops an overlay network to obtain a distributed environment where the blockchain is handled by the resources present therein. Two novel algorithms were introduced into the proposed system to minimize the irregularity and latency on one hand, and to maximize the throughput of the system on the other. The shared-time depending agreement algorithm (STD) minimizes the irregularity in the extraction operation and latency. The other, the shared throughput administration algorithm (STA) justifies the overall collection of the transmission load in the network and maintains the performance of the blockchain. The proposed system was applied to smart home IoT appliances to test the performance of the proposed system. The experimental results show that the proposed blockchain system minimizes nearly 70% of the data irregularity, latency, and furthermore, 30% of the blockchain extensibility is maximized as compared to the existing systems.

Kwame Omono Asamoah, Hu Xia, Sandro Amofa, Isaac Amankona Obiri · 9 authors

The challenges of population management as urban density increase globally have compelled researchers and developers to consider more efficient means of managing resources in cities. Consequently, the smart city concept has emerged as a response to addressing the challenge of optimal resource utilization in urban centers. However, with digital technologies proliferating as key components of the solution, it is necessary to develop a digital identity solution for all components of the smart city environment. For completeness, the solution must encompass all entities, including physical and intangible assets, processes, and most importantly, its residents. Consequently, a unified, distributed data integration and efficient analysis platform is required: the digital city operating system. In this article, we focus on a key component of digital city management in the form of secure identification of individual residents. We collect user attributes and securely transmit them to other system components for verification. Upon successful completion of the verification process, a digital identity is created for the applying resident and the set of transactions leading to the ID creation are stored in the blockchain. Our system is secure and can serve as the basis for the development of a digital infrastructure for smart city management.

Xuesong Xu, Zhi Zeng, Shengjie Yang, Hongyan Shao

With the rapid development of industrial internet of thing (IIoT), the distributed topology of IIoT and resource constraints of edge computing conduct new challenges to traditional data storage, transmission, and security protection. A distributed trust and allocated ledger of blockchain technology are suitable for the distributed IIoT, which also becomes an effective method for edge computing applications. This paper proposes a resource constrained Layered Lightweight Blockchain Framework (LLBF) and implementation mechanism. The framework consists of a resource constrained layer (RCL) and a resource extended layer (REL) blockchain used in IIoT. We redesign the block structure and size to suit to IIoT edge computing devices. A lightweight consensus algorithm and a dynamic trust right algorithm is developed to improve the throughput of blockchain and reduce the number of transactions validated in new blocks respectively. Through a high throughput management to guarantee the transaction load balance of blockchain. Finally, we conducted kinds of blockchain simulation and performance experiments, the outcome indicated that the method have a good performance in IIoT edge application.

Xiaoyuan Fu, F. Richard Yu, Jingyu Wang, Qi Qi · 5 authors

Distributed network function virtualization management and orchestration (NFV-MANO) offers a flexible way to manage and orchestrate diversified network services in large-scale Internet of vehicles (IoV). However, it is challenging to manage different services and resources in distributed NFV due to the difficulties of reliable message synchronization among multiple MANO systems. Recently, blockchain technology has emerged to solve the trust and security problems for the interconnections of multiple MANO systems. Moreover, multi-access edge computing (MEC) has become a prospective paradigm shift from the centralized cloud due to its advantages of completing tasks near users. In this work, we propose a blockchain-enabled distributed NFV framework to reach consensus among multiple MANO systems where the computation tasks of the blockchain are processed with MEC. The consensus procedures of MANO systems and blockchain nodes are explained in detail and the representation of the blockchain throughput is given. The blockchain throughput is the number of transactions a blockchain system can handle per second, which is an important evaluation indicator for the performance of a blockchain system. We make decisions for the primary node selection, the MANO system selection and the edge server selection for reaching consensus. Moreover, the blockchain throughput, the processing delay of computation tasks of blockchain and operational costs are jointly considered in the problem formulation. A dueling deep reinforcement learning approach is applied to solve this problem. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Shreya Joshi, Ms Bhavyaa, Suhani Gupta, Lalita Luthra

Blockchain is considered to be a disruptive core technology. Although many researchers have realized the importance of blockchain, but the research of it is still emerging. It is the record-keeping technology behind bitcoin and is one of the hottest and fastest growing skills in the IT sector today. It serves as an immutable ledger which allows transactions to take place in a decentralized man Blockchain-based applications are rising up, covering numerous fields including finance, healthcare, product management, Internet of Things (IoT), and many more. However, there are still some challenges of blockchain technology such as scalability and security problems which need to be overcome. This paper comprises of a comprehensive study of Blockchain technology. We have included here a deep dive into how blockchains work, its architecture, consensus and various applications. Furthermore, technical challenges are briefly listed.