Sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are known for fast data transfer thus, there is a need of decentralized authentication authority for the task of secure and transparent migration of the data from the nodes at a global stage in the entire network. Thus we need a Blockchain(BC) based network which involves transactions which can be duplicated and be spread across multiple nodes in a peer-peer network enabling mutual trust and data immutability enabling the network to go on and on in case some nodes get compromised or die due to heavy energy consumption. However, BC involves consensus as well before the chain is updated and traditional Proof of Work(PoW)method were being used for consensus and which we all know, consume high energy while utilizing large computational power and which makes it unfit for WSNs given they send data at a faster rate and will not be able to bear such high strain. Thus, we can either move towards an improved Proof of Stake(PoS) based method or any popular consensus method like Practical Byzatine Fault Tolerance(PBFT). We also plan to stick to a single base station(BS) having a lot many gateway nodes which perform the BC updation after consensus based on data received from the nodes.
Smart cities have emerged as a hub of intelligent applications (e.g., intelligent transportation systems, smart parking, smart homes, and e-healthcare) to provide ambient-assisted living and quality of experience to wide communities of users. The smooth execution of these applications depends on reliable data transmission between various smart devices and machines. However, the exponential increase in data traffic due to the growing dependency of end users on smart city applications has created various bottlenecks (e.g., channel congestion, manual flow configurations, limited scalability, and low flexibility) on the conventional network backbone, which can degrade the performance of any designed solution in this environment. To mitigate these challenges, SDN emerges as a powerful new technology that provides global visibility of the network by decoupling the control logic from the forwarding devices. The abstraction of network services in SDN architecture provides more flexibility for network administrators to execute various applications. In SDN architecture, the decision making process is handled by a logically centralized controller, which may have a single point of failure. An adversary/ attacker can compromise the controller using different types of attacks (e.g., eavesdropping, man-in-the middle attack, and distributed denial of service) in order to gain total control of the network by updating the flow table entries at the data plane or hindering control plane operations. Therefore, to cope with the aforementioned challenges, new strategies and solutions are required for securing the SDN-enabled network architecture at different planes and their associated interconnections. In this article, various security issues and different attack vectors are discussed along with possible solutions. To mitigate various attacks, BlockSDN, a blockchain as a service framework, for SDN is proposed. The architecture of permissioned blockchain is presented followed by two attack scenarios, 1) a malware compromised switch at the data plane and 2) distributed denial of service attack at the control plane, to demonstrate the applicability of the BlockSDN framework for various future applications. Finally, the open issues and challenges with respect to the design of blockchain solutions for SDN in smart city applications are also discussed.
Powered by a number of smart devices distributed throughout the whole network, the Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to provide services computing for massive data from devices. Fog computing, an extension of cloud-based IoT-oriented solutions, has emerged with requirements for distribution and decentralization. In this respect, the conjunction with Blockchain provides a natural solution for decentralization, as well as potentially helps fog computing overcome some deficiencies such as security and privacy then consequently expand the application scope of IoT. However, one of the key challenges of blockchain's integration with fog computing is scalability. To end this, this work proposes Groupchain, a novel scalable public blockchain of a two-chain structure suitable for fog computing of IoT services computing. Groupchain employs the leader group to collectively commit blocks for highertransaction efficiency and introduces bonus and deposit into the incentive mechanism to supervise behaviors of members in the leader group. Our security analysis shows that Groupchain retains the security of Bitcoin-like blockchain and enhances defense against attacks such as double-spend and selfish mining. We implement a prototype of Groupchain and conducted experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that Groupchain achieves optimization on transaction throughput and confirmation latency which are argued in Bitcoin.
Tri Nguyen, Ngoc Hong Tran, Lauri Lovén, Juha Partala · 6 authors
6G wireless networks improve on 5G by further increasing reliability, speeding up the networks and increasing the available bandwidth. These evolutionary enhancements, together with a number of revolutionary improvements such as high-precision 3D localization, ultra-high reliability and extreme mobility, introduce a new generation of 6G-native applications. Such application can be based on, for example, distributed, ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ultra-reliable, low-latency Internet of Things (IoT). Along with the enhanced connectivity and novel applications, privacy and security of the networks and the applications must be ensured. Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain provide one solution for application security and privacy, but introduce their own set of security and privacy risks. In this work, we discuss the opportunities and challenges related to blockchain usage in 6G, and map out possible directions for overtaking the challenges.
Fengxian Guo, F. Richard Yu, Heli Zhang, Hong Ji · 6 authors
In this paper, we present a blockchain-based mobile edge computing (B-MEC) framework for adaptive resource allocation and computation offloading in future wireless networks, where the blockchain works as an overlaid system to provide management and control functions. In this framework, how to reach a consensus between the nodes while simultaneously guaranteeing the performance of both MEC and blockchain systems is a major challenge. Meanwhile, resource allocation, block size, and the number of consecutive blocks produced by each producer are critical to the performance of B-MEC. Therefore, an adaptive resource allocation and block generation scheme is proposed. To improve the throughput of the overlaid blockchain system and the quality of services (QoS) of the users in the underlaid MEC system, spectrum allocation, size of the blocks, and number of producing blocks for each producer are formulated as a joint optimization problem, where the time-varying wireless links and computation capacity of the MEC servers are considered. Since this problem is intractable using traditional methods, we resort to the deep reinforcement learning approach. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach by comparing with other baseline methods.
Efficient and smart business processes are heavily dependent on the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where end-to-end optimization is critical to the success of the whole ecosystem. These systems, including industrial, healthcare, and others, are large scale complex networks of heterogeneous devices. This introduces many security and access control challenges. Blockchain has emerged as an effective solution for addressing several such challenges. However, the basic algorithms used in the business blockchain are not feasible for large scale IoT systems. To make them scalable for IoT, the complex consensus-based security has to be downgraded. In this article, we propose a novel lightweight proof of block and trade (PoBT) consensus algorithm for IoT blockchain and its integration framework. This solution allows the validation of trades as well as blocks with reduced computation time. Also, we present a ledger distribution mechanism to decrease the memory requirements of IoT nodes. The analysis and evaluation of security aspects, computation time, memory, and bandwidth requirements show significant improvement in the performance of the overall system.
Vehicular fog computing (VFC) has been envisioned as an important application of fog computing in vehicular networks. Parked vehicles with embedded computation resources could be exploited as a supplement for VFC. They cooperate with fog servers to process offloading requests at the vehicular network edge, leading to a new paradigm called parked vehicle assisted fog computing (PVFC). However, each coin has two sides. There is a follow-up challenging issue in the distributed and trustless computing environment. The centralized computation offloading without tamper-proof audit causes security threats. It could not guard against false-reporting, free-riding behaviors, spoofing attacks and repudiation attacks. Thus, we leverage the blockchain technology to achieve decentralized PVFC. Request posting, workload undertaking, task evaluation and reward assignment are organized and validated automatically through smart contract executions. Network activities in computation offloading become transparent, verifiable and traceable to eliminate security risks. To this end, we introduce network entities and design interactive smart contract operations across them. The optimal smart contract design problem is formulated and solved within the Stackelberg game framework to minimize the total payments for users. Security analysis and extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate that our scheme has high security and efficiency guarantee.
The world is going through a fundamental transformation with the emergence of the intelligent information era. The key domains linked with human life such as healthcare, transport, entertainment, and smart cities are expected to elevate the quality of service with high-end user experience. Therefore, the telecommunication infrastructure has to meet unprecedented service level requirements such as ultra high data rates and traffic volume for the prominent future applications such as Virtual Reality (VR), holographic communications, and massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC). There are significant challenges identifiable in the communication context to match the envisaged demand surge. The blockchain and distributed ledger technology is one of the most disruptive technology enablers to address most of the current limitations and facilitate the functional standards of 6G. In this work, we explore the role of blockchain to address formidable challenges in 6G, future application opportunities and potential research directions.
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies received a lot of attention recently for their applications in many domains. IoT domain is one of such applications, which can utilize cryptocur-rencies for micro payments without compromising their payment privacy. However, long confirmation times of transactions and relatively high fees hinder the adoption of cryptoccurency based micro-payments. The payment channel networks is one of the proposed solutions to address these issue where nodes establish payment channels among themselves without writing on blockchain. IoT devices can benefit from such payment networks as long as they are capable of sustaining their overhead. Payment channel networks pose unique characteristics as far as the routing problem is concerned. Specifically, they should stay balanced to have a sustainable network for maintaining payments for longer times, which is crucial for IoT devices once they are deployed.In this paper, we present a payment channel network design that aims to keep the channels balanced by using a common weight policy across the network. We additionally propose using multi-point connections to nodes for each IoT device for unbalanced payment scenarios. The experiment results show that we can keep the channels in the network more equally balanced compared to the minimal fee approach. In addition, multiple connections from IoT devices to nodes increase the success ratio significantly.
Cai Wen-jun, Wei Jiang, Ke Xie, Yan Zhu · 6 authors
The energy blockchain is a distributed Internet protocol for energy transactions between nodes in power systems. The consensus algorithm is the core component of the energy blockchain and has an essential impact on its application. At present, in the implementation of the energy blockchain, there are problems such as low transaction throughput (transactions per second) and high latency, which cannot meet the application requirements of real-time processing transactions in the energy field. To this end, according to the analysis of conventional blockchain consensus algorithm and traditional practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm, a dynamic-reputation practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm for the energy blockchain is proposed. The dynamic-reputation practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm adopts a credit-based consortium node consensus election method. The monitoring node divides the remaining nodes into two types of nodes according to the reputation value: the consensus node and the secondary node, which, respectively, participate in different stages of the block generation process, and dynamically update the consensus nodes with low reputation ratings. By constructing the experimental platform simulation, the test results verify the effectiveness of the dynamic-reputation practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm. Compared with the algorithm of the fabric platform, the dynamic-reputation practical Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm improves the transaction processing speed and is suitable for the blockchain application in the energy field.
In last decade crypto currencies become popular as there is no third party involvement while doing the transactions. Blockchain is the technology for using crypto-currencies. It attracts the attention of researchers and academicians , along with different features of Blockchain it is having the major issue of scalability which can be categorized into throughput , cost, capacity and networking . Improvement in Scalability affects the application of blockchain in business . Scalability affects due to some other factors like block interval time and block size which also may reduce the security . System may become vulnerable to different attacks if we blindly modify the scalability .In this paper we analyze the different ways to improve the scalability then we compare the features of blockchain with respect to different algorithms used to solve the scalability issue.
Milan Patnaik, G. Prabhu, Chester Rebeiro, Vashek Matyáš · 5 authors
Spectrum Sharing Data Falsification (SSDF) attacks can cause heavy performance degradation to Cognitive Radio (CR) based Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) networks. The challenge in such networks is to handle this security problem real time, in addition to spectrum sharing. This requires a robust CR architecture and protocol that can provide integrity of the spectrum sensing data being shared between Secondary Users (SUs) for collaborative spectrum decisions in protocols like PROLEMus. We propose one such protocol called Proactive Blockchain based Spectrum Sharing (ProBLeSS) protocol which leverages a blockchain to provide security against SSDF attacks in CR-IoBT networks.
Information Technology, Sipna COET, Amravati, India., Pratiksha P. Gofane, Vijay S. Gulhane, Information Technology, Sipna COET, Amravati, India. · 6 authors
The Block-chain technology contain multiple blocks are interconnected to each other with help of previous hash and current hash. The Block-chain is technology which is used to enable for moving some coin, data and assets from one user to another user. Where using hash algorithm, cryptographic algorithm and block-chain maintenance/updating. Block-chain technology contain the previous hash of first block is always zero that is called genesis block and current block will generate according to the data. In block-chain technology after complete the first block system automatically generated new block. Second block contain the previous hash will be always current hash of first block for interconnect the blocks and chain will formed ahead. According to this chain automatically detect there some transparency and this transparency says that block chain is very secured technology. This block-chain technology with transaction is very safe for companies, colleges and business. It is layered framework technology. Where perception layer, transmission layer, storage layer and application layer are present. In block-chain technology transaction contain there need not any third trusted party. Previous concept of block-chain with IOT that is not secured where some disadvantages of limited storage present and reduce that limitation we are using distributed ledger of block-chain technology. Where system have occurred peer to peer transaction. Further, block-chain contain well organized their weaknesses, strengths, opportunities, and threats of block-chain based transaction application. In block-chain contain using with OTP this block-chain will be more secured and easily transfer the money. Their future scope in business, education and companies.
Fake education certificates or fake degree is one of the major concerns in higher education. This fraud can be minimized if there is a tamper-proof and confidential registry of certificates wherein not one but multiple certified authorities verifies and stores the issued certificate in immutable repositories with proper privacy maintained. Secondly, there should be a mechanism for retrieving the authentic certificate without much cost and time. Blockchain is an immutable, shared, distributed ledger without the control of a single centralized authority that fits very well for the discussed use case. The proposed work, PrivateCertChain, has implemented the idea for university having multiple affiliated colleges, by deploying and verifying digitally signed e-certificate on Ethereum Blockchain. Multiple affiliated colleges can serve as the miners for verifying the signature of the issuer. For privacy concerns, the content of the certificate will be hashed and this hashed value will be stored in Blockchain along with the roll number of the certificate holder. Once the transaction hash is generated, it will be converted to QR code. The QR code is shared with the respective owner of the certificate and it will also serve as the credential of the certificate. Thus, anyone having the credential can view the authentic certificate which is kept on the blockchain, by scanning QR through the dedicated application designed for verification. The proposed solution can be a foolproof mechanism against all frauds as it guards for integrity, confidentiality, authenticity, and privacy of educational certificates.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Darshan Vishwasrao Medhane, Arun Kumar Sangaiah, M. Shamim Hossain, Ghulam Muhammad · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in the real world by providing autonomous support for communications and operations, thus enabling and promoting novel services that are commonly used in day-to-day life. It is important to do research on security frameworks for next-generation IoT and develop state-of-the-art confidentiality protection schemes to deal with various attacks on IoT networks. In order to offer prominent features like continuous confidentiality, authentication, and robustness, the blockchain technology comes out as a sustainable solution. A blockchain-enabled distributed security framework using edge cloud and software-defined networking (SDN) is presented in this article. The security attack detection is achieved at the cloud layer, and security attacks are consequently reduced at the edge layer of the IoT network. The SDN-enabled gateway offers dynamic network traffic flow management, which contributes to the security attack recognition through determining doubtful network traffic flows and diminishes security attacks through hindering doubtful flows. The results obtained show that the proposed security framework can efficiently and effectively meet the data confidentiality challenges introduced by the integration of blockchain, edge cloud, and SDN paradigm.
Philipp Frauenthaler, Marten Sigwart, Christof Spanring, Stefan Schulte
Current blockchain technologies provide very limited means of interoperability. In particular, solutions enabling blockchains to verify the existence of data on other blockchains are either very costly or are not fully decentralized. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Testimonium, a novel blockchain relay scheme that applies a validation-on-demand pattern and the on-chain execution of Simplified Payment Verifications to enable the verification of data across blockchains while remaining fully decentralized. Evaluating the scheme for Ethereum-based blockchains shows that Testimonium achieves a cost reduction of up to 92% over existing solutions. As such, the scheme lays a strong foundation for generic blockchain interoperability. For instance, it enables the development of an atomic-commit protocol for distributed transactions across blockchains.
With the gradual popularization of Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and the development of wireless networking technologies, the use of heterogeneous devices and runtime verification of task fulfillment with different constraints are required in real-world IoT scenarios. As far as IoT systems are concerned, most of them are built on centralized architectures, which reveal various assailable points in data security and privacy threats. Hence, this paper aims to investigate these issues by delegating the responsibility of a verification monitor from a centralized architecture to a decentralized manner using blockchain technology. We present a smart contract-based task management scheme to provide runtime verification of device behaviors and allows trustworthy access control to these devices. The business logic of the proposed system is specified by the smart contract, which automates all time-consuming processes cryptographically and correctly. The usability of the proposed solution is further demonstrated by implementing a prototype application in which the Hyperledger Fabric is utilized to implement the business logic for runtime verification and access control with one desktop and one Raspberry Pi. A comprehensive evaluation experiment is conducted, and the results indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.
Data sharing techniques have progressively drawn increasing attention as a means of significantly reducing repetitive work. However, in the process of data sharing, the challenges regarding formation of mutual-trust relationships and increasing the level of user participation are yet to be solved. The existing solution is to use a third party as a trust organization for data sharing, but there is no dynamic incentive mechanism for data sharing with a large number of users. Blockchain 2.0 with smart contract has the natural advantage of being able to enable trust and automated transactions between a large number of users. This paper proposes a data sharing incentive model based on evolutionary game theory using blockchain with smart contract. The smart contract mechanism can dynamically control the excitation parameters and continuously encourages users to participate in data sharing.
Envisioned to be the future of secured distributed systems, blockchain networks have received increasing attention from both the industry and academia in recent years. However, blockchain mining processes demand high hardware costs and consume a vast amount of energy (studies have shown that the amount of energy consumed in Bitcoin mining is almost the same as the electricity used in Ireland). To address the high mining cost problem of blockchain networks, in this paper, we propose a blockchain mining resources allocation algorithm to reduce the mining cost in PoW-based (proof-of-work-based) blockchain networks. We first propose an analytical queueing model for general blockchain networks. In our queueing model, transactions arrive randomly to the queue and are served in a batch manner with unknown service rate probability distribution and agnostic to any priority mechanism. Then, we leverage the Lyapunov optimization techniques to propose a dynamic mining resources allocation algorithm (DMRA), which is parameterized by a tuning parameter $K \gt 0$. We show that our algorithm achieves an $[O(1/ K),O(K)]$ cost-optimality-gap-vs-delay tradeoff. Our simulation results also demonstrate the effectiveness of DMRA in reducing mining costs.
Maintaining land records is a difficult task for countries with large area and population. Having a central database server is not a 100% safe alternative to paper-based traditional records as it is susceptible to cyber-attacks and frauds. This paper proposes an idea to solve this issue using blockchain. The proposed land records system is based on a hybrid blockchain network. The existing land records are put on the blockchain by the government. All land sales transactions are recorded on this hybrid blockchain. These transactions are mined (verified) by a miner which is run on government authorized peers or nodes. These records or transactions cannot be tampered with. The citizens can view their owned lands and corresponding transactions but cannot make changes to any data on the blockchain. Being based on hybrid blockchain, this system is benefitted by advantages of both the types of blockchain-public and private and is more secure and reliable than databases and paper records.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Florentina Magda Enescu, Nicu Bizon, Adrian Onu, Maria Simona Raboacă · 7 authors
Traditionally, the energy industry has been slow in adopting new disruptive technologies and the transition to a new energy market will require a new digital transformation plan, involving all parties from the energy market. Although it now seems to be an impossible and hard-to-accept scenario, especially by the big players in the industry, the pilot projects so far demonstrate that blockchain can play a major role in the future energy market, even if the technology is still in the first stages of the adoption life cycle. This article attempts to describe a solution to provide alternative irrigation systems for small farmers. The solution involves creating associations of small farmers that will use green energy from photovoltaic panels for the irrigation of agricultural lands. The efficiency of the proposed system can be monitored not only through digital hardware connected to photovoltaic panels and water pumps, but also by using the new blockchain technology that stimulates innovation and growth in the energy and a high level of automation though smart contracts. To accelerate the transition to the green energy economy, a SolarCoin version similar to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency has also been proposed, which is a utility token that creates new possibilities for energy and water trading.