Fog computing is an emerging paradigm in provisioning computing and storage resources for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. In a fog computing system, all devices can offload their data or computationally intensive tasks to nearby fog nodes, instead of to the distant cloud. As compared with cloud computing, fog computing can significantly reduce the transmission delay between IoT devices and computing servers. However, the current fog system is rather susceptible to malicious attacks. To increase the security level, we propose to partition the fog system into fog node clusters (FNCs), with fog nodes (FNs) in one cluster sharing the same access control list (ACL) which is protected by a blockchain. Generating blockchains requires tremendous computing power and can rapidly drain the computing capacities of FNs. In this article, we first customize the blockchain for FNC to reduce the required computing power consumption and storage spaces. Second, a new scheme is designed for the blockchain-based FNC (BFNC) to recover ACL automatically. In addition, we propose a heuristic algorithm to reduce the time to acquire hash values of blocks by computing cooperatively with all available devices. The simulation results have demonstrated that using the cooperative computing strategy can reduce the time of computing a block hash than noncooperative strategies.
Public blockchains targeting Internet of Things (IoT) are gaining more traction every day with majority of them being built on top of the Ethereum infrastructure. However, a growing number of these blockchains introduces security issues. There are 525 entries already in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure database related to Ethereum smart contracts. 479 of them are related to arithmetic errors, which include integer overflow or underflow. This paper, thus, concentrates on analyzing arithmetic vulnerabilities found in existing public blockchains targeted at IoT applications. Furthermore, the performance in terms of security and gas cost of smart contracts is analyzed with and without SafeMath library. In addition, an improved SafeMath library is proposed that has better arithmetic coverage and requires lower gas consumption. Four security tools are used to analyze the arithmetic protection of the improved SafeMath library. The results show that the improved SafeMath library is able to cover 4 more arithmetic operations compared to the original one by using only two common conditions checks and is capable of saving 26 units of gas, which is a significant amount in the long run.
The Internet of Things (IoT) suffers from various security vulnerabilities. The use of blockchain technology can help resolve these vulnerabilities, but some practical problems in terms of scalability continue to hinder the adaption of blockchain for application in the IoT. The directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based Tangle model proposed by the IOTA Foundation aims to avoid transaction fees by employing a different protocol from that used in the blockchain. This model uses the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to update a distributed ledger. However, concerns about centralization by the coordinator nodes remain. Additionally, the economic incentive to choose the algorithm is insufficient. The present study proposes a light and efficient distributed ledger update algorithm that regards only the subtangle of each step by considering the Bayesian inference. Experimental results have confirmed that the performance of the proposed methodology is similar to that of the existing methodology, and the proposed methodology enables a faster computation time. It also provides the same resistance to possible attacks, and for the same reasons, as does the MCMC algorithm.
In next-generation computing, the role of cloud, internet and smart devices will be capacious. Nowadays we all are familiar with the word smart. This word is used a number of times in our daily life. The Internet of Things (IoT) will produce remarkable different kinds of information from different resources. It can store big data in the cloud. The fog computing acts as an interface between cloud and IoT. The extension of fog in this framework works on physical things under IoT. The IoT devices are called fog nodes, they can have accessed anywhere within the range of the network. The blockchain is a novel approach to record the transactions in a sequence securely. Developing a new blockchains based middleware framework in the architecture of the Internet of Things is one of the critical issues of wireless networking where resolving such an issue would result in constant growth in the use and popularity of IoT. The proposed research creates a framework for providing the middleware framework in the internet of smart devices network for the internet of things using blockchains technology. Our main contribution links a new study that integrates blockchains to the Internet of things and provides communication security to the internet of smart devices.
Energy trading in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a fundamental approach to realize Industry 4.0, plays a vital role in satisfying energy demands and optimizing system efficiency. Existing research works utilize a utility company to distribute energy to energy nodes with the help of energy brokers. Afterwards, they apply blockchain to provide transparency, immutability, and auditability of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. However, their schemes are constructed on a weak security model and do not consider the cheating attack initiated by energy sellers. Such an attack refers to an energy seller refusing to transfer the negotiated energy to an energy purchaser who already paid money. In this article, we propose FeneChain, a blockchain-based energy trading scheme to supervise and manage the energy trading process toward building a secure energy trading system and improving energy quality for Industry 4.0. Specifically, we leverage anonymous authentication to protect user privacy, and we design a timed-commitments-based mechanism to guarantee the verifiable fairness during energy trading. Moreover, we utilize fine-grained access control for energy trading services. We also build a consortium blockchain among energy brokers to verify and record energy trading transactions. Finally, we formally analyze the security and privacy of FeneChain and evaluate its performance (i.e., computational costs and communication overhead) by implementing a prototype via a local Ethereum test network and Raspberry Pi.
The block chain is attaining popularity day to day as it is acting as distributed ledger for Cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin and ripple. This research paper has focused on the Blockchain and its working pattern with technical implementation of block creation. This technical paper is considering the prevention of DNS Cache poisoning attack in Blockchain which is known as larger class of name-based attacks. DNS Packet interceptions may be made using various attacks like Cache poisoning attack, man-in-the-middle attacks etc. As there are numerous security mechanisms to secure the Blockchain but in order to make Blockchain immune from cache poisoning attack, there is need to update the block creation module. Therefore, this research work is proposed to make reduction in probability of data corruption that can be created from different attacks. It resolves the issue of cache poisoning attacks using user defined port instead of predefined port. However, the initialization of transmission is performed here using predefined port number. In second step, the encrypted port number is decrypted to initiate communication using user defined port number. The use of port with IP address would restrict attacks during data transmission. The paper has presented the comparative analysis of existing DNS attacking prevention mechanism to proposed work.
This paper presents lightweight blockchain consensus protocols that are specifically designed for vehicular social networks, or other networks that resemble them. They are lightweight in the sense that no puzzles are required to be solved and no cryptocurrency systems are required to be built beforehand. Various scenarios are considered, including whether the communication is reliable and whether the vehicle grouping is static. Although we break our solution of the consensus problem into private chain and public chain, we provide a scheme to smoothly bridge between them. Theoretical analysis is provided to guarantee the algorithms to succeed with high probability, before experiments are conducted to verify the algorithms and compare their theoretical performance versus simulation performance, namely worst-case performance versus average performance.
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is to process, analyse, store and calculate the network data at the edge of the network. When the ground infrastructure is damaged in an emergency, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formation can be rapidly deployed to undertake the task of MEC. However, there are some potential problems to be considered in UAV‐enabled MEC, such as the trust among UAVs from different sources and the stability of UAV formation network. In view of the problems existing, this study proposes a blockchain‐based architecture to build a system of mutual trust, fairness, openness, and stability in this scenario. Through the implementation of blockchain technology, key data such as device computing capacity, task allocation, and task execution process are recorded openly, transparently, and irrevocably. As multi‐party trust is built to reduce the occurrence of fraud, system participants can get a reasonable reward. On this basis, the smart contract is used to ensure that algorithms are accessible to the public, and the sub‐blockchain technology improves the stability of the system. In the case study, the simulation results show that the resource consumption and time cost of the proposed scheme is reasonable and feasible.
The use of Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced genuine concerns regarding data security and its privacy when data are in collection, exchange, and use. Meanwhile, blockchain offers a distributed and encrypted ledger designed to allow the creation of immutable and tamper-proof records of data at different locations. While blockchain may enhance IoT with innate security, data integrity, and autonomous governance, IoT data management and its allocation in blockchain still remain an architectural concern. In this article, we propose a novel context-aware mechanism for on-chain data allocation in IoT-blockchain systems. Specifically, we design a data controller based on fuzzy logic to calculate the Rating of Allocation (RoA) value of each data request considering multiple context parameters, i.e., data, network, and quality and decide its on-chain allocation. Furthermore, we illustrate how the design and realization of the mechanism lead to refinements of two commonly used IoT-blockchain architectural styles (i.e., blockchain-based cloud and fog). To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we instantiate the data allocation mechanism in the blockchain-based cloud and fog architectures and evaluate their performance using FogBus. We also compare the efficacy of our approach to the existing decision-making mechanisms through the deployment of a real-world healthcare application. The experimental results suggest that the realization of the data allocation mechanism improves network usage, latency, and blockchain storage and reduces energy consumption.
Blockchain has been gradually applied to different Internet-of-Things platforms. As the efficiency of the blockchain mainly depends on the network computing capability, how to make sure the acquisition of the computational resources and participation of the devices would be the driving force. In this article, we focus on investigating incentive mechanism for rational miners to purchase the computational resources. An edge-computing-based blockchain network is considered, where the edge service provider (ESP) can provide computational resources for the miners. Accordingly, we formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game between the miners and ESP. The aim is to investigate SE of the optimal mining strategy under the two different mining schemes, in order to find the optimal incentive for the ESP and miners to choose autofit strategies. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme on encouraging devices to participate the blockchain.
Mahdi Daghmehchi Firoozjaei, Ali A. Ghorbani, Hyoungshick Kim, JaeSeung Song
In the current centralized IoT ecosystems, all financial transactions are routed through IoT platform providers. The security and privacy issues are inevitable with an untrusted or compromised IoT platform provider. To address these issues, we propose Hy-Bridge, a hybrid blockchain-based billing and charging framework. In Hy-Bridge, the IoT platform provider plays no proxy role, and IoT users can securely and efficiently share a credit with other users. The trustful end-to-end functionality of blockchain helps us to provide accountability and reliability features in IoT transactions. Furthermore, with the blockchain-distributed consensus, we provide a credit-sharing feature for IoT users in the energy and utility market. To provide this feature, we introduce a local block framework for service management in the credit-sharing group. To preserve the IoT users’ privacy and avoid any information leakage to the main blockchain, an interconnection position, called bridge, is introduced to isolate IoT users’ peer-to-peer transactions and link the main blockchain to its subnetwork blockchain(s) in a hybrid model. To this end, a k-anonymity protection is performed on the bridge. To evaluate the performance of the introduced hybrid blockchain-based billing and charging, we simulated the energy use case scenario using Hy-Bridge. Our simulation results show that Hy-Bridge could protect user privacy with an acceptable level of information loss and CPU and memory usage.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of IoT devices has increased exponentially. Therefore, we have put forward higher security requirements for the management, transmission, and storage of massive IoT data. However, during the transmission process of IoT data, security issues, such as data theft and forgery, are prone to occur. In addition, most existing data storage solutions are centralized, i.e., data are stored and maintained by a centralized server. Once the server is maliciously attacked, the security of IoT data will be greatly threatened. In view of the above-mentioned security issues, a security transmission and storage solution is proposed about sensing image for blockchain in the IoT. Firstly, this solution intelligently senses user image information, and divides these sensed data into intelligent blocks. Secondly, different blocks of data are encrypted and transmitted securely through intelligent encryption algorithms. Finally, signature verification and storage are performed through an intelligent verification algorithm. Compared with the traditional IoT data transmission and centralized storage solution, our solution combines the IoT with the blockchain, making use of the advantages of blockchain decentralization, high reliability, and low cost to transfer and store users image information securely. Security analysis proves that the solution can resist theft attacks and ensure the security of user image information during transmission and storage.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the rapid development of E‐Learning, the demand for high‐quality personalized education services and resources has increased rapidly. In order to meet this demand, a project called “Digital Education Crowdfunding and Crowdcreating Personalized Service Platform Development and Application Demonstration” was launched in China. The goal of the project is to provide a personalized education resource and service trading platform for producers, suppliers, and users by joint investment and collaborative creation. So how to ensure the authenticity and credibility of the objects (education resources and services) involved in this multi‐party participated service platform becomes a challenging task. Blockchain is emerging as a promising technology that enables people to make secure and reliable transactions because of the decentralization and collective maintenance features. Thus in this letter we proposed a novel blockchain‐based authentication service for digital education transaction object to resolve the problem of education transaction object authentication among different education institutions. We constructed information models for the two types object and stored the metadata information of the model on the blockchain to make it transparent and safe. And smart contracts are designed to authenticate education transaction object automatically among different education institutions. To improve the performance of blockchain‐based authentication service, an improved consensus process for blockchain network is proposed and incorporated into our prototype system. Performance simulation is carried out and the experimental results demonstrate the practicality of our blockchain‐based authentification service.
The appearance of wearable devices has allowed people to monitor their own health status even though they are in a home environment. In addition, there has also been an awareness of the population that health is something fundamental, causing the interest of people to control their own health, to track and analyze this personal health data. The person-centered approach to medicine emerged with the aim of enabling control of these health data for the people to whom they really belong, that is, the patient himself. In this way, a patient could not only monitor this data, but effectively decide who can and cannot access it. Blockchain is a technology that emerged with the aim of making secure transactions over the internet without the need for a trusted third party; in the context of health data, the trusted third party would be a hospital or an entity that stores and controls the data collected from patients. This research aims to develop a blockchain-based architectural solution for granting permission to access patient health data collected by a remote patient monitoring system through relationships on a social network. In order to validate the solution, smart contracts were implemented to identify, track data and allow the granting of permission to access patient data. Smart contracts were developed and tested using the blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric.
There has been an increasing trend of moving computing activities closer to the edge of the network, particularly in smart city applications (e.g., vehicle-to-everything - V2X). Such a paradigm allows the end user's requests to be handled/processed by nodes at the edge of the network; thus, reducing latency, and preserving privacy of user data/activities. However, there are a number of challenges in such an edge computing ecosystem. Examples include (1) potential inappropriate utilization of resources at the edge nodes, (2) operational challenges in cache management and data integrity due to data migration between edge nodes, particularly when dealing with vehicular mobility in a V2X application, and (3) high energy consumption due to continuous link breakage and subsequent reestablishment of link(s). Therefore in this paper, we design a blockchain-based secure data processing framework for an edge envisioned V2X environment (hereafter referred to as BloCkEd). Specifically, a multi-layered edge-enabled V2X system model for BloCkEd is presented, which includes the formulation of a multi-objective optimization problem. In addition, BloCkEd comprises an optimal container-based data processing scheme, and a blockchain-based data integrity management scheme, designed to minimize link breakage and reducing latency. Using Chandigarh City, India, as the scenario, we implement and evaluate the proposed approach in terms of its latency, energy consumption, and service level agreement compliance.
Personal IoT data is a new economic asset that individuals can trade to generate revenue on the emerging data marketplaces. Typically, marketplaces are centralized systems that raise concerns of privacy, single point of failure, little transparency and involve trusted intermediaries to be fair. Furthermore, the battery-operated IoT devices limit the amount of IoT data to be traded in real-time that affects buyer/seller satisfaction and hence, impacting the sustainability and usability of such a marketplace. This work proposes to utilize blockchain technology to realize a trusted and transparent decentralized marketplace for contract compliance for trading IoT data streams generated by battery-operated IoT devices in real-time. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (1) we propose an autonomous blockchain-based marketplace equipped with essential functionalities such as agreement framework, pricing model and rating mechanism to create an effective marketplace framework without involving a mediator, (2) we propose a mechanism for selection and allocation of buyers' demands on seller's devices under quality and battery constraints. We present a proof-of-concept implementation in Ethereum to demonstrate the feasibility of the framework. We investigated the impact of buyer's demand on the battery drainage of the IoT devices under different scenarios through extensive simulations. Our results show that this approach is viable and benefits the seller and buyer for creating a sustainable marketplace model for trading IoT data in real-time from battery-powered IoT devices.
Xi Lin, Jun Wu, Shahid Mumtaz, Sahil Garg · 6 authors
In a smart city, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) are generally deployed in static fashion in base stations (BSs). While moving vehicles with advanced on-board equipment can be regarded as dynamic computing resource transporters ignoring geographical limitations. Thus Internet of Vehicle (IoV) could assist the smart city to achieve flexible computing resource demand response (DR) via paid sharing the idle vehicle computing resources. Motivated by this, we propose a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing resource trading system to balance computing resource spatio-temporal dynamic demands in IoV-assisted smart city. On one hand, to guarantee transaction security and privacy-preserving in our system, we employ a consortium blockchain approach and demonstrate the process of secure computing resource trading without involving a centralized trusted third-party. On the other hand, to encourage individual smart vehicles to participate in our system, we construct a two-stage Stackelberg game jointly optimizing the utilities of buyers and sellers. And we also derive the optimal computing pricing and trading amount strategies in this proposed game. Finally, security analysis shows the security performance of our system and numerical simulations show that our strategies can encourage the collaboration between the buyer and smart vehicles.
Blockchain technology can be extensively applied in diverse services, including online micro-payments, supply chain tracking, digital forensics, health-care record sharing, and insurance payments. Extending the technology to the Internet of things (IoT), we can obtain a verifiable and traceable IoT network. Emerging research in IoT applications exploits blockchain technology to record transaction data, optimize current system performance, or construct next-generation systems, which can provide additional security, automatic transaction management, decentralized platforms, offline-to-online data verification, and so on. In this article, we conduct a systematic survey of the key components of IoT blockchain and examine a number of popular blockchain applications. In particular, we first give an architecture overview of popular IoT-blockchain systems by analyzing their network structures and protocols. Then, we discuss variant consensus protocols for IoT blockchains, and make comparisons among different consensus algorithms. Finally, we analyze the traffic model for P2P and blockchain systems and provide several metrics. We also provide a suitable traffic model for IoT-blockchain systems to illustrate network traffic distribution.