Zaher Haddad, Mostafa M. Fouda, Mohamed Mahmoud, Mohamed Abdallah
Fifth generation (5G) cellular network, is a promising network that provides user promising quality of services in various applications such as health, banking, education, etc. Security consideration is the most critical element facing the reliance upon this technology. Registration, authentication and key agreement protocols are considered the most important protocols in any cellular network, since the subscriber and the network trust each other and share a symmetric key. Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) developed security specifications for the user authentication with the provider. However, many researchers targeted these protocols and concluded that there are still some security issues and proposed authentication and key agreement protocols. On the other hand, blockchain is considered one of the emerging technologies that will have a great impact on our life in the coming days. Blockchain grants its security properties such as authenticity and integrity to various applications such as bitcoin, smart contracts, etc. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel, efficient and secure authentication and key agreement protocol for 5G networks using blockchain. Our security analysis illustrates that the proposed scheme is secure and withstands the known attacks; denial of service, distributed denial of service, man in the middle, hijacking and compromising attacks. Furthermore, our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is more efficient than the current scheme and also other schemes since it preserves the small battery properties of the user equipment and also preserves the bandwidth of the network.
The Electronic Health Records (EHR) sharing system is the state of art for delivering healthcare. The tools within the system can predict outcomes during the patient's lifetime, monitor how effective are treatments, track therapies and detect human errors. For main industry stakeholders, the priority is to ensure integrity and interoperability across the care continuum. Achieving this priority is still challenging considering an enormous amount of EHR data, security issues, and heterogeneity of healthcare information systems. To overcome these challenges, this work proposes BiiMED: a Blockchain framework for Enhancing Data Interoperability and Integrity regarding EHR-sharing. The proposed solutions include an access management system allowing the exchange of EHRs between different medical providers and a decentralized Trusted Third Party Auditor (TTPA) for ensuring data integrity. This work establishes a foundation for further research on dynamic data interoperability and integrity verification in a fully decentralized environment.
In recent years there are lot of thrills spinning around BLOCKCHAIN technology. Blockchain initially released in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto as a fundamental technology for the first ever global decentralized cryptography based digital currency known as BITCOIN. Todays in tech world every person and industry discussing about blockchain, and they feel blockchain technology changed the world like open source software change. Every industry wants to use and explore blockchain technology in different application like trading, supply chain, healthcare etc. Blockchain is a revolutionary technology but the question is from where this technology invented. In this paper author will discuss about distributed ledger technology which is known as parental technology of blockchain. This paper will break the myth that distributed ledger and blockchain both are the same technology, and will tell that every DLT is not blockchain but blockchain is a DLT. This paper presents the comparison of different DLT's and blockchain. In this paper author discuss different type of potential application area where DLT is very helpful. In the end of paper author present future research direction for blockchain and DLT with some challenges.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables flexible deployment and innovation of new networking applications by decoupling and abstracting the control and data planes. It has radically changed the concept and way of building and managing networked systems, and reduced the barriers to entry for new players in the service markets. It is considered to be a promising solution providing the scale and versatility necessary for IoT. However, SDN may also face many challenges, i.e., the centralized control plane would be a single point of failure. With the advent of blockchain technology, blockchain-based SDN has become an emerging architecture for securing a distributed network environment. Motivated by this, in this work, we summarize the generic framework of blockchain-based SDN, discuss security challenges and relevant solutions, and provide insights on the future development in this field.
Healthcare data is important in making critical policy decisions, patients care, and medical diagnostics to name a few. Due to the importance and market demand, healthcare data is also vulnerable to cyber attacks. The centralized record keeping systems expose a single node for the attackers to attack. A decentralized system is computationally expensive but has the ability to be revolutionary by keeping the patient at the core and providing security, transparency, privacy, and interoperability of the electronic healthcare data. A blockchain is such an implementation of a distributed and decentralized system using reliable cryptographic algorithms. This paper proposes a secure blockchain based architecture tailored specifically to cater to the needs of e-healthcare systems.
Md. Selim Hossain, Sajjad Waheed, Ziaur Rahman, Sk. A. Shezan · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) that has been developed owing toward the merging of various technologies such as instantaneous analytics, machine learning, artificial neural network, product sensors and implanted systems, etc. It also stages a significant part in multiple applications which are a smart city, smart home, agricultural, health monitoring, tourism, transportation, communication, business, education, etc. The security concern associating IoT has to be situated in the direction to attract the research community due to its immensely growing application in our daily life. Since it is light-weight nature, the security mechanism needs changes apart from comprehensive web security. PKI based certificate driven techniques, which in some instances seem not appropriate on the way toward encounter IoT challenges, e.g., as real-time effectiveness, costs, and performance from the security perspective. However, Blockchain has mind-blowing potentials to peer with the IoT aiming to build trust, transparency, and security. Its distinct properties, such as distributed behavior, immutability, and consensus mechanism, can stimulate and improve the rapidly growing IoT system through meaningful integration. We propose to address a practical smart home use case scenario using Ethereum Blockchain to improve IoT security. Public type and smart contract oriented Ethereum Blockchain are adaptable to enhance IoT security remains individual of the contributions that we claim throughout this research work.
Konstantin D. Pandl, Scott Thiebes, Manuel Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ali Sunyaev
Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger\nTechnology (DLT) currently lead to lively debates in academia and practice. AI\nprocesses data to perform tasks that were previously thought possible only for\nhumans. DLT has the potential to create consensus over data among a group of\nparticipants in uncertain environments. In recent research, both technologies\nare used in similar and even the same systems. Examples include the design of\nsecure distributed ledgers or the creation of allied learning systems\ndistributed across multiple nodes. This can lead to technological convergence,\nwhich in the past, has paved the way for major innovations in information\ntechnology. Previous work highlights several potential benefits of the\nconvergence of AI and DLT but only provides a limited theoretical framework to\ndescribe upcoming real-world integration cases of both technologies. We aim to\ncontribute by conducting a systematic literature review on previous work and\nproviding rigorously derived future research opportunities. This work helps\nresearchers active in AI or DLT to overcome current limitations in their field,\nand practitioners to develop systems along with the convergence of both\ntechnologies.\n
Blockchain technology, as a bedrock for distributed ledgers, offers a platform for innovation for a new decentralized and transparent transaction machinery in industries and businesses, and the port is not an exception. The inbuilt features of this technology enrich trust through transparency and traceability within any transaction of data, goods, services, and financial resources. Notwithstanding initial doubts about this technology, lately government and large corporations have offered to adopt and enhance this technology in various fields of applications, from social and legal industries, and finance to design, maritime and port networks. In this paper, the authors review the current status of the Blockchain technology and some of its applications. The potential benefit of such a technology in port and maritime supply chain is then discussed, and a vision for the future Blockchain ready port and maritime supply chain are proposed. The importation of containerized vehicles is used as an example to demonstrate how such technology can be deployed in a global port industry. Finally, the requirements and challenges to adopt this technology in the future in relation to, port and maritime systems are discussed.
Christopher Klinkmüller, Ingo Weber, Alexander Ponomarev, An Binh Tran · 5 authors
Second generation blockchain platforms, like Ethereum, can store arbitrary data and execute user-defined smart contracts. Due to the shared nature of blockchains, understanding the usage of blockchain-based applications and the underlying network is crucial. Although log analysis is a well-established means, data extraction from blockchain platforms can be highly inconvenient and slow, not least due to the absence of logging libraries. To close the gap, we here introduce the Ethereum Logging Framework (ELF) which is highly configurable and available as open source. ELF supports users (i) in generating cost-efficient logging code readily embeddable into smart contracts and (ii) in extracting log analysis data into common formats regardless of whether the code generation has been used during development. We provide an overview of and rationale for the framework's features, outline implementation details, and demonstrate ELF's versatility based on three case studies from the public Ethereum blockchain.
Traditional centralized data storage and processing solutions manifest limitations with regards to overall operational cost and the security and auditability of data. One of the biggest issues with existing solutions is the difficulty of keeping track of who has had access to the data and how the data may have changed over its lifetime; while providing a secure and easy-to-use mechanism to share the data between different users. The ability to electronically regulate data sharing within and across different organizational entities in the supply chain (SC) is an open issue that is only addressed partially by existing legal and regulatory compliance frameworks. In this article, we present Cydon, a decentralized data management platform that executes bespoke distributed applications utilizing a novel search and retrieve algorithm leveraging metadata attributes. Cydon utilizes a smart distributed ledger to offer an immutable audit trail and transaction history for all different levels of data access and modification within a SC and for all data flows within the environment. Results suggest that Cydon provides authorized and fast access to secure distributed data, avoids single points of failure by securely distributing encrypted data across different nodes while maintains an “always-on” chain of custody.
Abbas Yazdinejad, Gautam Srivastava, Reza M. Parizi, Ali Dehghantanha · 6 authors
In any interconnected healthcare system (e.g., those that are part of a smart city), interactions between patients, medical doctors, nurses and other healthcare practitioners need to be secure and efficient. For example, all members must be authenticated and securely interconnected to minimize security and privacy breaches from within a given network. However, introducing security and privacy-preserving solutions can also incur delays in processing and other related services, potentially threatening patients lives in critical situations. A considerable number of authentication and security systems presented in the literature are centralized, and frequently need to rely on some secure and trusted third-party entity to facilitate secure communications. This, in turn, increases the time required for authentication and decreases throughput due to known overhead, for patients and inter-hospital communications. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized authentication of patients in a distributed hospital network, by leveraging blockchain. Our notion of a healthcare setting includes patients and allied health professionals (medical doctors, nurses, technicians, etc), and the health information of patients. Findings from our in-depth simulations demonstrate the potential utility of the proposed architecture. For example, it is shown that the proposed architecture's decentralized authentication among a distributed affiliated hospital network does not require re-authentication. This improvement will have a considerable impact on increasing throughput, reducing overhead, improving response time, and decreasing energy consumption in the network. We also provide a comparative analysis of our model in relation to a base model of the network without blockchain to show the overall effectiveness of our proposed solution.
Abstract Blockchain and cryptocurrency are a hot topic in today’s digital world. In this paper, we create a game theoretic model in continuous time. We consider a dynamic game model of the bitcoin market, where miners or players use mining systems to mine bitcoin by investing electricity into the mining system. Although this work is motivated by BTC, the work presented can be applicable to other mining systems similar to BTC. We propose three concepts of dynamic game theoretic solutions to the model: Social optimum , Nash equilibrium and myopic Nash equilibrium . Using the model that a player represents a single “miner” or a “mining pool”, we develop novel and interesting results for the cryptocurrency world.
The blockchain is seen as a beneficial development for IoT (Internet of Things), as it offers vital answers for a package which can fix security and trust checks, major help expenses, etc. Blockchain's decentralization will be mainly due to the consensus mechanism which awards specific trade during a distributed path without the ties between others. It begins with the basic message of blockchain and explains why the accepted component recognizes a particular career during a blockchainIoT process. Two basic ideas of commended mechanisms such as Proof of Stake (PoS) and Proof of Work (PoW) are addressed and reports are demanded in IoT. The Direct Acyclic Graphs(DAG) is used to show why it is reactive than IoTPoS and PoW structure. Hashgraph and Tangle are mainly based on consensus mechanisms.
Deepak Puthal, Saraju P. Mohanty, Venkata P. Yanambaka, Elias Kougianos
In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time distributed networks popularly known as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing and edge computing. The blockchain is gaining a lot of interest in these domains to secure the system by ignoring centralized dependencies, where proof-of-work (PoW) plays a vital role to make the whole security solution decentralized. Due to the resource limitations of the devices, PoW is not suitable for blockchain-based security solutions. This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh), which introduces a cryptographic authentication mechanism to replace PoW for resource constrained devices, and to make the blockchain application-specific. PoAh is thus suitable for private as well as permissioned blockchains. Further, PoAh not only secures the systems, but also maintains system sustainability and scalability. The proposed consensus algorithm is evaluated theoretically in simulation scenarios, and in real-time hardware testbeds to validate its performance. Finally, PoAh and its integration with the blockchain in the IoT and edge computing scenarios is discussed. The proposed PoAh, while running in limited computer resources (e.g. single-board computing devices like the Raspberry Pi) has a latency in the order of 3 secs.
Taesic Kim, Justin J. Ochoa, Tasnimun Faika, H. Alan Mantooth · 7 authors
Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are a key energy storage component in various electrical and electronic systems, such as mobile phones and electric vehicles. A properly designed battery management system (BMS) is crucial to guarantee the safety, reliability, and optimal performance of the battery, as well as to interconnect the battery systems with each other and external systems through communication channels. However, security threats of the Li-ion battery systems are often overlooked by BMS developers in the design phase. The cybersecurity of BMSs is an essential factor to consider as more battery systems require internet connectivity for functionality, such as intelligent monitoring, control, and maintenance. This article discusses the overall security vulnerabilities from potential cyber-attacks and defense strategies, as well as the adoption of current blockchain technology in BMSs, which will be used as a cybersecurity baseline reference to BMS developers. The implementation of blockchain technology is promising to protect BMSs from malicious cyber-physical attacks and ensure the secure utilization of battery systems for numerous applications in cyber-physical environments.
Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies are being heavily exploited and used in may domains, especially for e-healthcare. In healthcare, IoT devices have the ability to provide real-time sensory data from patients to be processed and analyzed. Collected IoT data are subjected to centralized computation, processing, and storage. Such centralization can be problematic, as it can be a single point of failure, mistrust, data manipulation and tampering, and privacy evasion. Blockchain can solve such serious problems by providing decentralized computation and storage for IoT data. Therefore, the integration IoT and blockchain technologies can become a reasonable choice for the design of a decentralized IoT-based e-healthcare systems. In this article, first, we give a brief background on blockchain. Second, popular consensus algorithms used in blockchain are discussed in the context of e-health. Third, blockchain platforms are reviewed for their appropriateness in IoT-based e-healthcare. Finally, few use cases are methodologically given to show how key features of the IoT and blockchain can be leveraged to support healthcare services and ecosystems. We also propose a data-flow architecture that combines the IoT with blockchain, called IoBHealth, that can be used for storing, accessing, and managing of e-healthcare data.
In recent years, blockchain technology has received unparalleled attention from academia, industry, and governments all around the world. It is considered a technological breakthrough anticipated to disrupt several application domains. This has resulted in a plethora of blockchain systems for various purposes. However, many of these blockchain systems suffer from serious shortcomings related to their performance and security, which need to be addressed before any wide-scale adoption can be achieved. A crucial component of any blockchain system is its underlying consensus algorithm, which in many ways, determines its performance and security. Therefore, to address the limitations of different blockchain systems, several existing as well novel consensus algorithms have been introduced. A systematic analysis of these algorithms will help to understand how and why any particular blockchain performs the way it functions. However, the existing studies of consensus algorithms are not comprehensive. Those studies have incomplete discussions on the properties of the algorithms and fail to analyse several major blockchain consensus algorithms in terms of their scopes. This article fills this gap by analysing a wide range of consensus algorithms using a comprehensive taxonomy of properties and by examining the implications of different issues still prevalent in consensus algorithms in detail. The result of the analysis is presented in tabular formats, which provides a visual illustration of these algorithms in a meaningful way. We have also analysed more than hundred top crypto-currencies belonging to different categories of consensus algorithms to understand their properties and to implicate different trends in these crypto-currencies. Finally, we have presented a decision tree of algorithms to be used as a tool to test the suitability of consensus algorithms under different criteria.
Julio Moreno, Manuel Serrano, Eduardo B. Fernández, Eduardo Fernández‐Medina
Big data ecosystems are increasingly important for the daily activities of any type of company. They are decisive elements in the organization, so any malfunction of this environment can have a great impact on the normal functioning of the company; security is therefore a crucial aspect of this type of ecosystem. When approaching security in big data as an issue, it must be considered not only during the creation and implementation of the big data ecosystem, but also throughout its entire lifecycle, including operation, and especially when managing and responding to incidents that occur. To this end, this paper proposes an incident response process supported by a private blockchain network that allows the recording of the different events and incidents that occur in the big data ecosystem. The use of blockchain enables the security of the stored data to be improved, increasing its immutability and traceability. In addition, the stored records can help manage incidents and anticipate them, thereby minimizing the costs of investigating their causes; that facilitates forensic readiness. This proposal integrates with previous research work, seeking to improve the security of big data by creating a process of secure analysis, design, and implementation, supported by a security reference architecture that serves as a guide in defining the different elements of this type of ecosystem. Moreover, this paper presents a case study in which the proposal is being implemented by using big data and blockchain technologies, such as Apache Spark or Hyperledger Fabric.
Summary The emergence of mobile cloud computing enables mobile users to offload computation tasks to other resource‐rich mobile devices to reduce energy consumption and enhance performance. A direct peer‐to‐peer connection among mobile devices to offload computation tasks can be a highly promising solution to provide a fast mechanism, especially for deadline‐sensitive offloading tasks. The generic blockchain‐based system might fail in such a scenario due to it being a heavyweight mechanism requiring high power consumption in the mining process. To address these issues, in this article, we propose a directed acyclic graph‐enabled mobile offloading (DAGMO) algorithm. DAGMO model is empowered by traditional blockchain features and provides additional advantages to overcome the fundamental limitations of generic blockchain. A game‐theoretic approach is used to model the interactions between mobile devices. The numerical analysis proves the proposed model to enhance the overall welfare of the participating nodes in terms of computation cost and time.
Abstract. At present all business activities are bound to contracts or agreements. A written contract has several weaknesses, the contract can be lost and damaged, it is not cost effective and one party can commit fraud. The solution for that is to use the smart contract Ethereum. Smart contract Ethereum is a computer protocol that functions to facilitate, verify, or enforce digital negotiations written through the program code. Smart contract works without going through a third party and has a credible transaction process so that it cannot be tracked or changed. But Blockchain technology is not suitable for storing large amounts of data and expensive costs, the authors combine IPFS technology on Ethereum Blockchain. So the Ethereum Blockchain only stores the hash of the file, then the hash of this file can be connected to the file on IPFS to access it. In this study a web-based DApp (Decentralized applications) system was built that implemented IPFS on the smart contract Ethereum. The final result of this study is a discussion of data integrity and Quality of Service (QoS) communication between IPFS nodes on the smart contract Ethereum as a reference for implementation of the company. With the results of the implementation it was found that the data integrity possessed by IPFS was very good by fulfilling aspects of information security and having Quality of Service with average throughput values of 56.41 Kbps, 65.81 Kbps and 79.68 Kbps, for average packet loss values of 1.92%, 1.58% and 1.06%, while the average value of delay is 24.79 ms, 25.87 ms and 17.30 ms with the average value of the Quality of Service index which is 3 which meets the Satisfying category based on THIPON standards. Keywords: Blockchain, Smart Contract Ethereum, IPFS, Data Integrity, Quality of Service (QoS)