Mir Hassan, Jincai Chen, Adnan Iftekhar, Xiaohui Cui
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to change the way the world works from home automation to smart cities, from improved healthcare to an efficient management sys-tem in supply chains to industry 4.0 revolution. IoT is increasingly becoming an essential part of the homes and industrial automa-tion; nevertheless, there are still many challenges that need to fix. IoT solutions are costly and complicated, while issues regarding security and privacy must be addressed with a sustainable plan. Support the growing number of connected devices; the IoT is in dire need of a reboot. Blockchain technology might be the answer. Starting as a decentralized financial solution in the form of Bitcoin, Blockchain technology has expanded to diverse areas and Information Technology applications. Blockchain technology and Smart Contracts can address the outstanding security and privacy issues that impede further development of the IoT. Blockchain is a decentralized system with no central governance, facilitates interactions, promotes new and improved transaction models, and allows autonomous coordination of the devices using enhanced encryption techniques. The primary reason for this paper is to showcase the challenges and problems we are facing with the current internet of things solutions and analyze how the use of Blockchain and Smart Contracts can help achieve a new, more robust internet of things system. Finally, we examine some of the many projects using the Internet of Things together with Blockchain and Smart Contracts, to create new solutions that are only possible by integrating these technologies.
Alexandre Pinheiro, Edna Dias Canedo, Rafael T. de Sousa, Robson de Oliveira Albuquerque
The adoption of cloud computing solutions is an established reality in government agencies and in small, medium, and large companies due to procurement easiness and the variety of available services, as well as its low cost compared to the acquisition and management of own infrastructures. Among the most used services is cloud file storage, and the security of this storage has been an essential subject of recent research, particularly customer data integrity. Thus, this article proposes a solution for the monitoring of the integrity of files stored in the cloud, based on the use of smart contracts in Blockchain Networks, symmetric encryption, and computational trust. The proposed solution consists of a protocol that provides confidentiality, decentralization, audit availability, and the secure sharing of file integrity monitoring results, without overloading the services involved, as well as an unabridged reference implementation which was used to validate the proposal. The results obtained during the validation tests have shown that the solution is feasible and faultless in detecting corrupted files. These tests also confirmed that the sharing of integrity monitoring results, coupled with the application of computational trust techniques, significantly increased the efficiency of the proposed solution.
Tonglai Liu, Jigang Wu, Long Chen, Yalan Wu · 5 authors
In a mobile blockchain network, many mobile devices have insufficient computational capacity to execute computation-intensive tasks locally. To tackle this problem, blockchain tasks can be offloaded to edge servers with the aid of auction. However, most auction mechanisms on mobile blockchain ignore the automatic parallel execution and long-term performance. This paper aims to solve the problem of computation offloading in a mobile blockchain network. We transform this problem into a multi-choice multi-dimensional knapsack problem which is NP-hard. To improve the total utility of auction participants, this paper proposes a smart-contract-based double auction mechanism, named long-term auction for mobile blockchain (LAMB). The subtasks can be offloaded from one mobile device to heterogeneous edge servers. Also, LAMB satisfies the economic properties of an auction mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that, the utility and utilization ratio can be achieved by 130.55% higher and 138.64% higher, respectively, in comparison to the existing auction algorithm WBD. Furthermore, the proposed LAMB can guarantee long-term performance for task offloading, and it can achieve automatic execution in an autonomous and secure environment.
Blockchain helps to deliver Computerized working, on spot verification, cost efficiency, enhanced work. One of the fast initiatives for the implementation of Blockchain is taken by financial sector. As more than 60% of the market percent of the market value focuses on new technology. In the coming time, blockchain will start into influence into many domain including accountancy on it auxiliaries. Smart contract can play a very important role in banking and insurance. This can be very vital tool for the auditing purpose, because all transactions can be updated without any third party interference. All the accounting standards can be evaluated through blockchain systems thus giving professional accountants such as Chartered Accountants and Certified Public Accountants to focus more on the company policies and how it can improve its operations ethically. To access any resource in blockchain network. This paper presents a framework which use Fair access using Dynamic Access control. All process of fair access is recorded in smart contract and token allocation can be done with the help of Digital Signature. This makes system more perfect. For the very purpose of Blockchain intervening into accounting policies is to ensure that auditors are working to the potential in terms of verifying the accounts and financial records in accordance to the International Accounting Standards. This step hopes to minimize minimal frauds that might happen in the workplaces which could halt to the end of the business life as the privacy of smart contract can be enhanced.
Blockchain technology has been emerged in the last decade and has gained a lot of interests from several sectors such as finance, government, energy, health, etc. This paper gives a broad ranging survey of the application of blockchain in healthcare domain. In fact, the ongoing research in this area is evolving rapidly. Therefore, we have identified several use cases in the state of art applying the blockchain technology, for instance for sharing electronic medical records, for remote patient monitoring, for drug supply chain, etc. We have focused also on identifying limitations of studied approaches and finally we have discussed some open research issues and the areas of future research.
IoT has the potential to transform the way we think about information and communication technology. IoT has been studied extensively across many disciplines such as the networking, communication, security, business, and management communities. However, many unsolved challenges, especially in managing heterogeneous IoTs, remain to be discussed. Recent studies propose using blockchain, an emerging technology that enables decentralized coordination, to address inherent challenges in IoT. This article presents a preliminary study on an architecture that implements blockchain in managing heterogeneous IoT systems. We start by pointing out the limitations of prior IoT systems and the difficulties of integrating IoT and blockchain. Then we outline an architecture to manage a large-scale heterogeneous IoT system. Our main goal is to stimulate further effort and cross-disciplinary collaboration by providing guidance and reference for future studies.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) stands to benefit industries such as financial services with transparency and censorship resistance. DLT systems need to be scalable to handle mass user adoption. Mass user adoption is required to demonstrate the true value of DLT. This dissertation first analyses scalability in ethereum and EOS. Currently, ethereum 1.0 uses proof of work (PoW) and handles only 14 transactions per second (tps) compared to Visa's peak 47 000 tps. Ethereum 2.0, known as Serenity, introduces sharding, proof of stake (Casper), plasma and state channels in and effort to scale the system. EOS uses a delegated proof of stake (DPoS) protocol, where 21 super-nodes, termed ‘block producers' (BPs), facilitate consensus, bringing about significant scalability improvements (4000 tps). The trade-off is decentralisation. EOS is not sufficiently decentralised because the BPs yield significant power, but are not diverse. This dissertation conducts an empirical analysis using unsupervised machine learning to show that there is a high probability collusion is occurring between certain BPs. It then suggests possible protocol alterations such as inverse vote weighting that could curb adverse voting behaviour in DPoS. It further analyses whether universities are suitable BP's before mapping out required steps for universities to become block producers (leading to improved decentralisation in EOS)
Ch. V. N. U. Bharathi Murthy, M. Lawanya Shri, Seifedine Kadry, Sangsoon Lim
Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with records of data containing all details of the transactions carried out and distributed among the nodes present in the network. All the transactions carried out in the system are confirmed by consensus mechanisms, and the data once stored cannot be altered. Blockchain technology is the necessary technology behind Bitcoin, which is a popular digital Cryptocurrency. “Cloud computing is a practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.” It is still facing many challenges like data security, data management, compliance, reliability. In this article, we have mentioned some of the significant challenges faced by the cloud and proposed solutions by integrating it with blockchain technology. We tend to investigate a brief survey on earlier studies focused on blockchain integrating with the cloud to depict their supremacy. In this survey, we have also developed architecture integrating blockchain with cloud revealing the communication between blockchain and cloud.
Ahmad Akmaluddin Mazlan, Salwani Mohd Daud, Suriani Mohd Sam, Hafiza Abas · 6 authors
Blockchain technology is a private, secure, trustworthy, and transparent information exchange performed in a decentralised manner. In this case, the coordination and validation efforts are simplified as the records are designed to update regularly and there is no difference in the two databases. This review focuses on how the blockchain addresses scalability challenges and provides solutions in the healthcare field through the implementation of blockchain technology. Accordingly, 16 solutions fell under two main areas, namely storage optimization and redesign of blockchain. However, limitations persist, including block size, high volume of data, transactions, number of nodes, and protocol challenges. This review consists of six stages, namely identification of research question, procedures of research, screening of relevant articles, keywording based on the abstract, data extraction, and mapping process. Through Atlas.ti software, the selected keywords were used to analyse through the relevant articles. As a result, 48 codes and 403 quotations were compiled. Manual coding was performed to categorise the quotations. The codes were then mapped onto the network as a mapping process. Notably, 16 solutions fell under two main areas, namely storage optimization and redesign of blockchain. Basically, there are 3 solutions compiled for storage optimization and 13 solutions for the redesign of the blockchain, namely blockchain modelling, read mechanism, write mechanism, and bi-directional network.
Saqib Hakak, Wazir Zada Khan, Gulshan Amin Gilkar, Muhammad Imran · 5 authors
In recent years, unprecedented work has been done in the area of smart cities. The purpose of developing smart cities is to enhance quality of life factors for people dwelling within them. To achieve that purpose, technologies such as IoT and cloud computing have been utilized. Blockchain technology is also among the promising technologies that can offer countless valuable services to its end users. It is a immutable programmable digital register for the purpose of recording virtual assets having some value and was primarily developed for digital currencies like Bitcoin. To fully utilize the services of blockchain technology within smart cities, characteristics of blockchain technology, and its key requirements and research challenges need to be identified. Hence, in this article, an attempt has been made to identify the characteristics of blockchain technology. Furthermore, indispensable requirements for incorporating blockchain technology within smart cities are enumerated. A conceptual architecture for securing smart city using blockchain technology is proposed and explained using a possible use case study. An overview of a real-world three-blockchain- based smart city case study is also presented. Finally, several imperative research challenges are identified and discussed.
Mazin Debe, Khaled Salah, Muhammad Habib ur Rehman, Davor Svetinović
Public fog nodes can be deployed in public places closer to the edge where many personal and commercial devices (e.g., a sensor, an application, or a device) can connect to. These public fog nodes can provide real-time and localized services for networking, computing, storage and content delivery to the connected devices. The monetization and payment of such services is typically manual, centralized, and lacks the necessary trust. The providers of the public fog nodes typically offer fixed pricing models for their services, and the customers manually select and pay for the used services, with little or no transparency and trust in the provided service in terms of the used time, network bandwidth, and quality of service (QoS). This paper presents a novel scheme to enable blockchain-based monetization and automated payment in cryptocurrency for services provided by public fog nodes. The proposed scheme is decentralized, trustworthy, automated, and with certain guarantees for QoS, customer satisfaction, and dispute resolutions through a reputation system. The proposed solution uses the Ethereum blockchain and its native smart contract features to govern the interactions between devices and fog nodes. The proposed solution is implemented, tested and evaluated to show correct behavior and functionality. We also provide cost and security analysis and show that our solution is resilient against major security attacks. Our smart contract is made publicly available on Github1.
Haya R. Hasan, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Mohammed Omar · 8 authors
The rapid advancements in computing, storage, communications, and networking technologies have enabled the creation of Digital Twins (DTs). A DT is a digital representation of a real-world physical component, product, or equipment. A DT can be used for 3-D design, testing, simulation, and prototyping prior to the manufacturing of the physical component. Once a physical component is in operation, a DT can be used for configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. It is expected that DTs will gain significant attention in the foreseeable future, and will play a key role in Industry 4.0. However, today's approaches, systems, and technologies leveraged for the creation of DTs are mostly centralized and fall short of providing trusted data provenance, audit, and traceability. Also, data related to transactions, logs, and history are not secure or tamper-proof. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based creation process of DTs to guarantee secure and trusted traceability, accessibility, and immutability of transactions, logs, and data provenance. Our proposed approach uses smart contracts to govern and track transactions initiated by participants involved in the creation of DTs. Our approach also employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems to store and share DTs data. Moreover, we present details on our system design and architecture, implementation, and algorithms. Furthermore, we provide security and cost analysis, and show how our approach fulfills the requirements of DTs process creation. We make the smart contract code for creating DTs publicly available on Github.
Peter Gonczol, Panagiota Katsikouli, Lasse Herskind, Nicola Dragoni
Since Bitcoin's debut in 2008, blockchain, the technology behind the cryptocurrency, has been gaining increasing scientific and industrial interest. Due to the technology's innate distributed and immutable features, the adoption of blockchains on supply chains is one of the most promising recent applications. In this survey, we review academic researches and implementations of distributed ledgers on supply chains. We present the current state of research on the subject and summarize the benefits and the challenges of the distributed organization and management of supply chains. Focusing on industrial practices and use cases, we discuss the technical characteristics and maturity of the various industrial projects. Our goal is to assess the applicability of blockchains in the supply chain domain and to provide a foundation for practitioners and researchers to direct their future projects towards improving the technology and its applications.
Blockchain technology is found to have its applicability in almost every domain because of its advantages such as crypto-security, transparency, immutability, decentralized data network. In present times, a smart healthcare system with a blockchain data network and healthcare 4.0 processes provides transparency, easy and faster accessibility, security, efficiency, etc. Healthcare 4.0 trends include industry 4.0 processes such as the internet of things (IoT), industrial IoT (IIoT), cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fog computing, edge computing, etc. The goal of this work is to design a smart healthcare system and it is found to be possible through integration and interoperability of Blockchain 3.0 and Healthcare 4.0 in consideration with healthcare ground-realities. Here, healthcare 4.0 processes used for data accessibility are targeted to be validated through statistical simulation-optimization methods and algorithms. The blockchain is implemented in the Ethereum network, and with associated programming languages, tools, and techniques such as solidity, web3.js, Athena, etc. Further, this work prepares a comparative and comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art blockchain-based smart healthcare systems. The comprehensive survey includes methodology, applications, requirements, outcomes, future directions, etc. A list of groups, organizations, and enterprises are prepared that are working in electronic health records (EHR), electronic medical records (EMR) or electronic personal records (EPR) mainly, and a comparative analysis is drawn concerning adopting the blockchain technology in their processes. This work has explored optimization algorithms applicable to Healthcare 4.0 trends and improves the performance of blockchain-based decentralized applications for the smart healthcare system. Further, smart contracts and their designs are prepared for the proposed system to expedite the trust-building and payment systems. This work has considered simulation and implementation to validate the proposed approach. Simulation results show that the Gas value required (indicating block size and expenditure) lies within current Etherum network Gas limits. The proposed system is active because block utilization lies above 80%. Automated smart contract execution is below 20 seconds. A good number (average 3 per simulation time) is generated in the network that indicates a health competition. Although there is error observed in simulation and implementation that lies between 0.55% and 4.24%, these errors are not affecting overall system performance because simulated and actual (taken in state-of-the-art) data variations are negligible.
Multiple-operators (multi-OPs) spectrum sharing mechanism can effectively improve the spectrum utilization in fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication networks. The secondary users are introduced to opportunistically access the licensed spectrum of idle operators (OPs). However, the identity privacy and data security issues raise great concerns about the secure spectrum sharing among multi-OPs. To address these challenges, a permissioned blockchain trust framework is proposed for the spectrum sharing in multi-OPs wireless communication networks in this paper. The Multi-OPs Spectrum Sharing (MOSS) smart contract is designed on the constructed permissioned blockchain to implement the spectrum trading among multi-OPs. Without the need of trustless spectrum broker, the MOSS smart contract enforces multi-OPs to share the spectrum truthfully and designs a punishment mechanism to punish malicious OPs. The MOSS smart contract is tested on the Remix integrated development environment (IDE) and the gas costs of MOSS smart contract is estimated. The performance analysis of the proposed permissioned blockchain trust framework demonstrates that the privacy, openness and fairness of the proposed solution are better than traditional spectrum allocation solutions.
Manaf Zghaibeh, Umer Farooq, Najam Ul Hasan, Imran Baig
Governments rely on collected data to analyze their citizens' health requirements and needs. Such data is usually of scattered manner gathered by several agencies and entities that fall under different business models and goals. Hence, the scattered nature of this data creates a burden on governments in precisely planning adequate health bills that guarantee the wellbeing of their citizens. Furthermore, the issue of synchronizing and having a real-time access to such data exacerbates the problem even more. Therefore, a system that guarantees the integrity, accessibility, correctness and security of medical data in a highly synchronized environment is crucial for governments to accurately project their future needs. In this paper, we present Smart-Health (SHealth), a blockchain-based health management system. In its crux, SHealth is a private multi-layered blockchain integrated with a multi-tiered addressing scheme that defines the privileges and permissions of entities in the system. Blockchain-based systems assure security, reliability, availability, resistance against tampering and malicious attacks, seamless integration, and easy data management. SHealth proposes a complete autonomy to its users. Through a user-friendly graphical interface it capitalizes on smart contracts to initiate various requests and inquiries pertaining to patients such as appointments, medical tests, medications, medical procedures, or history. SHealth is simple, robust, efficient, secured, and completely automated. All the stakeholders in the system can access the health related data stored in a distributed database without compromising its authenticity. SHealth covers all the possible scenarios in health systems from which some of them are explained in this work.
Victor Youdom Kemmoe, W. H. Stone, Jeehyeong Kim, Daeyoung Kim · 5 authors
Smart contracts, as an added functionality to blockchain, have received increased attention recently. They are executable programs whose instance and state are stored in blockchain. Hence, smart contracts and blockchain enable a trustable, trackable, and irreversible protocol without the need for trusted third parties which generally constitute a single point of failure. If a user creates and distributes a smart contract, others will be able to interact with it while the underlying blockchain ensures a trustable execution. In this paper, we aim to introduce state-of-the-art technologies of the smart contract protocol. We firstly introduce the history of blockchain and smart contracts followed by their step-by-step operations. Then, we introduce the survey results which are classified into four categories based on their purposes: cryptography, access management, social application, and smart contract structure. By presenting the most recent knowledge, this paper will contribute to the advances and proliferation of smart contracts.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain, known as being the second most popular public blockchain after Bitcoin. Since Ethereum is decentralised the canonical state is determined by the Ethereum network participants via a consensus mechanism without a centralized coordinator. The network participants are required to evaluate every transaction starting from the genesis block, which requires a large amount of network, computing, and storage resources. This is impractical for many devices with either limited computing resources or intermittent network connectivity. To overcome this drawback Ethereum defines a light client protocol where the light client fetches the blockchain state from a node operating as a light protocol server. Light clients are unable to maintain blockchain state internally, and as a consequence can only perform partial validation on blocks. Thus they rely on the light server for full block validation and to provide the updated blockchain state. Light clients connect to multiple light servers to mitigate the risk of relying on a single potentially dishonest server. Ethereum light clients are known to suffer from a probabilistic security model, but they are widely assumed to be secure under normal operating conditions. In fact, the implicit security assumptions of light clients have not been formally characterised in the literature. We present and analyse the probabilistic security guarantees under three different adversarial scenarios. The results show that for any adversary that is able to manipulate the network, the security assurances provided by the light protocol are severely impacted, and in some cases entirely lost. These results clearly demonstrate that the assumption of normal operating conditions is insufficient to justify the security assumptions of light clients. Our work also provides insight to the security of light clients under different security parameters, allowing light client implementers to more accurately understand the potential security trade-offs.