Praveen M. Dhulavvagol, Vijayakumar H Bhajantri, Shashikumar G. Totad
Blockchain technology is evolving and revolutionizing the IT industry with better security, efficiency, and resilience. Blockchain technology is being used in many applications majorly in cryptocurrencies and bitcoin applications. Verified transactions which make a block and group of such transactions or blocks are immutable making the blockchain more secured and reliable. Blockchain achieves decentralization of power, trust, and secured of being hacked, which solves major problems or issues with the current systems. Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain platform because of its unlimited block size. Many complex problems with smart contracts can be implemented with Ethereum and the eradication of third party organizations interfering in transactions helps solving the issues of financial crisis and it is easy to implement compared to other blockchain technologies. There are certain limitations/issues in processing large number of transactions due to lack of speed in processing the transactions. Ethereum Blockchain code will be executed by different clients with varying speed and the performance level will be different. The goal of this paper is to understand Ethereum transactions and perform the comparative analysis of Geth and Parity ethereum clients on the private blockchain. In this paper, a private blockchain network is setup where the nodes will share the data among peer nodes or blocks within the network. Using this network setup a democracy voting application is developed which makes use of the blockchain to store and process the data, smart contracts are deployed to execute the transactions. Performance analysis of the two most popular ethereum clients Geth and Parity is carried out considering time, consistency and scalability parameters. Results interpret that the overall transactions are 91% on average faster in parity client as compared to Geth client.
Konstantin D. Pandl, Scott Thiebes, Manuel Schmidt-Kraepelin, Ali Sunyaev
Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed ledger technology (DLT) currently lead to lively debates in academia and practice. AI processes data to perform tasks that were previously thought possible only for humans. DLT has the potential to create consensus over data among a group of participants in untrustworthy environments. In recent research, both technologies are used in similar and even the same systems. This can lead to a convergence of AI and DLT, which in the past, has paved the way for major innovations of other information technologies. Previous work highlights several potential benefits of a convergence of AI and DLT but only provides a limited theoretical framework to describe upcoming real-world integration cases of both technologies. In this research, we review and synthesize extant research on integrating AI with DLT and vice versa to rigorously develop a future research agenda on the convergence of both technologies. In terms of integrating AI with DLT, we identified research opportunities in the areas of secure DLT, automated referee and governance, and privacy-preserving personalization. With regard to integrating DLT with AI, we identified future research opportunities in the areas of decentralized computing for AI, secure data sharing and marketplaces, explainable AI, and coordinating devices. In doing so, this research provides a four-fold contribution. First, it is not constrained to blockchain but instead investigates the broader phenomenon of DLT. Second, it considers the reciprocal nature of a convergence of AI and DLT. Third, it bridges the gap between theory and practice by helping researchers active in AI or DLT to overcome current limitations in their field, and practitioners to develop systems along with the convergence of both technologies. Fourth, it demonstrates the feasibility of applying the convergence concept to research on AI and DLT.
Markus Lücking, Niclas Kannengieber, Maurice Kilgus, Till Riedel · 7 authors
Pollution-monitoring systems (PMSs) are used worldwide to sense environmental changes, such as air quality conditions or temperature increases, and to monitor compliance with regulations. However, organizations manage the environmental data collected by such PMSs in a centralized manner, which is why recorded environmental data are vulnerable to manipulation. Moreover, the analysis of pollution data often lacks transparency to outsiders, which may lead to wrong decisions regarding environmental regulations. To address these challenges, we propose a software design for PMSs based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the long-range (LoRa) protocol for flexible, transparent, and energy-efficient environment monitoring and data management. To design the PMS, we conducted a comprehensive requirements analysis for PMSs. We benchmarked different consensus mechanisms (e.g., BFT-SMaRt and Raft) and digital signature schemes (e.g., ECDSA and EdDSA) to adequately design the PMS and fulfill the identified requirements. On this basis, we designed and implemented a prototype PMS and evaluated it in the field. The evaluation shows the effectiveness of DLT-based PMSs that include portable low-energy sensor nodes and demonstrates the applicability of the proposed software design for PMSs in contexts other than air pollution.
Md. Parvez Hossain, M Khaled, Shahjahan Ahamed Saju, Shanto Roy · 6 authors
Blockchain (BC) technology has gathered tremendous attention to the academia and industry due to its transparency and security by design without involving the third party. Academia and industry have adapted Blockchain with the future smart network, and they have been utilizing it in several application areas, including crypto-currency, IoT, supply chain management, smart contracts, and other major distributed applications. Alongside the growth of the BC, researchers have recognized distributed ledger as a potential for information management across the shareable platforms. However, most of the organizations still use centralized management systems that are slower and risks-associated. Therefore, to address this issue, we propose a BC-based distributed ledger framework that is capable of maintaining a vehicle registration and information management system across platforms. Our proposed framework addresses the issues in the traditional paper-based management system and ensures the process to be faster and more transparent without the direct involvement of a third party. As the Government must have the supervision capability, we introduce the system with a hybrid architecture that not only makes the user experience better but also transparent at the same time.
Weijun Lin, Xinghong Huang, Hui Fang, Victoria Wang · 9 authors
Increasingly, blockchain technology is attracting significant attentions in various agricultural applications. These applications could satisfy the diverse needs in the ecosystem of agricultural products, e.g., increasing transparency of food safety and IoT based food quality control, provenance traceability, improvement of contract exchanges, and transactions efficiency. As multiple untrusted parties, including small-scale farmers, food processors, logistic companies, distributors and retailers, are involved into the complex farm-to-fork pipeline, it becomes vital to achieve optimal trade-off between efficiency and integrity of the agricultural management systems as required in contexts. In this paper, we provide a survey to study both techniques and applications of blockchain technology used in the agricultural sector. First, the technical elements, including data structure, cryptographic methods, and consensus mechanisms are explained in detail. Secondly, the existing agricultural blockchain applications are categorized and reviewed to demonstrate the use of the blockchain techniques. In addition, the popular platforms and smart contract are provided to show how practitioners use them to develop these agricultural applications. Thirdly, we identify the key challenges in many prospective agricultural systems, and discuss the efforts and potential solutions to tackle these problems. Further, we conduct an improved food supply chain in the post COVID-19 pandemic economy as an illustration to demonstrate an effective use of blockchain technology.
Eman M. Abou-Nassar, Abdullah M. Iliyasu, Passent Elkafrawy, Oh-Young Song · 6 authors
Today, internet and device ubiquity are paramount in individual, formal and societal considerations. Next generation communication technologies, such as Blockchains (BC), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, etc. offer limitless capabilities for different applications and scenarios including industries, cities, healthcare systems, etc. Sustainable integration of healthcare nodes (i.e. devices, users, providers, etc.) resulting in healthcare IoT (or simply IoHT) provides a platform for efficient service delivery for the benefit of care givers (doctors, nurses, etc.) and patients. Whereas confidentiality, accessibility and reliability of medical data are accorded high premium in IoHT, semantic gaps and lack of appropriate assets or properties remain impediments to reliable information exchange in federated trust management frameworks. Consequently, We propose a Blockchain Decentralised Interoperable Trust framework (DIT) for IoT zones where a smart contract guarantees authentication of budgets and Indirect Trust Inference System (ITIS) reduces semantic gaps and enhances trustworthy factor (TF) estimation via the network nodes and edges. Our DIT IoHT makes use of a private Blockchain ripple chain to establish trustworthy communication by validating nodes based on their inter-operable structure so that controlled communication required to solve fusion and integration issues are facilitated via different zones of the IoHT infrastructure. Further, C# implementation using Ethereum and ripple Blockchain are introduced as frameworks to associate and aggregate requests over trusted zones.
Currently, many efforts have been done towards secure data privacy protection and reliable information trace, however the conventional solutions are still vulnerable to information loss, privacy leakage and other attacks till the blockchain technology emerged. Blockchain can record historical data by establishing a collectively maintained and tamper-resistant public ledger to ensure the security and reliability of the data stored in a distributed network. It realizes a decentralized network architecture, which can bring new solutions to many fields such as information tracing and privacy protection. In recent years, blockchain technology has gradually attracted the close attention of all industries, and this paper summarizes the existing blockchain-based systems and applications. We mainly review the applications of blockchain traceability technology in various fields, the blockchain decentralized applications, and other blockchain applications in data security protection, respectively. This work may bring new opportunities and challenges for the development of various industries in the future.
IoT devices have some special characteristics, such as mobility, limited performance, and distributed deployment, which makes it difficult for traditional centralized access control methods to support access control in current large-scale IoT environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an access control system in IoT named fabric-iot, which is based on Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework and attributed based access control (ABAC). The system contains three kinds of smart contracts, which are Device Contract (DC), Policy Contract (PC), and Access Contract (AC). DC provides a method to store the URL of resource data produced by devices, and a method to query it. PC provides functions to manage ABAC policies for admin users. AC is the core program to implement an access control method for normal users. Combined with ABAC and blockchain technology, fabric-iot can provide decentralized, fine-grained and dynamic access control management in IoT. To verify the performance of this system, two groups of simulation experiments are designed. The results show that fabric-iot can maintain high throughput in large-scale request environment and reach consensus efficiently in a distributed system to ensure data consistency.
Blockchain, a form of distributed ledger technology has attracted the interests of stakeholders across several sectors including healthcare. Its' potential in the multi-stakeholder operated sector like health has been responsible for several investments, studies, and implementations. Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems traditionally used for the exchange of health information amongst healthcare stakeholders have been criticised for centralising power, failures and attack-points with exchange data custodians. EHRs have struggled in the face of multi-stakeholder and system requirements while adhering to security, privacy, ethical and other regulatory constraints. Blockchain is promising amongst others to address the many EHR challenges, primarily trustless and secure exchange of health information amongst stakeholders. Many blockchain-in-healthcare frameworks have been proposed; some prototyped and/or implemented. This study leveraged the PRISMA framework to systematically search and evaluate the different models proposed; prototyped and/or implemented. The bibliometric and functional distribution of all 143 articles from this study were presented. This study evaluated 61 articles that discussed either prototypes or pilot or implementations. The technical and architectural analysis of these 61 articles for privacy, security, cost, and performance were detailed. Blockchain was found to solve the trust, security and privacy constraints of traditional EHRs often at significant performance, storage and cost trade-offs.
Noshina Tariq, Ayesha Qamar, Muhammad Asim, Farrukh Aslam Khan
The Internet of Things (IoT) has penetrated its roots in almost every domain of life. Smart healthcare is one of the major domains that extensively uses IoT infrastructures and solutions. IoT-based smart healthcare systems have immensely added value to the healthcare domain with the use of wearable and mobile devices. This leads to a substantial use of health data sharing for the improved, accurate, and timely diagnosis. However, smart healthcare systems are highly vulnerable to several security breaches and various malignant attacks, such as privacy leakage, tempering, forgery, etc. Recently, the blockchain technology emerged as a propitious solution against such breaches and challenges. This paper presents an up-to-date survey on different challenges and open issues faced in smart healthcare due to the traditional security measures along with the security requirements of such domains. It also amalgamates the potentials of blockchain technology as a promising security measure, highlights potential challenges in the healthcare domain, and provides an analysis of different blockchain-based security solutions.
This paper presents research challenges on security and privacy issues in the field of green IoT-based agriculture. We start by describing a four-tier green IoT-based agriculture architecture and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with smart agriculture. Then, we provide a classification of threat models against green IoT-based agriculture into five categories, including, attacks against privacy, authentication, confidentiality, availability, and integrity properties. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving technologies for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. In addition, we analyze the privacy-oriented blockchain-based solutions as well as consensus algorithms for IoT applications and how they will be adapted for green IoT-based agriculture. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the security and privacy of green IoT-based agriculture.
Caixiang Fan, Sara Ghaemi, Hamzeh Khazaei, Petr Musı́lek
Blockchain has been envisioned to be a disruptive technology with potential for applications in various industries. As more and more different blockchain platforms have emerged, it is essential to assess their performance in different use cases and scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey on the blockchain performance evaluation by categorizing all reviewed solutions into two general categories, namely, empirical analysis and analytical modelling. In the empirical analysis, we comparatively review the current empirical blockchain evaluation methodologies, including benchmarking, monitoring, experimental analysis and simulation. In analytical modelling, we investigate the stochastic models applied to performance evaluation of mainstream blockchain consensus algorithms. Through contrasting, comparison and grouping different methods together, we extract important criteria that can be used for selecting the most suitable evaluation technique for optimizing the performance of blockchain systems based on their identified bottlenecks. Finally, we conclude the survey by presenting a list of possible directions for future research.
Yiming Liu, F. Richard Yu, Xi Li, Hong Ji · 5 authors
Recently, with the rapid development of information and communication technologies, the infrastructures, resources, end devices, and applications in communications and networking systems are becoming much more complex and heterogeneous. In addition, the large volume of data and massive end devices may bring serious security, privacy, services provisioning, and network management challenges. In order to achieve decentralized, secure, intelligent, and efficient network operation and management, the joint consideration of blockchain and machine learning (ML) may bring significant benefits and have attracted great interests from both academia and industry. On one hand, blockchain can significantly facilitate training data and ML model sharing, decentralized intelligence, security, privacy, and trusted decision-making of ML. On the other hand, ML will have significant impacts on the development of blockchain in communications and networking systems, including energy and resource efficiency, scalability, security, privacy, and intelligent smart contracts. However, some essential open issues and challenges that remain to be addressed before the widespread deployment of the integration of blockchain and ML, including resource management, data processing, scalable operation, and security issues. In this paper, we present a survey on the existing works for blockchain and ML technologies. We identify several important aspects of integrating blockchain and ML, including overview, benefits, and applications. Then we discuss some open issues, challenges, and broader perspectives that need to be addressed to jointly consider blockchain and ML for communications and networking systems.
Affaf Shahid, Ahmad Almogren, Nadeem Javaid, Fahad Ahmed Al-Zahrani · 6 authors
Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. At the same time, consumers are now more interested in food product quality. However, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain its traceability throughout the supply chain network. The traditional supply chains are centralized and they depend on a third party for trading. These centralized systems lack transparency, accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a complete solution for blockchain-based Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contracts, deployed over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides immutability of data and records in the network, it still fails to solve some major problems in supply chain management like credibility of the involved entities, accountability of the trading process and traceability of the products. Therefore, there is a need of a reliable system that ensures traceability, trust and delivery mechanism in Agri-Food supply chain. In the proposed system, all transactions are written to blockchain which ultimately uploads the data to Interplanetary File Storage System (IPFS). The storage system returns a hash of the data which is stored on blockchain and ensures efficient, secure and reliable solution. Our system provides smart contracts along with their algorithms to show interaction of entities in the system. Furthermore, simulations and evaluation of smart contracts along with the security and vulnerability analyses are also presented in this work.
Guangsheng Yu, Xu Wang, Kan Yu, Wei Ni · 6 authors
The Blockchain technology, featured with its decentralized tamper-resistance based on a Peer-to-Peer network, has been widely applied in financial applications, and even further been extended to industrial applications. However, the weak scalability of traditional Blockchain technology severely affects the wide adoption due to the well-known trillema of decentralization-security-scalability in Blockchains. In regards to this issue, a number of solutions have been proposed, targeting to boost the scalability while preserving the decentralization and security. They range from modifying the on-chain data structure and consensus algorithms to adding the off-chain technologies. Therein, one of the most practical methods to achieve horizontal scalability along with the increasing network size is sharding, by partitioning network into multiple shards so that the overhead of duplicating communication, storage, and computation in each full node can be avoided. This paper presents a survey focusing on sharding in Blockchains in a systematic and comprehensive way. We provide detailed comparison and quantitative evaluation of major sharding mechanisms, along with our insights analyzing the features and restrictions of the existing solutions. We also provide theoretical upper-bound of the throughput for each considered sharding mechanism. The remaining challenges and future research directions are also reviewed.
Blockchain (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum) has drawn much attention and has been widely-deployed in recent years. However, blockchain scalability is emerging as a challenging issue. This paper outlines the existing solutions to blockchain scalability, which can be classified into two categories: first layer and second layer solutions. First layer solutions propose modifications to the blockchain (i.e., changing the blockchain structure, such as block size) while second layer solutions propose mechanisms that are implemented outside of the blockchain. In particular, we focus on sharding as a promising first layer solution to the scalability issue; the basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple committees, each processing a separate set of transactions. More specifically, (a) we propose a taxonomy based on committee formation and intra-committee consensus; and (b) we compare the main existing sharding-based blockchain protocols. We also present a performance-based comparative analysis (i.e., throughput and latency), of the advantages, and disadvantages in existing scalability solutions.
Blockchain technology has been deemed to be an ideal choice for strengthening existing computing systems in varied manners. As one of the network-enabled technologies, cloud computing has been broadly adopted in the industry through numerous cloud service models. Fusing blockchain technology with existing cloud systems has a great potential in both functionality/performance enhancement and security/privacy improvement. The question remains on how blockchain technology inserts into current deployed cloud solutions and enables the reengineering of cloud datacenter. This survey addresses this issue and investigates recent efforts in the technical fusion of blockchain and clouds. Three technical dimensions roughly are covered in this work. First, we concern the service model and review an emerging cloud-relevant blockchain service model, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS); second, security is considered a key technical dimension in this work and both access control and searchable encryption schemes are assessed; finally, we examine the performance of cloud datacenter with supports/participance of blockchain from hardware and software perspectives. Main findings of this survey will be theoretical supports for future reference of blockchain-enabled reengineering of cloud datacenter.
Internet of Things (IoT) equipment is usually in a harsh environment, and its security has always been a widely concerned issue. Node identity authentication is an important means to ensure its security. Traditional IoT identity authentication protocols usually rely on trusted third parties. However, many IoT environments do not allow such conditions, and are prone to single point failure. Blockchain technology with decentralization features provides a new solution for distributed IoT system. In this paper, a blockchain based multi-WSN authentication scheme for IoT is proposed. The nodes of IoT are divided into base stations, cluster head nodes and ordinary nodes according to their capability differences, which are formed to a hierarchical network. A blockchain network is constructed among different types of nodes to form a hybrid blockchain model, including local chain and public chain. In this hybrid model, nodes identity mutual authentication in various communication scenarios is realized, ordinary node identity authentication operation is accomplished by local blockchain, and cluster head node identity authentication are realized in public blockchain. The analysis of security and performance shows that the scheme has comprehensive security and better performance.
Due to the proliferation of ICT during the last few decades, there is an exponential increase in the usage of various smart applications such as smart farming, smart healthcare, supply-chain & logistics, business, tourism and hospitality, energy management etc. However, for all the aforementioned applications, security and privacy are major concerns keeping in view of the usage of the open channel, i.e., Internet for data transfer. Although many security solutions and standards have been proposed over the years to enhance the security levels of aforementioned smart applications, but the existing solutions are either based upon the centralized architecture (having single point of failure) or having high computation and communication costs. Moreover, most of the existing security solutions have focussed only on few aspects and fail to address scalability, robustness, data storage, network latency, auditability, immutability, and traceability. To handle the aforementioned issues, blockchain technology can be one of the solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper, we present a systematic review of various blockchain-based solutions and their applicability in various Industry 4.0-based applications. Our contributions in this paper are in four fold. Firstly, we explored the current state-of-the-art solutions in the blockchain technology for the smart applications. Then, we illustrated the reference architecture used for the blockchain applicability in various Industry 4.0 applications. Then, merits and demerits of the traditional security solutions are also discussed in comparison to their countermeasures. Finally, we provided a comparison of existing blockchain-based security solutions using various parameters to provide deep insights to the readers about its applicability in various applications.
Blockchain-based decentralized cryptocurrencies have drawn much attention and been widely-deployed in recent years. Bitcoin, the first application of blockchain, achieves great success and promotes more development in this field. However, Bitcoin encounters performance problems of low throughput and high transaction latency. Other cryptocurrencies based on proof-of-work also inherit the flaws, leading to more concerns about the scalability of blockchain. This paper attempts to cover the existing scaling solutions for blockchain and classify them by level. In addition, we make comparisons between different methods and list some potential directions for solving the scalability problem of blockchain.
Blockchain is going to be the most fundamental technology, and will change the world — going forward. In fact, the revolution has already begun. The birth of Industry 4.0 aka the Fourth Industrial Relution (I4.0), has created a need for autonomous and integrated, secure manufacturing systems. The current smart systems lack the decentralized decision making and real-time communication infrastructure, which is a condition for adaptive, smart manufacturing systems. In this paper, an autonomous, secure and collaborative platform based on Blockchain technology, is presented to adapt to such results. In support with Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services, a Blockchain Driven Cyber Physical Production System (BDCPS) architecture is designed to communicate with machines, users, devices, suppliers and other peers. Using the Smart Contracts feature and trust-less peer-to-peer decentralized ledger feature, BDCPS will validate the claim with a small-scale real-life Blockchain with IoT system. This implementation case study will be running a private Blockchain on a single board computer, and bridged to a microcontroller containing IoT sensors. The applications of this system in automotive manufacturing industry are presented, to proceed towards Industry 4.0.
CFDD (CounterFeit Drug Detection) using Blockchain in the Pharmaceutical Industry - written by Kavita Kumari , Kavita Saini published on 2019/12/31 download full article with reference data and citations