Analysis of existing work and studies lead to the observation that BIoT (Blockchain (BC) and Internet of Things (IoT) integration) faces various efficiency issues in IoT-to-BC adaption associated with (a) scalability, (b) energy efficiency, and (c) security. To solve these concerns, at the first step and via experimental analysis of multiple Distributed Applications (dApp), this paper and PhD thesis does identify key BIoT efficiency affecting metrics. In the second step, these metrics are used to design and evaluate an efficient BIoT architecture —termed as BIIT—. Extensive simulations conducted on IoT network proves that BIIT enhances the efficiency of IoT-to-BC communications even for a limiting IoT protocol such as LoRaWAN. As of the third, the design and evaluation of DLIT (Distributed Ledger (DL) for IoT daTa) is presented. DLIT offers a highly scalable and secure DL via a hybrid consensus mechanism, equipped with sharding, and IoT data modification possibilities.
Randeep Singh, Bilal Ahmed Mir, Lohith J. J, Dhruva Sreenivasa Chakravarthi · 7 authors
A radio communication sensor system is a collection of sensor modules that are connected to one another through wireless communication. It is common for them to be battery-powered and responsive to a nearby controller, referred to as the base station. They are capable of doing basic computations and transferring information to the base station in most scenarios. They are also in charge of transporting data from distant nodes, putting a burden on nodes with limited resources, and contributing to the quick depletion of energy in these nodes in the process. Nodes in close proximity to the base station are responsible for more than only detecting and sending data to the base station; they are also responsible for transmitting data from faraway nodes. To reward nodes that perform well, a protocol known as the Improved Fuzzy Inspired Energy Effective Protocol (IFIEEP) employs three separate sorts of nodes in order to provide more energy to those who do not. It takes into account the remaining node energy, the node's proximity to the base station, the node's neighbor concentration, and the node's centrality in a cluster when determining node viability. All of these assumptions are founded on a shaky understanding of the situation. Adaptive clustering must be applied to the most viable nodes in order to identify cluster leaders and transmit data to the base station, in addition to disseminating data across the rest of the network, in order to achieve success. In addition, the research provides proper heterogeneity parameters, which describe, among other things, the number of nodes as well as the starting energy of each node. The percentage gain in-network lifetime when compared to current approaches is minor for smaller numbers of supernodes; however, the percentage gain in the area covered 12.89 percent and 100% when more significant numbers of super nodes are used. These improvements in stability, residual energy, and throughput are accomplished by combining these improvements while also taking into consideration the previously neglected energy-intensive sensing energy aspect. The protocol that has been presented is meant to be used in conjunction with applications that make use of blockchain technology.
Despite numerous prior attempts to boost transaction per second (TPS) of blockchain systems, many sacrifice decentralization and security. This paper proposes a bodyless block propagation (BBP) scheme for which the blockbody is not validated and transmitted during block propagation, to increase TPS without compromising security. Nodes in the blockchain network anticipate the transactions and their ordering in the next upcoming block so that these transactions can be pre-executed and pre-validated before the block is born. For a network with $N$ nodes, our theoretical analysis reveals that BBP can improve TPS scalability from $O(1/log(N))$ to $O(1)$. Ensuring consensus on the next block's transaction content is crucial. We propose a transaction selection, ordering, and synchronization algorithm to drive this consensus. To address the undetermined Coinbase address issue, we further present an algorithm for such unresolvable transactions, ensuring a consistent and TPS-efficient scheme. With BBP, most transactions require neither validation nor transmission during block propagation, liberating system from transaction-block dependencies and rendering TPS scalable. Both theoretical analysis and experiments underscore BBP's potential for full TPS scalability. Experimental results reveal a 4x reduction in block propagation time compared to Ethereum blockchain, with TPS performance being limited by node hardware rather than block propagation.
Hasan Mujtaba Buttar, Waqas Aman, Muhammad Mahboob Ur Rahman, Qammer H. Abbasi
This article considers an Internet-of-Things (IoT) blockchain wireless network consisting of a leader node and various follower nodes which together implement the reliable, replicated, redundant, and fault-tolerant (RAFT) consensus protocol to verify a blockchain transaction, as requested by a blockchain client. Furthermore, two kinds of active attacks, that is, jamming and impersonation, are considered on the IoT blockchain network due to the presence of multipleactivemalicious nodes in the close vicinity. When the IoT network is under a jamming attack, we utilize the stochastic geometry tool to derive the closed-form expressions for the coverage probabilities for both uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) IoT transmissions (which eventually translate to the blockchain transaction success rate). On the other hand, when the IoT network is under an impersonation attack, we propose a novel method that enables a receive IoT node to exploit the pathloss of a transmit IoT node as its fingerprint to implement a binary hypothesis test for transmit node identification. To this end, we also provide the closed-form expressions for the probabilities of false alarms, missed detection, and misclassification. Finally, we present detailed simulation results that indicate the following: 1) the coverage probability (and hence the blockchain transaction success rate) improves as the jammers’ locations move away from the IoT network and 2) the three error probabilities decrease (i.e., chances of corruption of the blockchain ledger data due to false data injection by malicious node decrease) as a function of the quality of the link between the transmit and receive IoT nodes.
Filippos Pelekoudas‐Oikonomou, Georgios Zachos, Μαρία Παπαϊωάννου, Marcus de Ree · 7 authors
Despite the significant benefits that the rise of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) can bring into citizens' quality of life by enabling IoMT-based healthcare monitoring systems, there is an urgent need for novel security mechanisms to address the pressing security challenges of IoMT edge networks in an effective and efficient manner before they gain the trust of all involved stakeholders and reach their full potential in the market of next generation IoMT-based healthcare monitoring systems. In this context, blockchain technology has been foreseen by the industry and research community as a disruptive technology that can be integrated into novel security solutions for IoMT edge networks, as it can play a significant role in securing IoMT devices and resisting unauthorized access during data transmission (i.e., tamper-proof transmission of medical data). However, despite the fact that several blockchain-based security mechanisms have already been proposed in the literature for different types of IoT edge networks, there is a lack of blockchain-based security mechanisms for IoMT edge networks, and thus more effort is required to be put on the design and development of security mechanisms relying on blockchain technology for such networks. Towards this direction, the first step is the comprehensive understanding of the following two types of blockchain-based security mechanisms: (a) the very few existing ones specifically designed for IoMT edge networks, and (b) those designed for other types of IoT networks but could be possibly adopted in IoMT edge networks due to similar capabilities and technical characteristics. Therefore, in this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of the above two types of blockchain-based security mechanisms in order to provide a foundation for organizing research efforts towards the design and development of reliable blockchain-based countermeasures, addressing the pressing security challenges of IoMT edge networks in an effective and efficient manner.
With the dramatic increase of the Internet of Medical Things devices, self and remote health data monitoring is consistently receiving more attention. However, medical devices are usually challenging to deploy due to privacy regulations, and they generally leverage a centralized third party. Enabling data sharing would enhance new medical studies, formulate new treatments, and deliver new digital health technologies. Solving the issue will have a triple impact: we will handle sensitive information easily, contribute to international medical advancements, and enable personalized care. A possible solution is to exploit decentralization distributing privacy concerns directly to users. Solutions enabling this vision are closely linked to Distributed Ledger Technologies. Through its characteristics of immutability and transparency, this technology would allow privacy-compliant solutions in contexts where privacy is the first need. This paper envisions the InterPlanetary Health Layer and related real-world implementations in the Internet of Medical Things domain. The main idea of the proposed solution is to handle sensitive data by preserving privacy and guaranteeing data availability. Specifically, users can build their private network, collaboratively authorize operations among their data and manage their privacy conditions without relying on a third party. The results of several stress tests conducted on a real case study confirmed the feasibility of the proposed solution, which shows good scalability and a modest impact on the application performance measured during the decentralized data access.
Mina Younan, Mohamed Elhoseny, Abdelmgeid A. Ali, Essam H. Houssein
Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain (BC) are coupled to present smart and secure applications. Quantum Computing (QC) is a new paradigm that imposes itself as a main technology in the near future, especially in the 6G era, due to its powerful computations. As a result, immigration of the IoT and BC to the QC has to be studied and prepared. This paper provides a brief review of relevant recent work to identify opportunities for optimal integration. Besides, a new paradigm called Quantum Chain of Things (QCoT) is proposed and its perspective architecture is presented and verified into two parts: (a) BC-IoT using Arduino, and (b) QC-IoT using IBM Qiskit simulator. Finally, presented knowledge such as current challenges, threads, and integration opportunities could help researchers to investigate new trends and future directions.
Economic growth requires a sharp increase in the utilization of energy. Since the initial mechanical era, financial development has been driven by industrialization, transportation, and, most important of all, electrification, majorly achieved by petroleum product ignition. This way of development has had malicious and abusive aftershocks on the environment since the beginning. Smart grids are an idea to slightly diminish the burden on our Mother Nature, but this idea is getting tainted by the anticipation of ferocious technophiles who may try to get the grid down using quantum computers in the coming years. Thus, security becomes one of the major concerns for the smart grid. In this paper, we propose a quantum-resistant framework for associating smart grids and blockchain embedded with a permutation-substitution-based public-key cryptosystem in Galois Field to prevent unauthorized access and perform encryption of the private information of the user and consumption statistics. Permutation and substitution are performed to increase the diffusion and confusion of the data. Expenditures are quantified from the dissipation particulars, and the payment of electricity bill is performed using our blockchain wallet. The prediction model of consumption data is generated availing stochastic gradient descent. The performance analysis of the proposed cryptosystem is predicted after a simulation of the smart grid.
Zhiming Liu, Lu Hou, Kan Zheng, Qihao Zhou · 5 authors
The integration of the blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) systems can effectively guarantee data security in IoT applications. To facilitate the use of blockchain on resource-constrained IoT end devices, we propose RAFT+ with a new leader selection scheme in this article, which is based on the distributed consensus algorithm RAFT. The design of RAFT+ aims at mitigating the imparities between different types of IoT end devices and enabling these devices to allow different types of IoT end devices to participate in block consensus, thus maintaining strong consistency of the blockchain network. The leader selection scheme is generated by a deep${Q}$-Network (DQN), which can make the optimal selection of the leader under various conditions by leveraging the limited system resources as well as balancing the load of the consensus mechanism on multiple IoT end devices. Simulation results show that RAFT+ can enhance the system performance while maintaining the security of the system under high load conditions.
Baraa I. Farhan, Rawaa Ismael Farhan, Ghaith A. Hussein
With the adoption of assorted gadgets and technology loaded devices, there is need to work on security and privacy while using such platforms. Now, the focus of concern has turned to the overwhelming secrecy, the high performance security, and integrity of the transactions in the cyber space. In relation to a chain of records which is interlinked and highly encrypted due to the involving hashing and encryption each process, it is known as a blockchain. The blockchain removes the possibility of a fraudulent or accidental tampering with the framework. Blockchain has the ability to store sensor data, as well as the capacity to thwart data falsification. IoT deployment plans are usually complex, and the distributed ledger is particularly well-suited for Internet of Things (IoT) discovery, authentication, and recording of information. Wireless body networks are set to be published here on the use trends of Blockchain deployment using advanced scripting and embedded technology the included incorporation of effectual effects gives the final results as well as opposed to the conventional cryptography approach to security.
Bruno M. G. Rosa, Salzitsa Anastasova, Guang‐Zhong Yang
Implantable devices represent the future of remote medical monitoring and administration of both chemical and physical therapies to the patients. Although some of these devices are already in the market, the security mechanisms deployed inside them to withstand deliberate external influence are still decades away from the robust digital data security schemes employed in modern distributed networks these days. Medical data theft, spoofing, and disclosure pose serious threats that can ultimately lead to individual and social stigmas or even death. In this article, we present a small-form and batteryless implantable device with acquisition channels for biopotential (30-dB gain and 16-Hz bandwidth), arterial pulse oximetry, and temperature (0.12°C accuracy) recordings, suitable for cardiovascular, neuronal, and endocrine parameters assessment. The proposed device is powered by the near-field communication (NFC) interface with an external mobile phone, with a power consumption of 0.9 mW and achieving the full operation for distances close to 1 cm under the skin. In situ encryption of the acquired physiological signals is performed by a lightweight and short-term symmetric-key distribution scheme with data stream hopping, in order to ensure secure data transference over the air between the patient and trusted entities only, complemented by data storage, processing, and recovery through a medical blockchain type of network that involves the main stakeholders inside a medical community.
Bin Cao, Zixin Wang, Long Zhang, Daquan Feng · 7 authors
In the past decade, blockchain has shown a promising vision to build trust without any powerful third party in a secure, decentralized and scalable manner. However, due to the wide application and future development from cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things, blockchain is an extremely complex system enabling integration with mathematics, computer science, communication and network engineering, etc. By revealing the intrinsic relationship between blockchain and communication, networking and computing from a methodological perspective, it provided a view to the challenge that engineers, experts and researchers hardly fully understand the blockchain process in a systematic view from top to bottom. In this article we first introduce how blockchain works, the research activities and challenges, and illustrate the roadmap involving the classic methodologies with typical blockchain use cases and topics. Second, in blockchain systems, how to adopt stochastic process, game theory, optimization theory, and machine learning to study the blockchain running processes and design the blockchain protocols/algorithms are discussed in details. Moreover, the advantages and limitations using these methods are also summarized as the guide of future work to be further considered. Finally, some remaining problems from technical, commercial and political views are discussed as the open issues. The main findings of this article will provide a survey from a methodological perspective to study theoretical model for blockchain fundamentals understanding, design network service for blockchain-based mechanisms and algorithms, as well as apply blockchain for the Internet of Things, etc.
Partha Pratim Ray, Biky Chowhan, Neeraj Kumar, Ahmad Almogren
The pervasiveness of newly introduced Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has opened up new opportunities in healthcare systems, for example in facilitating remote patient monitoring. There are, however, security and privacy considerations in the transmission of data from these devices to the backend server, and across heterogeneous IoT networks. In this study, we propose a novel privacy-preserving scheme which is based on blockchain and swarm exchange techniques to facilitate seamless and secure transmission of user data (e.g., electronic health record (EHR)-related information) through secured swarm nodes of peer-to-peer communications. BIoTHR refers to the proposed scheme on the private blockchain-assisted EHR management using IoT. Specifically, new blockchain and swarm exchange infrastructures are suggested as a backbone of the proposed scheme to ensure secure and reliable data transmission and timely monitoring of data sent across IoT networks. An autonomous encryption-decryption mechanism is also utilized, along with a dynamic and modular server assistance technology to deploy EHR transmission in a secure manner. Moreover, several swarm-listen, announcement, peer open and peer closing algorithms are incorporated to employ the actual power of pervasive EHR transmission for better e-healthcare service provisioning. The proposed scheme is developed using the open-source tools of GnuPG, IPFS, and Golang. Proposed study simulates a number of heterogeneous IoT-based health sensor nodes, namely, body temperature, pulse rate, and oxygen saturation, i.e., SPO2, galvanic skin response, and blood glucose in blockchain-assisted swarm exchange framework. The results reveal that the proposed scheme, in terms of blockchain-IoT, swarm exchange and EHR transmission, outperforms several peer techniques.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT) have gained more popularity in recent years as an underlying infrastructure for connected devices and sensors in smart cities. The data generated from these sensors are used by smart cities to strengthen their infrastructure, utilities, and public services. WSNs are suitable for long periods of data acquisition in smart cities. To make the networks of smart cities more reliable for sensitive information, the blockchain mechanism has been proposed. The key issues and challenges of WSNs in smart cities is efficiently scheduling the resources; leading to extending the network lifetime of sensors. In this paper, a linear network coding (LNC) for WSNs with blockchain-enabled IoT devices has been proposed. The consumption of energy is reduced for each node by applying LNC. The efficiency and the reliability of the proposed model are evaluated and compared to those of the existing models. Results from the simulation demonstrate that the proposed model increases the efficiency in terms of the number of live nodes, packet delivery ratio, throughput, and the optimized residual energy compared to other current techniques.
In the mid 2030-s in the field of defense and national security communications the quantum computers and 6G artificial intelligence will have domination. 6G communication is accepted in a variety of mobile data comparts transmitted through spectral technologies. The human body becomes a part of the 6G network architecture. A set of network nodes or wearable devices, embedded sensors or nanodes collect confidential information that is exchanged for multiple purposes, such as health, statistics, and safety. An important part of the 6G new paradigm will be intelligent reflective surfaces, quantum teleportation, quantum encrypted messaging, 6G holography, distributed ledger, 6G layer security threats. The 6G wireless standards will allow real-time time zone high-speed internet communication with 1TB data per second. The radio frequency networks, THZ communications, molecular communications, and quantum communications will dramatically improve data rates.
Maha Aslani, Osama Amin, Faisal Nawab, Basem Shihada
Blockchain is a decentralized technology that protects sensitive data from being controlled by a central authority and can play a vital security role in developing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Most IIoT-blockchain systems focus on optimizing consensus mechanisms, which cannot provide satisfactory scalability until addressing the inherited problems of the networking infrastructure. Excessive messaging overheads and low networking performance are two critical issues of the current blockchain configurations. Moreover, the well-known architectural models, cloud-centric and fog-centric models, cannot provide acceptable performance in IIoT due to data aggregation and synchronization timing overheads, privacy, and trust issues. As such, we propose two novel blockchain solutions that can fulfill IIoT's strict challenges and requirements. First, the context-aware data-driven solution decreases irrelevant and useless data traffic. Second, the hybrid communications with sec-ond-layer chain solutions partition the data traffic through different communication media and provide better scalability and higher resistance against security issues. Finally, we present a future vision of the next blockchain generation that can fulfill the IIoT predictions.
Le Yang, Meng Li, Pengbo Si, Ruizhe Yang · 6 authors
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged with the developments of various communication technologies. In order to guarantee the security and privacy of massive IIoT data, blockchain is widely considered as a promising technology and applied into IIoT. However, there are still several issues in the existing blockchain-enabled IIoT: 1) unbearable energy consumption for computation tasks; 2) poor efficiency of consensus mechanism in blockchain; and 3) serious computation overhead of network systems. To handle the above issues and challenges, in this article, we integrate mobile-edge computing (MEC) into blockchain-enabled IIoT systems to promote the computation capability of IIoT devices and improve the efficiency of the consensus process. Meanwhile, the weighted system cost, including the energy consumption and the computation overhead, are jointly considered. Moreover, we propose an optimization framework for blockchain-enabled IIoT systems to decrease consumption, and formulate the proposed problem as a Markov decision process (MDP). The master controller, offloading decision, block size, and computing server can be dynamically selected and adjusted to optimize the devices energy allocation and reduce the weighted system cost. Accordingly, due to the high-dynamic and large-dimensional characteristics, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is introduced to solve the formulated problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can improve system performance significantly compared to other existing schemes.
We are experiencing an unprecedented healthcare crisis caused by newly discovered coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The outbreaks of COVID-19 reveal the frailties of existing healthcare systems. Therefore, the digital transformation of healthcare systems becomes an inevitable trend. During this process, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays a crucial role, while intrinsic vulnerabilities of security and privacy deter the wide adoption of IoMT. In this article, we present a blockchain-enabled IoMT to address the security and privacy concerns of IoMT systems. We also discuss the solutions brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT to COVID-19 from five different perspectives. Moreover, we outline the open challenges and future directions of blockchain-enabled IoMT.
In this article, we provide a concise but systematic review on blockchain-enabled cyber-physical systems (CPS). We dissect various blockchain-enabled CPS as reported in the literature in terms of their operations and the features of blockchain that have been used. We identify key common CPS operations that can be enabled by blockchain, and classify them in terms of their time sensitivity and throughput requirements. We also elaborate and classify features of blockchain in terms of different levels of benefits to CPS, including security, privacy, immutability, fault tolerance, interoperability, data provenance, atomicity, automation, data/service sharing, and trust. Finally, we point out two primary open research issues for developing blockchain-enabled CPS, namely, excessive delay in reaching consensus and limited throughput, and outline future research directions.