Gautami Tripathi, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a dynamic network of vehicles connected together through sensors and communicating devices embedded in them. These embedded devices work in internal and external synchronization and consistency with each other. The functionality of the vehicles can be controlled, tracked and monitored through a remote controlling station. In recent years we have seen an exponential growth in the automobile sector where things are moving towards automation. Driverless cars and drones are no longer fictions, rather a reality now. There are several pertinent benefits of automation in the automobile industry like better designs, better safety features, better fuel efficiency, better pickup, reduced maintenance, safer driving experience etc. However, with these advantages and benefits, there are several issues and challenges associated with the internet of vehicles. This paper discusses the existing state of the Internet of Vehicles ecosystem and the important issues and challenges faced by the manufacturer as well as the consumers in the IoV systems. Furthermore, the paper also discusses the potential use of blockchain based solutions to overcome these limitations and challenges. The concept of Blockchain technology along with its key characteristics is discussed focusing on the integration of “Blockchain” technology with the “Internet of Things (IoT)” technology in the urban transportation system. The work presented focuses on the applications of blockchain in the IoV ecosystem. More specifically, the paper delves into the blockchain technology for securing the IoV network. Finally, the paper highlights some of the issues, challenges and opportunities associated with the blockchain based IoV systems.
Abstract In the current paper the issues of the workload relocation in the fog- and edge-computing environments are in-question. The workload relocation problem is closely connected to the scheduling problems, yet, outside the cloud there is almost unlimited number of nodes to place the computational tasks. So the search space for the optimization problem grows, and the time of the workload relocation degrades. We emphasize the techniques to limit the set of candidate nodes for the tasks distribution. In the paper two approaches are proposed and considered in terms of time consumption. The simple models are developed with the following simulation. Also the distributed-ledger-based modifications of the techniques are proposed and examined.
The number of interconnected internet of things (IoT) devices is expected to achieve a fivefold increase over the last decade. This increasing number of IoT devices brings into focus the security challenges of IoT networks. Blockchain (BC) is one of the promising technologies that can be employed for achieving this challenging task. BC is used to store data blocks in the distributed ledger (Database) that is immutable. In this paper, we aim to take the advantages of BC technology in improving the IoT network security. In particular, we propose a security framework for IoT networks to enhance the devices' authentication. The proposed architecture consists of three layers, blockchain layer, authenticator layer and requester layer. The devices' authentication process is divided into two phases: device enrollment phase, and device authentication phase. The proposed framework satisfies the three pillars of security namely, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality is achieved by limiting the access to authorized device only which keep the data hidden from outsiders. Integrity is guaranteed by using BC that maintains the data from being altered. Availability is assured by maintaining the BC database on the cloud.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abbas Yazdinejad, Reza M. Parizi, Gautam Srivastava, Ali Dehghantanha · 5 authors
In recent years, there has been rapid growth in developing smart cities. Nearly 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water and a large proportion of underwater environments are still unknown and have not been explored. In this context, Internet of things (IoT) is one of the most important technologies used in smart cities. Due to the growth of IoT and its influence in all areas of human life, including the underwater environment, a new class of IoT, called Internet of underwater things (IoUT) has emerged. IoUT includes a network of underwater smart devices that are connected to each other and has applications in environmental monitoring, underwater exploration, disaster prevention and military. In autonomous interactions of underwater devices, objects must be authenticated and securely interconnected to avoid security risks by malicious nodes. Most authentication methods and security mechanisms are centralized and often require a trustful third party in communications, which may well increase the computation cost and energy consumption due to the subsequent overhead, especially for underwater communications. On the other hand, there are restrictions on devices in the underwater environment, the most important of which are energy constraints. In this paper, we propose a robust, transparent, and energy-efficient decentralized authentication mechanism for IoUT using blockchain technology. We show through results that the proposed method is suitable for underwater devices with limited memory, energy, and computational power. The proposed model’s decentralized authentication in a cluster network has a significant effect on reducing the energy consumption of the devices by 74.63% compared to classic authentication methods. Moreover, using the proposed method allows a savings of more than 41.9% in end-to-end delay and increases delivery rate by 21.6%.
Oluwakayode Onireti, Lei Zhang, Muhammad Ali Imran
Distributed systems are crucial to the full realization of the Internet of Thing (IoT) ecosystem as it mitigates the challenges of trust, security, and scalability associated with the traditional centralized approach. In this paper, we present an analytical modeling framework for Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)-a consensus method for blockchain in IoT networks. We define the viable area for the wireless PBFT networks which guarantees the minimum number of replica nodes required for achieving the protocol's safety and liveliness. We also present an analytical framework for obtaining the viable area which we later utilize for power optimization. Results show that significant energy saving can be achieved with the utilization of the viable area concept in wireless PBFT networks. The proposed framework can serve as a theoretical guidance for practical PBFT based wireless blockchain network deployment.
Since Bitcoin was first introduced i n 2008, many types of cryptocurrencies have been proposed based on blockchain. However, the performance of permissionless blockchains restricts the widespread of cryptocurrency. Recently, Libra was proposed by Facebook based on a permissioned blockchain, i.e. the Libra blockchain. The vision of Libra is to become a global currency supporting financial a pplications, but it is doubted whether the performance of the Libra blockchain is able to support frequent micropayment scenarios. In this paper, we propose a methodology to evaluate the performance of blockchain platforms and conducted an experimental study on the Libra blockchain. The results show that the Libra blockchain can only process about one thousand transactions per second at most, and the performance drops significantly a s t he number of validators increases. Although it outperforms permissionless blockchain platforms, the performance of the Libra blockchain is still unsatisfactory compared to other permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric and needs to make effective improvements in order to support global micropayment in the future.
A major yet trivial problem in the banking industry right now is how tedious and costly the traditional Know- Your-Customer(KYC) process is. The process is also tiresome for customers as they need to undergo the same process for each bank or financial institution with which they intend to work. Personal experiences of people dictate the cumbersome nature of the process, thereby demanding an efficacious alternative. Through this paper, we intend to do exactly that. We propose a new solution based on Distributed Ledger Technology or Blockchain technology, which will reduce the traditional KYC verification process cost for Institutions and cut short the general time line of the completion of the process while making it smoother for the customers. Major enhancement in our solution over the conventional methods is that the whole verification process is conducted only once for each customer, irrespective of number of institutions he or she wishes to be linked to. Also, since we are using the DLT, verification results can be securely shared with the customers thereby increasing transparency. Following this approach, we developed a Proof of Concept (POC) with the Ethereum API, websites as endpoints and an android app as front office; realising the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach. All in all, this approach improves customer experience, reduces cost overheads, and increases transparency in the process of onboarding a customer.
Rafael Ansey, James Kempf, Oleg Berzin, Xi Chen · 5 authors
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) are a new class of cryptographically secure identifier that does not require a centralized trust anchor for attesting to the validity of keying material. DIDs are based on distributed ledger (blockchain) technology and allow the entity itself to manage its own identifier, hence the name "self-sovereign" which is often applied to them. In this paper, we describe Gnomon, a system that uses DIDs to securely register 5G IoT devices and install firmware/software into the device. Gnomon is designed to avoid the kind of difficulties that plague current technology, which is largely based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and X.509 public key certificates. After a short introduction, we review current practice and briefly describe DIDs and verifiable credentials, a mechanism based on DIDs to securely assert information about the identified entity. We then describe the architecture of Gnomon and a prototype we built, based on the ION DID scheme, for applying DIDs and verifiable credentials to 5G IoT device registration and software installation.
In the era of the fourth industrial revolution (In-dustry 4.0), many Management Information Systems (MIS) integrate real-time data collection and use technologies such as big data, machine learning, and cloud computing, to foster a wide range of creative innovations, business improvements, and new business models and processes. However, the integration of blockchain with MIS offers the blockchain trilemma of security, decentralisation and scalability. MIS are usually Web 2.0 client-server applications that include the front end web systems and back end databases; while blockchain systems are Web 3.0 decentralised applications. MIS are usually private systems that a single party controls and manages; while blockchain systems are usually public, and any party can join and participate. This paper clarifies the key concepts and illustrates with figures, the implementation of public, private and consortium blockchains on the Ethereum platform. Ultimately, the paper presents a framework for building a private blockchain system on the public Ethereum blockchain. Then, integrating the Web 2.0 client-server applications that are commonly used in MIS with Web 3.0 decentralised blockchain applications.
Omaji Samuel, Nadeem Javaid, Muhammad Awais, Zeeshan Ahmed · 6 authors
The emergence of smart home appliances has generated a high volume of data on smart meters belonging to different customers. However, customers can not share their data in deregulated smart grids due to privacy concern. Although, these data are important for the service provider in order to provide an efficient service. To encourage the customers' participation, this paper proposes an access control mechanism by fairly compensating customers for their participation in data sharing via blockchain using the concept of differential privacy. We addressed the computational issues of existing ethereum blockchain by proposing a proof of authority consensus protocol through the Pagerank mechanism in order to derive the reputation scores. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed model to minimize privacy risk, and maximize aggregator's profit. In addition, gas consumption, as well as the cost of the computational resources, is reduced.
Mubariz Rehman, Nadeem Javaid, Muhammad Awais, Muhammad Imran · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoTs) is widely growing domain of the modern era. With the advancement in technologies, the use of IoTs devices also increases. However, security risks regarding service provisioning and data sharing also increases. There are many existing security approaches. However, these approaches are not suitable for IoTs devices due to their limited storage and computation resources. These secure approaches also require a specific hardware. With the invention of blockchain technologies, many security risks are eliminated. Blockchain also supports data sharing mechanism. In this paper, we proposed a secure service providing mechanism for IoTs using blockchain. We introduced cloud nodes for maintaining the validity states of edge service providers. The edge node reputation is considered as a service rating given by end users. Incentive is given to edge servers after validation of service codes. Incentive is in the form of cryptocurrency. Incentive and edge node reputation values are stored in cloud node and are updated with respect to time. Smart contract is proposed to check the validity state of the edge servers. Smart contract is also used for the comparison and verification of the service codes provided by edge servers. In our proposed system, we perform service authentication at both cloud and edge server layer. Moreover, Proof of Authority (PoA) is used as a consensus mechanism. PoA enhanced overall performance of our proposed system. By experimental analysis, it is shown that our proposed model is suitable for resource constrained devices.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology introduced immutable distributed ledgers to the technology landscape. With the current popularity and success of the blockchain technology, researchers are looking for further implementation opportunities for the tamper-free ledgers. The supply chain industry has been a beneficiary of blockchain technology with its rich set of participants. From financing all the way to tracking containers, there are opportunities in the supply chain industry to utilize distributed ledger technologies. Furthermore, Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless enabled devices add value by providing services based on their sensor capabilities. Our study is on the synergy of blockchain technology and IoT to provide quality data to supply chains. We believe that the next generation of IoT services would only be possible with the democratic autonomy of devices in an environment where privacy, trust, transparency, and security are provided. With blockchain and IoT, there is a potential in rearchitecting supply chain systems. With the addition of IoT capabilities, there are opportunities to create better business models.In this paper, we focus on delivery assurance in the supply chain industry, and we propose a novel blockchain-based transparent delivery framework for creating solutions that record and share data on the interaction of business participants. This framework helps create solutions that include handover and monitoring aspects of the delivery businesses and adds several benefits that come with the blockchain technology.
Data provenance technology and right confirmation technology have received great attention in recent years, because data exposure and abuse have been a serious problem with the rapid development of smart device and hospital. Based on the traceability and unchangeable properties of blockchain, we propose a model of personal health-related application data provenance and use smart contract to ensure right confirmation. We find that the user condition and use-right of personal health data can be effectively confirmed by using data provenance. In addition, the possible future extensions to personal health data on provenance are discussed.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
S. Umamaheswari, Sruthi Sreeram, N. Kritika, D. R. Jyothi Prasanth
Blockchain's most basic promise for the agriculture industry is that it removes the need for third parties otherwise required to ensure trust within buyer-seller relationships, or for that matter any source-destination relationship. In an environment enabled by blockchain technology, transactions become peer-to-peer with no use for intermediaries.Apart from providing the means to transact peer-to-peer, blockchain can create `smart contracts' that execute the terms of any agreement when specified conditions are met. Every time value changes hands, whether physical products, services or money, the transaction can be documented, creating a permanent history of the product or transaction, from source to ultimate destination. Blockchain can be of great help in this sector. A transparent and trusted system can be built by putting all the information about agricultural events on a blockchain. Farmers can also get instant data related to the seed quality, climate environment related data, payments, soil moisture, demand and sale price, etc. all on a single platform.The intent of this project is to store the sensor data in a blockchain and build a smart contract deployed in the Ethereum blockchain to facilitate buying and selling of crops and land.
Abdulla Chaer, Khaled Salah, Cláudio Lima, Partha Pratim Ray · 5 authors
5G is a revolutionary technology in mobile telecommunications that promises to be 20x faster than today's 4G technology. The novel characteristics of 5G can be exploited to support new business models and services that require seamless interactions among multiple parties that may include mobile operators, enterprises, telecom providers, government regulators, and infrastructure providers. Meanwhile, blockchain technology has evolved as an enabling, disruptive, and transformational technology that has started to be adopted across many industry vertical domains. Blockchain has been increasingly used to register, authenticate and validate assets and transactions, govern interactions, record data and manage the identification among multiple parties, in a trusted, decentralized, and secure manner. In this paper, we discuss and highlight how blockchain can be leveraged for 5G networks. First, an overview of blockchain capabilities as well as smart contracts, decentralized storage and trusted oracles are presented. Second, potential opportunities in which blockchain features are used to enable 5G services are outlined. Third, examples of system integration architecture and sequence flow diagrams to illustrate how blockchain along with other supporting decentralized technologies can support and facilitate such opportunities are discussed. Finally, key challenges and open research problems are identified and discussed.
Jigna J. Hathaliya, Priyanka Sharma, Sudeep Tanwar, Rajesh Gupta
In Healthcare 4.0, Remote patient monitoring (RPM) becomes a more powerful and flexible patient observation through wearable sensors at any time and anywhere. The most focused application area of RPM which allows doctors to get real-time information of their patient remotely with the help of wireless communication system. Thus, RPM reduces the time and cost of the patient. It also provides the quality care to the patient. To enhance the security and privacy of the patient data, in this paper, we have presented a Permissioned blockchain-based healthcare architecture. We have also discussed the challenges and their solutions. We have described the applications of blockchain. We also have given the usage of Machine learning with blockchain technology which can impact the healthcare industry.
Yusuf Muhammad Tukur, Dhavalkumar Thakker, Irfan‐Ullah Awan
The Internet of Things (IoT) has allured so much interest since inception thanks to the amazing capabilities it offers. Consequently, it has found tremendous applications and has been employed to meet increasing automation and computerization demands of public and private organizations where it handles enormous critical information. However, the major issue surrounding the IoT is, it is exposed to various physical and cyber threats including the significantly harmful insider threat. In this work, we approach the insider threat problem to IoT from the viewpoint of examining the influence of tampering with state of the sensing environment on the overall IoT system. Our aim is to investigate how altering the environment state in perception layer of the IoT affects the integrity of the data read by sensors; and provide mechanism to preserve the integrity of the system data to ensure accurate analytics and processing. We focused on threat models where insiders compromise physical properties about which data are collected and transmitted, deceiving the sensors into reading inaccurate data. As initial solution to the problem, we developed a framework that integrates Ethereum blockchain with edge computing to perform checks and preserve integrity of incoming sensor data before being analyzed, processed and stored.
Hamid Raza Malik, Ahsan Manzoor, Mika Ylianttila, Madhusanka Liyanage
Smart grids lay the foundation for future communities. Smart homes, smart buildings, smart streets, and smart offices are built when intelligent devices piles on intelligent devices. To reach the maximum capacity, they all must be supported by an intelligent power supply. For optimal and real-time electricity consumption, monitoring and trading, blockchain posses several potential benefits in its application to electricity infrastructure. To analyze the performance of the blockchain-based smart grid, this paper presents a virtual smart grid. A smart grid equipped with smart contracts, capable of executing virtual activities is evaluated and possible strengths and weaknesses are discussed. The paper draws a performance analysis of the blockchain-based smart grid by using the Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric-based implementations.
The booming Internet of Things (IoT) market has drawn tremendous interest from cyber attackers. The centralized cloud-based IoT service architecture has serious limitations in terms of security, availability, and scalability, and is subject to single points of failure (SPOF). Recently, accommodating IoT services on blockchains has become a trend for better security, privacy, and reliability. However, blockchain's shortcomings of high cost, low throughput, and long latency make it unsuitable for IoT applications. In this paper, we take a retrospection of existing blockchain-based IoT solutions and propose a framework for efficient blockchain and IoT integration. Following the framework, we design a novel blockchain-assisted decentralized IoT remote accessing system, RS-IoT, which has the advantage of defending IoT devices against zero-day attacks without relying on any trusted third-party. By introducing incentives and penalties enforced by smart contracts, our work enables "an economic approach" to thwarting the majority of attackers who aim to achieve monetary gains. Our work presents an example of how blockchain can be used to ensure the fairness of service trading in a decentralized environment and punish misbehaviors objectively. We show the security of RS-IoT via detailed security analyses. Finally, we demonstrate its scalability, efficiency, and usability through a proof-of-concept implementation on the Ethereum testnet blockchain.
Muhammad Anwar Hussain, Muhammad Shafie Abd Latiff, Syed Hamid Hussain Madni, Raja Zuraidah Raja Mohd Rasi · 5 authors
Blockchain, Bitcoin's core technology, and spinal cord have received enthusiastic attention since the last couple of decades. The Blockchain serves as a paradigm for distributed and unchangeable computations for bitcoins and cryptocurrencies. The key features behind this technology are to create a reliable, secure, transparent, decentralized, and reliable autonomous ecosystem. It is useful for a variety of applications, especially for legacy devices, resources, and infrastructure. In this article, we presented a technical overview, its application, and the challenges associated with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. This study aims to provide a ground-breaking overview and future research direction and promising importance of Blockchain.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
With the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) era and the rise of Big Data, cloud computing, and similar technologies, data resources are becoming increasingly valuable. Organizations and users can perform all kinds of processing and analysis on the basis of massive IoT data, thus adding to their value. However, this is based on data-sharing transactions, and most existing work focuses on one aspect of data transactions, such as convenience, privacy protection, and auditing. In this paper, a data-sharing-transaction application based on blockchain technology is proposed, which comprehensively considers various types of performance, provides an efficient consistency mechanism, improves transaction verification, realizes high-performance concurrency, and has tamperproof functions. Experiments were designed to analyze the functions and storage of the proposed system.
The continually rising demand for wireless services and applications in the era of Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) presents a significant number of unprecedented challenges to existing network structures. To meet the rapid growth need of mobile data services, blockchain radio access network (B-RAN) has emerged as a decentralized, trustworthy radio access paradigm spurred by blockchain technologies. However, many characteristics of B-RAN remain unclear and hard to characterize. In this study, we develop an analytical framework to model B-RAN and provide some basic fundamental analysis. Starting from block generation, we establish a queuing model based on a time-homogeneous Markov chain. From the queuing model, we evaluate the performance of B-RAN with respect to latency and security considerations. By connecting latency and security, we uncover a more comprehensive picture of the achievable performance of B-RAN. Further, we present experimental results via an innovative prototype and validate the proposed model.
With recent adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and their use in industry, user data privacy concerns remain a major preoccupation of regulation bodies. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enables users to control their data and be informed about any devices involved in collecting and processing this data. The overall objective is to enable individuals to have full rights and control over their data assets and to be able to transfer their data without any unmitigated risk. Blockchains provide the benefits of a distributed ledger that can securely manage digital transactions -- where the centralisation of data is eliminated. Blockchains have recently entered as an enabling technology into the IoT market, and used in a variety of different application areas. Blockchains enable the implementation of a more trusted system capable of processing operations between IoT services and sources of data. In smart buildings, for example, Blockchains support the formation of smart contracts as a means to give transactional capabilities to IoT devices, allowing users to keep data ownership and privacy using an immutable dataset. We describe how Blockchain technology can be used to develop an audit trail of data generated in IoT devices, enabling GDPR rules to be verified on such a trail. We describe how to translate a set of such rules into smart contracts to protect personal data in a transparent and automatic way.