Qingyi Zhu, Seng W. Loke, Rolando Trujillo-Rasúa, Frank Jiang · 5 authors
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and blockchain systems have received enormous academic, government, and commercial interest in recent years. This article surveys the integration of DLTs within another life-changing technology, the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-based applications, such as smart home, smart transport, supply chain, smart healthcare, and smart energy, promise to boost the efficiency of existing infrastructures and change every facet of our daily life. This article looks into the challenges faced by such applications and reviews a comprehensive selection of existing DLT solutions to those challenges. We also identify issues for future research, including DLT security and scalability, multi-DLT applications, and survival of DLT in the post-quantum world.
Simón Fernández-Vázquez, Rafael Rosillo, David de la Fuente, Paolo Priore
Blockchain is currently one of the most important topics in both the academia and industry world, mainly due to the possible effects that the continuing application of this new technology could have. The adoption of this technology by FinTech companies constitutes the next step towards the expansion of blockchain and its sustainability. The paper conducts a mapping study on the research topics, limitations, gaps and future trends of blockchain in FinTech companies. A total of 49 papers from a scientific database (Web of Science Core Collection) have been analyzed. The results show a deep focus in challenges such as security, scalability, legal and regulatory, privacy or latency, with proposed solutions still to be far from being effective. A vast majority of the research is focused into finance and banking sector, obviating other industries that could play a crucial role in the further expansion of blockchain. This study can contribute to researchers as a starting point for their investigation, as well as a source for recommendations on future investigation directions regarding blockchain in the FinTech sector.
Roben Castagna Lunardi, Regio A. Michelin, Charles V. Neu, Henry C. Nunes · 6 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a complex and dynamic system of connected devices on an unprecedented scale. Connecting everyday physical objects is creating new business models, improving processes and reducing costs and risks. Recently, blockchain technology has received a lot of attention from the community as a possible solution to overcome security issues in IoT. However, traditional blockchains (such as the ones used in Bitcoin and Ethereum) are not well suited to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and also with the large volume of information that is expected to be generated from typical IoT deployments. To overcome these issues, several researchers have presented lightweight instances of blockchains tailored for IoT. For example, proposing novel data structures based on blocks with decoupled and appendable data. However, these researchers did not discuss how the consensus algorithm would impact their solutions, i.e., the decision of which consensus algorithm would be better suited was left as an open issue. In this paper, we improved an appendable-block blockchain framework to support different consensus algorithms through a modular design. We evaluated the performance of this improved version in different emulated scenarios and studied the impact of varying the number of devices and transactions and employing different consensus algorithms. Even adopting different consensus algorithms, results indicate that the latency to append a new block is less than 161ms (in the more demanding scenario) and the delay for processing a new transaction is less than 7ms, suggesting that our improved version of the appendable-block blockchain is efficient and scalable, and thus well suited for IoT scenarios.
Several initiatives have made available open educational resources, offered through educational platforms, aiming to achieve a broader audience, thus having the opportunity of democratizing knowledge. However, accessibility aspects in these resources still have many gaps. One is how to help teachers to prepare curricular contents available to all students, regardless of their limitations and disabilities. In this sense, this paper presents a digital ecosystem architecture, called SELI, that is being developed by a group of eleven European and Latin American countries. This ecosystem aims to provide an accessible learning environment and its contents, besides proper authoring tools based on recent technologies such as Blockchain, microsites, and universal accessibility guidelines.
Summary Smart cities aim to provide smart governance with the emphasis on gaining high transparency and trust in public services and enabling citizen participation in decision making processes. This means on the one hand data generated from urban transactions need to be open and trustworthy. On the other hand, security and privacy of public data needs to be handled at different administrative and geographical levels. In this paper, we investigate the pivotal role of blockchain in providing privacy, self‐verification, authentication, and authorization of participatory transactions in open governance. We also investigate up to what extent edge computing can contribute toward management of permissioned sharing at specific administrative levels and enhance privacy and provide an economic approach for resource utilization in a distributed environment. We introduce a novel architecture that is based on distributed hybrid ledger and edge computing model. The architecture provides refined and secure management of data generated and processed in different geographical and administrative units of a city. We implemented a proof of concept of the architecture and applied it on a carefully designed use case, ie, citizen participation in administrative decisions through consensus. This use case highlights the need to keep and process citizen participation data at local level by deploying district chaincodes and only share consensus results through permissioned chaincodes. The results reveal that proposed architecture is scalable and provide secure and privacy protected environment for citizen participatory applications. Our performance test results are promising and show that under control conditions, the average registration time for a citizen transaction is about 42 ms, whilst the validation and result compilation of 100 concurrent citizens' transactions took about 2.4 seconds.
Muhammad Baqer Mollah, Jun Zhao, Dusit Niyato, Kwok‐Yan Lam · 8 authors
Due to the unique features and characteristics of blockchain technology, its applications have expanded across various sectors, including finance, banking, supply chains, and smart grids (SGs). Blockchain ensures security and trust in transactions without requiring a third party, making it particularly valuable in decentralized systems. This paper explores the integration of blockchain technology into SG systems. It begins with a comprehensive review of conventional and smart power grids, identifying the key challenges modern SGs face, particularly issues related to trust and fraud. An in-depth analysis of blockchain technology follows, highlighting its potential, advantages, and defining characteristics. The study then examines several blockchain-based SG applications and provides a comparative analysis of prior research. The findings of this review illuminate the critical role of blockchain in enhancing SG performance by addressing trust and fraud prevention challenges. Furthermore, this research has significant implications for the energy sector, as it underscores the potential of blockchain to revolutionize SGs through increased security, transparency, and efficiency. By providing a foundation for future studies, this paper aims to guide the development of unified blockchain frameworks that address scalability, privacy, and energy management, paving the way for a more secure and efficient decentralized energy system
Tejasvi Alladi, Vinay Chamola, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues, S. A. Kozlov
With the integration of Wireless Sensor Networks and the Internet of Things, the smart grid is being projected as a solution for the challenges regarding electricity supply in the future. However, security and privacy issues in the consumption and trading of electricity data pose serious challenges in the adoption of the smart grid. To address these challenges, blockchain technology is being researched for applicability in the smart grid. In this paper, important application areas of blockchain in the smart grid are discussed. One use case of each area is discussed in detail, suggesting a suitable blockchain architecture, a sample block structure and the potential blockchain technicalities employed in it. The blockchain can be used for peer-to-peer energy trading, where a credit-based payment scheme can enhance the energy trading process. Efficient data aggregation schemes based on the blockchain technology can be used to overcome the challenges related to privacy and security in the grid. Energy distribution systems can also use blockchain to remotely control energy flow to a particular area by monitoring the usage statistics of that area. Further, blockchain-based frameworks can also help in the diagnosis and maintenance of smart grid equipment. We also discuss several commercial implementations of blockchain in the smart grid. Finally, various challenges to be addressed for integrating these two technologies are discussed.
Internet of Things have brought exciting changes in the social norms, work environments and the prospects for future generations. These devices (Things) have already changed the way our networks are used for communication. With the introduction of machine to machine communication (M2M), where devices communicate without human involvement to perform routine day to day tasks.
Blockchain naturally fits multiple industry sectors due its characteristics of decentralization, enhanced security, tamper-proof, improved traceability and transparency. However, there is a significant concern of blockchain’s performance, since blockchain trades off its performance for a completely distributed feature, which enhances its security. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art progress of blockchain, mainly from a performance and security perspective. We extracted 42 primary papers from major scientific databases and 34 online technical articles. The objective is to understand the current research trends, challenges and future directions. We briefly introduce the key technologies of blockchain including distributed ledger, cryptography, consensus, smart contracts and benchmarks. We next summarize the performance and security concerns raised in the investigation. We discuss the architectural choices, performance metrics, database management enhancements, and hybrid blockchains, and try to identify the effort that the state-of-the-art has made to balance between the performance and security. We also make experiments on Ethereum and survey other popular blockchain platforms on the scalability feature of blockchain. We later discuss the potential applications and present the lessons learned. Finally, we attempt to identify the open issues and possible research directions.
Blockchain interoperability, which allows state transitions across different blockchain networks, is critical functionality to facilitate major blockchain adoption. Existing interoperability protocols mostly focus on atomic token exchanges between blockchains. However, as blockchains have been upgraded from passive distributed ledgers into programmable state machines (thanks to smart contracts), the scope of blockchain interoperability goes beyond just token exchanges. In this paper, we present HyperService, the first platform that delivers interoperability and programmability across heterogeneous blockchains. HyperService is powered by two innovative designs: (i) a developer-facing programming framework that allows developers to build cross-chain applications in a unified programming model; and (ii) a secure blockchain-facing cryptography protocol that provably realizes those applications on blockchains. We implement a prototype of HyperService in approximately 35,000 lines of code to demonstrate its practicality. Our experiments show that (i) HyperService imposes reasonable latency, in order of seconds, on the end-to-end execution of cross-chain applications; (ii) the HyperService platform is scalable to continuously incorporate new large-scale production blockchains.
Blockchain is considered to be able to solve the problem of trust between distributed nodes. However, it's a challenge to store the large amount of data produced by blockchain. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce node storage overhead while ensuring node independence and data recoverability. This paper proposes to downsample these data to reduce the storage overhead of nodes. These nodes keep good independence, if downsampling follows the entropy of blockchain and the block bodies are continuously stored. Moreover, it demonstrates that the entire blockchain history can be efficiently recovered through the cooperative decoding of a group of nodes like fountain codes, if reserved data over these nodes obey the soliton distribution. However, these data on nodes are transparent (stored data are uncoded and can be used directly by the node without decoding). Thus, the proposed algorithm not only keeps decentralization and security, but also has good scalability in independence and recoverability.
Internet of things (IoT) has made human life simpler through its numerous applications by interconnecting various devices and people together in a heterogeneous network. The number of users associated with IoT in different sectors such as media, intelligent transportation, and healthcare are increasing rapidly, therefore generating a large amount of data each day. Because of this, maintaining quality in the network has become an important aspect for end-to-end data delivery. Software defined networking thus provides flexibility and programmability to the network due to its global approach of network management. To adapt with the dynamic nature of QoS, blockchain technique with its encryption mechanism and distributed consensus algorithm can be deployed on SDN. In this paper, we propose the use of blockchain technology in Software-Defined Internet of Things to deliver high QoS at a low price.
The adoption of permissioned blockchain networks in enterprise settings has seen an increase in growth over the past few years. While encouraging, this is leading to the emergence of new data, asset and process silos limiting the potential value these networks bring to the broader ecosystem. Mechanisms for enabling network interoperability help preserve the benefits of independent sovereign networks, while allowing for the transfer or sharing of data, assets and processes across network boundaries. However, a naive approach to interoperability based on traditional point-to-point integration is insufficient for preserving the underlying trust decentralized networks provide. In this paper, we lay the foundation for an approach to interoperability based on a communication protocol that derives trust from the underlying network consensus protocol. We present an architecture and a set of building blocks that can be adapted for use in a range of network implementations and demonstrate a proof-of-concept for trusted data-sharing between two independent trade finance and supply-chain networks, each running on Hyperledger Fabric. We show how existing blockchain deployments can be adapted for interoperation and discuss the security and extensibility of our architecture and mechanisms.
On considering the integrity of electronic evidence, in particular,we can see that such evidence needs to be protected from a number of undesirable outcomes namely, alteration or destruction. We need to guard against these events and others when trying to maintain system integrity and preserve the purity of evidence so that it could be acceptable in the court. Chain of Custody is nothing but the consecutive documentation of records. The Chain of Custody has all the necessary steps that a crime investigator must follow to make sure whether the information is honest. The Chain of Custody is significant because it cannot be proven that evidence was not altered during the time between collection and its usage in court. Then the collected evidence is not credible. Blockchain technology,a decentralized network currently used by Bitcoins and other Cryptocurrency networks, helps provide a secure database with the help of hashing the data and storing it in blocks.We propose to implement blockchain technology for the process of Chain of Custody, which helps in tracking the people whoaccess the data and assist in assuring the credibility of the data provided during the time of submission in court.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Abel O. Gomez Rivera, Deepak K. Tosh, Laurent Njilla
State-of-the-art centralized internet of things (IoT) architectures suffer from scalability issues in terms of both devices and transactions. Centralized architecture infers a central server with finite resources to process the communication demands of large IoT networks. The security of such IoT infrastructures is contingent on the protection of the central server. To address the challenges of security and scalability of transactions, we design and implement an edge-based blockchain network, where a set of edge nodes are incorporated to serve the requests of field devices. The edge nodes of our network offer security and processing functionalities to data transactions made by field devices. Besides the proposed architecture, a proof of concept of our edge-based blockchain platform is implemented to study its feasibility and performance. The platform achieves the fundamental security properties and addresses the transaction scalability issue. Blockchain technology and edge computing have the potential to enable a robust, and flexible architecture for IoT networks while maintaining low latency and high availability. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is evaluated in a simulated network.