Blockchain has become one of the new buzzwords in technology in the last decade, mainly because of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that had an incredible rise in value in 2017. Despite its value falling since then, many have begun realizing that the peer-to-peer network behind it, Blockchain, can be used in a multitude of other technologies and industries. This paper focuses on summarizing Blockchain's applications beyond Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, as well as discussing its features that allow it to effectively do so. Blockchain has shown the world that it is a trusted and decentralized way to compute, for transactions and to transfer data. Hence, a variety of fields are now utilizing this emerging technology, from financial services to music to healthcare, and this paper has successfully compiled and evaluated a list of a few of these applications.
Today we find several solutions how to adapt IoT applications on blockchain technology. The most of the IoT devices have limited hardware resources to be able to execute a blockchain applications and take a real part of blockchain as a blockchain node. In this paper we analyzed Ethereum "aleth" blockchain and we identified the most called cryptographic functions that were used during the execution. Our aim is to model a low power consumption IoT architecture that can execute this blockchain application. The given architecture is deployed by a SystemC model and we used dedicated hardware accelerators to increase the performance. In addition we would like to deploy an architecture that meets the requirements of our industrial partner Renault. Renault figured out with a new type of use case with blockchain and especially with Smart Contracts applications where every cars are connected on a blockchain. With our IoT device model we could obtain a high gain of performance.
Blockchain technology is a decentralized distributed system meant for secure computation and information sharing platform free from any central authority that enables multiple authoritative domain which do not trust each other, to cooperate, coordinate and collaborate in rational decision-making process. Bitcoin is pioneer crypto currency platform that uses blockchain technology but over the time it has moved beyond Bitcoin and has successfully bypassed to other application domain. Beside Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger and Corda, Quorum have emerged as a successful distributive computing platform. Major consortium like Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Hyperledger and R3 are formed with aim to come up with business solution. Today we have different blockchain application in public sector, finance, supply-chain, healthcare and IoT. In many industries people think blockchain will be transformative. Financial sector is most enthusiastic in adopting blockchain followed by supply chain management. Blockchain is closely looked at in India too. In 2018 Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has issued a white paper in order to identify the potential application areas of blockchain in Indian banking. NITI Aayog is working on national strategy for blockchain which will identify the area where country can implement blockchain. Blockchain is still new and has issues like scalability, security and privacy breaches, limited transaction loads, and high (computational) costs, besides its technical problem, adopting blockchain into Indian market system has its own specific challenges. This paper discusses the prospect of blockchain technology in India, its current position and likely problem in its adoptation to Indian market place. This paper also give overview about blockchain and its fundamental technologies and prominent blockchain platform, it also gives account of application area's in which blockchain is implemented successfully around the world.
Erick D. Buenrostro, Abel O. Gomez Rivera, Deepak K. Tosh, Jaime C. Acosta · 5 authors
Military technology is ever-evolving to increase the safety and security of soldiers on the field while integrating Internet-of-Things solutions to improve operational efficiency in mission oriented tasks in the battlefield. Centralized communication technology is the traditional network model used for battlefields and is vulnerable to denial of service attacks, therefore suffers performance hazards. They also lead to a central point of failure, due to which, a flexible model that is mobile, resilient, and effective for different scenarios must be proposed. Blockchain offers a distributed platform that allows multiple nodes to update a distributed ledger in a tamper-resistant manner. The decentralized nature of this system suggests that it can be an effective tool for battlefields in securing data communication among Internet-of-Battlefield Things (IoBT). In this paper, we integrate a permissioned blockchain, namely Hyperledger Sawtooth, in IoBT context and evaluate its performance with the goal of determining whether it has the potential to serve the performance needs of IoBT environment. Using different testing parameters, the metric data would help in suggesting the best parameter set, network configuration and blockchain usability views in IoBT context. We show that a blockchain-integrated IoBT platform has heavy dependency on the characteristics of the underlying network such as topology, link bandwidth, jitter, and other communication configurations, that can be tuned up to achieve optimal performance.
Hamda Al Breiki, Lamees M. Al Qassem, Khaled Salah, Muhammad Habib ur Rehman · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of connected electromechanical devices that have limited computational, networking, and storage capabilities. IoT is now widely used in healthcare, smart cars, smart grids, smart homes, smart manufacturing, and smart cities. IoT devices sense, monitor, and collect data where it can be shared with legitimate users. IoT data can be aggregated, stored and made available by multiple IoT data hosting providers. IoT data storage, management, and access involve multiple stakeholders that many include admins, owners of IoT devices, data repository hosts and providers, normal users, etc. Decentralized control and trusted management of such IoT data become critical, in which the management and access control of data is not centralized, i.e., under the control of a single entity. To date, the available methods for for access control in IoT systems are mainly centralized. In this paper, we propose a decentralized access control system for IoT data using blockchain and trusted oracles. We use features of blockchain and smart contracts to propose a decentralized, scalable, and secure management solution for accessing IoT data. In addition, we use oracles as gateways that interface with the blockchain, IoT data hosts, and remote users to provide decentralized, trusted, and uniform source feeds for IoT data. The paper also presents architectural design, interactions, logic flow, algorithms, implementation details, along with cost, computation, and security evaluation. The full code of the developed smart contracts is made publicly available at GitHub.
To improve mobile users' quality-of-experience (QoE) in the mobile cyber-physical system (MCPS), caching layered-coding contents on edge nodes that are close to mobile users has been advocated as a promising solution, which can efficiently lower the content delivery delay and mitigate the overhead of backhaul network. However, due to the complexity of trust management and the limited caching capacities of edge nodes, designing an efficient edge caching scheme for mobile users becomes a challenge. Meanwhile, the content caching in MCPS also faces some security problems, where edge nodes may return incorrect results or viruses to mobile users, and mobile users would deliberately refuse to pay for caching services. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel blockchain-based trustworthy edge caching scheme for mobile users in MCPS. Specifically, we first exploit blockchain to supervise the caching transactions between the edge nodes and mobile users in a distributed manner, whereby the caching service information cannot be modified and denied by any entities. Furthermore, we devise a trust management mechanism for mobile users to search the trustworthy caching services from diversified edge nodes, where the trust degree of the edge node is real-time evaluated and updated by mobile users based on the quality of caching service. To take full advantage of caching resources, we design a max-min-based resource allocation algorithm, with which the trustworthy edge node could fairly allocate its caching resource based on mobile users' optimal demands. The simulation results show that the presented scheme not only improves the utilities of edge nodes but also increases the QoE of mobile users.
Anum Nawaz, Tuan Nguyen Gia, Jorge Peña Queralta, Tomi Westerlund
The edge and fog computing paradigms enable more responsive and smarter systems without relying on cloud servers for data processing and storage. This reduces network load as well as latency. Nonetheless, the addition of new layers in the network architecture increases the number of security vulnerabilities. In privacy-critical systems, the appearance of new vulnerabilities is more significant. To cope with this issue, we propose and implement an Ethereum Blockchain based architecture with edge artificial intelligence to analyze data at the edge of the network and keep track of the parties that access the results of the analysis, which are stored in distributed databases.
Digital world is shifting towards distributed systems due to scalability and reliability issues of centralized systems. Blockchain is one of rapidly growing technology of distributed nature. Most of people have information about public blockchain due to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but there is another face of blockchain which is private or permissioned blockchain. Permissioned blockchain is a distribute ledger for consortium enterprises network. The escalation in popularity of permissioned blockchain platforms in recent era is remarkable. There are multiple solutions available for permissioned blockchain, but there are three leading houses which deals enterprise blockchain, Fabric, Corda and Quorum. All developing communities have their contribution in market and claim their solution is best but blockchain just stepin permissioned era there are multiple plus and negative point in these frameworks. In this paper, I have discussed permissioned blockchain frameworks and analyze them comparatively on the bases of consensus range, modularity, language support, privacy, transaction rate, currency, and accumulate the adoption rate from these filters.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
C. G. Raji, A - Vinish, Ganesh Gopakumar, K Shahil
Cryptocurrency, a form of digital currency is the redistributed and open system that uses cryptography to reinforce security for the management of standard financial transactions. Administration of cryptocurrency mining demands significant hash functions which in turn necessitates a powerful rig. Here, we demonstrate the implementation of Cryptocurrency miner using Raspberry Pi system integrated with USB hash miners and with a CG-Miner software, installed in the operating system. Provision of a System on Single chips platform by Raspberry pi yields high compatibility, and the portable nature of the system assists the convoluted process of mining to achieve new horizons. The exponential rise of the cryptocurrency miners lead to the demand for an economical methodology for the mining process can be gratified by the Raspberry pi mining technique which help to quench the cost of the available systems providing a new cost effective and energy efficient technology.
Non-governmental organizations (NGO) depend on their members to survive. They need to reach the potential volunteers. They also aspire to keep track of their members' effectiveness and to motivate those members to be more active. The volunteers need a transparent system, where their privacy is preserved. Our meetings with several NGOs show that there is a solid need for a transparent, effective and trustworthy system, where NGOs can track their members' effectiveness, create enthusiasm and even collaborate with the volunteers from other NGOs. A system, where gamification principles are used for member motivation and the reputation of any member is calculated by his/her activities, is proposed. The blockchain technology will be used for the gamification process and the decentralized digital identity management. The decentralized digital identity management approach will help in providing the volunteers to gain full control over their identities and ensure the privacy. A design approach for the proposed system, the expected requirements and some possible use case scenarios have been presented. The prototype is implemented via Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Indy software platforms, as a proof of concept. Chaincodes are to be implemented for the system to work autonomously.
Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Amjad Hussain Zahid, Muzammil Hussain, Muhammad Shoaib Farooq · 6 authors
Today the WEB is growing and expanding with the unexpected high speed and recently it gained extensive attention. The world is focusing and working on the web so that it could make more ease in our life. The web start from static pages and goes towards the smart industries and factories. All the industrial machines are augmented and directly connected to the web which leads to connect with different systems. This type of systems visualizes the whole production process and these systems are autonomous to take decisions on its own. Forth industrial revolution is the second name of industry 4.0 which includes the Internet of Things (IoT), Cognitive Computing (CC), Big Data, AI and it is fostering Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Advanced web is covering the maximum aspects to encourage the businessman community to make trading using technology. The blockchain version 4.0 is helping the industry to ensure the transparency of supply, immutability of records and it ensures the trust of end to end trading organizations. Supply chain is now using the blockchain technology.
Dwiyan Rezkia Putra, Bayu Anggorojati, Ardhi Putra Pratama Hartono
Managing security access control has been becoming one of the open issues in Internet of Things (IoT) since the idea of IoT was introduced. The reasons being that the IoT system is built upon large numbers of constrained devices, with limited power, computing resources, and memory. Therefore, the access management needs to be highly distributed in order to ensure the scalability when many IoT nodes are connected in the system, and the cryptographic operation and other algorithms performed along with the access control mechanism have to be lightweight to fit the constrained device characteristics of IoT. The existing access controls proposed for IoT, such as Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) and Capability-based Access Control (CapBAC) are not truly distributed. As for the resource limitation in the IoT devices, recent developments of more powerful microprocessors or System on Chip (SoC) allow advanced cryptographic implementation on the chip itself, e.g. public key cryptography, with the cost of performance degradation. Recently, blockchain technology which is based on distributed ledger system, gains a lot of attention from the industries and researchers. Coupled with the smart contract and various distributed consensus mechanisms, blockchain can be a good solution for providing distributed access control in IoT. This paper proposed an architecture and mechanism of blockchain and smart-contract based access control for IoT. A proof-of-concept is implemented to validate the proposed idea and its performance is evaluated to gain some preliminary sights for further developments.
Massive amount of IoT data poses unique challenges in centralized data management systems. Specifically, IoT data can originate from heterogeneous and distributed sources, and commonly regulations forbid data from different IoT stakeholders to be managed via central governance. To serve for IoT applications, recent proposals leverage distributed ledgers (e.g., blockchains) to function on top of distributed data storage with improved data interoperability. Unfortunately, most of them do not consider data security and privacy in the first place. Along with this transformative paradigm, in this paper, we propose a ledger-assisted architecture for secure distributed IoT data management. This architecture adapts searchable encryption to decentralized storage network to enable encrypted query processing. Meanwhile, it is designed to leverage the distributed ledger to harden both data and query integrity. To deal with continuously generated IoT data, we further devise an efficient secure data insertion protocol, and employ a recent variant of blockchain for users to validate updated query results in a scalable manner. Evaluations on Azure blockchain service confirm the practicality of our proposed architecture.
Njabulo S. Mtetwa, Paul Tarwireyi, Matthew O. Adigun
Internet of Things (IoT) is a growing technology that is projected to have over 41.6 billion connected devices by 2025. The IoT idea is about connecting the unconnected things (sensors, clothes, refrigerators and others) to the existing network infrastructure. Across industries ranging from agriculture to manufacturing, organizations are rapidly growing business value with the IoT. However, many organizations are hesitating to further invest in IoT initiatives due to the fear of inadequate security. Security is a very critical consideration where everything becomes connected to the Internet. However, security in IoT is still a very open area that is yet to receive much attention. One challenge in IoT is ensuring the security of firmware updates on deployed IoT devices. Hackers can perform man-in-the-middle attacks to compromise an update procedure and take control of deployed devices if they do not use proper security mechanisms. This means that it is imperative to architect secure by design mechanisms to ensure security in IoT. Blockchain is an emerging technology that is touted as a potential cybersecurity transformational force. This work proposes the use of blockchain to provide a mechanism for nodes to verify the authenticity and integrity of firmware before downloading and ensures high availability of the firmware. A proof of concept system was implemented. The prototype illustrates how secure IoT firmware update can be realized through the use of smart contracts. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to check for authentic software by verifying it through blockchain smart contracts.
Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Amjad Hussain Zahid, Muzammil Hussain, Usama Riaz
Today, the privacy and the security of any organization are the key requirement, the digital online transaction of money or coins also needed a certain level of security not only during the broadcasting of the transaction but before the sending of the transaction. In this research paper we proposed and implemented a cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) wallet for the android operating system, by using the QR code-based android application and a secure private key storage (Cold Wallet). Two android applications have been implemented one of them is called cold wallet and the other one is hot wallet. Cold wallet (offline) is to store and generate the private key addresses for secure transaction confirmation and the hot wallet is used to send bitcoin to the network. Hot wallet application gives facility to the user view history of performed transactions, to send and compose a new bitcoin transaction, receive bitcoin, sign it and send it to the network. By using the process of cross QR code scanning of the hot and cold wallet to the identification, validation and authentication of the user made it secure.
Predictive Maintenance in the era of Internet-of-Things is envisioned to be an important functionality of consumer electronics along with many other application areas. Challenges for Predictive Maintenance within Internet-of-Things ecosystem include heterogeneity, scalability, identification, constrained resources, mobility, security, and privacy. In this paper, we propose a reference model for Predictive Maintenance of commercial appliances, the digital twins of which interact socially via Distributed Ledger Technologies.
With the introduction of the term blockchain in 2008, it's interest has been increasing in the community since the idea was coined. The reason for this interest is because it provides anonymity, security and integrity without any central third party organisation in control of data and transaction. It has attracted huge interest in research areas due to its advances in various platforms, limitations and challenges. There are various Distributed Ledger Technologies that demonstrates their special features which overcome limitations of other platforms. However, implementations of various distributed ledger technologies differ substantially based on their data structures, consensus protocol and fault tolerant among others. Due to these variations, they have a quite different cost, performance, latency and security. In this paper, working and in-depth comparison of major distributed ledger technologies including their special features, strengths and weaknesses is presented and discussed by identifying various criteria.
With a spectacular boom in blockchain technologies at various verticals and with the increase in renewable energy penetration, these could solve one of the major issues in Power Systems - Energy Demand Management by the utilities. Blockchain being a distributed architecture, it could fit into the deregulated energy market to enable energy trading in a self sustainable energy community and manage the power demands among the community members. As proof of concept, the blockchain technology is introduced in a smart community where consumers take part in energy trading among themselves as well as with the utility. In this paper, three use cases for P2P energy trading in a private blockchain network is discussed. The blockchain architecture is developed using the Hyperledger framework and the smart contracts are defined in the chaincode. The performance of the blockchain network on resource constrained IoT system based on Raspberry Pi is also evaluated.
Diego Stucchi, Ruggero Susella, Pasqualina Fragneto, Beatrice Rossi
A major challenge in networked sensor systems and other IoT environments is addressing security. Vulnerabilities in those systems arise from poor physical security, unauthenticated devices, insecure firmware updates, insecure communication, and data corruption. In recent times Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), of which Blockchain is an instance, have been identified as a possible solution to some of these issues. The blokchain model genetically ensures decentralized security and privacy, and therefore could provide IoT systems with a trusted infrastructure for securely logging data or exchanging tokens without the necessity, and costs, of central servers. Blockchain is no panacea, either. IoT devices that get connected to a blockchain network must still be secured, in particular they must protect the confidentiality of the keys. This requires the embedded microcontroller to execute only authenticated firmware, with protections against software attacks, such as buffer overflows, and resistance against side-channel attacks. In addition, as confirmed from the scarcity of implementations reported in the literature, it is still not clear whether blockchain protocols can be implemented efficiently on resource-constrained IoT devices. In this work, also supported by a Demo, we show an example of secure IoT device that enables the functionalities of IOTA, a DLT specifically designed for the use in the IoT. In particular, we present a Light Node based on STM32 that implements all the cryptographic functions, IOTA specific operations and communication functions required to successfully publish transactions in the IOTA distributed ledger. Our implementations on microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M) performs up to 22 times faster in terms of cycles and up to 4 times faster in absolute time with respect to the state-of-the-art implementation on a Raspberry PI 3B. Our Light Node also ensures protection of the stored private data and guarantees secure firmware update thanks to a suitable configuration of some security features provided by STM32 microcontrollers.
Abstract Blockchain and blockchain‐based decentralised applications have been attracting increasing attention recently. In public blockchain systems, users usually connect to third‐party peers or run a peer to join the P2P blockchain network. However, connecting to unreliable blockchain peers will lead to resource waste and even loss of cryptocurrencies by repeated transactions. In order to select reliable blockchain peers, it is urgently needed to evaluate and predict their reliability of them. Faced with this problem, we propose hybrid blockchain reliability prediction (H‐BRP), a Hybrid Blockchain Reliability Prediction model, to extract the blockchain reliability factors and then make the personalised prediction for each user. Comprehensive experiments conducted on 100 blockchain requesters and 200 blockchain peers demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed H‐BRP model. Further, the implementation and dataset of 2,000,000 test cases are released.
With the rapid development of smart devices and compute-intensive applications, fog computing has emerged as a promising solution to accommodate the ever-increasing computational demands. Particularly, in the peak time, the computational tasks can be offloaded from the overloaded base stations to fog servers by leveraging the under-utilized computational resources at the demand side. However, there are two major obstacles hindering the wide deployment of fog computing in Internet of things, which are the lack of an effective incentive mechanism and a task offloading algorithm. In this paper, we develop a two-stage resource sharing and task offloading approach by integrating contract theory with computational intelligence. In the first stage, we propose an efficient incentive mechanism to encourage servers to share their residual computational resources by employing the contract theory. In the second stage, a distributed task offloading algorithm is proposed by leveraging the online learning capability of multi-armed bandit. Specifically, we propose a distance-aware, occurrence-aware, and task-property-aware volatile upper confidence bound algorithm to minimize the long-term delay of task offloading. Finally, extensive simulations are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Blockchain is an emerging technology that uses distributed ledgers for transparent, reliable, and traceable information exchange among network nodes. Blockchain and its 3rd generation Tangle-based implementations quickly extend their territory beyond crypto-currency to a broad range of applications using fee-less transactions over the Internet of things (IoT). However, this technology suffers from sluggishness in consensus-based validation of information that restricts its applicability to time-sensitive applications such as smart health. In this letter, we propose an optimized policy for sampling rate by IoT sensors that utilize blockchain and Tangle technologies for their transmission with the goal of minimizing the age of information (AoI) experienced by the end-users, considering both processing and networking resource constraints. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of the proposed algorithm compared to the current fixed-rate update policy. Further, a closed-form solution is obtained for the optimal sampling rate in a network of homogeneous IoT nodes as a benchmark system.