Mirko Koscina, David Manset, Claudia Negri-Ribalta, Octavio Pérez Kempner
We propose a new healthcare data exchange platform for research centers, hospitals and healthcare institutions. Our model is based on a federated blockchain network that interconnect the healthcare institutions and orchestrate the data life cycle from the data publication to the data consumption. The blockchain is responsabible to keep the traceability of the whole process and we use a specially designed smart contract to control the data sharing process. Moreover, we provide the means to enforce GDPR and thus achieve a GDPR compliant model.
Michail Bampatsikos, Christoforos Ntantogian, Christos Xenakis, Stelios C. A. Thomopoulos
Today, an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare devices, crucial to a person's wellbeing and life, connects to the internet and consequently is exposed to a variety of threats. These devices possess low computational resources, and as a result they cannot use security tools such as antivirus or firewalls. Consequently, they become easy targets for cyber-attacks and malware infection, thus putting a person's life at risk. One way to protect these devices from malware infection is Remote Attestation (RA), a process by which a device with low computational power (prover) verifies its internal state to a party with higher computational resources (verifier) upon the latter's request. However, in case the verifier is malicious, it may constantly send numerous requests for RA to a prover to prevent it from performing the functions it was designed for. Thus, keeping it busy and rendering it unusable to its legit users as well as services. In short, the verifier performs a Computational Denial of Service (CDoS) attack against the prover. This paper proposes the BARRETT architecture which uses a Public Ethereum Network (PEN) in conjunction with an RA protocol to protect the prover from CDoS attacks. In particular, the PEN in BARRETT deters CDoS by forcing the verifier to pay a fee in Ether cryptocurrency every time they wish to send an Attestation Request (AR) to a prover. The verifier pays the fee since in BARRETT it can send the AR only via Ethereum transactions. Consequently, any attempt to perform a CDoS becomes prohibitively expensive.
In 2016, India launched the smart cities mission. The objective of this mission is to developed cities by using ‘Smart’ solutions that provide core infrastructure and give citizens a decent quality of life, a clean and sustainable environment. The focus is on sustainable and inclusive development. To achieve this it uses the technology to integrate and manage the infrastructures to provide better services and ensure efficient and optimal utilisation of available resources. Incorporation of new technologies for the development of smart cities gives the new ways of rethinking different services. In this paper, we are going study the applications of blockchain technology in smart city development
Spyros Voulgaris, Nikos Fotiou, Vasilios A. Siris, George C. Polyzos · 6 authors
In the last few years, we have been witnessing the convergence of the physical with the digital world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is progressing at a fast pace, and IoT devices are becoming pervasive in our physical environments, bringing the vision of Intelligent Environments closer to reality. At the same time, the newly-introduced blockchain technology is offering for the first time ever cryptographically proven trust based on a set of mutually untrusted nodes. Blockchain technology thus has the potential to become a key component of many IoT systems, offering them an unprecedented level of accountability, transparency, and reliability. This paper first lays out the principles on which blockchain systems are operating, along with descriptions of the most noteworthy blockchain implementations. It then presents a number of systems through which blockchains may interact with external systems and third-party data sources. Finally, it provides a survey of the state-of-the-art blockchain-based systems targeting IoT applications.
With the interest and attention that the Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) have recently demanded, the technology is advancing at a very high rate. With investors and applications in a wide variety of fields, a lot of funding and efforts are being driven into bringing the technology to everyday use. The community and companies are coming up with new ways to collaborate, which makes the blockchain ecosystem evolve at full tilt. Consequently, this paper’s aim is to review the academic and grey literature and to provide readers with information about the evolution, benefits and challenges of the Public Distributed Ledger Technologies and to discuss the latest solutions, which are being developed for bringing decentralization closer to the mainstream. The paper reviews the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structured distributed ledgers with focus on the Hedera Hashgraph, a novelty DLT bringing a unique consensus algorithm with new use-cases enabled by new cryptoeconomic mechanisms, as well as vital services, such as Solidity smart contracts and distributed file storage. Then, we are going to explore second-layer network protocols, a major topic for solving scalability issues and for decentralizing cryptocurrency exchanges. The article tries also to identify the particularities of these technologies and how they bring specific answers to the blockchain trilemma, consisting in three themes - scalability, interoperability and sustainability.
Saif Kazakzeh, Eyad Ayoubi, Baraa K. Muslmani, Malik Qasaimeh · 5 authors
Blockchain is an emerging technology that lacks sophisticated guidelines and frameworks for deployment purposes. This paper proposes a framework that helps in making suitable decisions concerning blockchain model adoption. In addition, the authors classified the major categories of blockchain metrics. Furthermore, the authors evaluated the proposed framework with two well-known educational blockchain-based models.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yao Sun, Lei Zhang, Gang Feng, Bowen Yang · 6 authors
Blockchain has shown a great potential for Internet of Things (IoT) systems to establish trust and consensus mechanisms with no involvement of any third party. It has been not clear how the low complexity devices and the wireless communications among them can pose constraints on the blockchain enabled IoT systems. In this paper, we establish a fundamental analysis model to underpin the blockchain enabled IoT system. By considering spatio-temporal domain Poisson distribution, i.e., node geographical distribution and transaction arrival rate in time domain are both modeled as Poisson point process (PPP), we first derive the distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), blockchain transaction successful rate as well as overall throughput. Then, based on the analytical model, we design an optimal full function node deployment for blockchain system to achieve the maximum transaction throughput with the minimum full function node density. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis and evaluate the relationship between blockchain full function node deployment and the density of IoT nodes.
Stefano Loss, Nélio Cacho, João Marcos do Valle, Frederico Lopes
Currently, blockchain has been widely used to store decentralised and secure transactions involving cryptocurrency (for instance, Bitcoin solution). On the other hand, smart city applications are concerned about how data and services can be safely stored and shared. In this regard, this article investigates the use of blockchain and pinpoints a set of essential requirements to meet the needs of blockchain for the context of smart cities. Base on that, we propose a platform, named Orthus, to support the use of blockchain in smart city initiatives. We have demonstrated how to use the proposed platform in the context of the Natal Smart City Initiative, in Brazil, to handle land registration. Finally, we compare this platform with other implementations that use blockchain in different domains.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a 3D real time and dynamic building modeling software that is used to enhance productivity in designing and constructing buildings. BIM is also a process to create and manage building information throughout building life cycle. BIM is used by many parties such as building owner, contractor, architect, engineer, site manager and facility manager. Thus to enhance security of BIM, we propose a new technology called blockchain. Blockchain has security features that can benefit BIM such as immutable and impossibility to be tampered with and forged, The features makes blockchain have incomparable advantages in ensuring information credibility, security and traceability. Thus, the objective of this research is to assess application of blockchain technology on Building Information Modeling (BIM). Construction management based on blockchain-based BIM could enhance information system security.
The Internet of Things (IoT) became widely utilized during last years, due to the large number of object that are connected to it - not only computers, but also humans, sensors and actuators. In the near future, a large number of objects will communicate to each other in a way never experienced before by the humankind. Connecting all these objects together will come with a wide area of challenges. One of the most important issues concerns trust. In majority of cases, centralized architectures are used to solve the problem, but the enormous number of object that can be connected in IoT will make almost impossible to manage and implement these solutions. Blockchain technology offers powerful solutions for decentralized architectures, which can be the future of IoT systems. A strong solution needs to be flexible to changes and must offer powerful resources to be successful. A hardware platform that uses FPGAs is suitable for those systems. In this paper we propose a solution for securing IoT systems using blockchain technology, implemented on a FPGA based architecture.
Blockchain is a decentralized distributed database. It is among the new generation technologies and its popularity is increasing day by day due to its attractive advantages. Although it was introduced in 1992 it was first used in 2008 with the Bitcoin virtual currency, which was laid experimentally by a developer codenamed Satoshi Nakamoto. After Bitcoin's success, Blockchain technology has been used in different fields. Not only in the financial sector; In many sectors such as health, energy, agriculture and supply chain management, applications have been developed in line with the needs. Security, first-hand operation, transparency and privacy advantages are the main reasons for the spread of Blockchain technology. By evaluating the advantages it provides, many companies have started to invest in Blokchains technology and the number of Blokchains projects has started to increase. HAVELSAN is a large-scale Defense Industry Software company, researching new generation technologies and conducting studies to create value at both the firm and national level. Blockchain is one of these technologies. Most of the projects and products made before the Blockchain were produced in the traditional structure using the central database. Blockchain still does not provide a central database performance. Although the value added will be added to the projects to be carried out with the block chain, the problem will arise where high transaction performance is important. Currently, Blockchain; ensures the accuracy, security and integrity of the data. However, as the Blockchain network grows, productivity decreases and is difficult to manage. The proposed solution to improve performance is to establish a hybrid model and to ensure that a centralized database works together with the Blockchain network. In this study, how to design a hybrid structure using Blockchain and central database, installation of the system and the problems encountered will be explained.
Sena Yakut, Özlem Şeker, Ertugrul Batur, Gökhan Dalkılıç
Blockchain is a public ledger without a central authority. Immutable and inalterable data blocks prove reliability and security which are the deficiencies of the current Internet of things (IoT) devices. IoT devices are hardware constrained devices which have specific functions but create large network to gather different data. Because of the security issues of the IoT devices, industrial use is limited. Generally, secure data transaction and storage are the main concerns over IoT devices and in order to solve the problem various solutions are being tested. However, decentralized and secure structure like the blockchain could be a solution. In this study, challenges of blockchain implementation on hardware constraint devices are discussed. Studies regarding blockchain implementation methods and blockchain implemented projects are mentioned. Experiments on frameworks used by blockchain are conducted and with the test results of the experiments, feasibility of implementing the blockchain on IoT devices are discussed.
Eryk Schiller, Sina Rafati Niya, Timo Surbeck, Burkhard Stiller
This paper studies various methods that improve the performance of Blockchain systems integrated with the Internet of Things (BIoT) using the LoRaWAN access method. Duty Cycle Enforcement (DCE) and Listen Before Talk (LBT) mechanisms as the channel access methods, Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) on the Transport Layer, and transaction aggregation on the Application Layer are evaluated. The main focus is put on the system performance studying the maximal number of transactions submitted, reliability of transport schemes, and the energy efficiency of the BIoT system. The combination of LBT-based MAC, the ARQ-enabled Transport Layer, and transaction aggregation at the Application Layer provides a good trade-off between submitted transaction count, packet loss, and energy efficiency. The proposed scheme complies to the data integrity demands of BIoT applications by specifying a reliable data transmission scheme from IoT devices to the BC.
Mobile Edge Computing or MEC enables the provision of computation, storage and network resources within close proximity to the mobile users. MEC can host a set of predefined services or it can dynamically deploy services as requests come from the users. In a typical scenario, mobile users identify the closest MEC node to them and interact with it, however, as they are moving the same service needs to be able to follow them in order to provide service continuity. This problem has been already addressed by phone operators, however, as MEC allows third-party service providers to deploy their applications on top of MEC, new challenges arise. High among them are availability and security. In this paper, we present a blockchain based MEC management with the goal of efficiently guaranteeing service continuity in a secure and timely manner. We propose an architecture and its implementation to validate three main scenarios.
In today modern digital world, there is huge need of security in medical field also. Among all modern data transfer techniques, Blockchain is a fast growing technology which provide a cryptodata through which we can transfer data between peer-to -peer node. Blockchain provide security which depends on highly cryptographic schemes. We can integrate blockchain with wireless body area network. Because WBAN is also a very emerging field of medical department. All the data of patient is maintained in a electronic health record (EHR). So Maintaining a EHR is very challenging face of medical field. In WBAN we transfer the patients data among different entities like healthcare server, medical staff, health insurer over the network. So we can provide security in this field through blockchain. In this paper we propose an architectural model of block chain with WBAN. We also mention some challenges which are faced in the field of medical health care applications.
Tanishq Varshney, Nikhil Sharma, Ila Kaushik, Bharat Bhushan
Without any involvement of third party, block chain has shown tremendous potential in establishing secure links with IoT.This technology can be widely used without using any centralized authority. By combining both the technologies throughput of the system can be enhanced. Due to its various applications it is being widely used in almost every field which makes it vulnerable to various attacks. In this paper, blockchain architecture along with its key properties has been discussed. Later part of paper comprises of various security principles such as confidentiality, integrity and availability, various attacks on network along with its countermeasures.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Achraf Fayad, Badis Hammi, Rida Khatoun, Ahmed Serhrouchni
Internet of Things (IoT) systems are almost a part of our daily lives. The security of this new paradigm had always faced many challenge in order to insure user privacy and authentication. These security issues are still far from being solved by the classical centralized architectures which reaches their limits in terms of scalability especially when thousands or tens of thousands of IoT devices are connected in the same network. To remedy this architectural issue, we rely on blockchains in order to propose a simple and lightweight blockchain-based authentication solution for IoT systems. We provided a real implementation of our proposed scheme relying on Ethereum blockchain and using different devices in order to confirm its feasibility and evaluate its initial performances. The results obtained confirm its suitability to such environments.
Cloud service for education purpose is the critical infrastructure for the smart campus. The state-of-the-art education clouds are usually developed and maintained by individual schools. The isolation nature makes these data being tampered easily, which leads to malicious tampering and information fragmentation. The blockchain is a perfect technology to address these issues. By leveraging the advantages of the public blockchain, consortium blockchain, and private blockchain, we propose EduBloud, a heterogeneous blockchain system empowered education cloud. The system showed higher reliability, lower latency, higher data throughput, and better economic efficiency than homogeneous blockchain implementations.
Md. Ashraf Uddin, Andrew Stranieri, Iqbal Gondal, Venki Balasubramanian
Blockchain emerging for healthcare provides a secure, decentralized and patient driven record management system. However, the storage of data generated from IoT devices in remote patient management applications requires a fast consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a lightweight consensus mechanism and a decentralized patient software agent to control a remote patient monitoring (RPM) system. The decentralized RPM architecture includes devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network- medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) software replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data to ensure reliable, secure and private communication. Performance analysis has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled remote patient monitoring system.
Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) contain private and sensitive information of the patients and require distribution across multiple stakeholders for sustained and consistent medical care. EMRs are owned and maintained by hospital systems. So, patients often face difficulties in getting their data shared among different stakeholders. Blockchain provides distributed, transparent, and immutable log of records that benefit the design of healthcare systems. There have been several studies done to use Blockchain technology as a mediation tool for sharing sensitive EMRs between multiple stakeholders in the e-health care system. However, these studies lack the requirement of patients to have full control over their EMR data. This work develops PACEX, PAtient-Centric EMR eXchange, that enables patients to share and have complete control over their data using Blockchain. In PACEX, we develop an easy-to-use patient application that interacts with different hospital systems and handles EMR exchanges with integrity. We developed a proof of concept implementation of PACEX using Ethereum Blockchain and Smart Contracts to achieve access control and maintain a history of record exchanges among different stakeholders. The evaluation results provide the quantitative analysis that gives time estimates for various transactions involved in PACEX and the qualitative analysis that describes the security properties of the system. PACEX achieves essential security requirements such as Authentication, Integrity, Access Control, and Traceability over the EMR data exchange.