In any registration process, it is a hassle to always bring physical documents. Not only that, the process is elongated if they are lost, and will contribute to identity theft if unauthorized persons have access to those documents. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to generate a decentralized system, similar to the concept of blockchain, to allow registered persons to access user’s personal records. To further elaborate, this system is designed to be used by three consumers, which are: user, authority, and third-party (requester). Nowadays, majority of systems are susceptible to massive data breaches. However, some researches have theorized that blockchain technology may solve this problem, such as one that uses a real-world example, Aadhaar. In conclusion, this project enhances that the area of blockchain identity is vital in helping society gain control of their personal details. Since most of researches are focused on storage system of businesses using blockchain, personal identities of the people should be digitized on the blockchain as well. An identity verification system that is entirely owned by the individual will increase trust that the data is genuine and reliable.
By the emergence of many intelligent application areas that can be diversified, such as homes and cities being smarter, creates new opportunities. It is clear that the Internet of Things (IoT) will be a large network with a growing number of connected devices at as a logarithmic speed in the coming years. IoT devices are embedded system elements that range from simple to complex. Typically, these IoT devices are more vulnerable to attack than other IoT endpoint devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, or servers, because they are limited in processing, storing, and networking capacity for information. Blockchain is a distributed, encrypted, immutable, and low-tolerance distributed ledger application. It is increasingly used in areas where data security is important. In this study, it is aimed to use IoT devices as blockchain elements as a solution to existing IoT security problems. A blockchain network was created by using Raspberry Pi 3 elements.
Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed public ledgers which holds sensitive and invariant data in an encrypted and secured manner to ensure no mid-way alterations are possible in a transaction, proving user a secure and trustable facility. While cryptocurrency like Bitcoin are major and most popular faces, Blockchain technology has gained a huge momentum recently. Objective of this paper is to layout a detailed survey on blockchain technology, to explain some important terminologies related to Blockchain, to compare IoT and traditional network on the basis of security, compatibility and capacity and to provide an insight on blockchain based IoT and Industrial IoT. Later, the challenges faced while adopting blockchain in IoT and it's future scopes are discussed.
Christos Profentzas, Magnus Almgren, Olaf Landsiedel
For any distributed system, and especially for the Internet of Things, recording interactions between devices is essential. At first glance, blockchains seem to be suitable for storing these interactions, as they allow multiple parties to share a distributed ledger. However, at a closer look, blockchains require heavy computations, large memory capacity, and always-on communication to the cloud; these are three properties that are challenging for IoT devices with limited resources. In this paper, we present IoTLogBlock to address these challenges. IoTLogBlock connects resource-constrained IoT devices to the blockchain, and it consists of three building blocks jointly enabling recording transactions: a lightweight contract signing protocol, a blockchain network, and a smart contract. The contract signing protocol allows devices to interact locally to perform transactions, even if no communication to the cloud and the blockchain exists at that moment. At a later time, devices forward the stored transactions to the blockchain, where a smart contract ultimately verifies the transactions. We evaluate our design on low-power devices and quantify the performance in terms of memory, computation, and energy consumption. Our results show that a constrained device can create and sign a transaction within 3 s on average. Finally, we expose the devices to network scenarios with edge connections ranging from 10 s to over 2 h.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have improved many aspects of healthcare and allowed for easier patient management for medical providers. Blockchains have been proposed as a promising solution for supporting Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but have also been linked to scalability concerns about supporting real-world healthcare systems. This paper quantifies the scalability issues and bottlenecks related to current blockchains and puts into perspective the limitations blockchains have with supporting healthcare systems. Particularly we show that well known blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and IOTA cannot support transactions of a large scale hospital system such as the University of Kentucky HealthCare system and leave over 7.5M unsealed transactions per day. We then discuss how bottlenecks of blockchains can be relieved with sidechains, enabling well-known blockchains to support even larger hospital systems of over 30M transactions per day. We then introduce the Patient-Healthchain architecture to provide future direction on how scaling blockchains for EHR systems with sidechains can be achieved.
There has been increasing interest in connecting disjointed Electronic Medical Records, mobile health data, and related health data systems for the purpose of improving preventative and precision medicine, while also providing individuals with greater access and control to their data. Blockchains provide data transparency, immutability, and decentralized trust - making them a promising solution to the interoperability and security issues faced by such health data systems. Several papers have proposed the use of blockchain technology in healthcare to determine its viability as a solution and to identify potential applications and challenges. We build upon their work by 1) presenting implementation details related to blockchain applications in health data systems, 2) discussing the security, privacy, and performance trade-offs of each, and 3) identifying a set of research questions regarding the use of blockchain technology in health data systems. We find that blockchain-based healthcare research should place greater emphasis on real-world deployments and testing, smart-contract security, efficient and usable audit tools, blockchain governance, and adherence to healthcare data regulations and standards.
Lucas de Camargo Silva, Mayra Samaniego, Ralph Deters
Community-based online platforms for hospitality services have connected hosts and guests globally. With the increasing popularity of those platforms - e.g., Airbnb - some management issues have attracted the attention of researchers - for instance, granting access to properties and rooms remotely, without requiring hosts and guests to meet in person. Solutions have been proposed - e.g., locks with pin pad and vendor centralized smart locks - but they usually have shortcomings that compromise either security, privacy, or convenience. This research designs and proposes a blockchain-based system for smart door locks to provide the convenience of remote access control management, while security and privacy for both hosts and guests are not compromised. Moreover, to surpass current locks' functionalities, this research proposes a feature that enables the guests to cease the hosts' access to the lock, during their stay. This feature also guarantees to the guest that no one will be able to change that access rule without their explicit approval. The proposed solution integrates Ethereum blockchain as the foundation of the system and uses Infura API as the bridge to connect the IoT infrastructure to the blockchain network. Such architecture alleviates hardware demand from the equipment, which can favor the use of resource-constrained IoT devices. Once Ethereum is used to build the solution, and users are charged fees to perform some actions in the blockchain, the system is evaluated concerning operation costs. Three Ethereum test networks - Ganache, Ropsten, and Rinkeby - were used to run the smart contract and assess the charge to complete significant actions in the system. The results show that the cost to use the smart lock is low, especially if the benefits of security, privacy, and convenience are taken into consideration. Most of the actions yielded fees about cents of a US dollar, where the exception is a one-time payment of USD3.83 - worst-case scenario - to deploy the smart contract - i.e., setup the system.
Fernando Richter Vidal, Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia, Christophe Soares
The authenticity of academic diplomas is a matter of great concern for employers and other authorities to verify the authenticity of academic degrees. The issuing institutions may have closed or fail to keep accurate records. In these situations, the verification of academic diplomas launches challenges. In a worldwide education market, many institutions are involved, and it becomes even harder to keep track and handle different approaches/procedures to verify the status and authenticity of diplomas. As in many other areas, the blockchain technology surges as a promising solution to the referred problem. In this paper, we propose an approach using this technology implemented in University Fernando Pessoa. We also discuss the new challenges in security and implementation raised by the usage of this technology.
Wireless network virtualization is regarded as a technology to enable sharing of physical wireless infrastructure and RF slices for improving not only wireless network capacity and coverage but also wireless security. This article provides a perspective of fusion of three emerging technologies: SDN, EC, and blockchain technology for wireless network virtualization. SDN, with the help of controllers, allows dynamic configuration of network resources for their efficient management. EC not only helps to process user signals and queries at respective base stations with the shortest possible delay, but also helps to avoid the need of a high-speed backhaul link between a base station and centralized controllers. Blockchain technology protects owners of wireless infrastructures from a double spending attack that allocates the same wireless resource (RF slice) to multiple virtual wireless networks. The proposed approach aims to reduce business friction and increase the trust and transparency in the wireless networking industry.
Adrian Spătaru, Laura Ricci, Dana Petcu, Barbara Guidi
The applications of Blockchain and Smart Contracts cover all aspects of digital information processing, varying from Asset Management platforms to Online Shops and Digital Identity Management. Several start-up companies and fellow researchers are interested in creating decentralized Clouds using the Blockchain as the mechanism for synchronization, identity management, and payment. This paper presents a conceptual platform exploiting Ethereum Smart Contracts to handle resource scheduling for Cloud Applications, investigates the operational constraints and measures the cost and latency for three scheduling strategies. In addition, it presents the constraints under which instances can be terminated asynchronously, which increases the cost of the transaction. The minimum cost for executing an application is similar to paying 12 hours for a standard Virtual Machine in today's Clouds if the Smart Contracts are deployed on the Ethereum Network, which limits the interest of users with short running applications.
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become an essential part in smart transportation systems of modern cities. However, because of dynamicity and infrastructure-less of VANETs, the ever increasing number of network security issues become obstacles for the realization of smart cities. Software-defined VANETs have provided a reliable way to manage VANETs dynamically and securely. However, the traditionally centralized control plane makes it vulnerable to malicious nodes and results in performance degradation. Therefore, a distributed control plane is necessary. How to reach a consensus among multiple controllers under complex vehicular environment is an essential problem. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based distributed software-defined VANET framework (block-SDV) to establish a secure architecture to overcome the above issues. The trust features of blockchain nodes, the number of consensus nodes, trust features of each vehicle, and the computational capability of the blockchain are considered in a joint optimization problem, which is modeled as a Markov decision process with state space, action space and reward function. Since it is difficult to be solved by traditional methods, we propose a novel dueling deep Q-learning (DDQL) with prioritized experience replay approach. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed block-SDV framework.
Blockchain is the backbone technology behind crypto-currency and Bitcoin. By concept, Blockchain is a distributed database where transactions are recorded in an incorruptible and non-modifiable manner. Currently, Blockchain technology is envisioned as a powerful framework for open-access networks, decentralized information processing and sharing systems, etc. This review is motivated due to the lack of an extensive survey on the existing decentralized consensus mechanisms in Blockchain technology. So in this paper, an in-depth review of the distributed consensus mechanisms has been presented. In addition to this, a comparative analysis of the consensus protocols based on the type of Blockchain is also demonstrated.
Internet of things (IoT), mobile edge computing (MEC), and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) have attracted significant attention in both industry and academic research. By consolidating these technologies, IoT can be facilitated with improved connectivity, better data transmission, energy saving, and other advantages. However, the communication between these entities is subject to potential cyber threats. In addition, the integrity of the data must be maintained after storing into local storage. Blockchain is a data structure that supports features like pseudonymity, data integrity etc. This paper represents a blockchain based data acquisition process in which information is gathered from IoTs using UAV as a relay and is securely kept in blockchain at MEC server. In the proposed scheme, data are encrypted prior to transfer to MEC server with the assistance of a UAV. Upon receiving the data, MEC server validates the data and the identity of the sender. Successful validation is followed by stocking of the data into blockchain, subsequent to obtaining consent from the validators. Security analysis is conducted in order to show the feasibility of the proposed secure scheme. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed via simulation and implementation.
Blockchain has been receiving considerable attention from the research community lately. Several research efforts have proposed the use of blockchain in many application domains. Not all of these application areas have received the same level of blockchain attention however and, for some of the applications, blockchain investigation has even stopped. Blockchain has the ability to shape the future, but not in all applications and topics. We explored those application areas that have not received much blockchain attention so that we can focus more on the application domains that have strong potential to reach the customer and have a high impact on the market. Based on our quantitative evaluation of blockchain applications and topics, we recommend those that need further investigation and implementation.
Hasan Al-Sakran, Yaser Alharbi, Irina Serguievskaia
The botnet problem of launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on other networks mainly arises from the rapid growth in the number of insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices distributed across these networks. The focus of this work is to defend such an IoT network and its associated resources from attacks, and to prevent such networks from becoming a part of botnet launching DDoS attacks on other networks and resources. To achieve these objectives, this research emphases designing of a botnet prevention model for Internet of Things using emerging technologies such as Blockchain, Smart Contract, and Software Defined Networking (SDN). Blockchain is decentralized structure which fits with the decentralized nature of IoT. For securing IoT network, the proposed solution presented in this research based on building above the IoT network a Blockchain network and on top of it to use Smart Contracts that embedded the SDN rules.
Technology always bring opportunities to business process to evolve. This paper aims to approach blockchain technology using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Hyperledger composer is one of the tools to make blockchain. Our study includes three Hyperledger composer concepts (assets, participants and transactions) and smart contract concept. This paper elaborates our past work on microservices in reservation-based parking system as our case study and focus in mapping BPMN to the three Hyperledger composer concepts mentioned above. Our finding includes identification of assets, participants and transactions with smart contract incorporation in our case study. The results also show BPMN pools and tasks changes. We present these changes in comparison table and revised BPMN diagram.
Jesús Máximo Montes DÃaz, Cecilia E. RamÃrez, Manuel Coronado Gutierrez, VÃctor M. Larios
In Smart Cities, an era of technology and on-demand offerings, being able to have a signed contract in the least amount of time possible can significantly benefit business operations. This project focuses on the Document of Understanding (DOU) contract oriented to supply chain operations, which forms the basis for the relationship between a consumer service and the provider of that service. The sign off of this process is currently too long; opening an opportunity to apply Blockchain as a solution. For this task, we have used local resources, applying design thinking and agile practices to create a local Blockchain Ledger. Consequently, we created a proof of concept Blockchain demo, which holds the complete detailed history of the agreement, with immutable transactions and transparency, adding security and privacy of the participant's information. With this demo, we registered the time needed to have the DOU contract signed off by everyone involved in the process, and it was drastically improved. The innovative contribution of this project is the application of Blockchain to our business activities, improving business operations, and giving us a real-time view of all the information. As a result, when combining our work methods with the latest technology, we have all-around improvements in business operations. Now with a successful trial run of the application, we can confidently apply smart contracts in day to day activities in a Smart City; it can be replicated in other areas that manage sensitive information and financial reports.
Chol Hyun Park, Ivanrey Mejia Barlongo, Yoohwan Kim
In the recent decade, self-consumption and local renewable energy communities are growing, especially in California, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. In these communities, approximately twenty percent of electricity comes from solar generation. However, what happens if a household generates more than what they consume? In most cases, the excess energy would go back to the grid with little to no compensation given by the energy utility. In today's market, there are countless homeowners who would like to profit from their own PV system. Unfortunately, there is no energy marketplace that would allow homeowners to sell or purchase energy to and from their neighbors. Luckily with blockchain, this idea becomes a reality. With the use of distributed ledger technology, it is possible to perform energy transactions in near-real time from a prosumer to consumer without the need of a central authority. Our thesis suggests ways to handle the facilitation of energy transactions using an Ethereum blockchain system in an effortless and efficient way.
Distributed Ledger Technology promises to solve multiple problems emergent of existing IT solutions and business processes on the intersection of trust, privacy, security, automation, authentication and authorization. However, multiple obstacles restrict the potential of the technology, specifically production-related challenges in the enterprise-centric ecosystem. The paper provides a holistic view of the top production readiness challenges of the decentralized application (dApp) for enterprise along with alternative solutions. We propose a novel approach to identify challenges and rank them. The identified challenges and possible solutions provide a baseline assessment. We present a novel, reusable, and extensible framework to help the system engineering teams to assess the challenges towards production readiness. We expect this study to benefit the DLT community to enhance the understanding of challenges and potential research areas for contribution.
Mohammad El-Hajj, Ahmad Fadlallah, Maroun Chamoun, Ahmed Serhrouchni
Enterprises are no doubt interested in reaching data collected from billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices which opens a huge potential business. The main concern remains the security challenges from the distribution of key while using public key cryptography. To ensure that IOT connected devices can be trusted to be what they are supposed to be, robust IoT device authentication is mandated. Each IoT device therefore requires a unique identity which can be verified when the device tries to link to an intermediate device. One of the early solutions used to secure data transmission among parties in public networks is the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) which is used to distribute and manage public keys (digital certificates) among different parties and these certificates are generated upon request by Certificate Authorities (CA). Nevertheless, for billions of devices connected to IoT and mobile phones, the distribution management of certificates for each client proved to be inefficient. In this research, we propose a decentralized authentication platform based on PKI and Ethereum Blockchain. The public key certificates are stored in a decentralized fashion and the private keys are stored inside the devices themselves. It also includes a protocol for Pre-Shared Keys (PSK) distribution. PSK keys are then used by PSK-based security protocols for securing the communication channel between two devices. This platform includes a client-side module, a server-side Wallet Management Function, and a smart contract deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain network. This platform can be used by applications for end devices and/or intermediate devices authentication and a secure Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication. The proposed platform is validated by the implementation of a Secure Session Establishment between IoT devices. Results show that the solution implementation has minimal impact on the existing networks, and the secure session setup time between two devices is negligible compared to the existing security methods. Eventually, this scheme can help removing the trust requirement placed on clients by the current PKI/CAs infrastructure.
Bhabendu Kumar Mohanta, Anisha Sahoo, Shibasis Patel, Soumyashree S. Panda · 6 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) has lots of attention in the last decade. The connected IoT devices are more than the total world population. Due to its low cost, easy to deploy, and simple to implement, application areas are large like smart city, smart home, smart transportation, environment monitoring, agriculture and many more. There exists some security and privacy challenges in IoT system. The device identification is one of the challenges in any IoT application. Authentication is one of the processes to identify the device. Though some work has been done on this problem, most of these are using a centralized system. In this paper, we have proposed a distributed authentication system using the Blockchain technology The implementation of the proposed authentication is done on Ethereum platform for its better results in order to justify it as a superior scheme.
Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that have been attracting significant attention from diverse application domains ranging from smart homes, smart cities to smart healthcare and manufacturing. Especially in smart city context, IoT devices play a significant role since the city of the future is an interconnected one, where distributed devices communicate with one another, constantly exchanging streams of real time data. However, the fundamental challenge on deploying such technology is the inherent limitations on IoT device's computational power, network connectivity, energy consumption, which in turn hinders secure deployment. The introduction of Blockchain technology for digital cash offers a promising data security scheme for IoT applications in trust-less environments. Blockchain promises an elegant approach for secure information dissemination, machine-to-machine micro-transactions, and access control in a smart city context for IoT devices. However, the computational and storage requirements for original Blockchain model presents difficulties for IoT deployment. In this paper, we propose an experimental lightweight distributed ledger for IoT devices, TangoChain, utilizing a directed acyclic graph as underlying ledger data structure. We discuss the rationale behind our design approach, then present our in-progress proof-ofconcept prototype implementation details, and highlight the potentials for secure IoT device deployments in a smart city context.
Block chain being a foundational technology impacting and attracting a wide range of applications has become predominant in solving the problem of privacy preserving and security in multitude sectors that is under the control of the government and the private. The paper also presents the security and the privacy mechanism using the block chain to prevent the misuse and the corruption in the sharing of huge set of data generated from the judiciary, security, legislature, commercial code registries etc. The proposed system enables reliability and the trust in the data sharing in the communication channels utilizing the block chain with the RSA digital signature. The proposed system is simulated as a java programming version to evince the enhancement in the latency in the sharing of the information's along with the privacy and the security
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques