Blockchains are distributed ledgers that use a tamper-sensitive, append-only data structure in conjunction with a consensus protocol to enable mutually distrusting parties to maintain a global set of states. A primary barrier to adoption of blockchain technology by industry is the current performance and scalability limitations of these systems, which lag far behind incumbent database systems. Of particular interest are “lottery-style” consensus algorithms, which are relatively scalable to many participants but suffer from low throughput (performance). Proof-of-Elapsed-Time (PoET) is one such algorithm with great promise for use in industry, though the parameters that govern its performance have not been well studied. This thesis explores, through simulation, key performance outcomes in PoET blockchain networks implemented with the Hyperledger Sawtooth framework. A better quantitative understanding of the interactions among these system parameters will be crucial for efficiently optimizing real world blockchain networks and facilitating adoption by industry.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an enabling technology for numerous initiatives worldwide such as manufacturing, smart cities, precision agriculture, and eHealth. The massive field data aggregation of distributed administered IoT devices allows new insights and actionable information for dynamic intelligent decision-making. In such distributed environments, data integrity, referring to reliability and consistency, is deemed insufficient and requires immediate facilitation. In this article, we introduce a distributed ledger (DLT)-based system for ensuring IoT data integrity which securely processes the aggregated field data. Its uniqueness lies in the embedded use of IOTA’s ledger, called “The Tangle”, used to transmit and store the data. Our approach shifts from a cloud-centric IoT system, where the Super nodes simply aggregate and push data to the cloud, to a node-centric system, where each Super node owns the data pushed in a distributed and decentralized database (i.e., the Tangle). The backend serves as a consumer of data and a provider of additional resources, such as administration panel, analytics, data marketplace, etc. The proposed implementation is highly modularand constitutes a significant contribution to the Open Source communities, regarding blockchain and IoT.
Wireless power transfer is a promising approach to charge low-power IoT devices for energy replenishment. However, energy attacks from malicious IoT devices can result in significant energy loss to energy transmitters. In this article, we propose a new distributed and secure wireless power transfer architecture by utilizing blockchain. The proposed architecture includes two planes: the energy plane and blockchain plane. We further abstract three types of traffic flows, transaction flow, consensus flow and coin flow, to provide a profound insight into the workflow of blockchain. Furthermore, to obtain the optimal amount of transferred energy in the energy plane, and to resolve high operational overhead of the consensus process in the blockchain plane, we develop a contract theory based wireless power transfer scheme and a DPoS based lightweight consensus scheme, and design an efficient wireless power transfer mechanism by combining the two schemes. Illustrative results demonstrate that our proposed schemes offer significant energy loss reduction with moderate operational overhead.
Machine learning and blockchain are two of the most notable technologies of recent years. The first is the foundation of artificial intelligence and big data analysis, and the second has significantly disrupted the financial industry. Both technologies are data‐driven, and thus there are rapidly growing interests in integrating both for more secure and efficient data sharing and analysis. In this article, we review existing research on combining machine learning and blockchain technologies and demonstrate that they can collaborate efficiently and effectively. In the end, we point out some future directions and expect more research on deeper integration of these two promising technologies.
Marcos Vinicius M. R. Souza, Hélio Crestana Guardia
Advances in ubiquitous computing and in the Internet of things (IoT) bring new challenges to access control systems, such as not having to rely on a centralized trusted party, and the ability to use contextual data. Such characteristics may be required to enable IoT services in smart homes and cities, and in electronic health systems. In these environments, service-based device to device interactions reinforce the need for flexible and scalable authenticity and confidentiality mechanisms. This work presents an access control model to address such challenges using a blockchain infrastructure. In the proposed model, services and contextual data are defined using smart contracts, and blockchain logs are used for reliable information management. Assets are associated with permissions, and their transfers prove access control rights in service invocation requests. A reference implementation on Hyperledger shows the viability of the model.
Xiaolong Xu, Yi Chen, Xuyun Zhang, Qingxiang Liu · 6 authors
Summary Edge computing (EC) emerges as a novel computing paradigm to offload computing tasks from user equipments (UEs) to edge notes (ENs) in fifth‐generation networks, which definitely breaks the resource limitation of UEs to a certain degree. However, it is troublesome to guarantee the overall operating performance of ENs due to the uneven distributed resource demands of UEs, the resulting transmission delay and the data loss for computation offloading between the covered EN and the deployed destination EN. In view of this challenge, a blockchain‐based computation offloading method, named BCO, is proposed in this paper. Technically, since blockchain is a promising technique for the decentralized system, a blockchain‐based EC framework is designed to degrade the data loss possibility by integrating blockchain and EC. Then, the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm, the third version (NSGA‐III), is leveraged to acquire the balanced offloading strategies. Furthermore, by taking advantage of Simple Additive Weighting and Multiple Criteria Decision Making, the optimal offloading strategy is identified. Finally, systematic experiments and analyses on the comparative experiment are conducted to verify the efficiency of our proposed method BCO.
Sep 9, 2019·Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers
Regulatory compliance is an essential exercise in the modern societies confirming safety and prevention of harm to consumers. Despite many efforts from international and national quality control authorities, transparency and accountability in regulatory compliance remain a challenging technical-legal problem sitting atop a heavy reliance on trust. This paper presents a theoretical model of regulatory compliance aiming at improving accountability for systems and data audit and introduces a higher degree of transparency in management and quality control. It explores the technical aspects of two emerging technologies the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain, and using a common use-case in practice shows how to better align these technologies with legal concerns and trust in regulatory compliance.
Sebastian Linsner, Franz Kuntke, Gina Maria Schmidbauer-Wolf, Christian Reuter
Digitalization, which proceeds in all branches, as well in agriculture, by using new technology, sensors and networking, requires responsible usage of data. One possibility to manage data and use them to create value is the blockchain-technology. It is primary enforced by the food industries and consumers to ensure traceability and transparency. To put blockchain-technology into beneficial use in agriculture, this domain has to be analyzed regarding social and business aspects. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study where 41 actors from the agricultural domain participated in focus groups and delivered a written statement. It was found that farmers are interested in adapting new markets and technologies early to get an economic advantage. On the other hand, the fear of losing traditional local business partners and the social surroundings of the farmers must be considered.
Blockchain is a technology that can ensure data integrity in a distributed network, and it is actively applied in various fields. Recently, blockchain is gaining attention due to combining with the Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the industrial field. Moreover, many researchers have proposed the Industrial IoT (IIoT) architecture with blockchain for data integrity and efficient management. The IIoT network consists of many heterogeneous devices (e.g., sensors, actuators, and programmable logic controllers (PLC)) with resources-constrained, and the availability of the network must be preferentially considered. Therefore, applying the existed blockchain technology is still challenging. There are some results about the technique of constructing blockchain lightly to solve this challenge. However, in these results, the analysis in perspective of cryptographic performance (area, throughput, and power consumption) has not been considered sufficiently, or only focused on the architecture of the blockchain network. The blockchain technology is based on cryptographic techniques, and the main part is a cryptographic hash function. Therefore, if we construct the blockchain-based IIoT architecture, we have to consider the performance of the hash function. Many lightweight hash functions have been proposed recently for the resource-constrained environment, and it can also be used to the blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the considerations of lightweight blockchain for IIoT. Also, we conduct an analysis of lightweight hash for blockchain, and propose a new lightweight hash-based blockchain architecture that can change the hash algorithm used for mining adjust to network traffic.
Blockchain technology has been increasingly used for decentralizing cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) architectures to address limitations faced by centralized systems. While many existing efforts are successful in decentralization with multiple servers (i.e., full nodes) to handle faulty nodes, an important issue has arisen that external clients have to rely on a relay node to communicate with the full nodes in the blockchain. Compromization of such relay nodes may result in a security breach and even a blockage of IoT sensors from the network. In this article, we propose blockchain-based decentralized IoT management systems for censorship resistance, which include a “diffusion” function to deliver all messages from sensors to all full nodes and an augmented consensus protocol to check data losses, replicate processing outcome, and facilitate opportunistic outcome delivery. We also leverage public key aggregation to reduce communication complexity and signature verification. The experimental results from proof-of-concept implementation and deployment in a real distributed environment show the feasibility and effectiveness in achieving censorship resistance.
Abstract Blockchain is a key technology that enables cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc. In recent years, researchers have ventured into tapping the potential of blockchain‐based ecosystems beyond cryptocurrencies. This paper explores the convergence of blockchain with the Internet of things (IoT) and its improved versions like software‐defined network (SDN)–based IoT, which are upcoming technologies in the area. This paper gives a brief description of the IoT and its challenges, especially the security aspects. It also discusses how blockchain concept can further resolve these challenges on the SDN‐based IoT platform. This paper first discussed the evolution of conventional IoT to the SDN‐based IoT, which can resolve many drawbacks of a conventional IoT system. Also, it is focused on how the concept of blockchain can be converged with SDN‐based IoT system to further improve its security aspects. Although the convergence of these different technologies has resulted into many advantages, many associated challenges still remain. This paper highlighted these challenges and opportunities to discover many other research issues that need to be resolved. The details of current literature on the same issue has also been highlighted in this paper.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) idea, regular gadgets end up savvy and self-governing. As we are seeing idea behind this is transforming into a realism on account of achievement in innovation, but we still face challenges, especially in some field like security e.g., information dependability. Taking account, the upcoming advancement in the field of IoT, it seems very important to give trust in the field of enormous approaching data foundation. Blockchain has given us the new way to share our data with others. Building such a trust in discrete condition with is term as the key factor of blockchain in which we don’t need any specialists is a hi-tech development that can possibly change numerous enterprises, the IoT among them. Troublesome advances, for example, IoT used enormous information and distributed to beat its restrictions, and we blockchain can be one of the accompanying ones. This paper centers around this correlation, explores difficulties in blockchain with IoT implementation, and reviews recent significant work so as to investigate about how the existing blockchain technology can change the way we work in IoT.
The security aspect of the IoT occupies a place of great importance especially after the evolution that has known this field lastly because it must take into account the transformations and the new applications .Blockchain is a new technology dedicated to the data sharing. However, this does not work the same way in the different systems with different operating principles. This article will discuss network security using the Blockchain to facilitate the sending of messages and information, enabling the use of new processes and enabling autonomous coordination of devices. To do this, we will discuss proposed solutions to ensure a high level of security in these networks in the work of other researchers. Finally, our article will propose a method of security more adapted to our needs as a team working in the ad hoc networks, this method is based on the principle of the Blockchain and that we named ”MPR Blockchain”.
Sri Nikhil Gupta Gourisetti, Michael Mylrea, Hirak Patangia
Blockchain technology has been gaining great interest from a variety of industry sectors, including financial, food processing, and power and energy markets. Realizing the strength of blockchain technology beyond the successful application in the cryptocurrency arena, researchers have been evaluating and using blockchain for applications such as supply chain management, transactive industry (both financial and energy), system integrity, device cybersecurity, identity management, and much more. One of the unique elements of the blockchain technology that made it such a captivating technology to researchers is its plethora of features. Some of the features include smart contracts, cryptocurrency and tokenizing, immutable distributed ledger, cryptographic hashing, and digital signature. In addition, there are multiple types of blockchains, such as permissioned/private and permissionless/public, and various consensus models, such as proof-of-work, proof-of-authority, proof-of-burn, and proof-of-stake. Therefore, it is often nontrivial to determine if an application requires a blockchain. If so, what kind of blockchain and consensus is most appropriate? This article discusses the blockchain applicability framework (BAF), which was specifically designed with the purpose to answer those questions. The BAF is divided into five domains, 18 subdomains, and about 100 controls. It is designed to ingest detailed user requirements to perform a weighted evaluation that is built on mathematical constructs to determine the ideal combination of blockchain that is appropriate for an application. Along with the core logical formulation of the BAF, this article depicts the efficacy of the BAF through two use cases.
R.L. Kashyap, Karishma Arora, Mohak Dwarkadhish Sharma, A. Aazam
Achieving good performance in terms of throughput and scalability, with high quality of security has always been a challenging problem in all sorts of scheduling. Permissioned blockchain allows multiple contracts of non-trusting peer organization to be deployed for working in consortium. It is the responsibility of the scheduler often called as an ordering service to form block of transactions to get committed through consensus. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is one of the most popular consensus algorithm used in current implementations of blockchain. Most consensus algorithms including PBFT follow FIFO scheduling strategy to create the block of transactions. With block chain being supported for multi-contract environment, scheduling should consider difference in service requirements specifically security requirement for heterogeneous contracts. The current work proposes SAGA-PBFT (Security-Aware Genetic Algorithm based Practical Byzantine fault Tolerance) scheduler, which uses multi objective genetic algorithm for balancing the security requirement and security overhead at the time of block creations. The algorithm assigns the security level to each transaction as per its security requirement but in an unpredictable manner making security attack difficult. It further uses security aware PBFT for consensus. Experimental simulation proves that SAGA-PBFT when compared with PBFT, achieves better commit time and scalability with best possible security.
Security is one of the most important issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). The Mirai botnet case in September 2016 revealed a serious vulnerability in IoT devices. Researchers try to mitigate the issues using several approaches. One of them uses Blockchain for the solution. At first, the integration of the Blockchain on IoT seems promising. However, there are problems in resource consumption and latency. Several solutions emerge to make Blockchain uses low resource consumption i.e., LSB and FogBus. Unfortunately, each solution has its weaknesses. FogBus has a weakness in integrity, whereas LSB has a weakness in its availability when an attack occurs on a broker. We introduce Lightweight Multi-Fog (LMF) Blockchain Model to increase availability in the LSB model. The main idea is increasing the integrity availability by splitting location based on Broadcast Domains while using Fog Computing on each Broadcast Domain. An attack in some Broadcast Domain cannot impact transactions and process in other Broadcast Domain and each Broadcast Domain have its separate transaction and process. LMF enhances the integrity and availability of the Light Blockchain Model. However, it still requires simulations in the future to get a better understanding of LMF performance, resource consumption, and latency.
Gabriel Tudor, Andrei Cornel-Cristian, Madalina Arhip-Calin, Alexandru Zamfirescu
The introduction of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) have caused a series of challenges from an engineering perspective mostly due to their unpredictable nature. In order to consolidate, improve production of energy, transmission and distribution, the traditional power system has evolved from a monolithic architecture to a decentralized architecture. It's not uncommon for Decentralized Control Systems also known as Distributed Control Systems (DCS) to process data locally close to the area where it's generated using edge computing. This paper aims to study Blockchain technology, the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a decentralized solution using Blockchain in an increasingly evolving Cloud and IOT markets.