George Suciu, Mari-Anais Sachian, Marius Dobrea, Cristiana-Ioana Istrate · 7 authors
This paper presents how a Smart Grid system is secured and how blockchain implementation provides confidentiality and integrity for such a system. One main issue that has to be addressed in smart grid systems is databases security. Blockchain has been proven to be a safe alternative to be used in mining systems because it allows a secure applicability in databases. Another important feature is that each hash in a crypto mining system cannot be changed if it has such an algorithm behind its build, thus resulting in a secure and reliable system. This paper aims to show how blockchain can affect and be used in a smart power management system going forth from the SealedGRID platform. This system enables the user to monitor in real time the power usage in a smart grid system, therefore, this platform being built with security and resilience against attacks in mind.
Blockchain is the most popular security network technology in the 21stcentury and still under active research. The consensus algorithms in Blockchain plays a major role and are crucial for maintaining the integrity and security of a distributed network. In addition, there are various problems arising from the consensus algorithms adopted in the existing Blockchain network. Therefore, it is of upmost importance to develop a consensus algorithm to address these problems. In this paper, therefore, we propose an efficient consensus algorithm in a Blockchain network environment consisting of several distributed users. First, we study the process of consensus among users to add new blocks to the existing Blockchain. Second, we introduce the other conventional consensus algorithms, analyze the problems of each algorithm, and propose Rock-Scissors-Paper (RSP) algorithm to mitigate these problems. The RSP algorithm is an algorithm that achieves consensus among distributed users using three static balanced variables, Rock (R), Scissors (S), and Paper (P) to avoid attacks by malicious participants. Furthermore, the propose RSP algorithm is compared with the existing consensus algorithms to predict the performance and its effects in a distributed mobile network environment.
Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is referred exclusively to smart and cheap sensor based devices lying on top of machines or machine parts, to collect and process massive raw data and therefore to make intelligent decisions autonomously, without human intervention, according to the Industry 4.0 requirements. However, there are still challenges to address, such as the massive amount of data generated in high speeds and the fast processing requirements and also challenges in the security domain, such as data integrity and ID authentication. Currently decentralized IoT/Fog network architectures would come in handy, in order to release data processing “burden” from isolated Cloud servers. On the other hand, Blockchain has emerged as a key technology for handling manufacturing, raw or processed data, in safety and security environment, while distributing it to the physical world, consisting of heterogeneous entities, such as manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, logistics agents or simple clients, thus reinforcing the IT and automation potentials of product supply chain. In this paper we propose an abstraction layer architecture that solves all that issues. On the one hand, there is a decentralized IOT/Fog and cloud framework for real time machine condition monitoring (MCM) and fault prediction, where computational demanding tasks are distributed across fog nodes and decision fusion rules are set and controlled by the Cloud. On the other hand, a peer to peer Blockchain ledger is also proposed for integrating the IOT/Fog, MCM network architecture along with other entities of the physical world, making supply chain network more efficient and intelligent. The proposed generic architecture can be applied to other application areas as well.
The main purpose behind Internet of Things (IoT) is to extract extensive economic as well as other benefits and to alter day to day life of human being. but along with so many benefits IoT has a major disadvantage that it is considered to be an unreliable platform. However, in recent times block has received a enormous attention. One of the key features of blockchain is that it is a distributed and tamper- resistant ledger which holds a congruous record of data at distinct levels as a result of which it helps in overcoming the security issues in IoT networks. Applications based on blockchain are emerging, covering a number of platforms. However, blockchain is still facing a number of obstructions in its way which need to be solved. In this paper a review based on blockchain technology has been presented focusing on the characteristics, architecture and application areas of blockchain technology. The paper also highlights the advancements in various consensus algorithms and the challenges faced in implementing blockchain in the IoT domain. Finally the paper addresses several open research directions in the related field.
With the fast-growing demands for efficient and scalable content distribution, information-centric networking (ICN) can be a promising candidate for future networks. ICN promises direct retrieval of the content using its unique, persistent, and location-independent name. In ICN, all nodes work together to scale up content delivery, but security issues caused by malicious behaviors of ICN nodes cannot be avoided. To this end, in this article we develop a trust-enhanced blockchain based ICN (BICN) architecture for content delivery. In our proposed architecture, the whole process of content delivery is first traced in an implicitly trusted way by exploiting the excellent properties of the blockchain, so that the malicious ICN nodes can be located. Second, we leverage transactions to record the mapping between human-readable name and self-certifying name in BICN, which supports convenient and trusted alteration for users' requirements. Moreover, we present a case study in BICN based smart grid for energy data delivery, where we perform security analysis and conduct experiments. Numerical results show the superior performance of our proposal. Finally, we present open issues for future work.
Liviu Hirtan, Piotr Krawiec, Ciprian Dobre, Jordi Mongay Batalla
Blockchain is a technology that offers the ability to create new business models and solves trust issues in a more efficient way. It can lead to many research opportunities and business innovations. Academia and industry proposed many blockchain based software solutions within a wide range of domains. In this paper we present a system design where blockchain technology is proposed to be used in the healthcare system, where the vital information regarding the medical analyses are shared between hospitals, medical clinics and research institutes based on access policies defined by the patients. In order to protect confidential data, our solution involves the use of two types of chains: a private one, the sidechain, which keeps information about real ID of the patients, and a public one, the mainchain, which stores information about patients' health data marked with a temporary ID. To test it, we developed the design using Hyperledger Fabric framework. Presented experimental results show good performance of the system in relation to the following metrics: 1) the time needed to identify the medical data for a particular patient, and 2) the mainchain propagation time of all the blocks within the peer to peer network.
Sachin Sharma, Kamal Kumar Ghanshala, Seshadri Mohan
With the transformation of connected vehicles into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the time is now ripe for paving the way for the next generation of connected vehicles with novel applications and innovative security measures. The connected vehicles are experiencing prenominal growth in the auto industry, but are still studded with many security and privacy vulnerabilities. Today's IoV applications are part of cyber physical communication systems that collect useful information from thousands of smart sensors associated with the connected vehicles. The technology advancement has paved the way for connected vehicles to share significant information among drivers, auto manufacturers, auto insurance companies and operational and maintenance service providers for various applications. The critical issues in engineering the IoV applications are effective to use of the available spectrum and effective allocation of good channels an opportunistic manner to establish connectivity among vehicles, and the effective utilization of the infrastructure under various traffic conditions. Security and privacy in information sharing are the main concerns in a connected vehicle communication network. Blockchain technology facilitates secured communication among users in a connected vehicles network. Originally, blockchain technology was developed and employed with the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, to provide increased trust, reliability, and security among users based on peer-to-peer networks for transaction sharing. In this paper, we propose to integrate blockchain technology into ad hoc vehicular networking so that the vehicles can share network resources with increased trust, reliability, and security using distributed access control system and can benefit a wider scope of scalable IoV applications scenarios for decision making. The proposed architecture is the faithful environment for information sharing among connected vehicles. Blockchain technology allows multiple copies of data storage at the distribution cloud. Distributed access control system is significantly more secure than a traditional centralized system. This paper also describes how important of ad hoc vehicular networking in human life, possibilities in real-world implementation and its future trends. The ad hoc vehicular networking may become one of the most trendy networking concepts in the future that has the perspective to bring out much ease human beneficial and secured applications.
Recently, special attention has been brought to blockchain-based platforms for the development of decentralized Smart Grid applications. The scope of this paper is first to review the state-of-the-art assessing the effectiveness of applying blockchain as a vehicle for the decentralization of the energy market and afterwards, to design a simplified decentralized transactive application and investigate its applicability through simulations, focusing on the Ethereum blockchain protocol. The results support the applicability of blockchain in automating electricity supply contracting under the concept of decentralized markets.
This research tries to prove low-cost computer devices such as mini-computers can be used in the development of blockchain technology. Mini-computer technology is used because of many problems that occur due to the use of hardware resources that are discussed large, specifically in the pharmaceutical industry in the process drug makers, packing drugs (drug packaging identities), checking drugs, installations (printing drug identities), and this use to label drug to read posts on drug strips, to make the products used by customers better. This study uses an experimental design. Experiments were carried out with devices to use and blockchain technology. The device used is a Raspberry Pi mini-computer, and blockchain technology is the Ethereum platform. The results of this study indicate the installation process until the blockchain system can run. The results show that the raspberry pi device can be implemented with Ethereum blockchain technology correctly and adequately.
To build a large-scale distributed Internet of Things (IoT), a feasible prototype for Internet of Everything, blockchain can provide strong support with its excellent characteristics such as traceability and openness. Despite that the blockchain technology ideally enhances the reliability and security of IoT systems, emerging new security challenges remain to be resolved. This article details the security vulnerabilities in the convergence of blockchain and IoT as well as corresponding feasible solutions.
Fereidoun Moradi, Ali Sedaghatbaf, Sara Abbaspour Asadollah, Aida Čaušević · 5 authors
There is a growing interest in using the Blockchain for resolving IoT security and trustworthiness issues existing in today's complex systems. Blockchain concerns trust in peer to peer networks by providing a distributed tamper-resistant ledger. However, the combination of these two emerging technologies might create new problems and vulnerabilities that attackers might abuse. In this paper, we aim to investigate the trust mechanism of Lightweight Scalable BlockChain (LSB), that is a Blockchain specifically designed for Internet of Things networks, to show that a malicious participant in a Blockchain architecture have possibility to pursue an On-Off attack and downgrade the integrity of the distributed ledger. We choose a remote software update process as an instance to represent this violation. Finally, using the actor-based language Rebeca, we provide a model of a system under attack and verify the described attack scenario.
A technology that has shifted the entire paradigm of computer applications during the last decade is undoubtedly, the Blockchain technology. The purpose of inventing Blockchain was to develop a technology in which data is immutable, confidential and located on a de-centralized network. This technology was first used to build a cryptocurrency application, which is just one of many applications developed using Blockchain technology. Since, most of the emphasis has been on the money and finance related services, now the vertical industries have also started to implement Blockchain. This study contributes to review the opportunities of using Blockchain technology in vertical industries.
Andrea Bracciali, Ioannis Chatzigiannakis, Andrea Vitaletti, Marco Zecchini
Smart cities leverage Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to enhance the quality of urban services. However, it is nowadays clear that the success of a smart city largely depends on the level of engagement of its citizens. In this paper we explore to what extent disruptive blockchain technologies can be used to incentivise the democratic participation of citizen. The investigated approach extends the standard IoT cycle 1) sense data, 2) cloudify and elaborate them, and 3) push information to the users. Here, the user takes an active role by means of data-informed votes on policies, therefore influencing behaviours. We illustrate such an approach by means of a proof-of-concept decentralised application (dApp) supporting the negotiation of polices for the management of urban water resources. The dApp consists of a smart contract that manages the execution of other smart contracts (the policies) according to the data-driven choices of the community. This use case demonstrates how suitably blockchain technologies can support fair and safe access to data and user engagement in smart cities.
In the past few years, blockchain thechnologies have sparked a lot of interest in the scientific and businness communities. The working Bitcoin blockchain has spawned a number of scientific research on the technology, security and reliability of the model. It managed to generate a new kind of economy with a market cap of around $ 300 billion at its peak. This article aims to elaborate on the development of blockchain technologies, to discuss the main problems, as well as to show various solutions.
The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose a lightweight consensus for this architecture, called LC4IoT. The consensus is evaluated through extensive simulations. The results show that the proposed consensus uses low computational power, storage capability and latency.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Edge intelligence is a key enabler for IIoT as it offers smart cloud services in close proximity to the production environment with low latency and less cost. The need for ubiquitous communication, computing, and caching resources in 5G beyond will lead to a growing demand to integrate heterogeneous resources into the edge network. Furthermore, distributed edge services can make resource transactions vulnerable to malicious nodes. Ensuring secure edge services under complex industrial networks is a big challenge. In this article, we present an edge intelligence and blockchain empowered IIoT framework, which achieves flexible and secure edge service management. Then we propose a cross-domain sharing inspired edge resource scheduling scheme and design a credit-differentiated edge transaction approval mechanism. Numerical results indicate that the proposed schemes bring significant improvement in both edge service cost and service capacities.
Junfeng Xie, F. Richard Yu, Tao Huang, Renchao Xie · 6 authors
In the past decade, crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin have developed rapidly. Blockchain as the underlying technology of these digital crypto-currencies has attracted great attention from academia and industry. Blockchain has many good features, such as trust-free, transparency, anonymity, democracy, automation, decentralization and security. Despite these promising features, scalability is still a key barrier when the blockchain technology is widely used in real business environments. In this article, we focus on the scalability issue, and provide a brief survey of recent studies on scalable blockchain systems. We first discuss the scalability issue from the perspectives of throughput, storage and networking. Then, existing enabling technologies for scalable blockchain systems are presented. We also discuss some research challenges and future research directions for scalable blockchain systems.
Increased penetration of Renewable Energy Sources(RES) and ever expanding global energy demands push forward the need of efficient utilization of RES by incorporating the prosumers (who are able to inject produced renewable energy) into the energy infrastructure.Moreover, there is emerging demand of the prosumers to participate in the electricity market and monetise their contributions.In order to facilitate these demands, the traditional centralised architectures are no longer viable therefore a decentralised transactive energy system enabling peer to peer energy trading, should be adopted.In this context, Blockchain based decentralised ledger technology emerges as the most viable solution which offers peer to peer energy trading platform providing a unique distributed local energy market model(LEM) for beneficial energy exchanges among participants which represents evolution for future smart grids.This thesis provides comprehensive review of the fundamental characteristics of the blockchain technology and its promising solutions for the energy industry.P2P energy trading, one of the use case of blockchain in energy sector has been focused and explored by thoroughly reviewing various initiatives, research and pilot projects that are currently working in that area.Moreover potential challenges pertaining to this blockchain based application are also evaluated.Based on the extensive research and literature review, a simple model of blockchain based peer to peer energy trade using IoT devices has been developed.Hence, this thesis provides all the necessary technical details and steps required to build the simple model of blockchain application for energy transactions.
Over the last decade, blockchain technology has emerged to provide solutions to the complexity and privacy challenges of using distributed databases. It reduces cost for customers by eliminating intermediaries and builds trust in peer-to-peer communications. Over this time, the concept of blockchain has shifted greatly due to its potential in business growth for enterprises and the rapidly evolving applications in a collaborative smart-city ecosystem, healthcare, and governance. Many platforms, with different architectures and consensus protocols, have been introduced. Consequently, it becomes challenging for an application developer to choose the right platform. Furthermore, blockchain has misaligned with the goals for an efficient green collaborative digital ecosystem. Therefore, it becomes critical to address this gap and to build new frameworks to align blockchain with those goals. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of blockchain architecture and consensus protocols, bringing a retrospective analysis and discussing the rationale of the evolution of the various architectures and protocols, as well as capturing the assumptions conducive to their development and contributions to building collaborative applications. We introduce a classification of those architectures helping developers to choose a suitable platform for applications and providing insights for future research directions in the field to build new frameworks.
As the great prevalence of various Internet of Things (IoT) terminals, how to solve the problem of isolated information among different IoT platforms attracts attention from both academia and industry. It is necessary to establish a trusted access system to achieve secure authentication and collaborative sharing. Therefore, this article proposes a distributed and trusted authentication system based on blockchain and edge computing, aiming to improve authentication efficiency. This system consists of physical network layer, blockchain edge layer and blockchain network layer. Through the blockchain network, an optimized practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus algorithm is designed to construct a consortium blockchain for storing authentication data and logs. It guarantees trusted authentication and achieves activity traceability of terminals. Furthermore, edge computing is applied in blockchain edge nodes, to provide name resolution and edge authentication service based on smart contracts. Meanwhile, an asymmetric cryptography is designed, to prevent connection between nodes and terminals from being attacked. And a caching strategy based on edge computing is proposed to improve hit ratio. Our proposed authentication mechanism is evaluated with respect to communication and computation costs. Simulation results show that the caching strategy outperforms existing edge computing strategies by 6%-12% in terms of average delay, and 8%-14% in hit ratio.
Blockchain is a digital, distributed, and decentralized network to store information in a tamper-proof way with an automated way to enforce trust among different participants. An open distributed ledger can record all transactions between different parties efficiently in a verifiable and permanent way. It captures and builds consensus among participants in the network. Each block is uniquely connected to the previous blocks via a digital signature which means that making a change to a record without disturbing the previous records in the chain is not possible, thus rendering the information tamper-proof. Blockchain holds the potential to disrupt any form of transaction that requires information to be trusted. This means that all intermediaries of trust, as they exist today, exposed to disruption in some form with the initiation of Blockchain technology. Blockchain works by validating transactions through a distributed network in order to create a permanent, verified, and unalterable ledger of information.
Blockchain interoperability, which allows state transitions across different\nblockchain networks, is critical functionality to facilitate major blockchain\nadoption. Existing interoperability protocols mostly focus on atomic token\nexchange between blockchains. However, as blockchains have been upgraded from\npassive distributed ledgers into programmable state machines (thanks to smart\ncontracts), the scope of blockchain interoperability goes beyond just token\nexchange. In this paper, we present HyperService, the first platform that\ndelivers interoperability and programmability across heterogeneous blockchains.\nHyperService is powered by two innovative designs: (i) a developer-facing\nprogramming framework that allows developers to build cross-chain applications\nin a unified programming model; and (ii) a secure blockchain-facing\ncryptography protocol that provably realizes those applications on blockchains.\nWe implement a prototype of HyperService in about 35,000 lines of code to\ndemonstrate its practicality. Our experiment results show that HyperService\nimposes reasonable latency, in order of seconds, on the end-to-end execution of\ncross-chain applications\n
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
The blockchain technology is taking the world by storm. Blockchain with its decentralized, transparent and secure nature has emerged as a disruptive technology for the next generation of numerous industrial applications. One of them is Cloud of Things enabled by the combination of cloud computing and Internet of Things. In this context, blockchain provides innovative solutions to address challenges in Cloud of Things in terms of decentralization, data privacy and network security, while Cloud of Things offer elasticity and scalability functionalities to improve the efficiency of blockchain operations. Therefore, a novel paradigm of blockchain and Cloud of Things integration, called BCoT, has been widely regarded as a promising enabler for a wide range of application scenarios. In this article, we present a state-of-the-art review on the BCoT integration to provide general readers with an overview of the BCoT in various aspects, including background knowledge, motivation, and integrated architecture. Particularly, we also provide an in-depth survey of BCoT applications in different use-case domains such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation and smart industry. Then, we review the recent BCoT developments with the emerging blockchain and cloud platforms, services, and research projects. Finally, some important research challenges and future directions are highlighted to spur further research in this promising area.