There is no doubt that Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology will a major impact in the automated futuristic world. Even though the usage of IoT is increasing rapidly, it is riddled with scalability, security, privacy and integrity issues. Even though blockchain was initially created for managing cryptocurrencies, its decentralised nature, higher security, integrity and privacy has led to being integrated with IoT in order to improve it. There are multiple challenges arising from this integration which increases the complexities. It is necessary to study these challenges involved in this integration before carrying it out. Hence, this paper has carried out a systematic study of the various challenges involved in IoT individually and also the advantages and challenges of integrating it with the blockchain system.
Blockchain technology uses the cryptographic technique to create expanding list of data records called blocks. Along with transaction and timestamp data, each block holds a hash value obtained using cryptographic technique. Blockchain gains importance for its decentralized data transaction and authorization without the need for third-party intervention. Although, it is mostly used in Finance sector these days, due to its inherent ability to protect data it can be applied to every field of computation especially in fields where data transaction is voluminous. Internet of Things (IoT) is one such area where it involves collection, transfer and processing of real time data from objects, humans and sensors to automate various tasks. Hence, this paper reviews the blockchain technology, and how it can be coupled with IoT to overcome the privacy and security issues. This paper first systematically introduces the concept of blockchain technology, its applications along with the need for IoT devices and its implementation. Finally, it discusses the blockchain based IoT (BIoT) its architecture, advantages, challenges in implementation
Benefiting from the real-time processing ability of edge computing, computing tasks requested by smart devices in the Internet of Things are offloaded to edge computing devices (ECDs) for implementation. However, ECDs are often overloaded or underloaded with disproportionate resource requests. In addition, during the process of task offloading, the transmitted information is vulnerable, which can result in data incompleteness. In view of this challenge, a blockchain-enabled computation offloading method, named BeCome, is proposed in this article. Blockchain technology is employed in edge computing to ensure data integrity. Then, the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm III is adopted to generate strategies for balanced resource allocation. Furthermore, simple additive weighting and multicriteria decision making are utilized to identify the optimal offloading strategy. Finally, performance evaluations of BeCome are given through simulation experiments.
Blockchain is a distributed operation and information supervision technology programmed initially for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The awareness in Blockchain technology is rapidly growing since the notion was invented in the year 2008. The motivation for the concentration in Blockchain is its significant characteristics that deliver security, privacy, and information reliability devoid of any additional system regulating the communications, and consequently it generates fascinating research domains, specifically from the viewpoint of methodological difficulties and restrictions. This study discovers the wide‐ranging Blockchain technology and studies it's perspective with respect to ‘ internet‐of‐things ’ controlled nodes. A resilient prototype method has been programmed that reveals a basic system exhausting Blockchain. The outcome illustrates that the established method is functional in test‐bed environment.
Mohamad Kassab, Joanna F. DeFranco, Tarek Malas, Phillip A. Laplante · 6 authors
Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable volume of data is daily to monitoring patients, managing clinical research, producing medical records, and processing medical insurance claims. While the focus of applications of blockchain in practice has been to build distributed ledgers involving virtual tokens, the impetus of this emerging technology has now extended to the medical domain. With the increased popularity, it is crucial to study how this technology accompanied with a system for smart contracts can support and challenge the healthcare domain for all interrelated actors (patients, physicians, insurance companies, regulators) and involved assets (e.g., patients’ data, physician’s data, equipment’s and drug’s supply chain, etc.). The contributions of this paper are the following: (i) report the results of a systematic literature review conducted to identify, extract, evaluate and synthesize the studies on the symbiosis of blockchain in healthcare; (ii) summarize and categorize existing benefits/challenges on incorporating blockchain in healthcare domain; (iii) provide a framework that will facilitate new research activities; and (iv) establish the state of evidence with in-depth assessment.
Abstract South Korea invests a budget of trillions in national R&D projects every year, and has achieved excellent performance doing so each year. However, since the projects are planned, evaluated, and managed by different departments and institutions, duplicate planning and submission leads to insufficient sharing of research results. Currently, the National Technology Information Service (NTIS) inspects project duplication based on keywords, which leads to duplicate planning among departments and closed management of research results. Since the NTIS builds in centralized systems, the inspection systems supports one-way management for duplication checking and information sharing. Therefore, we propose a new platform, called the Trusted Information Project Platform (TIP-Platform), for easily checking for project duplication, sharing research results, and updating research results. TIP-Platform adopts a new concept for user authority setting, the distributed ledger structure, transaction structure, and service. For the adaption, the TIP-Platform uses blockchain technology that performs recording and management via blocks by distributing the right to record and managing transactions. This platform makes it easy for anyone to view and use project-related information such as research results and duplication review. In this paper, we describe how the TIP-Platform can achieve excellent research results through information sharing of a project. This platform needs to be based on trust, because it shares information and continually updates information.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
\n\t\t\t\t\tBlockchain technology with its secure, transparent and decentralized nature has been recently employed in many mobile applications. However, the process of executing extensive tasks such as computation-intensive data applications and blockchain mining requires high computational and storage capability of mobile devices, which would hinder blockchain applications in mobile systems. To meet this challenge, we propose a mobile edge computing (MEC) based blockchain network where multi-mobile users (MUs) act as miners to offload their data processing tasks and mining tasks to a nearby MEC server via wireless channels. Specially, we formulate task offloading, user privacy preservation and mining profit as a joint optimization problem which is modelled as a Markov decision process, where our objective is to minimize the long-term system offloading utility and maximize the privacy levels for all blockchain users. We first propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based offloading scheme which enables MUs to make optimal offloading decisions based on blockchain transaction states, wireless channel qualities between MUs and MEC server and user’s power hash states. To further improve the offloading performances for larger-scale blockchain scenarios, we then develop a deep RL algorithm by using deep Q-network which can efficiently solve large state space without any prior knowledge of the system dynamics. Experiment and simulation results show that the proposed RL-based offloading schemes significantly enhance user privacy, and reduce the energy consumption as well as computation latency with minimum offloading costs in comparison with the benchmark offloading schemes.\n\t\t\t\t
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
For current and future Internet of Things (IoT) networks, mobile edge-cloud computation offloading (MECCO) has been regarded as a promising means to support delay-sensitive IoT applications. However, offloading mobile tasks to the cloud gives rise to new security issues due to malicious mobile devices (MDs). How to implement offloading to alleviate computation burdens at MDs while guaranteeing high security in mobile edge cloud is a challenging problem. In this paper, we investigate simultaneously the security and computation offloading problems in a multi-user MECCO system with blockchain. First, to improve the offloading security, we propose a trustworthy access control mechanism using blockchain, which can protect cloud resources against illegal offloading behaviours. Then, to tackle the computation management of the authorized MDs, we formulate a computation offloading problem by jointly optimizing the offloading decisions, the allocation of computing resource and radio bandwidth, and smart contract usage. This optimization problem aims to minimize the long-term system costs of latency, energy consumption and smart contract fee among all MDs. To solve the proposed offloading problem, we develop an advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithm using a double-dueling Q-network. Evaluation results from real experiments and numerical simulations demonstrate the significant advantages of our scheme over the existing approaches.
Dinh C. Nguyen, Pubudu N. Pathirana, Ming Ding, Aruna Seneviratne
For current and future Internet of Things (IoT) networks, mobile edge-cloud\ncomputation offloading (MECCO) has been regarded as a promising means to\nsupport delay-sensitive IoT applications. However, offloading mobile tasks to\nthe cloud is vulnerable to security issues due to malicious mobile devices\n(MDs). How to implement offloading to alleviate computation burdens at MDs\nwhile guaranteeing high security in mobile edge cloud is a challenging problem.\nIn this paper, we investigate simultaneously the security and computation\noffloading problems in a multi-user MECCO system with blockchain. First, to\nimprove the offloading security, we propose a trustworthy access control using\nblockchain, which can protect cloud resources against illegal offloading\nbehaviours. Then, to tackle the computation management of authorized MDs, we\nformulate a computation offloading problem by jointly optimizing the offloading\ndecisions, the allocation of computing resource and radio bandwidth, and smart\ncontract usage. This optimization problem aims to minimize the long-term system\ncosts of latency, energy consumption and smart contract fee among all MDs. To\nsolve the proposed offloading problem, we develop an advanced deep\nreinforcement learning algorithm using a double-dueling Q-network. Evaluation\nresults from real experiments and numerical simulations demonstrate the\nsignificant advantages of our scheme over existing approaches.\n
Internet of things (IoT) is becoming increasingly important and ubiquitous in home and industries. It makes object a part of the Internet and fuses the digital and physical world together. However, if not properly secured, IoT device can be vulnerable to tampering that can change the content of the data stored in the network. Blockchain, a technology used in cryptocurrency, can be used for addressing the security and privacy challenges in IoT. Blockchain can be beneficial to IoT by adding more security layer and reducing dependency on a central authority. This paper proposed to develop a blockchain based platform for IoT application. Blockchain technology can be utilized to provide a decentralized network, creating a more secured IoT system. The proposed blockchain network will be based on Ethereum blockchain network allowing the use smart contract application for management of IoT devices. Experiment is conducted to show the feasibility of the blockchain based platform. The proposed blockchain based platform is capable of managing several IoT devices connected to the network.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The design of access control mechanisms for healthcare systems is challenging: it must strike the right balance between permissions and restrictions. In this work, we propose a novel approach that is based on the Blockchain technology for storage patient medical data and create an audit logging system able to protect health data from unauthorized modification and access. The proposed method consists of a tree structure: a main chain linked with the patient's identity and one or several Subchains which are used for storing additional critical data (e.g., medical diagnoses or access logs).
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a wide network consisting of Internet-connected objects using installed software, such as home appliances, vehicles, and other entities embedded with sensors, actuators, radio-frequency identification (RFID), and electronics to exchange data. In the last two decades, numerous IoT solutions have been developed by small, medium-sized, and large enterprises to make our lives easier. Furthermore, private and academic researchers have extensively investigated some practical IoT solutions. The rapid expansion of IoT solutions accompanies numerous security concerns because the underlying IoT protocols and communication technologies have not considered security. Recently, blockchain has emerged to become one of the promising technologies that might overcome some of the IoT limitations (security limitations, in particular). Blockchain technology is a database ledger that uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and stores transactions and asset registries. Blockchain can be described as a mounting list of records (i.e., blocks) with the following properties: distributed, decentralized, immutable, and shared. This paper surveyed recent security advances to overcome IoT limitations using blockchain. In this article, the blockchain attempts to overcome IoT limitations that are related to cyber security have been classified into four categories: end-to-end traceability; data privacy and anonymity; identity verification and authentication; and confidentiality, data integrity, and availability (CIA). Intended as a guideline for future research, this paper also explores systematic processes.
While Ethereum run in public networks which make the blockchain size large and transaction run time longer than time for private or national network, that led to continuous worries over the expanding size of Ethereum Blockchain, which certainly reduce Cryptocurrency's effectiveness. The estimations were on increase and believed it would cross the node limit of 1 TB terribly shortly. If new consumer a full node enters to that blockchain and cryptocurrency world, a node is a computer software cum database of the blockchain, which a full node client must download on their personal computers to become a full node in the blockchain. in this way, the client can be verifying transaction on the network with the help of other nodes on the system. We proposed to implement national cryptocurrency which developed using Ethereum as a development platform that could serve national or regional people that has limited or slow internet connections like Iraq, in addition payments in countries with unstable fiat currencies, although cryptocurrencies are suffering from unstable exchange rates against fiat currencies, the use of national cryptocurrency instead of the native fiat cash could even be a far better alternative for individuals in certain countries like Iraq, Iran and Syria, with high rate of inflation. The reminder of this paper is arranging as following: an introduction, the advantages and drawbacks of cryptocurrencies, Background on Blockchain and Ethereum, implementation, results and conclusion.
A blockchain is a system for storing and sharing information that is secure because of its transparency. Each block in the chain is both its own independent unit containing its own information, and a dependent link in the collective chain, and this duality creates a network regulated by participants who store and share the information, rather than a third party. Blockchain has many applications in healthcare, and can improve mobile health applications, monitoring devices, sharing and storing of electronic medical records, clinical trial data, and insurance information storage. Research about blockchain and healthcare is currently limited, but blockchain is on the brink of transforming the healthcare system; through its decentralized principles, blockchain can improve accessibility and security of patient information, and can therefore overturn the healthcare hierarchy and build a new system in which patients manage their own care.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
The blockchain-empowered mobile-edge computing (MEC) is a promising solution for enhancing the computation capabilities of mobile equipments (MEs) to process computation-intensive tasks such as the real-time data processing tasks and mining tasks. However, because of the “cold start” and “long return” problems, efficient computation offloading cannot be achieved in blockchain-empowered MEC because the MEs do not always have enough coins to afford the offloading service cost. In this article, we study the joint computation-offloading and coin-loaning problem for blockchain-empowered MEC to minimize the total cost of all MEs. We introduce the banks that can provide loan services to the MEs to address the above two issues. We formulate the problem as a noncooperative game to model the competitions between the myopic MEs. By using a potential game method, we prove the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) and design a distributed algorithm to achieve the NE point with low computational complexity. We also provide an upper bound on the price of anarchy of the game by theoretical proof. Besides, two smart contracts are designed to automatically perform the computing resource trading and coin loaning processes. Lastly, our simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the total cost of all MEs, has better performance compared with other solutions, and scales well as the number of MEs increases. Moreover, the financial cost for executing the two smart contracts on the Ethereum network is low.
The growth of individualized product demands drives high flexibility of manufacturing processes, which requires large-scale deployment of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Since centralized control of IIoT suffers from poor flexibility in coping with disturbances and changes, a decentralized organization structure is a better choice, in which a permissioned blockchain-driven IIoT can enable partially decentralized self-organization and thus offload and accelerate the optimization of upper-level manufacturing planning. A novel iterative bi-level hybrid intelligence model named ManuChain is proposed to get rid of unbalance/inconsistency between holistic planning and local execution in individualized manufacturing systems. Lower-level blockchain-driven smart contracts proactively decentralize fine-grained and individualized task execution among machine tools via Raspberry Pi-based smart gateways and make the results available on an upper-level digital twin model for iterative coarse-grained holistic optimization. A prototype ManuChain based on a permissioned blockchain network is presented to realize both lower-level crowd self-organizing intelligence and upper-level holistic optimization intelligence.
Summary This paper presents a blockchain‐based architecture for our current electronic health record (EHR) systems. Being built on top of existing databases maintained by health providers, the architecture implements a blockchain solution to ensure the integrity of data records and improve interoperability of the systems through tracking all events that happen to the data in the databases. In this proposed architecture, we also introduce a new incentive mechanism for the creation of new blocks on the blockchain. The architecture is independent of any specific blockchain platforms and open to further extensions; hence, it potentially fits in with other electronic record systems that require protection against data misuse.
Jose P. Martins, João C. Ferreira, Vítor Monteiro, José A. Afonso · 5 authors
In this research work, we apply the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm with a decentralized blockchain approach to handle the electric vehicle (EV) charging process in shared spaces, such as condominiums. A mobile app handles the user authentication mechanism to initiate the EV charging process, where a set of sensors are used for measuring energy consumption, and based on a microcontroller, establish data communication with the mobile app. A blockchain handles financial transitions, and this approach can be replicated to other EV charging scenarios, such as public charging systems in a city, where the mobile device provides an authentication mechanism. A user interface was developed to visualize transactions, gather users’ preferences, and handle power charging limitations due to the usage of a shared infrastructure. The developed approach was tested in a shared space with three EVs using a charging infrastructure for a period of 3.5 months.
Ryan Shah, Michael McIntee, Shishir Nagaraja, Sahil Bhandary · 6 authors
Secure sensor calibration constitutes a foundational step that underpins operational safety in the Industrial Internet of Things. While much attention has been given to IoT security such as the use of TLS to secure sensed data, little thought has been given to securing the calibration infrastructure itself. Currently traceability is achieved via manual verification using paper-based datasheets which is both time consuming and insecure. For instance, when the calibration status of parent devices is revoked as mistakes or mischance is detected, calibrated devices are not updated until the next calibration cycle, leaving much of the calibration parameters invalid. Aside from error, any party within the calibration infrastructure can maliciously introduce errors since the current paper based system lacks authentication as well as non-repudiation. In this paper, we propose a novel resilient architecture for calibration infrastructure, where the calibration status of sensor elements can be verified on-the-fly to the root of trust preserving the properties of authentication and non-repudiation. We propose an implementation based on smart contracts on the Ethereum network. Our evaluation shows that Ethereum is likely to address the protection requirements of traceable measurements.
Open access
2 source records
cs.CR
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
With features such as decentralization, consistency, tamper resistance, non-repudiation, and pseudonym, blockchain technology has the potential to strengthen the Internet of Things (IoT) significantly, thus opening an intriguing research area in the integration of blockchain and IoT. However, most existing blockchain schemes were not dedicated to the IoT ecosystem and hence could not meet the specific requirements of IoT. This paper aims to fix the gap. Inspired by Chainspace, a blockchain platform which could be applicable in IoT, VChain is proposed, a novel blockchain scheme suitable for IoT which is more secure, concrete, and practical compared with Chainspace. Specifically, in VChain, a two-layer BFT-based consensus protocol with HoneyBadger BFT protocol is proposed and a collective signature scheme as building blocks. The designs above allow for supporting faulty-shards-tolerance and asynchronous network model, which could not be sustained in Chainspace, and keeping high efficiency as well. Moreover, the sharding strategy presented in VChain, different from that in RapidChain, which adopts the energy-consuming PoW mechanism for sharding, is environmentfriendly and thus makes VChain fit for IoT well. Last but not least, VChain also inherits the merits of Chainspace to separate the execution and verification of smart contracts for privacy.