Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger to capture and record economic transactions of mobile applications. In blockchain operation process, mining tasks play a key role and pose intensive computation demands on resource constrained mobile devices. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising solution to alleviate the heavy burden on the devices through task offloading. Since only the miner device that first obtains a block can get rewards, there are risks of the devices for consuming edge computing resources without any profit. However, traditional task offloading schemes that purely rely on expected utilities of the devices always ignore the difference of various devices in balancing risks and rewards, thus make the offloading inefficient. To address this problem, we adopt a prospect theoretic approach to design an optimal offloading scheme for MEC-empowered blockchain, where diverse preferences of devices for profits and risks are explicitly taken into account. Specifically, we formulate the offloading process as a Stackelberg game that incorporates notions from prospect theory. We design an efficient algorithm to obtain the optimal offloading strategies, which maximize the utilities of both the miner devices and the MEC service providers. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed offloading schemes.
Mahdi Daghmehchi Firoozjaei, Ali A. Ghorbani, Hyoungshick Kim, JaeSeung Song
The Digital economy is based on confidence in its trustworthiness. Blockchain distributed consensus provides a reliable and trustful network for financial and non-financial transactions. Blockchain-based electric vehicles (EVs) charging applications benefit blockchain features to provide automated and verifiable services for EV charging market. Requirements for feasible charging operation and privacy concerns are challenging issues with blockchain-based EV charging approaches. To provide a feasible charging ability and preserve EV owner's privacy, we introduce EVChain. The EVChain is a trustful and decentralized platform based on blockchain technology to share charging credits in the EV charging market. To share credits, the main blockchain in EVChain is connected to one or more subnetwork blockchains. We introduce an interconnection position to preserve EV owners' privacy with k-anonymity protection. We simulate and evaluate the privacy protection it provides, based on an example EV charging scenario.
The Internet of Things is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity, requiring massive data processing and storage. Unfortunately, because of the unique characteristics of resource constraints, short-range communication, and self-organization in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud or fog nodes for outsourced computation and storage, which has brought about a series of novel challenging security and privacy threats. For this reason, one of the critical challenges of having numerous IoT devices is the capacity to manage them and their data. A specific concern is from which devices or Edge clouds to accept join requests or interaction requests. This paper discusses a design concept for developing the IoT data management platform, along with a data management and lineage traceability implementation of the platform based on blockchain and smart contracts, which approaches the two major challenges: how to implement effective data management and enrich rational interoperability for trusted groups of linked Things; And how to settle conflicts between untrusted IoT devices and its requests taking into account security and privacy preserving. Experimental results show that the system scales well with the loss of computing and communication performance maintaining within the acceptable range, works well to effectively defend against unauthorized access and empower data provenance and transparency, which verifies the feasibility and efficiency of the design concept to provide privacy, fine-grained, and integrity data management over the IoT devices by introducing the blockchain-based data management platform.
Md. Abdur Rahman, Md. Mamunur Rashid, Stuart J. Barnes, Syed Maruf Abdullah
In this paper, we propose a secure internet of vehicles (IoV) framework that can handle the transportation ecosystem of a very large and dynamic crowd. The framework will allow personalized and location-aware vehicle IoT data to store in blockchain and off-chain repositories for secure sharing with one's community of interest. As a test case of our proposed application, we have developed distributed smartphone applications that can be interfaced with the OBD-II interface to collect in-vehicle data from the CAN bus of a vehicle and an ambient intelligent environment consisting of IoT devices. The in-vehicle environment can collect vehicle sensory information, process the sensory data within the mobile edge network and store the transactions and the raw sensory data to blockchain and off-chain repositories through secure digital wallets. Finally, we will present our implemented framework and initial test results.
Blockchain technology is getting more attention due to its inherent nature in resistance to data modification. Blockchain combined with IoT enables to improve the level of services for various domains with security guarantees. Numerous research has begun in order to link the blockchain along with autonomous vehicles system on 5G networks. Ultrafast connections, speedier data downloads, and the ability to handle millions of connections more than LTE networks are crucial to support a rapid autonomous system. Therefore, the system requires proper data storage management, high secure transaction, and non-interference network. The blockchain is suitable for the 5G vehicular system since it is immutable, tamper-proof, and secure by design. Although the decentralized 5G autonomous vehicular network provides countless benefits, yet it raises more than a few challenges. This paper provides an initial stage of the blockchain-enabled 5G vehicular networks, architecture, and technical aspects. Some remarks and challenges are also discussed.
Aug 1, 2019·2019 IEEE Intl Conf on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)
When banks loan to small and micro enterprises, they are faced with higher credit costs and difficulties in controlling risks. Blockchain provides a distributed infrastructure for business connectivity across organizations. Blockchain is a consensus, traceable, tamper-proof, final shared data ledger. Blockchain not only improves the efficiency of data connections, but also promotes the credible flow of data. In this background, we propose Bis: a Novel Blockchain based Bank-tax interaction system in smart city. We have designed the total scheme, and the tax bureau can use blockchain to build bank-tax interactive system. Most commercial banks can obtain the enterprises tax information in an efficient and safe way through multi-channels technology of Blockchain. We carried out system development and experiments to prove that our Bis system can solve enterprise tax data sharing and business connection problems across enterprises, tax bureau and banks.
Logs are critical data, which can help us to troubleshoot and identify the person in charge of an unexpected accident. Log systems have been widely used for log storage. However, the traditional log system can't prevent the log from being tampered. Centralized servers are more vulnerable to be attacked. Those who have permission to operate records can easily tamper with logs. Blockchain is a disruptive technology in recent years, which has the advantages of decentralization, tamper-proof and traceability. Given its decentralization and tamper-proof properties, the paper proposed a blockchain-based framework for secure log storage. However, the cost of storing big files in the blockchain is very high. Thus, the paper utilized the InterPlanetary File System(IPFS) to store log files instead of a blockchain. Besides, the paper adopted Ethereum blockchain to store the hash of log files and a smart contract to create an index for log files. The solution is not only applicable to log but also other scenarios requiring secure data storage and efficient retrieval.
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Blockchain has been considered as the enabler to provide automated and trust-less Internet of things (IoT) services. However, legacy consensus mechanisms applied in most of the blockchain networks pose obstacles for deployment in IoT in respect of decentralization and scalability. The emerging Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based models aim at delivering the benefits of blockchain without making compromise on performance. This paper gives a critical analysis on the two representative DAG-based models, IOTA and Hashgraph. In particular, we provide an insightful overview of the two blockchains, with their features and functionalities. We define desired criteria for evaluating these two blockchains, provide an in-depth analysis on the two systems, and identify open challenges IOTA and Hashgraph are facing for their application in IoT.
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Jack Huang, Yuan Wei Qi, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Andrew Meads · 5 authors
In New Zealand, there is currently no shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) system integrated between major healthcare organisations, such as hospitals, medical centres, and specialists. Thanks to its characteristics, blockchain technology can be a suitable platform for building a large-scale EHR system for New Zealand. In this paper, we present MedBloc, a blockchain-based secure EHR system that enables patients and healthcare providers to access and share health records in a usable yet privacy-preserving manner. MedBloc captures a longitudinal view of the patient's health story and enables patients to give or withdraw consent for regulating access to their records. To protect medical data, MedBloc uses an encryption mechanism and enforces a smart contract based access control mechanism for regulating access. MedBloc not only demonstrates how the blockchain can establish New Zealand's first shared EHR system but it shows how blockchain can potentially disrupt the entire medical technology domain.
With the deepening of research on Bitcoin privacy protection, Bitcoin, a new type of digital currency, has become more difficult to regulate. A Bitcoin privacy protection confusion scheme with regulatory RBmix is proposed for this problem. The model of RBmix uses a fair blind signature algorithm and introduces trusted third parties with regulatory, anonymity, scalability, Bitcoin compatibility, and anti-DoS aggression. Experimental results show that the RBmix protocol has good scalability and execution efficiency.
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
The decentralized and distributed nature of the Blockchain technology makes it a suitable solution to improve the device-to-device communication security challenges. This work explores the possible application of blockchain technology to address the IoT security problems under the 5G cellular system. We propose a multi-layer security network model for IoT network based on blockchain technology. The proposed model addresses the problems associated with the actual deployment of the blockchain technology by dividing the IoT network into a multi-layer decentralized system. In the proposed model, we divide the network into K-unknown clusters using Evolutionary Computation algorithms which are Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). A local authentication mechanism is chosen for authentication and authorization purpose within each cluster handed by each Cluster Head (CH). The high security and credibility assurance of the blockchain technology provides an authentication mechanism for CHs communication with each other and Base Stations (BS) through a local blockchain implementation without a central authority. We also propose a global blockchain implementation for BSs communications. Finally, our proposal implements an open source blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric to verify the proposed system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
A key property of current blockchain solutions is the immutability of data stored in the blockchain. While this is a desired feature e.g. for crypto currencies, it can be a show stopper for other use cases that still require ex-post correction or removal of stored data. Existing proposals for redactable blockchains address this issue, but support the correction of specific types of stored data only. To overcome these limitations, we propose and introduce a correctable blockchain architecture that supports correction of arbitrary data. The proposed solution uses a consensus-enforced voting mechanism for decentralized decision making on requested data corrections. Information on applied corrections is stored in a second chain, which ensures that the corrected chain can still be validated successfully. We have verified the security of the proposed correctable blockchain architecture by means of a detailed security analysis. Furthermore, we have evaluated the proposed solution by means of a first reference implementation, which demonstrates the solution's feasibility. First experiments conducted with this reference implementation indicate that the added data-correction functionality has only negligible impacts on the overall performance.
Nowadays, the applications of blockchain technology spring up rapidly, providing opportunities for solving the weaknesses in online education field, such as the complexity of e-learning assessment, the lack of a unified e-learning assessment standard and the insecurity of digital education certificates. In this paper, we propose a blockchain system for e-learning assessment and certification, which includes an entirely new network structure on the basis of the combination of the public and private blockchains, as well as four specific smart contract schemes for the realization of the e-learning assessment and credit exchange, the digital certificate issuance and secure storage, the digital certificate verification and the e-learning voucher allocation, respectively. The proposed system has been demonstrated as a promising candidate solution to establish a fairer, healthier and more open e-learning and online education environment.
Summary Sharing trusted data among trusted stakeholders is very important to large‐scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the entities and organizations involved in IoT naturally lack trusted relationships, which poses significant challenges to the above vision. Specifically, the first challenge is to ensure that the data in the physical world can be objectively and truly injected into the information world of IoT. The second is to ensure the credibility of the entities' identities in IoT. The third is to ensure the authenticity of data, the credibility of identity, and the reliable transmission of data when a third trusted party is unable to provide the expected trusted services. In view of the above challenges, this paper proposes a secure and lightweight triple‐trusting architecture (SLTA), which fully uses a blockchain‐related supporting technology. The architecture includes an oracle‐based data collection mechanism, which ensures that the data collected from edge devices of IoT cannot be modified, and the distributed identity management mechanism, which enhances personal privacy, security, and control of digital identities. Furthermore, a series of innovative designs for applying the blockchain to special large‐scale cooperation scenario in IoT are proposed, which is also a part of the key mechanisms of the SLTA. The innovative design includes a new software‐defined blockchain structure model and a lightweight Byzantine fault‐tolerant algorithm that provides credible support for decentralized data collection, identity management, and data transfer, as well as low‐overhead sequential storage mechanism.
Aug 1, 2019·2019 18th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/13th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Alexander Marsalek, Thomas Zefferer, Edona Fasllija, Dominik Ziegler
In blockchain-based solutions, the amount of data stored in the blockchain increases steadily. Considerable amounts of data accordingly need to be download and stored at decentralized nodes to carry out meaningful validations. For the Bitcoin blockchain, approximately 197 GB must currently be downloaded and processed by any node aiming to fully verify the correctness of stored transactions. This represents an emerging problem with respect to resource-constrained thin clients that lack the required download or storage capacities, but with which meaningful validations still need to be carried out. This problem will gain even more relevance in the future, as blockchain technology is applied to new domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT) that necessitate the use of thin clients. We address this emerging problem by proposing a novel compressible blockchain architecture. In our proposal, we use a snapshot-based approach, to create snapshots of the blockchain at regular intervals and store them in blocks. These blocks are chained, forming a second blockchain that is linked to the primary chain. In this way, the amount of data that needs to be downloaded and stored by decentralized nodes is reduced considerably, while the full validation of the entire blockchain still remains feasible. In this paper, we describe the proposed compressible blockchain architecture in detail. We conducted evaluations that demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution and show its advantages over related approaches introduced in the literature. Overall, our design can be used to reduce the size of the blockchain by up to 93%, facilitating secure blockchain-based applications even on resource-constrained thin clients such as IoT devices.
This study proposed a management system of the electronic medical records in the blockchain environment. In the proposed system, electronic medical records are first stored in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and then the system generates the hash value, which will be sent to the smart contract to correlate with the patients' data. After that, if the medical staff's medical authority is confirmed by the system, the smart contract can send back the hash value that IPFS generated, and thus the system will present the complete electronic medical records. In the experimental simulation, the results showed that our proposed electronic medical record management and storage process not only can block forged or tampered electronic medical records via smart contracts, but also make it easy to integrate electronic medical records and share medical resources.
S. Raj Anand, Rama Chaithanya Tanguturi, D S Soundarrajan
The latest trend in the research filed implies the importance of data security in wireless sensor networks. There are various approaches identified for securing the data by using trust wide security such as cryptographic systems and routing protocols. However, these approaches are very critical to identify the optimal path in the network and attacks by unauthorized node cannot be prevented. In this paper, a new algorithm for combining the AODV (Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) routing protocol and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is implemented to produce trustable routing in every location through block chain. The possible routing procedure will enhance the routing nodes to acquire routing information among all the nodes but will never allow the node to capture the information. The routing protocol on the blockchain is used to utilize the path efficiently without deviation caused by other anchor nodes. It also identifies the congestion in the entire path of the particular network and avoids tampering of information between the nodes. The blockchain enabled with PSO algorithm and AODV routing protocol provides the simulation results about the efficient packet delivery system. The Security has been performed in every node used to identify the best route for producing the efficient throughput and quality of services.
Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at an exponential rate but the area of privacy and security in IoT still remains unexplored. The existing algorithms or methods are mainly centralized and hence they are vulnerable due to their single point authentication topology. As it has been estimated that by 2020 there will be more ‘things’ than people on this earth the problem of security becomes a major concern in IoT networks, as a person having control to an IoT network will be able to control a large portion of an organization. Blockchain has recently been used to provide security to peer-to-peer networks. Blockchains are computationally expensive, heavyweight and are considered unsuitable for IoT architecture. In this paper a new lightweight and secure architecture for IoT by using Ethereum Blockchain retaining most of its security providing powers is proposed. Since Blockchain is decentralized it solves the single point authentication problem existing in IoT networks. A Smart Home System as a representative case study has been implemented for broader IoT applications. The two parameters measured are temperature and intrusion detection. The proposed model tackles some more challenges that exist in IoT networks. The Qualitative evaluation of the proposed architecture highlights how it tackles various attacks.
From hairbrushes to scales, all devices have sensors embedded in them to collect and communicate data. Smart Healthcare is proving to be an exciting and dynamic area with lots of room for new innovations and the increasing consumer demand for proactive health monitoring devices. Having India poised to spend a lot on healthcare, recent innovations using IoT devices and big data analytics can propel the healthcare industry into the future. Smart healthcare providers are leveraging cloud computing with fog computing to optimize their healthcare services. These smart healthcare applications depend mainly on the raw sensor data collected, aggregated, and analyzed by the smart sensors. Smart sensors these days generate myriad amount of data like text, image, audio, and video that require real-time or batch processing. Aggregating these diverse data from various types of resources remains a dispute till date. To resolve this issue, we have proposed a softwarized infrastructure that integrates cloud computing and fog computing, message brokers, and Tor for supple, safe, viable, and a concealed IoT exploitation for smart healthcare applications and services. Our proposed platform employs machine-to-machine (M2M) messaging, data fusion and decision fusion, and uses rule-based beacons for seamless data management. Our proposed flexBeacon system provides an IoT infrastructure that is nimble, secure, flexible, private, and reasonable. We have also proposed an M2M transceiver and microcontroller for flawless data incorporation of smart healthcare applications and services. Based on the IoT devices’ technical capabilities and resource availability, some systems are capable of making use of homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs. The proposed flexBeacon platform offers seamless management and data aggregation without loss of accuracy. The cost of implementing a softwarized IoT for smart healthcare is also greatly reduced.
The Blockchain for Education platform helps us to make the tamper-proof certificates and their correct and the overall permanent allocation of these certificates to learners, as well as verification of certificates. It can reduce the overall frauds and tampering of the degrees and certificates. Blockchain technology can be used to solve many educational problems and can help educators as well as learners to monitor the learning outcomes. The data can be stored securely and tamper proof format when it’s stored onto the blockchain network. Here smart contracts can be designed and deployed on to the Ethereum blockchain that can be designed using the solidity programming language. Blockchain can be applied to private, public and consortium sectors depending upon the usage and the scope of the blockchain. Education system can take benefit of this scalability of the blockchain and can be effectively useful in the educational institutions.
Andreas Kamilaris, Agusti Fonts, Francesc X. Prenafeta‐Boldú
Blockchain is an emerging digital technology allowing ubiquitous financial transactions among distributed untrusted parties, without the need of intermediaries such as banks. This article examines the impact of blockchain technology in agriculture and food supply chain, presents existing ongoing projects and initiatives, and discusses overall implications, challenges and potential, with a critical view over the maturity of these projects. Our findings indicate that blockchain is a promising technology towards a transparent supply chain of food, with many ongoing initiatives in various food products and food-related issues, but many barriers and challenges still exist, which hinder its wider popularity among farmers and systems. These challenges involve technical aspects, education, policies and regulatory frameworks.
Tiago M. Fernández‐Caramés, Iván Froiz-Míguez, Óscar Blanco-Novoa, Paula Fraga‐Lamas
Diabetes patients suffer from abnormal blood glucose levels, which can cause diverse health disorders that affect their kidneys, heart and vision. Due to these conditions, diabetes patients have traditionally checked blood glucose levels through Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose (SMBG) techniques, like pricking their fingers multiple times per day. Such techniques involve a number of drawbacks that can be solved by using a device called Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which can measure blood glucose levels continuously throughout the day without having to prick the patient when carrying out every measurement. This article details the design and implementation of a system that enhances commercial CGMs by adding Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities to them that allow for monitoring patients remotely and, thus, warning them about potentially dangerous situations. The proposed system makes use of smartphones to collect blood glucose values from CGMs and then sends them either to a remote cloud or to distributed fog computing nodes. Moreover, in order to exchange reliable, trustworthy and cybersecure data with medical scientists, doctors and caretakers, the system includes the deployment of a decentralized storage system that receives, processes and stores the collected data. Furthermore, in order to motivate users to add new data to the system, an incentive system based on a digital cryptocurrency named GlucoCoin was devised. Such a system makes use of a blockchain that is able to execute smart contracts in order to automate CGM sensor purchases or to reward the users that contribute to the system by providing their own data. Thanks to all the previously mentioned technologies, the proposed system enables patient data crowdsourcing and the development of novel mobile health (mHealth) applications for diagnosing, monitoring, studying and taking public health actions that can help to advance in the control of the disease and raise global awareness on the increasing prevalence of diabetes.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the era of big data, the amount of collected data has increased dramatically. Data are one of the most important commodities in IoT. To maximize the utility of the collected data, it is crucial to design an open IoT data market that enables data owners and consumers to carry out data trading securely and efficiently. To address the challenge of security presented by an untrusted and nontransparent data market, we propose an edge/cloud-computing-assisted, blockchain-enhanced data market framework to support secure and efficient IoT data trading, with a particular focus on an optimal pricing mechanism. In this mechanism, an authorized market-agency works as a scheduler, determining the win-owner and its pricing strategy to the consumer. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game to solve the pricing and purchasing problem of the data consumer and the market-agency. In the first stage of the game, the market-agency gives the win-owner and its pricing strategy. In the second stage, the data consumer decides on its purchasing quantity of data. We consider competition between data owners and propose a competition-enhanced pricing scheme (CPS). We apply backward induction to analyze the subgame perfect equilibrium at each stage for both independent and CPSs. Lastly, we validate the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium, and the numerical results show the efficiency of the CPS.