Jul 1, 2019·2019 International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Abdur R. Shahid, Niki Pissinou, Corey Staier, Rain Kwan
The Internet of Things (IoT), forming the foundation of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), connects a huge number of ubiquitous sensing and mobile computing devices. The mobile IoT systems generate an enormous volume of a variety of dynamic context data and typically count on centralized architectures to process them. However, their inability to ensure security and decline in communication efficiency and response time with the increase in the size of IoT network are some of the many concerning weaknesses that are holding back the fast-paced growth of IoT. Realizing the limitations of centralized systems, recently blockchain-based decentralized architecture is being considered as the key to redesigning the IoT systems in a way that is designed to be secure, transparent, highly resistant to outages, auditable, and efficient. However, before realizing the new promise of blockchain for IoT, there are significant challenges to address. One fundamental challenge is the scale issue around data collection, storage, and analytic as IoT sensor devices possess limited computational power and storage capabilities. In particular, since the chain is always growing, IoT devices require more and more resources. Thus, an oversized chain poses storage and scalability problems. With this in mind, the overall goal of our research is to design a lightweight scalable blockchain framework for IoT of mobile devices. This framework, coined as "Sensor-Chain", promises a new generation of lightweight blockchain management with a superior reduction in resource consumption, and at the same time capable of retaining critical information about the IoT systems of mobile devices.
Blockchain is an immutable, transparent, public ledger that is distributed among the nodes in the network. It is a decentralized system in which transactions run on untrusted devices. To ensure equality and fairness, these transactions need to agree on some protocols. They are known as consensus algorithms. They are the core of blockchain and decide how blockchain works. Applying these algorithms, it is almost impossible for unauthorized users to crack the confidential information in the blocks. However, there are some security and performance issues that are required to be improved. In this paper, we have an overlook on various consensus algorithms, their working and where they are applied. In addition, we have reviewed blockchain technology, its application areas, advantages, and issues.
Recently, Blockchain a decentralized as well as distributed public ledger technology in (P2P) peer-to-peer network, has received considerable attention. It applies a block structure (linked) used to store as well as verify data and also applies the trusted mechanism for synchronization of changes in data in order to possibly create a tamper-proof digital platform for sharing as well as storing data. Blockchain can also be used to diverse the interactive system of internet (e.g. supply chain system, Internet of things). The blockchain model of bitcoin has been used in wide range of services like from asset trading to transaction of real estate, from services of escrow to national income distribution system in some countries. In this paper we present a comprehensive survey on blockchain, working of blockchain, security analysis on blockchain, privacy threats for blockchain and potential applications of blockchain.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Electronic Health Records have proven to be indispensable yet continue to present a host of problems. One of the most pressing concerns is how to share patient information freely and efficiently. Hospitals and clinics may share data internally, but there is an inability due to the lack of infrastructure or an unwillingness to share data between systems. Implementing a peer-to-peer distributed digital ledger, known as a blockchain, to record and transmit transactional data in conjunction with Cloud based technologies may be a solution to bridge the communication gap. This paper sets forth a new approach for a blockchain and cloud computing network utilizing Amazon Web Services and Ethereum blockchain to facilitate semantic level interoperability of Electronic Health Records systems without standardized data forms and formatting.
While Bitcoin dominates the market for cryptocurrencies, its use in micropayments is still a challenge due to its long transaction validation times and high fees. Recently, the concept of off-chain payments is introduced that led to the idea of establishing a payment network called Lightning Network (LN). Off-chain links provide the ability to do transactions without writing to Blockchain. However, LN's design still favors fees and is creating hub nodes that defeat the purpose of Blockchain. In addition, it is still not reliable as not all the transactions are guaranteed to be transmitted to their destinations. If current retailers would like to use it, these problems might hinder its adoption. To address this issue, in this paper, we advocate creating a private payment network among a given set of retailers that will serve their business needs, just like the idea of private Blockchains. The goal is to build a pure peer-to-peer topology that will eliminate the need for relays and increase the robustness of payments. Using off-chain links as edges and retailers as nodes, the problem is formulated as a multi-flow commodity problem where transactions represent the commodities from various sources to destinations. As the multi-flow commodity problem is NP-Complete, we propose a heuristic approach that utilizes Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm in a dynamic way by updating the edge weights when new payment paths are to be found. The order of transactions is randomized to provide fairness among the retailers. The evaluations indicate that the proposed heuristic comes close to an optimal solution while providing scalability and user privacy.
Healthcare has been the industry with the highest boom in terms of both revenue and data. With so much of electronic health records, the security has been the need of the hour. To make this critical information more secure, there has been an urge to use the blockchain technology. Therefore, researches came up with a solution of blockchain technology in medical healthcare that will not only protect data from being tampered but will also ensure that the data leakage is stopped. This technology could preserve data and thus guarantee reliability. And if this technology is used along with cloud computing technology, problems related to storage can also be vanished, because cloud is trusted for storing and managing data. Also, the blockchain can address the security issues of the cloud. Indeed, medical data sharing and storing with Blockchain‐based cloud can address a lot of issues of medical data. The main aim of this paper is to present the current state‐of‐the‐art on blockchain‐based medical healthcare system. We have clearly discussed several existing works on the same domain and also presented a comparative study among the published works.
Pekka Nikander, Juuso Autiosalo, Santeri Paavolainen
The upsurge of Industrial Internet of Things is forcing industrial information systems to enable less hierarchical information flow. The connections between humans, devices, and their digital twins are growing in numbers, creating a need for new kind of security and trust solutions. To address these needs, industries are applying distributed ledger technologies, aka blockchains. A significant number of use cases have been studied in the sectors of logistics, energy markets, smart grid security, and food safety, with frequently reported benefits in transparency, reduced costs, and disintermediation. However, distributed ledger technologies have challenges with transaction throughput, latency, and resource requirements, which render the technology unusable in many cases, particularly with constrained Internet of Things devices.To overcome these challenges within the Industrial Internet of Things, we suggest a set of interledger approaches that enable trusted information exchange across different ledgers and constrained devices. With these approaches, the technically most suitable ledger technology can be selected for each use case while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of the most widespread ledger implementations. We present state of the art for distributed ledger technologies to support the use of interledger approaches in industrial settings.
The fast developing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies provide a promising opportunity to build large-scale systems to connect numerous heterogeneous devices into the Internet. Most existing IIoT infrastructures are based on a centralized architecture, which is easier for management but cannot effectively support immutable and verifiable services among multiple parties. Blockchain technology provides many desired features for large-scale IIoT infrastructures, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, trackability, and immutability. This paper presents a blockchain-based IIoT architecture to support immutable and verifiable services. However, when applying blockchain technology to the IIoT infrastructure, the required storage space posts a grant challenge to resource-constrained IIoT infrastructures. To address the storage issue, this paper proposes a hierarchical blockchain storage structure, \textit{ChainSplitter}. Specially, the proposed architecture features a hierarchical storage structure where the majority of the blockchain is stored in the clouds, while the most recent blocks are stored in the overlay network of the individual IIoT networks. The proposed architecture seamlessly binds local IIoT networks, the blockchain overlay network, and the cloud infrastructure together through two connectors, the \textit{blockchain connector} and the \textit{cloud connector}, to construct the hierarchical blockchain storage. The blockchain connector in the overlay network builds blocks in blockchain from data generated in IIoT networks, and the cloud connector resolves the blockchain synchronization issues between the overlay network and the clouds. We also provide a case study to show the efficiency of the proposed hierarchical blockchain storage in a practical Industrial IoT case.
Vangelis Malamas, Thomas K. Dasaklis, Panayiotis Kotzanikolaou, Mike Burmester · 5 authors
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) provides ubiquitous healthcare services for patient monitoring and treatment. However, the interaction between doctors, patients, healthcare personnel and device manufacturers, with different and often conflicting security and privacy objectives, make such services vulnerable and subject to exploitation. In addition, since parties may require different access levels and the IoMT devices involve different functionalities, access control can be challenging. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-enabled authorization framework for managing both IoMT devices and medical files by creating a distributed chain of custody and health data privacy scheme. The core idea is to build trust domains for the various stakeholders and IoMT devices, in such a way that fine-grain access is enabled by taking into account critical attributes of the IoMT ecosystem such as a) the different roles and capabilities of the IoMT devices and b) their interaction with the users/stakeholders. A private blockchain is used in combination with on-chain smart contracts to allow for a forensics-by-design management architecture with audit trails for integrity and provenance guarantees as well as health data privacy. The private blockchain ecosystem is authenticated by a proof-of-medical-stake consensus mechanism that is tailored for medical applications.
Konstantin Zhidanov, Sergey Bezzateev, Alexandra Afanasyeva, Mikhail Sayfullin · 7 authors
The blockchain technology is currently penetrating different sides of modern ICT community. Most of the devices involved in blockchain-related processes are specially designed targeting only the mining aspect. At the same time, the use of wearable and mobile devices may also become a part of blockchain operation, especially during the charging time. The paper considers the possibility of using a large number of constrained devices supporting the operation of the blockchain. The utilization of such devices is expected to improve the efficiency of the system and also to attract a more substantial number of users. Authors propose a novel consensus algorithm based on a combination of Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Activity (PoA), and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The paper first overviews the existing strategies and further describes the developed cryptographic primitives used to build a blockchain involving mobile devices. A brief numerical evaluation of the designed system is also provided in the paper.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ada Bagozi, Devis Bianchini, Valeria De Antonellis, Massimiliano Garda · 5 authors
The implementation of remote services in the factory of the future is gaining more and more attention. A distributed process can be considered, where an Original Equipment Manufacturer supplies services based on data collected from the machines of its clients. Examples of services are those implementing anomaly detection and predictive maintenance techniques. Data on which remote services are based, as well as their execution logic, must be transparently shared among participants, to enforce trust among OEM and its clients. The goal of this paper is to propose an approach where blockchain technology and Smart Contracts are used to ensure the required level of trust when implementing the aforementioned services. Events occurring on monitored machines are stored as transactions in a blockchain-based system, to ensure non repudiation of data on which remote services are based. Moreover, trust-demanding tasks in the execution logic of services are considered to design Smart Contracts, that guarantee the required level of trustworthiness among participants. The example featuring Remote Monitoring Services for anomaly detection is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
Yaodong Huang, Jiarui Zhang, Jun Duan, Bin Xiao · 6 authors
Edge devices with sensing, storage, and communication resources are penetrating our daily lives. These resources make it possible for edge devices to conduct data transactions (e.g., micro-payments, micro-access control). The blockchain technology can be used to ensure transaction unmodifiable and undeniable. In this paper, we propose a blockchain system that adapts to the limitations of edge devices. The new blockchain system can fairly and efficiently allocate storage resources on edge devices, which makes it scalable. We find the optimal peer nodes for transaction data storage in the blockchain, and propose a recent block storage allocation scheme for quick retrieval of missing blocks. The proposed blockchain system can also reach mining consensus with low energy consumption in edge devices with a new Proof of Stake mechanism. Extensive simulations show that our proposed blockchain system works efficiently in edge environments. On average, the new system uses 15% less time and consumes 64% less battery power when compared with traditional blockchain systems.
Deception of Certificates is the major issue that is faced by the educational sector. In order to prevent forgery of certificates and to provide a secure certificate verification environment an authenticated system application is developed using blockchain with smart contracts. The immutability property of blockchain prevents the data stored from being manipulated and helps in implementing a verification system. The system generates a new block for every user in the blockchain. These blockchain are replicated across all the nodes involved in a Peer-to-Peer network and thus it improves the reliability of the system. Whenever a user is validated, their certificates are digitally provided by the system to the user along with a Quick Response code. This helps in sharing of certificates between the employers. The authenticity of certificates is improved by embedding the certificates with imperceptible watermark using the alpha blending process. This helps to avoid various attacks at different phases of certificate distribution.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Emmanuel Nyaletey, Reza M. Parizi, Qi Zhang, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed file system that seeks to decentralize the web and to make it faster and more efficient. It incorporates well-known technologies, including BitTorrent and Git, to create a swarm of computing systems that share information. Since its introduction in 2016, IPFS has seen great improvements and adoption from both individuals and enterprise organizations. Its distributed network allows users to share files and information across the globe. IPFS works well with large files that may consume or require large bandwidth to upload and/or download over the Internet. The rapid adoption of this distributed file system is in part because IPFS is designed to operate on top of different protocols, such as FTP and HTTP. However, there are underpinning concerns relating to security and access control, for example lack of traceability on how the files are accessed. The aim of this paper is to complement IPFS with blockchain technology, by proposing a new approach (BlockIPFS) to create a clear audit trail. BlockIPFS allows us to achieve improved trustworthiness of the data and authorship protection, and provide a clear route to trace back all activities associated with a given file using blockchain as a service.
With the rapid development of blockchain platforms, it is important that different implementations are tested and analyzed for comparative purposes. One such implementation is Hyperledger Sawtooth, a new member of the Hyperledger family. Sawtooth blockchain is a permissioned implementation developed in part by Intel. While research has been done on Hyperledger Fabric, research on Sawtooth is not well documented. Using the Hyperledger Caliper benchmarking tool, we aim to test the performance of the blockchain and identify potential issues.
Supply chain management (SCM) is fundamental for gaining financial, environmental and social benefits in the supply chain industry. However, traditional SCM mechanisms usually suffer from a wide scope of issues such as lack of information sharing, long delays for data retrieval, and unreliability in product tracing. Recent advances in blockchain technology show great potential to tackle these issues due to its salient features including immutability, transparency, and decentralization. Although there are some proof-of-concept studies and surveys on blockchain-based SCM from the perspective of logistics, the underlying technical challenges are not clearly identified. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of potential opportunities, new requirements, and principles of designing blockchain-based SCM systems. We summarize and discuss four crucial technical challenges in terms of scalability, throughput, access control, data retrieval and review the promising solutions. Finally, a case study of designing blockchain-based food traceability system is reported to provide more insights on how to tackle these technical challenges in practice.
Smart contracts are code to keep agreements in the form of data or smart contracts residing in a blockchain system. Making data corruptions to these data records may lead to insert unwanted agreements, corrupt an existing one, or remove the latter ones mistakenly. This paper reports the progress of our progress in developing a fuzz testing service with client side support. It will present the overall approach of the testing services followed by a discussion on the road ahead.
The main advantage of the Bitcoin-style blockchain systems is immutability of data and decentralized authority. Despite its success, Bitcoin suffers from scalability issues. The potential of the blockchain technology cannot be fully realized unless it is made more scalable. We extend previous analysis on a fundamental trade-off between the throughput and forking rate of the blockchain system. We further propose FastChain to increase the throughput of the blockchain system by reducing the block propagation time. FastChain adopts bandwidth-informed neighbor selection. Miners disconnect from bandwidth-limited neighbors and favor the nodes with higher bandwidth. We build a Blockchain Dynamics Simulator (BDSim) to evaluate the performance of FastChain. FastChain improves the throughput by 20%~40% in the normal operations.
Murat Kuzlu, Manisa Pipattanasomporn, Levent Gurses, Saifur Rahman
Focusing on one of the most popular open source blockchain frameworks-Hyperledger Fabric, this paper evaluates the impact of network workload on performance of a blockchain platform. In particular, the performance of the Hyperledger Fabric platform is evaluated in terms of: (a) throughput, i.e., successful transactions per second; (b) latency, i.e., response time per transaction in seconds; and (c) scalability, i.e., number of participants serviceable by the platform. The results indicate that the instance of Hyperledger Fabric platform being implemented can support up to 100,000 participants on the selected AWS EC2 instance. As long as the transaction rate is maintained within 200 transactions per seconds, the network latency is in the order of fraction of a second.
Supply chain in industry is a flow of information and goods traversal through multiple suppliers such as raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users. Supply chain management (SCM) helps in smooth monitoring and accounting of information and goods traversal among multiple users. However, the existing supply chain management processes lack in offering transparency of information, user's privacy, timely updates on demand peaks, improper tracing of information, quality management, deal repudiation and trust among users. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework for pharmaceutical supply chain management which uses an ethereum blockchain, a distributed ledger technology. We propose different smart contracts to manage pharmaceutical supply chain processes over an ethereum blockchain. This framework helps in achieving user privacy, transparency of the supplied drug, tracking of drugs, quality management, non-repudiation and demand supply management with the improved trust among the users. At the end, we analyze the proposed framework in terms of fulfilling the pharmaceutical supply chain management requirements.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Land is an immovable unique property, its value depends on its location and to prove the ownership of the land, one must provide various legal documents that should conclusively prove it. Due to this reason a land administration and ownership title registration system should be highly secure to avoid any document forgery. The current real estate registration process take a long time to update in the centralized databases maintained in the government registration department, other departments related to the properties which creates numerous property ownership title disputes. The process of storing the land transaction records on centralized storage servers is vulnerable for the hackers to tamper the records to make duplicate, modify and forge the original transactions and also maintaining the ownership title i.e sale deed in the paper documents may lead to missing, damage of documents and also due to human errors it may contain improper, incomplete details related to the property. This paper proposes a system called the Blockchain based Secure Smart Property Registration Management System (SSPRMS) which provides a solution of tamper free, permanent storage of real estate transaction information records on the decentralized distributed public digital ledgers called hyper ledgers. The SSPRMS provides secure, instant the transfer of ownership title without the help of third party, with zero transaction cost using Smart Contracts, implemented based on PoW consensus algorithms, also providing the self-notarization mechanism, and availability of evidence for the land title from distributed databases and a Smart Property Cards (SPC) provides a mechanism for storing updated owner ship title and other details of the property in the digitized form on the digital smart cards instead of storing these information in the paper documents which eradicate the property related disputes, the fraudulent, illegal registrations of property ownership titles.
Data integration and fast effective data processing are the primary challenges in today’s high-performance computing systems used for Big Data processing and analysis in practical scenarios. Blockchain (BC) is a hot, modern technology that ensures high security of data processes stored in highly distributed networks and ICT infrastructures. BC enables secure data transfers in distributed systems without the need for all operations and processes in the network to be initiated and monitored by any central authority (system manager). This paper presents the background of a generic architectural model of a BC system and explains the concept behind the consensus models used in BC transactions. Security is the main aspect of all defined operations and BC nodes. The paper presents also specific BC use cases to illustrate the performance of the system in practical scenarios..