Blockchain technology has been devised from the first cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin and was soon noted to have a much more full range of applications beyond serving as the platform for the digital cryptocurrency. Conceptually, a blockchain (BC) is defined as a decentralized ledger that registers every transactional operation made in encrypted data format. The implementation of such concept bring about augmented security, enforce accountability, and could potentially accelerate a shift in the work environment dynamics from the current centralized structure to a decentralized, cooperative chain of transactions by encouraging trust and transparency. This paper presents an overview of BC technology and its applications in the AEC industry and its potential integration with the building information (BIM) process. Furthermore, the study explores how BC technologies can improve the BIM working environment by reinforcing network security, providing more reliable data storage and management of permissions, ensuring change tracing and data ownership. The paper discusses the fundamental principles of distributed ledgers, their current applications and potential future advances, and their classification based on inherent characteristics of consensus reaching and permission management. The study presents some examples the prospective application of BC technologies in enhancing the framework for automating the code compliance checking process such as smart contract technologies and Hyperledger Fabric, as well as discussing the pros, cons, possible directions, and future research directions.
Ali Alammary, Samah Alhazmi, Marwah Almasri, Saira Gillani
Recently, blockchain technology has gained considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. This is mainly due to its unique features including decentralization, security, reliability, and data integrity. Despite this growing interest, little is known about the current state of knowledge and practice regarding the use of blockchain technology in education. This article is a systematic review of research investigating blockchain-based educational applications. It focuses on three main themes: (1) educational applications that have been developed with blockchain technology, (2) benefits that blockchain technology could bring to education, and (3) challenges of adopting blockchain technology in education. A detailed results analysis of each theme was conducted as well as an intensive discussion based on the findings. This review also offers insight into other educational areas that could benefit from blockchain technology.
Daehwa Rayer Lee, Yunhee Jang, Hanbin Jang, Hyoungshick Kim
Recently, Samsung released Galaxy S10 supporting the cryptowallet feature [5]. However, it is still questionable whether cryptocurrency can be popularly used for mobile payments because processing transactions in existing blockchain systems are too slow. For example, public blockchain systems such as Bitcoin [6] (7 transactions per second (TPS)) and Ethereum (15 TPS) are significantly slower than mainstream payment systems such as Visa (2,000 TPS) using a centralized database.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The connected and autonomous vehicles are expected to rely heavily on connectivity to exchange data and computation services with other vehicles and remote infrastructure including roadside units and other edge infrastructure to increase their immediate view, which leads to greater safety, coordination and more comfortable experience for their human occupants. In order for vehicles to obtain data, compute and other services from other vehicles or road-side infrastructure, it is important to be able to make micropayments for those services and for the services to run seamlessly despite the challenges posed by mobility and ephemeral interactions with a dynamic set of neighboring devices. We present MOTIVE, a trusted and decentralized framework that allows vehicles to make peer-to-peer micropayments for data, compute and other services obtained from other vehicles or road-side infrastructure within radio range. The framework utilizes distributed ledger technologies including smart contracts to enable autonomous operation and trusted interactions between vehicles and nearby entities.
Yongping Zhang, Xiwei Xu, Ang Liu, Qinghua Lu · 6 authors
Integrated and collaborative manufacturing system develops as massive data are obtained by the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. However, the “trust tax” imposed on manufacturers during their countless collaborations with customers, suppliers, distributors, governments, service providers, and other manufacturers is very high. Blockchain is an emerging technology that can lead to more transparent, secure, and efficient transactions. It represents a new paradigm, as well as new thinking, of how data can be securely stored, integrated, and communicated among different stakeholders, organizations, and systems that unnecessarily trust each other. Blockchain is greatly useful for reducing the “trust tax,” especially beneficial for the small- and medium-sized enterprises that must tolerate much heavier trust tax than the established manufacturers. This paper investigates the blockchain-based security and trust mechanism and elaborates a particular application of blockchain for quality assurance, which is one of the strategic priorities of smart manufacturing. Data generated in a smart manufacturing process can be leveraged to retrieve material provenance, facilitate equipment management, increase transaction efficiency, and create a flexible pricing mechanism. The dairy industry is used to instantiate the value propositions of blockchain for quality assurance.
Mingli Wu, Kun Wang, Xiaoqin Cai, Song Guo · 6 authors
As an innovated and revolutionized technology, blockchain has been applied in many fields, such as cryptocurrency, food traceability, identity management, or even market prediction. To discover its great potential, both industry and academia have paid great attention to it and numerous researches have been conducted. Based on the literature and industry whitepapers, in this survey, we unroll and structure the blockchain related discoveries and scientific results in many aspects. Particularly, we classify blockchain technologies into four layers and carry out a comprehensive study on the consensus strategies, the network, and the applications of blockchain. Different blockchain applications are put into the corresponding categories based on the fields, especially in Internet of Things (IoT). When introducing each layer, we not only organize and summarize the related works, but also discuss the fundamental issues and future research directions. We hope this survey could shed some light on the research of blockchain and serve as a guide for further studies.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) separates the network control plane and data plane, which provides a network-wide view with centralized control (in the control plane) and programmable network configuration for data plane injected by SDN applications (in the application plane). With these features, a number of drawbacks of the traditional network architectures such as static configuration, non-scalability and low efficiency can be effectively avoided. However, SDN also brings with it some new security challenges, such as single-point failure of the control plane, malicious flows from applications, exposed network-wide resources and a vulnerable channel between the control plane and the data plane. In this paper, we design a monolithic security mechanism for SDN based on Blockchain. Our mechanism decentralizes the control plane to overcome single-point failure while maintaining a network-wide view. The mechanism also guarantees the authenticity, traceability, and accountability of application flows, and hence secures the programmable configuration. Moreover, the mechanism provides a fine-grained access control of network-wide resources and a secure controller-switch channel to further protect resources and communication in SDN.
Vishal Sharma, Ilsun You, Dushantha Nalin K. Jayakody, Daniel Gutiérrez Reina · 5 authors
Mobile edge computing (MEC) reduces the computational distance between the source and the servers by fortifying near-user site evaluations of data for expedited communications, using caching. Caching provides ephemeral storage of data on designated servers for low-latency transmissions. However, with the network following a hierarchical layout, even the near-user site evaluations can be impacted by the overheads associated with maintaining a perpetual connection and other factors (e.g., those relating to the reliability of the underpinning network). Prior solutions study reliability as a factor of throughput, delays, jitters, or delivery ratio. However, with modern networks supporting high data rates, a current research trend is in ultrareliability. The latter is defined in terms of availability, connectivity, and survivability. Thus, in this paper, we focus on the ultrareliable communication in MEC. Specifically, in our setting, we use drones as on-demand nodes for efficient caching. While some existing solutions use cache-enabled drones, they generally focus only on the positioning problem rather than factors relating to ultrareliable communications. We present a novel neural-blockchain-based drone-caching approach, designed to ensure ultrareliability and provide a flat architecture (via blockchain). This neural-model fortifies an efficient transport mechanism, since blockchain maintains high reliability amongst the peers involved in the communications. The findings from the evaluation demonstrate that the proposed approach scores well in the following metrics: the probability of connectivity reaches 0.99; energy consumption is decreased by 60.34%; the maximum failure rate is affected by 13.0%; survivability is greater than 0.90; reliability reaches 1.0 even for a large set of users.
Those working on Blockchain technologies have described several new innovative directions and novel services in the Internet of things (IoT), including decentralized trust, trusted and verifiable execution of smart contracts, and machine-to-machine communications and automation that reach beyond the mere exchange of data. However, applying blockchain principles in the IoT is a challenge due to the constraints of the end devices. Because of fierce cost pressure, the hardware resources in these devices are usually reduced to the minimum necessary for operation. To achieve the high coverage needed, low bitrate mobile or wireless technologies are frequently applied, so the communication is often constrained, too. These constraints make the implementation of blockchain nodes for IoT as standalone end-devices impractical or even impossible. We therefore investigated possible design approaches to decentralized applications based on the Ethereum blockchain for the IoT. We proposed and evaluated three application architectures differing in communication, computation, storage, and security requirements. In a pilot setup we measured and analyzed the data traffic needed to run the blockchain clients and their applications. We found out that with the appropriate designs and the remote server architecture we can strongly reduce the storage and communication requirements imposed on devices, with predictable security implications. Periodic device traffic is reduced to 2400 B/s (HTTP) and 170 B/s (Websocket) from about 18 kB/s in the standalone-device full client architecture. A notification about a captured blockchain event and the corresponding verification resulted in about 2000 B of data. A transaction sent from the application to the client resulted in an about 500 B (HTTP) and 300 B message (Websocket). The key store location, which affects the serialization of a transaction, only had a small influence on the transaction-related data. Raw transaction messages were 45 B larger than when passing the JSON transaction objects. These findings provide directions for fog/cloud IoT application designers to avoid unrealistic expectations imposed upon their IoT devices and blockchain technologies, and enable them to select the appropriate system design according to the intended use case and system constraints. However, for very low bit-rate communication networks, new communication protocols for device to blockchain-client need to be considered.
Ioannis Paliokas, Nikolaos Tsoniotis, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras
For consumer-oriented medical devices, the issues of rising cybersecurity threats and the need of end users to maintain control lead to a search for effective solutions. This article presents a blockchain framework for consumer-oriented medical devices aiming at added value, including immutability, auditability, and accountability in processes such as user-device binding, registration, maintenance, and alerting. The proposed solution implements a set of smart contracts (SC) to deliver more secure services in smart-home environments.
Efficient information flow in an intelligent system is vital for effectively controlling the entire system. Currently, intelligent systems are used in many industries related to energy production, sustainable agriculture/transport, and intelligent building/cities. Information technology (IT) and information and communication technologies (ICT) play vital roles in introducing technical or technological innovation in these industries as well as establishing a collaborative network. Also, the digitization of existing systems has been quite effective at creating a sustainable global environment as it allows more efficient and well-balanced control of socio-economic factors. However, it has become clear that adopting an intelligent system to achieve innovation, sustainability, and safety may well depend on the quality of the algorithms to be used for that very system. Despite recent controversies, new and renewable energies are considered as a realistic alternative to fossil fuels, which have been integral to modern industries but are regarded as a cause of environmental or economic problems, not to mention their limited deposits. Therefore, since renewable energies will gradually replace existing energy sources but require more time to be fully available, it is essential to find a method of managing them in a fair and transparent way. The United States, Japan, and some European countries are attempting to achieve such a goal by utilizing a blockchain system, but the issues pertaining to its functionality, security, or efficiency have yet to be addressed. This study introduces a viable consensus algorithm (Hyper Delegation Proof of Randomness, or HDPoR algorithm) for blockchain and attempts to validate its parallel computing capability through simulations. This study also attempts to design an efficient but secure peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction service model for these energies for the future where blockchain-based systems will hold a key position in the digitalized world. As its main contribution, this study introduces an effective method of applying blockchain to a new and renewable energy transaction system by presenting a consensus algorithm that can improve its infrastructure and performance.
Sidra Malik, Volkan Dedeoglu, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak
Traceability and integrity are major challenges for the increasingly complex supply chains of today's world. Although blockchain technology has the potential to address these challenges through providing a tamper-proof audit trail of supply chain events and data associated with a product life-cycle, it does not solve the trust problem associated with the data itself. Reputation systems are an effective approach to solve this trust problem. However, current reputation systems are not suited to the blockchain based supply chain applications as they are based on limited observations, they lack granularity and automation, and their overhead has not been explored. In this work, we propose TrustChain, as a three-layered trust management framework which uses a consortium blockchain to track interactions among supply chain participants and to dynamically assign trust and reputation scores based on these interactions. The novelty of TrustChain stems from: (a) the reputation model that evaluates the quality of commodities, and the trustworthiness of entities based on multiple observations of supply chain events, (b) its support for reputation scores that separate between a supply chain participant and products, enabling the assignment of product-specific reputations for the same participant, (c) the use of smart contracts for transparent, efficient, secure, and automated calculation of reputation scores, and (d) its minimal overhead in terms of latency and throughput when compared to a simple blockchain based supply chain model.
Blockchain's properties in addressing trust in highly decentralized environments can make it an enabler for novel sharing economy services. In this paper, we demonstrate the practicality of blockchain-based Secure IoT as a Service (SIoTaaS), where an IoT device can be rented from a service provider, securely and in a privacy-preserving fashion. Our framework allows the simultaneous operations of distinct providers of IoT-based sharing economy services at a large scale. Multiple parties can securely share text and multimedia in the context of location and point-of-interest sharing, perform financial transactions by hiding true identity of parties involved in various online transactions, perform user and IoT registration, transfer value transactions via Ethereum tokens between providers and consumers, as well as raw IoT data payload. This can turn smart room IoT devices, such as smart locks, light bulbs, air conditioning and fans into rentable business entities within a secure sharing economy platform. We will demonstrate such a proof of concept IoT sharing economy framework, which is specifically designed to support the temporary IoT needs of very large numbers of users, such as Hajj pilgrims concentrating for a short period of time at a single area in Saudi Arabia.
This paper proposes an architecture for dynamic decentralized marketplace for trading of Internet of Things data. To this end, we introduce a 3-tier framework which consists of provider, consumer and broker. The framework is realized using multiple trustless broker which matches and selects potential data provider based on the consumers requirements. Rather than using a centralized server to manage the contract between provider and consumer, the framework leverages smart contract-based agreement for automatically enforcing the terms of the contract to the involved parties.
Blockchain is an innovative distributed ledger technology which has attracted a wide range of interests for building the next generation of applications to address lack-of-trust issues in business. Blockchain as a service (BaaS) is a promising solution to improve the productivity of blockchain application development. However, existing BaaS deployment solutions are mostly vendor-locked: they are either bound to a cloud provider or a blockchain platform. In addition to deployment, design and implementation of blockchain-based applications is a hard task requiring deep expertise. Therefore, this paper presents a unified blockchain as a service platform (uBaaS) to support both design and deployment of blockchain-based applications. The services in uBaaS include deployment as a service, design pattern as a service and auxiliary services. In uBaaS, deployment as a service is platform agnostic, which can avoid lock-in to specific cloud platforms, while design pattern as a service applies design patterns for data management and smart contract design to address the scalability and security issues of blockchain. The proposed solutions are evaluated using a real-world quality tracing use case in terms of feasibility and scalability.
Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping the incumbent industry to smart industry featured with data-driven decision-making. However, intrinsic features of IoT result in a number of challenges, such as decentralization, poor interoperability, privacy, and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology brings the opportunities in addressing the challenges of IoT. In this paper, we investigate the integration of blockchain technology with IoT. We name such synthesis of blockchain and IoT as blockchain of things (BCoT). This paper presents an in-depth survey of BCoT and discusses the insights of this new paradigm. In particular, we first briefly introduce IoT and discuss the challenges of IoT. Then, we give an overview of blockchain technology. We next concentrate on introducing the convergence of blockchain and IoT and presenting the proposal of BCoT architecture. We further discuss the issues about using blockchain for fifth generation beyond in IoT as well as industrial applications of BCoT. Finally, we outline the open research directions in this promising area.
Due to the advantages of blockchain technologies, including decentralization, immutability, transparency and security, people try to replace existing problematic architectures /frameworks with blockchain based ones. In this paper we propose a novel authentication and authorization framework based on blockchain technologies to control access to the resources of an IoT device. In this paper, we focus on devices such as the Cyber Handyman used in remote collaboration applications to develop our framework. We tested our smart contracts on the Ropsten test network. Our results showed that it can handle 25 service requests simultaneously.
The focus of this position paper is to study and identify trust requirements in blockchain systems. So far, we have found that the overall trust-related requirements engineering knowledge is far from what is needed for successful engineering of various trust-related challenges in blockchain systems. We have identified an urgent need and challenge to revisit requirements engineering models to effectively include trust requirements; and to produce a trust engineering taxonomy, models, and techniques for achieving and fulfilling blockchain system trust requirements and goals.
Valentina Gatteschi, Fabrizio Lamberti, Claudio Giovanni Demartini
A high number of research initiatives investigated the advantages of blockchain technology in different sectors. The objective of this work is to present an overview of blockchain-based applications in the consumer electronics field. In particular this work reports around fifty blockchain initiatives in the contexts of healthcare, smart homes, smart cities, automotive and smart devices, and discusses advantages/limitations of this technology.
Blockchain technology is reshaping the the traditional economies. People may have more trust than ever before as the transaction is immutable and transparent. Success in crypto-currency and other technical areas highlights many attractive features of the blockchain technology that can benefit more aspects of modern society. Time Banking is a generalized exchange economy not based on money, but values everyone's contribution on the same scale, the time expended. Time banking is a noble idea with great potential, but the security and trust issues are not well addressed. In this paper a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Time Banking System (BlendTBS)is proposed to build a trustful, dynamic and respectful community. People in this community are encouraged to be engaged in mutual serving relationships. For this purpose, the BlendTBS is designed to reward the residents who commit in socially beneficial activities. An initial prototype is implemented on a permissioned blockchain network and a small scale study is planned to examine the utility of BlendTBS to a traditional community on the island of Aneityum, Republic of Vanuatu. Within a selected community in the village of Analgahuat, deeper insights will be explored by observing the trust enabled by Blockchain technology that allows peer to peer service exchanges between any two individuals. Authors hope this position paper may inspire more interests in the roles that blockchain technology can play in modern society.
In order to meet the increasing demand of the blockchain, it needs to find a solution to the scalability problem. It has been focused on sharding recently to address the scalability problem. In the sharding method, the blockchain is divided into pieces. Instead of a more extensive network, networks with fewer nodes are created. As a result, it becomes more important that each node in the network is reliable. In this study, studies using sharding method have been investigated, and methods for the assigning nodes to shards are proposed. The use of learning-based adaptive methods for this process will contribute to the safe and reliable use of shards. The probability of the shards to deteriorate and influence the whole blockchain will be reduced.
Mobile Ad-hoc Cloud (MAC) is the constellation of nearby mobile devices to serve the heavy computational needs of the resource-constrained edge devices. One of the major challenges of MAC is to convince the mobile devices to offer their limited resources for the shared computational pool. Credit-based rewarding system is considered as an effective way of incentivizing the arbitrary mobile devices for joining the MAC network and to earn the credits through computational crowdsourcing. The next challenge is to get the reliable computation as incentives attract the malicious devices to submit fake computational results for claiming their reward and we have used the blockchain based reputation system for identifying the malicious participants of MAC. This paper presents a malicious node identification algorithm integrated within the Iroha based permissioned blockchain. Iroha is a project of hyperledger which is focused on mobile devices and thus light-weight in nature. It is used for keeping the track of rewarding and reputation system driven by the malicious node detection algorithm. Experiments are conducted for evaluating the implemented test-bed and results show the effectiveness of algorithm in identifying the malicious devices and conducting reliable data analysis through the blockchain based computational crowdsourcing in MAC.