The Internet of Things promises to connect more than 50 billion devices in a multitude of application domains. However, user privacy and security remain a major challenge in IoMT. In this paper, we present a work in progress for a lightweight blockchain based scheme aiming to secure the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The proposed approach consists of four main components: a cloud server, network cluster, medical facility, and smart medical devices. Each medical facility contains a “bolster”, a powerful computing device that operates as a gateway/server to support in-range smart medical devices. The bolster holds a private and secure block role. It is used to securely communicate with other blocks in the same blockchain. Experimental analysis shows that the proposed scheme presents a non-significant overhead; yet it brings major advantages to meet the standard security and privacy requirements in IoMT.
We present and evaluate models that allow clients to access IoT resources using secure and trusted device-to-device (D2D) communication, while utilizing smart contracts to obtain the benefits of blockchain technology. These benefits include decentralized trust, immutability, transparency, and high availability. The models consider different network connection capabilities of the clients and the IoT resources, namely continuous network connectivity and D2D-only connectivity. We describe two approaches for utilizing blockchains and smart contracts in the authorization process: in the first approach, only hashes of the authorization information are recorded on the blockchain. In the second approach, a smart contract handles authorization requests. We implement the approaches using the OAuth 2.0 delegated authorization framework and evaluate the implementations on the public Ethereum testnet Rinkeby, in terms of execution cost, contract creation cost, and delay. Our evaluation quantifies the tradeoffs of blockchain cost and smart contract functionality, such as blocking and non-blocking operation, and the reduction of the transaction cost that can be achieved when multiple authorization requests are concatenated in a single transaction.
Jun 1, 2019·2019 6th IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud)/ 2019 5th IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Scalable Cloud (EdgeCom)
Recently, Blockchain (BC) attracts a lot of research's to study their salient features in order to adopt it into various domains. BC promise to address security and privacy preservation issues in a distributed manner and eliminating the centralized concept. However, Internet of Thing (IoT) environments is constricted resources with limited capabilities in terms of; computation, storage, and energy that deter to adopt BC in a straightforward manner due to its intensive computational requirements and bandwidth consumption overhead. To address those issues, this paper introduces a Lightweight Blockchain based Cybersecurity (LBC) for IoT environments. Unlike the Proof of Work (PoS) and Proof of Stake (PoS) in Bitcoins, we aim to mitigate the heavy computational cost that required in a consensus algorithm to meet the IoT requirements. To provide scalability feature to the proposed scheme, Edge Block Manager (EBM) and Aggregation Block Managers (ABM) have been introduced; where EBM aims to overcome the limited capabilities of local IoT resources and manages local BC in centralized manner. While ABM constitute of numerous of EBM to manages the public BC in a distributed manner. Our novel proposed scheme can preserve high throughput and low latency. Obviously, waiting period, verification, and block appending period have been mitigated. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme is resisted against typical attacks.
Subhi Alrubei, Jonathan Rigelsford, Callum. A Willis, Edward A. Ball
Blockchain technology is a distributed database `distributed ledger' and offers features such as autonomy, decentralisation and a trustless environment. These features make blockchain suitable to be applied to different applications within the Internet of Things (IoT) realm. This paper provides a practical implementation of Proof of Authority (PoA) Ethereum blockchain on an IoT system in a real-world use case. This implementation was practically accomplished in order to investigate and highlight some of the possible issues that could affect the integration of blockchain with IoT, to lay the ground for future research and possible solutions to these issues.
Martin Dobler, Mark C. Ballandies, Valentin Holzwarth
Global supply chains represent the backbone of the modern manufacturing industry. Planning of global supply chains still represents a major hurdle, mainly because of the high complexity and unforeseen disruptions that have to be mastered for meeting the different logistics windows in a globally distributed production environment. Trust in supply chains is an additional challenge. A major - albeit sometimes overlooked - part of Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the management and integration of customs processes, clearing of tariffs, (re-)billing of customers, and fulfilling other legal requirements related to crossing borders, ranging from environmental standards over goods inspection to general paper work. With the exception of work offered by the World Customs Organization (WCO) the issue of customs and blockchain is still underrepresented in research and practice. In this paper, we look at innovations that drive the current ICT-enabled SCM research and how these can be combined with smart customs management. After a literature review and introduction to the state-of-the-art, we list potential trust-based innovations for SCM and customs in digital business ecosystems. Based upon the innovations we also describe a requirements analysis of existing distributed ledger technologies (requirements for system layout, system configuration, system governance). A description of the prototype for the Lake Constance region - on which we are currently working - concludes the paper.
Public blockchain network (PBN) has been widely used in wired networks such as bitcoin network, in which proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm is deployed among miners to reach consensus on users data during the mining process. However, the PoW consensus mechanism is computation-consuming which obstacles the application of PBN in wireless mobile networks since most Internet of Things/mobile devices (IMDs) are resource limited. Recently, mobile edge computing (MEC) has been regarded as a promising technology which can allow IMDs to offload their computation tasks to the edge nodes. Although IMDs can offload their computation tasks to the edge nodes, there is still lots of competition among enormous solo mining IMDs when reaching consensus. In this paper, we first formulate the computation resource allocation problem of PBN from the viewpoint of coalition game theory under the MEC environment. Then, we propose a coalition formation game-based algorithm to maximize the system sum utility and take both the individual profit of IMD and coalition profit into consideration. Furthermore, we prove the proposed algorithm converges to a Nash-stable partition in a fast convergence rate and finally reaches the near-optimal solution with low computational complexity. The simulation results demonstrate the optimality and convergence of the proposed algorithm, and the proposed algorithm outperforms other schemes in terms of system sum profit and ratio of rewarded IMDs to overall IMDs.
Bo Tang, Hongjuan Kang, Jingwen Fan, Qi Li · 5 authors
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a rapidly-growing transformative expansion of the Internet with increasing influence on our daily life. Since the number of "things" is expected to soon surpass human population, control and automation of IoT devices has received considerable attention from academia and industry. Cross-platform collaboration is highly desirable for better user experience due to fragmentation of user needs and vendor products with time. Centralized approaches have been used to build federated trust among platforms and devices, but limit diversity and scalability. We propose a decentralized trust framework, called IoT Passport, for cross-platform collaborations using blockchain technology. IoT Passport is motivated by the familiar use of passports for international travel but with greater dynamism. It enables platforms to establish arbitrary trust relations with each other containing specific rules for intended collaborations, enforced by a combination of smart contracts. Each interaction among devices is signed by the participants and recorded on the blockchain. The records are utilized as attributes for authorization and as proofs of incentive plans. This approach incorporates the preferences of participating platforms and end users, and opens new avenues for collaborative edge computing as well as research on blockchain-based access control mechanism for IoT environments.
In the last few years, two technological events emerged. First, the rising of Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies such as IoT allowed the direct link between machines on the shop floor, establishing a machine-to-machine communication (M2M). Second, blockchain enables transactions such payments and contracts without a formal reliable or accreditation institutions, such as banks or government. Goal: The goal of this paper is to explore the state-of-art of the blockchain technology applied to the manufacture sector. In this sense, the option of the M2M transaction being intermediated by blockchain on the shop floor is a hypothesis to be tested. Moreover, it could be questioned if these subjects are being appreciated by the academia. Design / Methodology / Approach: a systematic review of the literature was conducted, considering blockchain, the industrial context, and the Industry 4.0 related technologies. Results: As a result, only 12 papers that were classified according to their application fields and practice stages were obtained. Limitations of the investigation: this field of application is brand new; thus, the available literature is scarce; only 12 papers were obtained. Practical implications: As the main result, it was identified that the possibilities of blockchain applications to Industry have been poorly explored by literature. Originality / Value: The paper addresses the possibility of application of blockchain in M2M-based manufacture, and detaches the research gap in the academic literature related to it.
Yongjun Ren, Yan Leng, Fujian Zhu, Jin Wang · 5 authors
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to play a vital role in the field of patient-health monitoring shortly. They provide a convenient way to collect patient data, but they also bring serious problems which are mainly reflected in the safe storage of the collected data. The privacy and security of data storage in WBAN devices cannot meet the needs of WBAN users. Therefore, this paper adopts blockchain technology to store data, which improves the security of the collected data. Moreover, a storage model based on blockchain in WBAN is proposed in our solution. However, blockchain storage brings new problems, for example, that the storage space of blockchain is small, and the stored content is open to unauthorized attackers. To solve the problems above, this paper proposed a sequential aggregate signature scheme with a designated verifier (DVSSA) to ensure that the user's data can only be viewed by the designated person and to protect the privacy of the users of WBAN. In addition, the new signature scheme can also compress the size of the blockchain storage space.
The advent of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies enable IoT and smart city application developers to conceive new types of applications and solutions for identity management, trust, and data monetization. However, architecting blockchain-based IoT applications remain challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of blockchain platforms and lack of guidelines on how to interface existing components in the IoT ecosystem with the emerging Blockchain technology. This article explains the characteristics of blockchain and IoT technologies and presents a general reference architecture that can be used to develop many blockchain-based peer-to-peer IoT applications.
Tiago M. Fernández‐Caramés, Óscar Blanco-Novoa, Iván Froiz-Míguez, Paula Fraga‐Lamas
Industry 4.0 has paved the way for a world where smart factories will automate and upgrade many processes through the use of some of the latest emerging technologies. One of such technologies is Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which have evolved a great deal in the last years in terms of technology (e.g., control units, sensors, UAV frames) and have significantlyr educed their cost. UAVs can help industry in automatable and tedious tasks, like the ones performed on a regular basis for determining the inventory and for preserving item traceability. In such tasks, especially when it comes from untrusted third parties, it is essential to determine whether the collected information is valid or true. Likewise, ensuring data trustworthiness is a key issue in order to leverage Big Data analytics to supply chain efficiency and effectiveness. In such a case, blockchain, another Industry 4.0 technology that has become very popular in other fields like finance, has the potential to provide a higher level of transparency, security, trust and efficiency in the supply chain and enable the use of smart contracts. Thus, in this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a UAV-based system aimed at automating inventory tasks and keeping the traceability of industrial items attached to Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags. To confront current shortcomings, such a system is developed under a versatile, modular and scalable architecture aimed to reinforce cyber security and decentralization while fostering external audits and big data analytics. Therefore, the system uses a blockchain and a distributed ledger to store certain inventory data collected by UAVs, validate them, ensure their trustworthiness and make them available to the interested parties. In order to show the performance of the proposed system, different tests were performed in a real industrial warehouse, concluding that the system is able to obtain the inventory data really fast in comparison to traditional manual tasks, while being also able to estimate the position of the items when hovering over them thanks to their tag's signal strength. In addition, the performance of the proposed blockchain-based architecture was evaluated in different scenarios.
Innovating business processes involves cutting-edge technologies where the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain are technological breakthroughs. IoT is envisioned as a global network infrastructure consisting of numerous connected devices over the Internet. Many attempts have been made to improve and adapt business workflows for best utilizing IoT services. One possible solution is to digitize and automate internal processes using IoT services, in which Blockchain smart contract is a viable solution to establish the trust of process executions without intermediaries. Modern business processes are composed of disparate services; many of them tend to be delivered based on IoT. Interoperating with such services poses major challenges: 1) time for finality settlement of transactions is unpredictable and usually experiencing delay; 2) several implementations of permissioned Blockchain pose a major concern of trust regarding nodes that perform consensus; and 3) trust of process executions and IoT information is the major factor to the success of modern business processes, which require the composition of distributed IoT services. Traditional business processes are mostly managed by a single entity, which induces the problem of trust of process executions. In this paper, a smart contract for establishing the trust of process executions that fits into the IoT environment is presented. A consensus approach with selected validators extended from Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is introduced to address time and prejudice challenges.
Summary This paper introduces a fully decentralized low‐power wide‐area network (LPWAN) infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT) using the LoRa protocol. While global LPWANs typically require roaming agreements between network providers and a trusted third party for server resolution, we propose a trustless model where the network servers are resolved using a blockchain application. Since LoRaWAN relies on symmetric cryptography, we also propose a new security model that adds non‐repudiation using digital signatures. This paves the way for linking devices to decentralized applications. We finally analyze the impact of this new model on message size and energy requirements.
Lasse Herskind, Alberto Giaretta, Michele De Donno, Nicola Dragoni
Summary Disbursement registration has always been a cumbersome, opaque, and inefficient process, up to the point that most businesses perform cash‐flow evaluations only on a quarterly basis. We believe that automatic cash‐flow evaluations can actively mitigate these issues. In this paper, we present BitFlow, a blockchain‐based architecture that provides complete cash‐flow transparency and diminishes the probability of undetected frauds through the BitKrone, a non‐volatile cryptocurrency that maps to the Danish Krone ( DKK ). We show that confidentiality can be effectively achieved on a permissionless blockchain using Zero‐Knowledge proofs, ensuring verifiable transfers and automatic evaluations. Furthermore, we discuss several experiments to evaluate our proposal, in particular, the impact that confidential transactions have on the whole system, in terms of responsiveness and from an economical expenditure perspective.
Paweł Szałachowski, Daniël Reijsbergen, Ivan Homoliak, Siwei Sun
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes nodes to participate. However, despite its unprecedented success Bitcoin suffers from many inefficiencies. For instance, Bitcoin's consensus mechanism has been proved to be incentive-incompatible, its high reward variance causes centralization, and its hardcoded deflation raises questions about its long-term sustainability. In this work, we revise the Bitcoin consensus mechanism by proposing StrongChain, a scheme that introduces transparency and incentivizes participants to collaborate rather than to compete. The core design of our protocol is to reflect and utilize the computing power aggregated on the blockchain which is invisible and "wasted" in Bitcoin today. Introducing relatively easy, although important changes to Bitcoin's design enables us to improve many crucial aspects of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies making it more secure, efficient, and profitable for participants. We thoroughly analyze our approach and we present an implementation of StrongChain. The obtained results confirm its efficiency, security, and deployability.
In this paper, we discussed an efficient statistical method with proof-of-work consensus approach for cloud and fog computing. With this method, solution with precise probability in minimal time is realized. We have used the expectation maximization algorithm and polynomial matrix factorization. The advantages of this statistical method are the less iteration to converge to the consensus solution and easiness to configure the complete mathematical model as per the requirement. Moreover, the energy and memory consumption are also less which make this approach appealing for cloud and fog computing. The experimental results also show that the proposed approach is significantly efficient in terms of time and memory consumption. This novel approach seems beneficial for Internet-of-Things (IoT), one of the most fast-growing technologies in network computing.
Offloading computation-intensive blockchain mining tasks to the edge servers (ESs) is a promising solution for blockchain-empowered Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) because the computing capabilities in IIoT are usually limited, whereas the blockchain mining tasks are computationally intensive. However, the computation offloading solutions for data processing tasks and for blockchain mining tasks have been studied separately. Moreover, most of the existing solutions for offloading assume that all IIoT devices can directly connect to the ESs or cloud data centers. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a multihop cooperative and distributed computation offloading algorithm that considers the data processing tasks and the mining tasks together for blockchain-empowered IIoT. First, we study the multihop computation offloading problem for both the data processing tasks and the mining tasks to minimize the economic cost of IIoT devices. Second, we formulate the offloading problem as a potential game in which the IIoT devices can make their decisions autonomously and prove the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) for the game. Third, we design an efficient distributed algorithm based on exchanging messages between IIoT devices to achieve the NE with low computational complexity. Lastly, our experimental results demonstrate that our distributed algorithm scales well as the number of IIoT devices increases and has the minimum system cost compared with other approaches.
In this paper, we present Low-Bandwidth Distributed Applications Framework (LDAF)-an application-aware gateway for communication-constrained Internet of things (IoT) devices. A modular approach facilitates connecting to existing cloud backend servers and managing message formats and APIs' native application logic to meet the communication constraints of resource-limited end devices. We investigated options for positioning the LDAF server in fog computing architectures. We demonstrated the approach in three use cases: (i) a simple domain name system (DNS) query from the device to a DNS server, (ii) a complex interaction of a blockchain-based IoT device with a blockchain network, and (iii) difference based patching of binary (system) files at the IoT end devices. In a blockchain smart meter use case we effectively enabled decentralized applications (DApp) for devices that without our solution could not participate in a blockchain network. Employing the more efficient binary content encoding, we reduced the periodic traffic from 16 kB/s to ~1.1 kB/s, i.e., 7% of the initial traffic. With additional optimization of the application protocol in the gateway and message filtering, the periodic traffic was reduced to ~1% of the initial traffic, without any tradeoffs in the application's functionality or security. Using a function of binary difference we managed to reduce the size of the communication traffic to the end device, at least when the binary patch was smaller than the patching file.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a remarkable data producer and these data may be used to prevent or detect security vulnerabilities and increase productivity by the adoption of statistical and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. However, these desirable benefits are gained if data from IoT networks are dependable—this is where blockchain comes into play. In fact, through blockchain, critical IoT data may be trusted, i.e., considered valid for any subsequent processing. A simple formal model named “the Mirror Model” is proposed to connect IoT data organized in traditional models to assets of trust in a blockchain. The Mirror Model sets some formal conditions to produce trusted data that remain trusted over time. A possible practical implementation of an application programming interface (API) is proposed, which keeps the data and the trust model in synch. Finally, it is noted that the Mirror Model enforces a top-down approach from reality to implementation instead of going the opposite way as it is now the practice when referring to blockchain and the IoT.