This paper deals with the incorporation of Blockchain technology in the security of Internet of Things(IoT) based on Remote Patient monitoring systems. The paper presents the benefits and also practical obstacles of blockchain-based security approaches in remote patient monitoring using IoT devices. Furthermore, the paper evaluates various potentially suitable cryptographic technologies for deployment in IoT.
Internet of Things (IoT) has created huge vibes in the technology arena. It has been pivotal in providing cutting-edge solutions in diversified fields. Few applications include smart homes, smart cities, medical, transport and logistics. IoT provides real-time data exchange through wired or wireless networks with no standards being developed to regulate the flow of information within system. As such, the security and access control in the IoT has become an issue of prominence. Now days, researchers understood the potentiality of the Blockchain (BC) in context with the security and authentication. More specifically the decentralized nature of BC makes it apt for integration with the IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a model that makes use of the blockchain concept to bridle the security and authentication problems in the IoT network. We consider various factors that effect this integration of blockchain and IoT. Our investigations conclude that this hybrid model is powerful and can provide significant transformations in building novel applications across distributed platforms.
As the Internet of things (IoT) is increasingly popular, the number of IoT devices such as sensors and smart equipments are growing at an astonishing rate and data generated by these devices is exploding. However, these massive IoT data, stored in the form of isolated data centers, can not be shared by others who also need it. Moreover, data exchange is now needing a secure and fair mechanism to guarantee the data provider's rights and data security. Data providers also lack the motivation to share their data, as no effective mechanism exists to reward this behavior. To solve these problems, we propose a digital asset exchange mechanism based on blockchain technology, in which we record the behavior of data publishing and exchanging into the blockchain, which can ensure the reliability and transparency of data exchange without the restriction of trusted third-party payment institutions. Especially, to inspire the data providers to share their high-quality data, we design an incentive mechanism based on QoS, which gives higher rewards to those who provide high-quality data. Experimental results of this prototype demonstrate that this mechanism is appropriate to be applied in practice.
Kamran Shehzad, Muhammad Afrasayab, M. Younis Ali Khan, Muhammad Azhar Mushtaq · 6 authors
In recent years, Internet of things have revolutionized the daily life operations by automating routine tasks, changing the way humans interact with each other or with machines. In fact, direct machine to machine interaction is a key enabling feature of IOTs. Their advantages span from small house hold devices to large industrial systems. Although IOTs provide numerous benefits, their implementation possesses different problems mainly because of the critical nature of the tasks they perform and due to their limited computational capabilities. The Blockchain is the future disruptive technology that has gained the interest of large number of industries to address the issues being faced by them. In this paper, we highlighted issues pertaining to the IOT domain and then analyzed the way how these can be solved using Blockchain features. In addition, we also highlighted the problems that arise with the deployment of Blockchain in IOTs.
Blockchain has increasingly been considered a disruptive tool for business models. The aim of this paper is to show how blockchain applied to smart cities can successfully promote the inclusion of persons with disability (PWD). By relying on prior literature, we noticed a gap in any approaches related to this topic. Through interviews with several area specialists, we proceeded to the construction of an integration model for PWD in smart cities. Along with research and the input of several key players from different industries, we were able to find specific applications of blockchain in smart cities for PWD. Therefore, the role of this paper is to demonstrate how we can integrate PWD through blockchains' information, digital identification and verifications. This study has enabled us to identify that the Blockchain system can find answers to problems related to the inclusion of PWD by creating technological solutions for the issues addressed within the World Report in Disability (2011) in the areas of education, accessibility, employment, insurance and health.
This paper deals with the security matters in automotive by using the Blockchain technology and an innovative thinking skill which has been applied to develop the new prototype design from the initial idea. The Blockchain Governance Game and Fog Computing are adopted to build the new highly secure decentralized service architecture. These relatively new technologies make possible to design the Blockchain based on the automotive security. Although the paper is condensed and does not contain the details, it will be the good guideline for the direction of future research. The thinking skill called Systematic Innovation is the core to solve this problems in the proper Blockchain security network design and well demonstrated in this paper.
Blockchain technology is an invention where digital transactions refer to distributed database without the need of third party intervention and authentication. In present time several organizations in various disciplines are adopting this technology which has transparency, integrity, efficiency in cost and time. Its unique technology is being adopted in various industries like banking, legal, healthcare, rentals, education and many more. The intention of this paper is to outline the Blockchain technology and its function in various domain.
Medical diagnostics such as medical tests, x-rays etc. are stored in two ways- Physical records and Online records, which cannot be accessed by patients without authorized permission. Even doctors/medical professionals do not get this data during crucial times. This could be avoided by sharing medical data of patients to the doctors and patient directly. Present storage method is also at a security threat of being tampered and accessed by unauthorized. This paper proposes blockchain network to address the issues related to medical records system which is easily accessed by the patient or doctor to take better and effective decisions ensuring immutability. Doctors view/update past visits for a medical record, if given the permission to by the respective patients. The proposed model uses Hyperledger Composer, Composer REST server, Hyperledger Fabric and Angular 4. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain framework thus allowing the model to have permission control. The UI allows doctors/patients to easily access the patients records as and when required. The patients grant permission to a particular doctor when required and revoke access once the doctor as completed a visit. Similarly every doctor is allowed to view a patients data only when granted permission and is then allowed to update the history. Only a doctor can update the patient's history to ensure data integrity.
Data security and privacy is one of the most crucial design parameter in any kind of modern application. The rate of connected devices is increasing day by day hence enhancing the security becomes a challenge. The healthcare industry faces many losses due to poor security design in data sharing and access management. Today most of the security is ensured leveraging cryptography alone, but blockchain has become another solution for security and privacy. Blockchain can be used as decentralized trust and a provider of universal truth across the application. Blockchain also utilizes cryptography in itself makes it more secure and trust able, hence the proposed solution uses combination of blockchain and cryptography to reinforce patient data permissions and sharing. Blockchain also enables to become compliant of various data protection and privacy rules.
Today, Internet of Things (IoT) technology is applied to everywhere providing tremendous amounts of IoT service such as home control, facility management, and social public services. The GS1, a non-profit international standard organization, standardized an Object Name Service (ONS) which enables users to manage and discover services in the midst of tremendous amounts of service. However, it has a vulnerability in security and fault tolerance of providing service, because the ONS operates based on the DNS protocol. It is weak against data tampering attacks caused by DNS cache poisoning, spoofing, and local DNS cracking. It has a weak fault tolerance from problems with attack or malfunction. In this paper, we propose a BlockONS, which is novel ONS based on a blockchain. It provides a strength in data tampering attacks allowing a fault tolerance for sustainable service. The BlockONS consists of new service data modeling for an off-chain scaling, data tampering validation method, and fault tolerance mechanism. We designed the BlockONS into two parts: a BlockONS Node part to valid data tampering, and a BlockONS Agent part for scaling and fault tolerance. Finally, we implement the BlockONS prototype using a Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain and intel i5 NUC. We proof the feasibility of the BlockONS by comparing with performance of an existing ONS.
In this paper, we focus on the energy efficiency aware architecture of caching the necessary production messages and the transaction process to support a readable and tamper proof internet of things (IoT). To achieve this, blockchain can provide a reliable distributed storage of the messages, because any changes of the cached messages will break the structure of the blockchain. Specifically, we assume that the access points belonging to different telecom operators collect the messages in the IoT network, wherein multiple servers used for either caching or computing are placed at each access point. We define that the caching servers can be divided into the data loading caches for caching the received wireless IoT data and the data transmission caches for transmitting the IoT data into the blockchain based cloud caching servers. The blocks generated in the data loading caches at each access point will be written into the blockchain based on both the proof-of-work and the capacity of the data loading caches at each access point. Then, we formulate the optimization problem maximizing the system energy efficiency by optimizing the allocation of cache, computation and communication resources by a geometric programming model. By the CVX tool in matlab software, the geometric programming model can be solved effectively. We study the impact of different parameters involved in the blockchain on the system performance, and verify the effectiveness of our proposed energy efficiency aware optimization mechanism in the blockchain based IoT.
The Internet of Things (IoT) visualizes a massive network with billions of interaction among smart things which are capable of contributing all sorts of services. Self-configuring things (nodes) are connected dynamically with a global network in IoT scenario. The small things are widely spread in a real world paradigm with minimal processing capacity and limited storage. The recent IoT technologies have more concerns about the security, privacy and reliability. Sharing personal data over the centralized system still remains as a challenging task. If the infrastructure is able to provide the assurance for transferring the data but for now it requires special attention on security and data consistency. Because, centralized system and infrastructure is viewed as a more attractive point for hacker or cyber-attacker. To solve this we present a secured smart contract based on Blockchain to develop a secured communicative network. A Hash based secret key is used for encryption and decryption purposes. A demo attack is done for developing a better understanding on blockchain technology in terms of their comparison and calculation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
May 1, 2019·2019 IEEE 5th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
Blockchain technology combines the openness of the Internet with the security of cryptography to provide a way to verify key information and to establish a trust in applications such as peer-to-peer payment services. Blockchain can be used to track the healthcare transactions and can ensure authorized access to patient records and compliance with the health information protection laws. In this paper, a dual blockchain model for the healthcare sector is proposed. The model combines healthcare authority blockchains and private patient blockchains for a tamperproof permission tracking system which ensures increased security and privacy while improving record and permission redundancy. The proposed model and its possible implementation are discussed in the context of Canadian healthcare privacy legislation in Alberta.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), of which Blockchain is a popular example, are increasingly becoming an integral feature of many modern systems.While cryptocurrencies are a common motivating example, and they drive systems such as Bitcoin, DLT has many other uses across industries including Health Care, Supply Chain, IoT, and Finance among others.One of the key concepts that make DLT appealing is the ability for large-scale systems that do not trust each other to reach consensus and share a commonly verifi able ledger, in order to track resources, changes to system-wide data, and other artifacts.Cryptocurrencies are one type of resource that can be tracked, but DLT has been used for energy, pharmaceuticals, and many other domains.
Current swarm robotics systems are not utilized as frequently in surveillance missions due to the limitations of the existing distributed systems' designs. The main limitation of swarm robotics is the absence of a framework for robots to be self-governing, secure, and scalable. As of today, a swarm of robots is not able to communicate and perform tasks in transparent and autonomous ways. Many believe blockchain is the imminent future of distributed autonomous systems. A blockchain is a system of computers that stores and distributes data among all participants. Every single participant is a validator and protector of the data in the blockchain system. The data cannot be modified since all participants are storing and watching the same records. In this thesis, we will focus on blockchain applications in swarm robotics using Ethereum smart contracts because blockchain can make a swarm globally connected and secure. A decentralized application (DApp) is used to deploy surveillance missions. After mission deployment, the swarm uses blockchain to communicate and make decisions on appropriate tasks within Ethereum private networks. We set a test swarm robotics system and evaluate the blockchain for its performance, scalability, recoverability, and responsiveness. We conclude that, although blockchain enables a swarm to be globally connected and secure, there are performance limitations that can become a critical issue.
Blockchains - with their inherent properties of transaction transparency, distributed consensus, immutability and cryptographic verifiability - are increasingly seen as a means to underpin innovative products and services in a range of sectors from finance through to energy and healthcare. Discussions, too often, make assertions that the trustless nature of blockchain technologies enables and actively promotes their suitability - there being no need to trust third parties or centralised control. Yet humans need to be able to trust systems, and others with whom the system enables transactions. In this paper, we highlight that understanding this need for trust is critical for the development of blockchain-based systems. Through an online study with 125 users of the most well-known of blockchain based systems - the cryptocurrency Bitcoin - we uncover that human and institutional aspects of trust are pervasive. Our analysis highlights that, when designing future blockchain-based technologies, we ought to not only consider computational trust but also the wider eco-system, how trust plays a part in users engaging/disengaging with such eco-systems and where design choices impact upon trust. From this, we distill a set of guidelines for software engineers developing blockchain-based systems for societal applications.
Eduardo A. Franciscon, Marcos P. Nascimento, Jones Granatyr, Marcos R. Weffort · 6 authors
The growth in use of Blockchain technology has enabled the development of applications in various industries. In particular, there has been an interest about using it in government to manage electronic public services, such as configuring and improving electronic government (e-government). However, the in-depth study of practical Blockchain solutions in the government sector is still under-researched despite the growing academic interest in this area. Therefore, this article presents a systematic literature review based on the current technology relating to Blockchain architectures applied by governments to public services.
Michael Herbert Ziegler, Marcel Großmann, Udo R. Krieger
Considering the Internet-of-Things, the blockchain technology has recently become a major focus of research. One of its major drawbacks is given by the poor performance of blockchain systems subject to heavy load. In particular, systems which use Proof-of-Work as leader election strategy are not suitable for an active participation of IoT devices. We propose a new system architecture which uses the Plasma framework to integrate blockchain technology and fog computing and evaluate the performance of its prototype. The Plasma framework has the advantage to provide a scalable hierarchical design based on sidechains and an off-chain scaling strategy which is agnostic with regard to the architecture of the employed root chain.
Shuming Seng, Xi Li, Changqing Luo, Hong Ji · 5 authors
The past few years have witnessed the explosive growth of mobile user equipment (UEs) and the popularity of computation-intensive applications, leading to a mobile edge computing paradigm for Ultra-dense wireless networks (UDNs). Since numerous UEs need to offload a large amount of computation tasks to edge servers/UEs, it is very challenging to coordinate computation offloading among UEs and edge servers in UDNs. To address this issue, we propose a decentralized computation offloading coordination platform that is based on the blockchain. Specifically, we first establish a blockchain platform for announcing computation offloading requests and coordinate computation offloading among UEs and edge servers. Then, we develop a modified GS-based user matching algorithm to find the matching relationship between offloading requester's computation tasks and the edge server/UEs. In particular, user matching is based on task execution time and energy consumption. We conduct simulations and provide extensive simulation results to show the significant performance improvement achieved by the proposed offloading scheme.
The past several years have witnessed an explosive growth in cryptocurrencies, but the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have also raised many concerns, among which a crucial one is the scalability issue. Suffering from the large overhead of global consensus and security assurance, even the leading cryptocurrencies can only handle up to tens of transactions per second, which largely limits their applications in real-world scenarios. Among many proposals to improve the cryptocurrency scalability, one of the most promising and mature solutions is the payment channel network (PCN), which offers the off-chain settlement of transactions with minimal involvement of expensive blockchain operations. In this paper, we investigate the problem of payment routing in PCNs from an optimization perspective, which is to minimize the transaction fee of a payment path, subject to the timeliness and feasibility constraints. We present an optimal distributed algorithm CheaPay for this problem. Extensive simulations demonstrate that CheaPay significantly outperforms baseline algorithms in terms of the success ratio and the average accepted value.
This paper proposes a new device-to-device edge computing and networks (D2D-ECN) framework which facilitates low-latency execution of real-time Internet-of Things applications through computation offloading with minimal overhead. Our framework accounts for key challenges of D2D-ECN in terms of the efficiency of the resource management and the resulting security concerns caused by lacking trustworthy between task owners and resource providers. In particular, we propose to use a blockchain-empowered framework for implementing resource trading and task assigment as the smart contracts. However, the existing Proof-of-Work (PoW) is impractical for the resource-constrained IoT devices due to high computational complexity of the mining process. Thus, we present a reputation-based consensus mechanism called proof-of-reputation (PoR), where the device with the highest reputation score is responsible for packaging the resource transactions and reputation records in the blockchain. Furthermore, we evaluate the reputation score of each device according to the current computation performance and history reputation. Security, feasibility analysis and numerical results show that our proposed computation offloading scheme can be deployed in the decentralized D2D-ECN system safely and effectively.
Smart Communities seeks to thrive in a context of broadband economy, its engine and reason for being. The success of any community is a function of its economic backbone or the supply chain. A supply chain can be defined as the integration of customers, retailers, distributors and manufacturers. The changing technology has made the survival in commerce highly competitive and price sensitive. Blockchain technology can be the game-changer for decentralizing infrastructure and building a trust layer for business logic. BlockCom is a commerce model based on the emerging technology of blockchain. This paper presents a double auction scheme for energy trading between customers and suppliers. A smart contract implements a distributed algorithm to maximize individual participating profit. Parties bid to smart contract which act as auctioneer for maximizing the profit. Mathematical parameter named credibility score has been created to deal with trust issues in the decentralized network using byzantine fault tolerant mechanism. BlockCom provides a fresh perspective on the concept of supply chain and commerce.
With the spread of pragmatic approaches to blockchains and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), the need to operate securely across multiple DLTs has become apparent. The class of operations that span two or more DLTs is generally referred to as interledger. Various interledger approaches have been proposed, researched and taken into use, including for example, atomic cross-chain transactions, sidechains, bridging approaches, ledger-of-ledger structures, and layered value transfer protocols, such as the W3C Interledger Protocol (ILP).In this demonstration, we exemplify ongoing work in our research group at Aalto University. We demonstrate how a resource-constrained IoT device may be made able to interact with an “IoT-friendly” ledger, with an interledger gateway service bridging to a public permissionless ledger. The demo use case reflects a scenario where an IoT device advertizes a service that is available for anyone on the Internet, pending a successful and validated payment has been made on the Ethereum ledger. This demonstration shows how this can be accomplished in an auditable and secure manner across ledgers using hashed timelock agreements (HTLAs) to provide payment escrow.
Vysakh Anilkumar, Joseph Antony Joji, Asif Afzal, Reshma Sheik
Blockchain technology has been shining like a star after the introduction and widespread acceptance of the Bitcoin, the very first cryptocurrency in people's everyday lives. At the beginning, Blockchain was used only for monetary transactions but studies have proven that it has many more applications. Blockchain platforms introduce a decentralized mode of control are rapidly being developed in the world on a large scale and their survey along with their characteristics are being discussed in this paper. But since developing Blockchain applications on a Blockchain network are more costly, there is a need for a simulation platform to refine and test the applications before it can be committed to the network There are a huge number of Blockchain simulation platforms available. The real task is to choose one among them that is best suited for decentralised application (DApp) developers. In this paper, a study is made using an E-voting application [7] to compare different Ethereum simulation platforms.