Circular Economy is a novel economic model, where every 'asset' is not wasted but reused and upscaled. The Internet of Things-IoT paradigm can underpin the transition to a Circular Economy by enabling fine-grained and continuous asset tracking. However, there are issues related to security and privacy of IoT devices that generate and handle sensitive and personal data. The use of Blockchain technology provides an answer to this issue, however, its application raises issues related to the highly-constrained nature of these networks. In this paper, Edge Computing is presented as a solution to this issue, providing a way in which Blockchain and Edge Computing can be used together to address the constrained nature of IoT. Furthermore, we present the challenges that this combination poses and the opportunities that it brings. We propose an architecture that decreases the IoT devices requirements for memory capacity and increases the overall performance. We also discuss the architecture design and the challenges that it has, comparing it to the traditional Blockchain architecture as well as an Edge Computing architecture for Mobile Blockchain. The paper closes with a discussion and future extensions of our work are presented, as well.
Blockchain technology has found a great number of applications, from banking to the Internet of Things (IoT). However, it has not yet been envisioned whether and which problems in Software Engineering (SE) Blockchain technology could solve. In this paper, we coin this field "Blockchain-based Software Engineering" and exemplify how Blockchain technology could solve two core SE problems: Continuous Integration (CI) Services such as Travis CI and Package Managers such as apt-get. We believe that Blockchain technology could help (1) democratize and professionalize Software Engineering infrastructure that currently relies on free work done by few volunteers, (2) improve the quality of artifacts and services, and (3) increase trust in ubiquitously used systems like GitHub or Travis CI.
The Central and State governments of India uses the Public Distribution System(PDS) to distribute food grains to the citizen of India at subsidized rates to ensure food security. The system is prone to losses of food grains because of prevalent corruption among the officials serving the system and also due to physical losses during storage and transport. Blockchains have become a commonly used audit trail verification utility because of its inherent nature, that it is a distributed ledger for recording transactions. This makes it a key candidate to replace the current centralized system that exists for the tracking of commodities being distributed by the PDS. Like any centralized system the current centralized system can be sabotaged by the people in administration, as it relies heavily on trust on the central authority. In this paper we propose an intelligent scheme for tracking the commodities in PDS using IoT based sensors that monitor the arrival and dispatch of commodities and generate corresponding transactions. These transactions should be stored permanently to keep track of the commodities for which a decentralized Blockchain based system is used that continuously logs every valid transaction. As the amount of transactions increase so does the data to be stored on the blockchain, hence we propose a hierarchical blockchain approach where in transaction summaries of a local blockchain are recorded as transactions in a higher level blockchain after which the local blockchains can start afresh recording newer transactions only. This approach results in reduction in the amount of data to be stored on the blockchain. At the same time one can find aggregate information at a higher level which can be used to determine the supply demand ratio. Anyone can verify the current availability of the food grains throughout the distribution network of the PDS and track the commodities right from the network of warehouses to the end point sales-the fair price shops where the food grains are delivered to the consumers. These transactions can be audited at any time as all transactions are recorded in the Blockchain which can prevent any misuse or corruption.
Smart grid (SG) provides a peer-to-peer energy trading mechanism wherein the electric vehicles (EVs) can trade for energy with their peers using the information and communication technologies. However, the dependence on third party for coordinating the energy trading decisions leads to a bottleneck for any distributed environment. Therefore, blockchain technology can provide a privacy-preserving and effective consensus mechanism without the control of trusted third party. Although blockchain provides inherent secure framework for transactional process, but the this security is because of computational complexity enforced. In SG environment, the conventional blockchain process could not be employed due to limited computational resources with EVs, which makes it difficult to solve the tough computational puzzles to validate the transactions. On the other hand, any compromise on the computation difficulty makes it more vulnerable to various types of attacks. Therefore, in this paper, SmartChain: a blockchain inspired smart and scalable ledger framework which does not require much computational complexity is designed for secure peer-to-peer energy trading in SG ecosystem. The proposed framework is evaluated using the parameters such as execution and validation time. The results obtained depict the superiority of SmartChain in contrast to the conventional blockchain process.
Blockchain technology offers advantages such as integrity, anonymity, credibility and independence of the institution and time because of its decentralized nature. One of the current areas for tackling challenges and potential application of blockchain technology is education. Higher education is a complex system with various challenges that could be potentially improved by introducing this technology. This paper shows a brief overview of current systems, their current state and a direction of their development, but also proposes specific guidelines and upgrades for current systems, that would enhance them and, consequently, the area of education. It also proposes blockchain integration levels in higher education that, combined with data extraction, can expand and deepen the area of education for the benefit of institutions, employers and students.
Mohamad Kassab, Joanna F. DeFranco, Tarek Malas, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto · 5 authors
Healthcare systems have been supported by technology to help improve the user experience with the entire health system. However, many operational challenges still remain, in particular those related to a unified management of electronic health records (EHR) that could enable multiple doctors to have access to the complete health history of their patient. Blockchain could support unified records, data security and privacy improvement and insurance decisions/transactions making it an effective solution for the above mentioned healthcare technology challenges. The main contribution of this paper is providing preliminary results of a literature review on the adoption of blockchain to support the management of EHR in health systems - along with the benefits and challenges.
The emerging blockchain technology provides a new paradigm for maintaining data integrity and unforgeability in a distributed manner. However conventional public blockchain systems suffer large consensus latency thus cannot be well applied to Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with the high mobility of vehicles and low latency requirement. In addition, not all messages in IoV should be stored in a global ledger. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Blockchain (HB) which divides the system into two layers and each layer maintains an exclusive ledger. Sensing information of vehicles are recorded in differnet layer according to its influence scope. Furthermore, based on the transactions recorded in the hierarchical blockchain, we design the proactive file duplicate caching scheme considering not only popularities but influence scopes for the enhancement of overall system performance. Simulation results shows the superiority of the proposed architecture compared with conventional vehicular systems, in terms of failure rate, latency and system utility.
Wazen M. Shbair, Mathis Steichen, Jérôme François, Radu State
Future blockchain applications are anticipated to serve millions of users. Thus the evaluation of new blockchain applications have to consider large-scale assessment of the technologies behind the scene. Most of current testing approaches have been done either on simulators or via local small blockchain networks. Hence, the performance in real world conditions is unpredictable. This demonstration introduces BlockZoom, a large-scale blockchain testbed that runs on top of a highly reconfigurable and controllable HPC platform. BlockZoom presents a reproducible environment for experimenting distributed ledgers technologies and smart contract applications. Through different configuration scenarios developers can evaluate the applications performance and the blockchain behavior at a scale comparable to the production environment. The target audience of this demonstration includes researchers and developers in blockchain technology.
Internet of Things (IoT), an significant support for strategic emerging industries, is re-building industrial systems, such as transportation, healthcare and energy, while a number of new features and requirements like data cross-industry sharding appear in recent years. The emerging Blockchain technology has provided a promising opportunity to break information island and single-domain management in multi-domain IoT systems by leveraging distributed storage. On the other hand, the transaction consensus throughput in the mainstream blockchain systems, such as Ethereum and Fabric, is far from meeting the demand for massive data storage in time in multi-domain IoT systems. In this paper, we design a sharding protocol called MDIoTSP. The protocol first partitions the overall blockchains into many small shards, each of which generally recognized as a micro-blockchain according to the multiple domains, and then make the final consensus by merging the hash digests of the sub-blocks which generated from the shards for the multi-domain IoT blockchains ecosystem specifically. We also develop MicrothingsChains to run MDIoTSP in multi-domain IoT blockchains to prove our assumption that MDIoTSP scales up the transaction consensus throughput near linearly with the number of shards.
Mengting Liu, Yinglei Teng, F. Richard Yu, Victor C. M. Leung · 5 authors
The rapid development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) necessitates a secure and reliable infrastructure to store and share the massive data. Blockchain, a distributed and immutable ledger, is widely considered as a promising solution to ensure data security and privacy for IoV. To deal with the massive IoV data, the scalability of blockchain becomes a critical issue, which should maximize transactional throughput as well as handling the dynamics of IoV scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based performance optimization framework for blockchain-enabled IoV, where transactional throughput is maximized while guaranteeing the decentralization, latency and security of the underlying blockchain system. In this framework, we first carry out the performance analysis for blockchain systems from the aspects of scalability, decentralization, latency and security. Further, DRL technique is adopted to select block producers and adjust block size and block interval to adapt to the dynamics of IoV scenarios. Simulation results show that our proposed framework can effectively improve the throughput of blockchain-enabled IoV systems without affecting other properties.
Recently, there has been increasing interest in employing blockchain in different applications, other than crypto-currencies. Blockchains allow a peer to peer distributed network where different nodes communicate with each other, in a trustless manner. Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is an Internet of Things (IoT) technology, which enables long range communication. Although LoRaWAN networks are secure, the LoRaWAN join procedure is susceptible to replay and jamming attacks. Moreover, trust between network server and LoRa end device is the basic foundation of LoRaWAN network however, the centralized nature of network servers raise trust issues between network operators and customers. To solve this problem, we propose a lightweight two factor authentication mechanism for LoRaWAN join procedure, based on blockchain technology. The proposed blockchain based framework provides an extra layer of security for LoRaWAN join procedure and build trust among LoRaWAN network components. The proposed framework is validated using the Ethereum blockchain. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework provides efficient system performance in terms of throughput and latency. The proposed blockchain architecture is a cost effective solution, which can be utilized in the LoRaWAN network with few network servers and LoRa end device, having no strict requirement of throughput and latency.
Applications in the area of IoT and smart cities rely heavily on data to manage and control their operational environments. In such applications, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms help the government officials, city administrators, and industries to make an informed decision on managing their cities and factories using the data collected from various sources. As we step into the era where ”data is termed as new oil”, there is a need for protocols with support for selling and buying data without giving up the data ownership to third-parties. In this demo, we present Streaming Data Payment Protocol (SDPP), which is an application layer protocol for selling and buying data. SDPP uses blockchain and distributed ledger technology for micropayments and immutable storage of transaction records. In addition, our protocol has a built-in mechanism to set data granularity since the bulk transfer of data between a seller and a buyer may lead to a loss for the seller if the buyer terminates the connection after receiving the data without making a payment. In this demo, we present SDPP and explain how it can contribute to the emerging data economy using a proof-of-concept implementation that uses TCP protocol for data communication and IOTA as both cryptocurrency and a distributed ledger.
Shenbin Zhang, Ence Zhou, Bingfeng Pi, Jun Sun · 6 authors
Blockchain is one of the most popular distributed ledger technologies. In order to solve the trustless problems between enterprises, many permissioned blockchain platforms are proposed in recent years. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain which is comprised of chaincode, endorsing peers, ordering service, committing peers and membership service. Fabric provides identity authentication, transactions encryption and high performance. Hence, decentralized application based on Fabric can be applied among enterprises to implement the immutable and high throughput for transactions. However, some limitations still exist in Fabric framework. This paper surveys the risk of non-deterministic transactions in Fabric, which can be caused by read-write conflict and transactions order dependency. Transactions are judged to be invalid by committing peers when read-write conflict exists. Besides, transactions submission order may be disrupted during endorsing and ordering. Both of the two risks can make the final transaction execution result non-deterministic. Finally, a solution of cache layer on Fabric client is proposed to solve the risk of non-deterministic transactions.
Sina Rafati Niya, Danijel Dordevic, Atif Ghulam Nabi, Tanbir Mann · 5 authors
Supply Chain Tracking (SCT) is considered as a major challenge for stakeholders of heterogeneous production, processing, transporting, storing, and selling systems. Studies on solutions in SCT reveal that many centralized SCT applications lack a design, which can support or even enable main features of a reliable, transparent, and publicly accessible SCT system for end users. This work demonstrates the implementation of a SCT application which, employs SC on the Ethereum blockchain (BC). This Decentralized Application (Dapp) provides a hardware-and platform-independent approach that flexibly enables multiple object combinations and transformations to be tracked with a use case-agnostic design and utilization.
Frank Golatowski, Björn Butzin, Tim Brockmann, Thorsten Schulz · 10 authors
In this paper, we analyze the state of the art in distributed ledger technologies and blockchains and investigate potential applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Afterwards, we discuss interoperability of blockchains, and their use in smart contracts, and artificial intelligence.
A blockchain has attracted in many research fields. In this paper, a blockchain-based distributed optimization method for energy management systems (EMSs) is studied. In distributed optimization, the original problem is decomposed, and the local problems are solved by multiple agents. Hence, distributed optimization is appropriate for large-scale multi-agent systems. In this paper, ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers) is utilized as one of the powerful methods in distributed optimization. In ADMM, an aggregator is required for collecting the computation result in each agent. Using blockchains, the function of an aggregator can be contained in a distributed ledger, and an aggregator may not be required. As a result, tampering from attackers can be prevented. In this paper, after ADMM and blockchains are summarized, an EMS studied in this paper is introduced. By numerical experiments, the effectiveness and limitation of blockchain-based distributed optimization are clarified from the viewpoints of tamper tolerance and computation time.
Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong, Dusit Niyato, Dong In Kim
The burgeoning vehicular networks generate a huge amount of sensing data. Data sharing among vehicles enables a number of valuable vehicular applications to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. To ensure security and traceability of data sharing, an efficient Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm is utilized to establish Blockchain-Enabled VEhicular Networks (BEVENs). Miners in DPoS include active miners and standby miners. The active miners are responsible for block generation and block verification. However, due to the limited number of active miners in DPoS, the compromised active miners may collude with each other to generate maliciously manipulated results of block verification. To prevent the internal collusion among the active miners, a newly generated block can be further verified and audited by the standby miners. To incentivize the participation of the miners in block verification, we adopt the contract theory to model the interactions between active miners and standby miners, where both block verification security and delay are taken into consideration. Numerical results demonstrate the security and efficiency of our schemes for data sharing in BEVENs.
S. Madumidha, P. Siva Ranjani, U. Vandhana, B. Venmuhilan
The traceability of Agriculture food supply chain management is important to ensure the food safety. It also increases the customer satisfaction and peer-to-peer productivity. The centralized data storage makes it more difficult to assure quality, rate and origin of the products. So we are in need of a decentralized system where transparency is available which makes people from the producers to consumers satisfaction. Blockchain technology, which is a digital technology that allows us to acquire traceability and transparency in the supply chain. Making use of this technology actually improves the community between different stakeholders and farmers. The properties of blockchain essentially provides increased capacity, better security, immutability, minting, faster settlement and full traceability of stored transactions records. This paper presents a fully decentralized blockchain based traceability that enables to build blocks for agriculture that continuously integrate with IoT devices from provider to consumer. To implement, we introduced “Provider-Consumer Network” -a theoretical end to end food traceability application. The objective is to create distributed ledger that is accessible by all users in the network that in turn brings transparency.
With the rapid development of the internet of things (IoT), traditional industries are setting off a massive wave of digitization. In the era of the Internet of Everything, millions of devices and links in IoT pose more significant challenges to data management. Most existing solutions employ centralized systems to control IoT devices, which brings about the privacy and security issues in IoT data management. Recently, blockchain has attracted much attention in the field of IoT due to its decentralization, traceability, and non-tamperability. However, it is non-trivial to apply the current blockchain techniques to IoT due to the lack of scalability and high resource costs. Different blockchain platforms have their particular advantages in the scenario of IoT data management. In this paper, we propose a cross-chain framework to integrate multiple blockchains for efficient and secure IoT data management. Our solution builds an interactive decentralized access model which employs a consortium blockchain as the control station. Other blockchain platforms customized for specific IoT scenarios run as the backbone of all IoT devices. It is equivalent to opening the off-chain channels on the consortium blockchain. Our model merges transactions in these channels for confirmation based on the notary mechanism. Finally, we implement a prototype of the proposed model based on hyperledge Fabric and IOTA Tangle. We evaluate the performance of our method through extensive experiments. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.
Shubhani Aggarwal, Mohammad Shojafar, Neeraj Kumar, Mauro Conti
Data Dissemination is the distribution of data/statistics to the end users. With the adoption of Internet of Drones (IoD) environment for data dissemination, an efficient scheme is proposed which provides data integrity, identity anonymity, authentication, authorization, accountability (AAA) to the system model. We propose a system model having Ethereum based public blockchain distributed network in order to secure drone communication for the data collection and transmission. The proposed model provides secure communication between the drones and the users in a decentralized way. In this paper, blockchain technology is used for the storage of collected data from the drones and update the information into the distributed ledgers to reduce the burden of drones. It also provides integrity, authentication, and authorization to the collected data by the drones in the system model. Motivated by this consideration, the goal of this paper is threefold. First, we select a forger node from the number of drones. Second, we create blocks and validate their processes. Third, we provide secure data dissemination by applying Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Afterward, we evaluate the security of the presented system model compared against the corresponding ones of some state-of-the-art in terms of communication time/cost. The results confirm that our system model is reliable and scalable for data dissemination in the IoD environment.
Due to the fact that financial data stands a great risk of attack, several schemes are being deployed to ensure security and integrity of financial data. In considering the security of the financial transaction data, it is essential to consider a network that ensure that processing nodes would have copies of the financial accounting ledger so as to prevent complete when a section of the network fails. In this article we propose an application of a blockchain to financial transaction data backup mechanism over a decentralized network. By using a decentralized distributed blockchain ledger, each node can have a copy of the transaction data such that, failure in one node does not engender a total failure in transaction data. The system have been described and simulated using the element of account ledger which consist of credit and debit transaction accompanied by timestamps and transaction ID. To secure this information in the chain each block contains in addition to the account ledger information a hash of the previous block as well as the hash of the current block.
This work explores a new low-latency distributed ledger structure based on bounded width directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). In this design, each user has their own blockchain traceable back to a common root. These individual chains mutually witness each other to confirm transactions and form a global partially ordered set of events. The number of witness hashes required to establish new blocks is defined as the “DAG width”. This width has an upper bound which of the total number of users in the system, though the actual number of witnesses required is usually far less. In this paper we mathematically model the expected DAG width using analytical techniques from the near miss birthday problem and simulate expected widths for expected network latency and user activity.
Sina Rafati Niya, Eryk Schiller, Ile Cepilov, Fabio Maddaloni · 8 authors
Proof-of-Work (PoW) in Blockchains (BC), which is a widely used consensus algorithm, suffers from high power consumption of miners and low transaction rates. This work demonstrates a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based BC called Bazo, which is specially designed and adapted for Internet of Things (IoT) data streams. Bazo displays enhanced performance in terms of energy consumption and transactions processing in comparison to PoW-based BC. To further improve performance of Bazo, sharding and transaction aggregation methods are employed. Moreover, IoT-BC adaptation helpers of a modular and layered architecture are provided to allow wireless devices to submit data into the BC. The designed architecture can support multiple hardware and software platforms as well as network technologies.
Michael Coblenz, Joshua Sunshine, Jonathan Aldrich, Brad A. Myers
Much recent work focuses on finding bugs and security vulnerabilities in smart contracts written in existing languages. Although this approach may be helpful, it does not address flaws in the underlying programming language, which can facilitate writing buggy code in the first place. We advocate a re-thinking of the blockchain software engineering tool set, starting with the programming language in which smart contracts are written. In this paper, we propose and justify requirements for a new generation of blockchain software development tools. New tools should (1) consider users' needs as a primary concern; (2) seek to facilitate safe development by detecting relevant classes of serious bugs at compile time; (3) as much as possible, be blockchain-agnostic, given the wide variety of different blockchain platforms available, and leverage the properties that are common among blockchain environments to improve safety and developer effectiveness.