Ajayi Oluwashina Joseph, Joseph Raffety, Philip Morrow, Lin Zhiwei · 7 authors
The proliferation of the Internet of Things has seen it adopted to practically all aspects of life. There has been an increase in demand for more IoT devices which are manufactured by several companies. This has however left need to address vulnerabilities within and threats to these devices. In many cases, these vulnerabilities arise from manufacturer focus on functionality rather than security. Secure by design IoT devices are rare in the market today. Efforts to address this are being made by the IoT research community, however, more effort is required. Deficiencies of current efforts include accountability of devices and privacy of data generated across the IoT landscape. The aim of this Ph.D. research is to improve the security, privacy, veracity, and trust. The approach developed in this study will be based on non-repudiation of actions among self-organized IoT devices in an IoT Ecosystem by leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). A proposed system architecture which relies on the Distributed Ledger Technology and its related features will enable services to be applied to the IoT landscape to achieve aspects of end to end IoT security. The initial progress to date is presented within this manuscript.
Blockchain technology is a new shift in the Internet world, it has brought about changes in many sectors. Where transactions can be securely accomplished via point-to-point connections in a distributed system without the need for a third-party, with the help of consensus algorithms. In this paper, we will conduct a comprehensive survey on the Blockchain technology with focusing in the popular consensus algorithms, in order to figure out their features, and the factors that affect the performance and security. Also, we will provide a classification of the consensus algorithms and we will perform a comprehensive comparison of studied consensus algorithms. In addition, we will provide a detailed discussion of the consensus algorithms that studied with an analysis of the main factors affecting these algorithms. Finally, we will refer to some recommendations that must be considered and which can contribute to the development of this area.
The development of Internet of Things (IoT) has paved way for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are indispensable for ITS with intelligent vehicles (IV) as their key players. To ensure proper and reliable VANET operation, IVs need secure inter- and intra-network communication with trust and reliability of data (provenance). This paper aims to provide trust management in VANETs by proposing a trustless system model using blockchain and a certificate authority (CA) for registering IVs as well as revoking their registration if need be. Furthermore, to preserve data reliability, this paper uses physical unclonable functions (PUFs). Implementation of DrivMan shows that it is able to establish distributed trust management and enables secure data sharing while preserving the privacy of IVs.
Ivan Jovović, Siniša Husnjak, Ivan Forenbacher, Sven Maček
The Industry 4.0 is experiencing significant challenges, including the need for an increased amount of data transmission with improved security, transparency and credibility. The 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G) and Blockchain are innovative emerging technologies that can respond to these needs. 5
Tim K. Mackey, Tsung-Ting Kuo, Basker Gummadi, Kevin A. Clauson · 9 authors
Blockchain is a shared distributed digital ledger technology that can better facilitate data management, provenance and security, and has the potential to transform healthcare. Importantly, blockchain represents a data architecture, whose application goes far beyond Bitcoin - the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain and has popularized the technology. In the health sector, blockchain is being aggressively explored by various stakeholders to optimize business processes, lower costs, improve patient outcomes, enhance compliance, and enable better use of healthcare-related data. However, critical in assessing whether blockchain can fulfill the hype of a technology characterized as 'revolutionary' and 'disruptive', is the need to ensure that blockchain design elements consider actual healthcare needs from the diverse perspectives of consumers, patients, providers, and regulators. In addition, answering the real needs of healthcare stakeholders, blockchain approaches must also be responsive to the unique challenges faced in healthcare compared to other sectors of the economy. In this sense, ensuring that a health blockchain is 'fit-for-purpose' is pivotal. This concept forms the basis for this article, where we share views from a multidisciplinary group of practitioners at the forefront of blockchain conceptualization, development, and deployment.
Today’s e-health system is centralized. This system obliges all users (patients and healthcare staff) to have a high level of trust in the intermediary who stores the data. Moreover, healthcare employees must trust that their patients are providing authentic medical records and are not altering th em in order to obtain drugs for illegal purposes. The solution proposed in this paper is a new blockchain-based architecture for the creation of an e-health system. In this architecture, wireless sensor networks (WSN) will be used in association with a WSN controller v.2 to supervise patients and their testing by healthcare staff. Transactions between blockchain and WSN are made through smart contracts, removing the need for intermediaries and preventing human error. This new model facilitates a distributed ledger, creating an e-health system that is much more optimized than the current one.
The previous blockchain data transmission techniques in industrial Internet of Things (IoT) have low security, high management cost of the trading center, and big difficulty in supervision. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure FaBric blockchain-based data transmission technique for industrial IoT. This technique uses the blockchain-based dynamic secret sharing mechanism. A reliable trading center is realized using the power blockchain sharing model, which can also share power trading books. The power data consensus mechanism and dynamic linked storage are designed to realize the secure matching of the power data transmission. Experiments show that the optimized FaBric power data storage and transmission has high security and reliability. The proposed technique can improve the transmission rate and packet receiving rate by 12% and 13%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed technique has good superiority in sharing management and decentralization.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Mohamed Ridda Laouar, Zaineb Touati Hamad, Sean B. Eom
The potential of urban planning to solve environmental problems in general and manage waste, in particular, is important because the illegal dumping of solid waste is one of the events related to illegal waste treatment activities. The waste management process is very poor, especially when it comes to confirming the correct destination for the delivery of waste. In this work, we are proposing a chain-based approach to waste tracking to enable waste data reporting in a single system. The blockchain is a technology that has already proven itself in the financial sector. It securely records transactions in a large, time-stamped ledger using the proof of work algorithm (PoW), and allows us to write smart contracts on the ethereum network. The application of this technology to the waste sector will enable reliable, transparent and secure recording of all waste movements, thus enabling waste to be traced from source to treatment and disposal. Users will be able to import and export data through a user interface offering different levels of functionality and access. It will also identify and act on illegal wasteful crimes.
(1) Background: Large eHealth systems should have a mechanism to detect unauthorized changes in patients’ medical documentation, access permissions, and logs. This is due to the fact that modern eHealth systems are connected with many healthcare providers and sites. (2) Methods: Design-science methodology was used to create an integrity-protection service model based on blockchain technology. Based on the problem of transactional transparency, requirements were specified and a model was designed. After that, the model’s security and performance were evaluated. (3) Results: a blockchain-based eHealth integrity model for ensuring information integrity in eHealth systems that uses a permissioned blockchain with off-chain information storage was created. In contrast to existing solutions, the proposed model allows information removal, which in many countries’ eHealth systems is a legal requirement, and is based on a blockchain using the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. (4) Conclusion: A blockchain can be used to store medical data or only security-related data. In the proposed model, a blockchain is mainly used to implement a data-integrity service. This service can be implemented using other mechanisms, but a blockchain provides a solution that does not require trusted third parties, works in a distributed eHealth environment, and supports document removal.
Healthcare information exchange is an important research topic, which can benefit both healthcare providers and patients. In healthcare data sharing, many cloud-based solutions have been proposed, but the trustworthiness of a third-party cloud service is questionable. Recently, blockchain has been introduced in healthcare record sharing, which does not rely on trusting a third party. However, existing approaches only focus on the records collected from medical examination. They are not efficient in sharing data streams continuously generated from sensors and other monitoring devices. Today, IoT devices have been widely deployed and sensors and mobile applications can monitor patients’ body conditions. The collected data are shared to laboratories and institutions for diagnosis and further study. Moreover, existing approaches are too rigid to efficiently support metadata change. In this paper, an efficient data-sharing scheme is proposed, called MedChain, which combines blockchain, digest chain, and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the above efficiency issues in the existing approaches for sharing both types of healthcare data. Based on MedChain, a session-based healthcare data-sharing scheme is devised, which brings flexibility in data sharing. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements in data sharing.
In the digital healthcare era, it is utmost important to harness medical information scattered across healthcare institutions to support in-depth data analysis. However, the boundaries of cyberinfrastructure of healthcare providers place obstacles on data sharing. In this position paper, we firstly identify the challenges of medical data sharing and management. Then we introduce the background and give a brief survey on the state-of-the-art. Finally, we conclude the paper by discussing a few possible research directions to cope with the challenges in current medical information sharing.
Francesco Restuccia, Kanhere, Salvatore D'Oro andSalil S., Tommaso Melodia, Sajal Kanta Das
One of the key challenges to the IoT's success is how to secure and anonymize billions of IoT transactions and devices per day, an issue that still lingers despite significant research efforts over the last few years. On the other hand, technologies based on blockchain algorithms are disrupting today's cryptocurrency markets and showing tremendous potential, since they provide a distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a single entity. Although the blockchain may present itself as a cure-all for the IoT's security and privacy challenges, significant research efforts still need to be put forth to adapt the computation-intensive blockchain algorithms to the stringent energy and processing constraints of today's IoT devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing literature on the topic of blockchain for IoT, and present a roadmap of research challenges that will need to be addressed to enable the usage of blockchain technologies in the IoT.
Yao Sun, Lei Zhang, Gang Feng, Bowen Yang · 6 authors
Blockchain has shown a great potential in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems for establishing trust and consensus mechanisms without involvement of any third party. Understanding the relationship between communication and blockchain as well as the performance constraints posing on the counterparts can facilitate designing a dedicated blockchain-enabled IoT systems. In this paper, we establish an analytical model for the blockchain-enabled wireless IoT system. By considering spatio-temporal domain Poisson distribution, i.e., node geographical distribution in spatial domain and transaction arrival rate in time domain are both modeled as Poisson point process (PPP), we first derive the distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), blockchain transaction successful rate as well as overall throughput. Based on the system model and performance analysis, we design an algorithm to determine the optimal full function node deployment for blockchain system under the criterion of maximizing transaction throughput. Finally, the security performance is analyzed in the proposed networks with three typical attacks. Solutions such as physical layer security are presented and discussed to keep the system secure under these attacks. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our theoretical analysis and optimal node deployment algorithm.
Number of internet connected devices is increasing as IoT is getting more prevalent. Volume of data collected by IoT sensors is very high and requires considerable resources for data processing like analytics. Edge processing enables getting the sensor data processed closer to the source. It's not always possible and/or economical to set up a resource intense infrastructure at the edge. This paper proposes use of blockchain based decentralized application to enable IoT edge processing. With this setup, it is possible for a resource owner to join the ecosystem and to lend the compute resources as needed. IoT devices can offload some of the edge computation to the resource owner nodes as and when required. This paper explains architectural components and overall solution for implementation. Based on the usecase of video analytics at edge, experimental setup is implemented for the IoT edge solution using hyperledger sawtooth blockchain.
Blockchain technology initially developed for transactions on cryptocurrencies is now gaining popularity in major domains such as education, healthcare, media, government, smart computing, and business enterprise. Blockchain manages the transactions database in a decentralized way replicated on all the nodes with no single governing authority. In this paper, we present a classification and taxonomy of different blockchain development platforms and simulators along with their consensus protocols, the types of supported blockchain networks and programming languages. We also assess the performance of a blockchain application for deployment at the UAE University (UAEU) versus increasing number of nodes, blocks and block size, on top of experimental network latencies and bandwidth between the nodes. Our results show that a large-scale deployment of blockchain at UAEU is feasible.
Abid Sultan, Muhammad Azhar Mushtaq, Muhammad Abubakar
In the past few years block chain has gained lot of popularity because blockchain is the core technology of bitcoin. Its utilization cases are growing in number of fields such as security of Internet of Things (IoT), banking sector, industries and medical centres. Moreover, IoT has expanded its acceptance because of its deployment in smart homes and city developments round the world. Unfortunately, IoT network devices operate on limited computing power with low storage capacity and network bandwidth. Thus, they are extra close to attacks than other end-point devices such as cell phones, tablets, or PCs. This paper focus on addressing significant security issues of IoT and maps IoT security issues in contradiction of existing solutions found in the literature. Moreover issues that are not solved after implementation of blockchain are highlighted.
With the process of the population aging, the problem of the aged in the urban is becoming increasingly prominent in China, especially the shortage of pension resources. In order to solve this problem, we proposed Volunteer time bank (VOLTimebank) based on blockchain, a novel distributed ledger that allows transactions without any third party organization. VOLTimebank is a record management system to handle volunteer service records. The system provides a channel for volunteers to serve the elderly and gives volunteers a way to exchange the services they can offer today with the services that they hope to get in the future. And a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus mechanism is used to select auditors, whose main task is to audit volunteers' services. Each holder of the (volunteer medals (VOLMedals) has the right to vote for auditors and be voted to be an auditor. As a proof of concept, we present a prototype implementation of VOLTimebank via smart contracts based on Ethereum. VOLTimebank is a true realization of "Serve today, enjoy tomorrow", encouraging more people to take part in the volunteer services, for the elderly and for themselves. This paper is intended to illustrate the ideas and methods of VOLTimebank.
Wilson S. Melo, Alysson Bessani, Nuno Neves, Altair O. Santin · 5 authors
In recent years, measuring instruments have become quite complex due to the integration of embedded systems and software components and the increasing aggregation of new features. Consequently, metrological regulation and control require more efforts from notified bodies, becoming slower and more expensive. In this paper, we evaluate the use of blockchains as a resource to overcome such challenges. We start with a conceptual model for implementing measuring instruments in a distributed blockchain-based architecture and compare it with traditional measuring instruments and distributed measuring models discussed in previous works. We also made a security analysis, demonstrating that blockchain-based measuring systems can impact the way measuring instruments are used in consumer relations while improving security and simplifying metrological regulation and control. We implement a vehicle speed measuring system using the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform. We evaluate the security and performance of our blockchain-based measuring system by executing tests with data from real speed meter sensors. The results are promising and validate the feasibility of our idea. Finally, we point out the main challenges related to our approach, suggesting alternatives and potential issues to be addressed by future works.
Mohammad Maroufi, Reza Abdolee, Behzad Mozaffari Tazekand
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy, energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.
Blockchains are proposed for many application domains apart from financial transactions. While there are generic blockchains that can be molded for specific use cases, they often lack a lightweight and easy-to-customize implementation. In this paper, we introduce the core concepts of blockchain technology and investigate a real-world use case from the energy domain, where customers trade portions of their photovoltaic power plant via a blockchain. This does not only involve blockchain technology, but also requires user interaction. Therefore, a fully custom, private, and permissioned blockchain is implemented from scratch. We evaluate and motivate the need for blockchain technology within this use case, as well as the desired properties of the system. We then describe the implementation and the insights from our implementation in detail, serving as a guide for others and to show potential opportunities and pitfalls when implementing a blockchain from scratch.
While the intersection of blockchain and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has received considerable research interest lately, the conflict between the high resource requirements of blockchain and the generally inadequate performance of IIoT devices has not been well tackled. On one hand, due to the introductions of mathematical concepts, including Public Key Infrastructure, Merkle Hash Tree, and Proof of Work (PoW), deploying blockchain demands huge computing power. On the other hand, full nodes should synchronize massive block data and deal with numerous transactions in peer-to-peer network, whose occupation of storage capacity and bandwidth makes IIoT devices difficult to afford. In this paper, we propose a lightweight blockchain system called LightChain, which is resource-efficient and suitable for power-constrained IIoT scenarios. Specifically, we present a green consensus mechanism named Synergistic Multiple Proof for stimulating the cooperation of IIoT devices, and a lightweight data structure called LightBlock to streamline broadcast content. Furthermore, we design a novel Unrelated Block Offloading Filter to avoid the unlimited growth of ledger without affecting blockchain's traceability. The extensive experiments demonstrate that LightChain can reduce the individual computational cost to 39.32% and speed up the block generation by up to 74.06%. In terms of storage and network usage, the reductions are 43.35% and 90.55%, respectively.