Blockchain Papers

Muneeb Ul Hassan, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Jinjun Chen

No abstract is available for this record.

Ronghua Xu, Seyed Yahya Nikouei, Yu Chen, Erik Blasch · 5 authors

Thanks to rapid technological advances in the Internet of Things (IoT), a smart public safety (SPS) system has become feasible by integrating heterogeneous computing devices to collaboratively provide public protection services. While a service oriented architecture (SOA) has been adopted by IoT and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture to provide scalable and extensible services for a distributed IoT based SPS system. Furthermore, traditional security solutions rely on a centralized authority, which can be a performance bottleneck or single point failure. Inspired by microservices architecture and blockchain technology, this paper proposes a BLockchain-ENabled Decentralized Microservices Architecture for Smart public safety (BlendMAS). Within a permissioned blockchain network, a microservices based security mechanism is introduced to secure data access control in an SPS system. The functionality of security services are decoupled into separate containerized microservices that are built using a smart contract, and deployed on edge and fog computing nodes. An extensive experimental study verified that the proposed BlendMAS is able to offer a decentralized, scalable and secured data sharing and access control to distributed IoT based SPS system.

Thomas McGhin, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo, Charles Zhechao Liu, Debiao He

No abstract is available for this record.

Fakhar ul Hassan, Anwaar Ali, Rahouti, Mohamed, Siddique Latif · 11 authors

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization, transparency, and trusted auditability. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentralized database, blockchain finds its applications in fields as varied as the energy sector, forestry, fisheries, mining, material recycling, air pollution monitoring, supply chain management, and their associated operations. In this paper, we present a survey of blockchain-based network applications. Our goal is to cover the evolution of blockchain-based systems that are trying to bring in a renaissance in the existing, mostly centralized, space of network applications. While re-imagining the space with blockchain, we highlight various common challenges, pitfalls, and shortcomings that can occur. Our aim is to make this work as a guiding reference manual for someone interested in shifting towards a blockchain-based solution for one's existing use case or automating one from the ground up.

Edvard Tijan, Saša Aksentijević, Katarina Ivanić, Mladen Jardas

This paper researches decentralized data storage represented by blockchain technology and the possibility of its development in sustainable logistics and supply chain management. Although the benefits of blockchain technology have been most widely researched in the financial sector, major challenges in logistics, such as order delay, damage to goods, errors, and multiple data entry can also be minimized by introducing blockchain technology. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current and rising trends of blockchain technology usage in logistics and supply chain management.

Zhi Li, Hanyang Guo, W.M. Wang, Yijiang Guan · 8 authors

Customer service is transforming from traditional manual service toward automated service, which utilizes different computational informatics to achieve a higher efficient and quality services. Automated customer service requires big data and expertise in data analysis as prerequisites. However, many companies, especially small and medium enterprises, do not have sufficient data and experience due to their limited scale and resources. They need to rely on third parties, and this reliance results in the lack of development of core customer service competency. In order to overcome these challenges, an open and automated customer service platform based on Internet of things (IoT), blockchain, and automated machine learning (AutoML) is proposed. The data are gathered with the use of IoT devices during the customer service. An open but secured environment to achieve data trading is ensured by using blockchain. AutoML is adopted to automate the data analysis processes for reducing the reliance of costly experts. The proposed platform is analyzed through use case evaluation. A prototype system has also been developed and evaluated. The simulation results show that our platform is scalable and efficient.

Ke Huang, Xiaosong Zhang, Yi Mu, Xiaofen Wang · 9 authors

Applying consortium blockchain as a trust layer for heterogeneous industrial Internet-of-Things devices is cost-effective. However, with an increase in computing power, some powerful attacks (e.g., the 51% attack) are inevitable and will cause severe consequences. Recent studies also confirm that anonymity and immutability of blockchain have been abused to facilitate black market trades, etc. To operate controllable blockchain for IIoT devices, it is necessary to rewrite blockchain history back to a normal state once the chain is breached. Ateniese et al. proposed redactable blockchain by using chameleon hash (CH) to replace traditional hash function, it allows blockchain history to be written when needed (EuroS&P 2017). However, we cannot apply this idea directly to IIoT without solving the following problems: (1) achieve a decentralized design of CH; (2) update the signatures accordingly to authenticate the redacted contents; (3) satisfy the low-computing need of the individual IIoT device. In this paper, we overcome the above issues by proposing the first threshold chameleon hash (TCH) and accountable-and-sanitizable chameleon signature (ASCS) schemes. Based on them, we build a redactable consortium blockchain which is efficient for IIoT devices to operate. It allows a group of authorized sensors to write and rewrite blockchain without causing any hard forks. Basically, TCH is the first TCH and ASCS is a public-key signature supporting file-level and block-level modifications of signatures without impairing authentications. Additionally, ASCS achieves accountability to avoid abuse of redaction. While security analysis validates our proposals, the simulation results show that redaction is acceptably efficient if it is executed at a small scale or if we adopt a coarse-grained redaction while sacrificing some securities.

Raheel Ahmed Memon, Jianping Li, Junaid Ahmed

In recent years, blockchains have obtained so much attention from researchers, engineers, and institutions; and the implementation of blockchains has started to revive a large number of applications ranging from e-finance, e-healthcare, smart home, Internet of Things, social security, logistics and so forth. In the literature on blockchains, it is found that most articles focused on their engineering implementation, while little attention has been devoted to the exploration of theoretical aspects of the system; however, the existing work is limited to model the mining process only. In this paper, a queuing theory-based model is proposed for understanding the working and theoretical aspects of the blockchain. We validate our proposed model using the actual statistics of two popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, by running simulations for two months of transactions. The obtained performance measures parameters such as the Number of Transactions per block, Mining Time of Each Block, System Throughput, Memorypool count, Waiting Time in Memorypool, Number of Unconfirmed Transactions in the Whole System, Total Number of Transactions, and Number of Generated Blocks; these values are compared with actual statistics. It was found that the results gained from our proposed model are in good agreement with actual statistics. Although the simulation in this paper presents the modeling of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies only, the proposed model can be used to represent a wide range of blockchain-based systems.

Kristián Košťál, Pavol Helebrandt, Matej Belluš, Michal Ries · 5 authors

Nowadays, we are surrounded by a large number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and sensors. These devices are designed to make life easier and more comfortable. Blockchain technology, especially its mass application, is becoming a term number one. Adoption of blockchain into enterprise networks still has a few challenges that need to be tackled. Utilizing blockchain can bring increased security and efficiency of network maintenance. The key feature of the blockchain, immutability, brings resistance to unauthorized modifications. The whole history of device configuration changes is stored in the blockchain, hence recovery after incidents is very straightforward. This paper extends our previous studies. We are introducing an improved architecture for management and monitoring of IoT devices using a private blockchain. The majority of the system is built on a chaincode, which handles CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations as well as encryption and access control. Device configuration files are stored in the blockchain. When a modification occurs, the device downloads a new configuration in a simple manner. The chaincode receives notification whether setup was successful and this history is available for administrators. Our results show that such a system is possible and dissemination of configuration changes to IoT devices can be secured by the blockchain. The key novelty of our solution is a distributed management of configuration files of IoT devices in enterprise networks utilizing blockchain technology. This is essentially improving security and storage options for configurations in the blockchain.

Ammar Muthanna, Abdelhamied A. Ateya, Abdukodir Khakimov, Irina Gudkova · 7 authors

Designing Internet of Things (IoT) applications faces many challenges including security, massive traffic, high availability, high reliability and energy constraints. Recent distributed computing paradigms, such as Fog and multi-access edge computing (MEC), software-defined networking (SDN), network virtualization and blockchain can be exploited in IoT networks, either combined or individually, to overcome the aforementioned challenges while maintaining system performance. In this paper, we present a framework for IoT that employs an edge computing layer of Fog nodes controlled and managed by an SDN network to achieve high reliability and availability for latency-sensitive IoT applications. The SDN network is equipped with distributed controllers and distributed resource constrained OpenFlow switches. Blockchain is used to ensure decentralization in a trustful manner. Additionally, a data offloading algorithm is developed to allocate various processing and computing tasks to the OpenFlow switches based on their current workload. Moreover, a traffic model is proposed to model and analyze the traffic indifferent parts of the network. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in simulation and in a testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves higher efficiency in terms of latency and resource utilization.

Kaidong Wu

A decentralized application (dapp for short) refers to an application that is executed by multiple users over a decentralized network. In recent years, the number of dapp keeps fast growing, mainly due to the popularity of blockchain technology. Despite the increasing importance of dapps as a typical application type that is assumed to promote the adoption of blockchain, little is known on what, how, and how well dapps are used in practice. In addition, the insightful knowledge of whether and how a traditional application can be transformed to a dapp is yet missing. To bridge the knowledge gap, this paper presents a comprehensive empirical study on an extensive dataset of 734 dapps that are collected from three popular open dapp marketplaces, i.e., ethereum, state of the dapp, and DAppRadar. We analyze the popularity of dapps, and summarize the patterns of how smart contracts are organized in a dapp. Based on the findings, we draw some implications to help dapp developers and users better understand and deploy dapps.

Evangelos Pournaras, Srivatsan Yadhunathan, Ada Diaconescu

Structure plays a key role in learning performance. In centralized computational systems, hyperparameter optimization and regularization techniques such as dropout are computational means to enhance learning performance by adjusting the deep hierarchical structure. However, in decentralized deep learning by the Internet of Things, the structure is an actual network of autonomous interconnected devices such as smart phones that interact via complex network protocols. Self-adaptation of the learning structure is a challenge. Uncertainties such as network latency, node and link failures or even bottlenecks by limited processing capacity and energy availability can significantly downgrade learning performance. Network self-organization and self-management is complex, while it requires additional computational and network resources that hinder the feasibility of decentralized deep learning. In contrast, this paper introduces a self-adaptive learning approach based on holarchic learning structures for exploring, mitigating and boosting learning performance in distributed environments with uncertainties. A large-scale performance analysis with 864,000 experiments fed with synthetic and real-world data from smart grid and smart city pilot projects confirm the cost-effectiveness of holarchic structures for decentralized deep learning.

Sabah Suhail, Rasheed Hussain, Abid Khan, Choong Seon Hong

"Trustworthy data" is the fuel for ensuring transparent traceability, precise decision-making, and cogent coordination in the supply chain (SC) space. However, the disparate data silos act as a trade barrier in orchestrating the provenance of product story starting from the transformation of raw materials into the circuit board to the assembling of electronic components into end products available on the store shelf for customers. Therefore, to bridge the fragmented siloed information across global supply chain partners, the diffusion of blockchain (BC) as one of the advanced distributed ledger technology (DLT) takeover the on-premise legacy systems. Nevertheless, the challenging constraints of blockchain including scalability, accessing off-line data, fee-less microtransactions and many more lead to the third wave of blockchain called IOTA. In this paper, we propose a framework for supporting provenance in the electronic supply chain (ECS) by using permissioned IOTA ledger. Realizing the crucial requirement of trustworthy data, we use Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) channel provided by IOTA that allows the SC players to procure distributed information while keeping confidential trade flows, tamper-proof data, and fine-grained accessibility rights. To identify operational disruption, we devise a transparent product ledger through transaction data and consignment information to keep track of the complete product journey at each intermediary step during SC processes. Furthermore, we evaluate the secure provenance data construction time for varying payload size.

Yanqi Zhao, Yiming Liu, Aikui Tian, Yong Yu · 5 authors

A large number of IoT devices are connected via the Internet. However, most of these IoT devices are generally not perfect-by-design even have security weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Thus, it is essential to update these IoT devices securely, patching their vulnerabilities and protecting the safety of the involved users. Existing studies deliver secure and reliable updates based on blockchain network which serves as the transmission network. However, these approaches could compromise users privacy when updating the IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain based privacy-preserving software updates protocol, which delivers secure and reliable updates with an incentive mechanism, as well protects the privacy of involved users. The vendor delivers the updates and it makes a commitment by using a smart contract to provide financial incentive to the transmission nodes who deliver the updates to the IoT devices. A transmission node gets financial incentive by providing a proof-of-delivery. The transmission node uses double authentication preventing signature (DAPS) to carry out the fair exchange to obtain the proof-of-delivery. Specifically, the transmission node exchanges an attribute-based signature from a IoT device by using DAPS. Then, it uses the attribute-based signature as a proof-of-delivery to receive financial incentives. Generally, the IoT device has to execute complex computation for an attribute-based signature (ABS). It is intolerable for resource limited devices. We propose a concrete outsourced attribute-based signature (OABS) scheme to resist the weakness. Then, we prove the security of the proposed OABS and the protocol as well. Finally, we implement smart contract in Solidity to demonstrate the validity of the proposed protocol.

Alessio Meneghetti, Tommaso Parise, Massimiliano Sala, Daniele Taufer

The main problem faced by smart contract platforms is the amount of time and computational power required to reach consensus. In a classical blockchain model, each operation is in fact performed by each node, both to update the status and to validate the results of the calculations performed by others. In this short survey we sketch some state-of-the-art approaches to obtain an efficient and scalable computation of smart contracts. Particular emphasis is given to sharding, a promising method that allows parallelization and therefore a more efficient management of the computational resources of the network.

Chunxia Yu, Luping Zhang, Wenfan Zhao, Sicheng Zhang

Cloud manufacturing is a promising rising paradigm in which geographically distributed manufacturing resources are exposed as services in the cloud platform. The task of cloud manufacturing is to provide manufacturing resources as services to fulfil users’ demands. However, in existing cloud manufacturing architecture all the information is possessed by the platform operator, and the management of manufacturing services is highly centralised. It is firmly believed that decentralisation and elevating information transparency can help increase the operational performance. Blockchain is such a technology that distributes transactions information to a peer-to-peer network such that information is fully shared and unchangeable by partial peers. This paper proposes a blockchain-based cloud manufacturing architecture to enhance information transparency and decentralisation. The proposed platform is responsible for exposing manufacturing resources and wrapping them as services. Manufacturing services can be purchased by any user accessing to the platform. The blockchain is used to intermediate the service composition and record transaction results. Moreover, a quality of service (QoS) aware service composition model is proposed in the blockchain-based cloud manufacturing. A particle swarm optimisation (PSO) is proposed to solve the model. Finally, simulations are done to provide an application of the service composition in blockchain-based cloud manufacturing.

Susel Góngora Alonso, Jon Arambarri, Miguel López-Coronado, Isabel de la Torre Díez

No abstract is available for this record.

Mengting Liu, F. Richard Yu, Yinglei Teng, Victor C. M. Leung · 5 authors

Recent advances in the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) provide plenty of opportunities for various industries. To address the security and efficiency issues of the massive IIoT data, blockchain is widely considered as a promising solution to enable data storing/processing/sharing in a secure and efficient way. To meet the high throughput requirement, this paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based performance optimization framework for blockchain-enabled IIoT systems, the goals of which are threefold: 1) providing a methodology for evaluating the system from the aspects of scalability, decentralization, latency, and security; 2) improving the scalability of the underlying blockchain without affecting the system's decentralization, latency, and security; and 3) designing a modulable blockchain for IIoT systems, where the block producers, consensus algorithm, block size, and block interval can be selected/adjusted using the DRL technique. Simulations results show that our proposed framework can effectively improve the performance of blockchain-enabled IIoT systems and well adapt to the dynamics of the IIoT.

Yang Xu, Ju Ren, Guojun Wang, Cheng Zhang · 6 authors

Emerging network computing technologies extend the functionalities of industrial IoT (IIoT) terminals. However, this promising service-provisioning scheme encounters problems in untrusted and distributed IIoT scenarios because malicious service providers or clients may deny service provisions or usage for their own interests. Traditional nonrepudiation solutions fade in IIoT environments due to requirements of trusted third parties or unacceptable overheads. Fortunately, the blockchain revolution facilitates innovative solutions. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based fair nonrepudiation service provisioning scheme for IIoT scenarios in which the blockchain is used as a service publisher and an evidence recorder. Each service is separately delivered via on-chain and off-chain channels with mandatory evidence submissions for nonrepudiation purpose. Moreover, a homomorphic-hash-based service verification method is designed that can function with mere on-chain evidence. And an impartial smart contract is implemented to resolve disputes. The security analysis demonstrates the dependability, and the evaluations reveal the effectiveness and efficiency.

Rakhi Soni, Gaurav Kumar

With the growing use of the internet, new technology came into the existence and it is on the same edge now, where decades ago the internet was. Internet of things (IoT) is facing many security issues. Due to the lack of the security standards, industries are afraid to take a risk with IoT. In the Healthcare industry where data is vast and valuable, it is risky to use IoT with it. It can compromise the patient's security. In this paper, various methods are discussed for Healthcare issues in IoT, by several researchers. Mainly the research work is focused on the different solutions proposed in the healthcare for IoT. At the end, a theoretical analysis of proposed solution is done.

Gavin D'mello, Horacio González–Vélez

Contemporary software deployments rely on cloud-based package managers for installation, where existing packages are installed on demand from remote code repositories. Usually frameworks or common utilities, packages increase the code reusability within the ecosystem, whilst keeping the code base small. However, disruptions in the package management services can potentially affect development and deployment workflows. Furthermore, cloud package managers have arguably an ambiguous ownership model and offer limited visibility of packages to the users. This work describes the development of a blockchain-based package control system which is decentralised, reliable, and transparent. Blockchain nodes are installed within the distributed infrastructure to provide immutability, and then a dependency graph is constructed with the help of smart contracts to trace the software provenance. Our system has been successfully tested with 4338 packages from NPM, 950 out of which are the top depended-upon packages.

A. Devibala

Blockchain is picking up footing and can be named as one of the furthermost basic topics nowadays. This paper introduces a wide review of the present blockchain customs for the Internet of Things (IoT) structures. It begins by outlining the blockchain and delineating the present examinations that arrangement with blockchain progressions. Even though commentators' question about its adaptability, security, and supportability, it has effectively changed numerous people's way of life in a few zones because of its extreme impact on ventures and organizations. The range of square chain applications ranges from budgetary, human services, car, hazard the executives, Internet of things (IoT) to open and social administrations a few investigations center on using the block chain information structure in different applications. For the most part it depicted here human services application and issue dependent on the ebb and flow study, it features open research difficulties and examine conceivable future research headings in the square chain innovations for IoT.

Md. Ashraf Uddin, Andrew Stranieri, Iqbal Gondal, Venki Balasubramanian

Blockchains have been widely used in Internet of Things(IoT) applications including smart cities, smart home and smart governance to provide high levels of security and privacy. In this article, we advance a Blockchain based decentralized architecture for the storage of IoT data produced from smart home/cities. The architecture includes a secure communication protocol using a sign-encryption technique between power constrained IoT devices and a Gateway. The sign encryption also preserves privacy. We propose that a Software Agent executing on the Gateway selects a Miner node using performance parameters of Miners. Simulations demonstrate that the recommended Miner selection outperforms Proof of Works selection used in Bitcoin and Random Miner Selection.

Arman Pouraghily, Tilman Wolf

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises technical solutions to many important societal problems relating to the environment, healthcare, transportation, etc. One approach to making IoT solutions more cost-effective is the idea of horizontal integration, where sensors and actuators are shared between different applications. In such environments, economic transactions between system components are used to pay for data and services. Blockchain-based overlay networks have been developed to provide such financial mechanism for IoT devices with sufficient processing power and operating system support. However, no practical solutions for low-end devices exist. In addition, existing solutions also require setting up multiple blockchain accounts for a single administrative domain, which incurs high fees when consolidating those accounts. In this paper, we propose a Ticket-Based Verification Protocol, which defines two separate logical entities, contract manager and transaction verifier. Our design limits the need for high-performance embedded systems to only one unit per administrative domain and reduces the processing and networking overhead other IoT devices in that domain.