Blockchain Papers

Qihui Zhang, Wenfen Liu, Kang Yang, Xuexian Hu · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Chuan-Feng Chiu, Hsiao-Yu Wang, Han-Yun Hsieh, Wei-Chuan Chung

No abstract is available for this record.

Temidayo Abayomi-Zannu, Isaac Odun-Ayo, Barka Fori Tatama, Sanjay Misra

No abstract is available for this record.

Zongqing Tian, Biwei Yan, Qiang Guo, Jianyun Huang · 5 authors

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), more and more devices are connected to the Internet. As IoT devices are resource-constrained in terms of processing, storage and network capacity, it becomes a challenging task to ensure the access of IoT devices. Identity authentication is a key technology to prevent illegal users from access resources and permissions. Based on the principle of blockchain technology, combining blockchain technology with IoT, this paper proposes a blockchain system framework for IoT identity authentication, which implements the authentication between devices and cloud servers, IoT base stations as well as devices, and then analyzes its feasibility.

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Identity is a tool that identifies a person or group and ensures that they are recognized by others. Personalidentification cards issued by the states to people contain specific information about the person given.Identity systems used for centuries are now digitalized, ID cards with chips and passports with chipshave entered our lives. In the past, only information such as name, surname and place of birth wereincluded in ID cards with chips and passports. But today, in addition to our personal information, itincludes our biometric information such as fingerprints, iris, digital signatures. Blockchain technology,which has entered our lives with the financial sector, offers application areas in different sectors andsubjects. Some of these are IoT (internet of things), security and reliability systems, copyrights, publicand health sectors. In this study, it has been mentioned about the advantages and the features obtainedby using blockchain technology in identity management. The purpose of this study; It is to ensure thesafe use of identity information thanks to the features provided by the block chain such as distributeddatabase called DLT (distributed ledger technology), peer-to-peer transmission, transparency andirreversible records. Also in this study, a software that can simulate blockchain technology was createdand an Android application that reads data with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology wasdeveloped. Thus, the process of adding the data in the ID card or passport to the block chain by readingthe data from NFC with the Android application can be performed.

Lijun Xiao, Dezhi Han, Xiangwei Meng, Wei Liang · 5 authors

With the development of sensor devices, wireless sensor networks have been widely used, and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are relatively common application scenarios in wireless sensor networks. The wearable device is used to collect physiological data of the human body, and the server device is adopted to store physiological data of the human body. The openness of the network environment and network devices’ dynamic nature make WBANs vulnerable to security threats from attackers. The centralized two-hop architecture contains only one hub node, and the data stored in the hub node may be tampered with by attackers. Once attackers occupy the node, the entire network will be paralyzed. To tackle such an issue, it is proposed in this article a model in WBANs architecture based on Blockchain technology, where the authentication protocol and blind signature protocol between nodes are designed in the new WBANs model, making the Blockchain data transmission system in a wireless network environment secure and reliable. Experimental results show that the proposed method is promising and shows higher levels of safety and stability than other methods.

Shubham Sahai, Ras Dwivedi, Abhishek Gunda, D. Meena · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Andreas Erwig, Julia Hesse, Maximilian Orlt, Siavash Riahi

No abstract is available for this record.

Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Sachin Shetty, Minho Jo

The Internet of Intelligent Things (IoIT) communication environment can be utilized in various types of applications (for example, intelligent battlefields, smart healthcare systems, the industrial internet, home automation, and many more). Communications that happen in such environments can have different types of security and privacy issues, which can be resolved through the utilization of blockchain. In this paper, we propose a tutorial that aims in desiging a generalized blockchain-based secure authentication key management scheme for the IoIT environment. Moreover, some issues with using blockchain for a communication environment are discussed as future research directions. The details of different types of blockchain are also provided. Some of the widely-accepted consensus algorithms are then discussed. Next, we discuss different types of applications in blockchain-based IoIT communication environments. The details of the associated system models are provided, such as, the network and attack models for the blockchain-based IoIT communication environment, which are helpful in designing a security protocol for such an environment. A practical demonstration of the proposed generalized scheme is provided in order to measure the impact of the scheme on the performance of the essential parameters. Finally, some of the future research challenges in the blockchain-based IoIT communication environment are highlighted, which will also be helpful to the researchers.

Jaewon Noh, Sangil Jeon, Sunghyun Cho

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have several security issues such as privacy preservation, secure authentication, and system reliability. In the VANET, a vehicle communicates with other vehicles or infrastructures using broadcasting messages. These messages contain not only normal traffic information, but also identification information of sender. In general, the identification information remains encrypted to ensure privacy. However, the conventional centralized system can decrypt the identification information using private information of the sender vehicle. As a result, the central server can often be targeted by adversaries. We propose a message authentication scheme for anonymity and decentralization of information using blockchain technology. Here, we introduce public-private key and message authentication code (MAC) for secure authentication. In this paper, we adopt consensus algorithms for composing blockchain system such as the proof of work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) into the proposed authentication process. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed method is secure from the attacks which include impersonation from internal attacker as well as typical attacks.

Chun‐Ta Li, Dong‐Her Shih, Chun-Cheng Wang, Chin‐Ling Chen · 5 authors

In recent years, due to the rapid development of information techniques and network technologies, more and more medical documents have been replaced by electronic files for sharing and transmitting in real time. However, medical data transmitted over public communication channels may suffer from security attacks and privacy threats. Blockchain technology has been gotten many attentions in different areas due to its unique properties such as anonymity, verifiability, immutability and decentralization. In order to secure patient privacy and provide more personal healthcare services, in this paper, we propose a data aggregation scheme based on Blockchain technology for medical environments. Moreover, in order to implement remote medical monitoring, we design a group authentication mechanism for multiple authorized users (such as patient, doctors, caregivers, family and friends) to freely access patient's personal health records. The authorized group members in a group will agree on a group session key and use it to protect patient's sensitive information. In case of a new member joins the medical group or an old member leaves the medical group, the group session key needs to be updated at any time. Finally, the electronic medical system will become more secure, reliable and useful by our proposed scheme.

Maede Hojjati, Alireza Shafieinejad, Halim Yanıkömeroğlu

Subscriber authentication is a primitive operation in mobile networks required by each operator prior to offering any service to end users. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol for roaming services in 5G networks. Each Home Network (HN) creates its own smart contract and publishes its address to inform other operators who want to offer roaming services to HN subscribers. All subsequent communication between the HN and Serving Network (SN) is done by calling the function of this smart contract. The proposed protocol eliminates the need for a secure channel between the HN and SN, which is a primary requirement of current 5G AKA protocols. In practice, a secure channel requires the HN and SN to establish a secure session before running the AKA protocol. Further, the proposed protocol leverages the benefits of blockchain, such as auditable log, decentralized architecture, and the prevention of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Furthermore, we provide a security proof of the protocol through formal verification using ProVerif. The results show that our scheme tends to preserve user privacy and at the same time provides mutual authentication of the participants. Finally, our evaluation of the Ethereum blockchain shows that the protocol is efficient in terms of both transaction and execution costs.

Nabil Alkeilani Alkadri, Rachid El Bansarkhani, Johannes Buchmann

A canonical identification (CID) scheme is a 3-move protocol consisting of a commitment, challenge, and response. It constitutes the core design of many cryptographic constructions such as zero-knowledge proof systems and various types of signature schemes. Unlike number-theoretic constructions, CID in the lattice setting usually forces provers to abort and repeat the whole authentication process once the distribution of the computed response does not follow a target distribution independent from the secret key. This concept has been realized by means of rejection sampling, which makes sure that the secrets involved in a protocol are concealed after a certain number of repetitions. This however has a negative impact on the efficiency of interactive protocols because it leads to a number of communication rounds that is multiplicative in the number of aborting participants (or rejection sampling procedures). In this work we show how the CID scheme underlying many lattice-based protocols can be designed with smaller number of aborts or even without aborts. Our new technique exploits (unbalanced) binary hash trees and thus significantly reduces the communication complexity. We show how to apply this new method within interactive zero-knowledge proofs. We also present BLAZE \(^{+}\): a further application of our technique to the recently proposed lattice-based blind signature scheme BLAZE (FC’20). We show that BLAZE \(^{+}\) has an improved performance and communication complexity compared to BLAZE while preserving the size of keys and signatures.

Neo C. K. Yiu

Innovative solutions addressing product anti-counterfeiting and record provenance have been deployed across today's internationally spanning supply chain networks. These product anti-counterfeiting solutions are developed and implemented with centralized system architecture relying on centralized authorities or any form of intermediaries. Vulnerabilities of centralized product anti-counterfeiting solutions could possibly lead to system failure or susceptibility of malicious modifications performed on product records or various potential attacks to the system components by dishonest participant nodes traversing along the supply chain. Blockchain technology has progressed from merely with a use case of immutable ledger for cryptocurrency transactions to a programmable interactive environment of developing decentralized and reliable applications addressing different use cases globally. In this research, so as to facilitate trustworthy data provenance retrieval, verification and management, as well as strengthening capability of product anti-counterfeiting, key areas of decentralization and feasible mechanisms of developing decentralized and distributed product anti-counterfeiting and traceability ecosystems utilizing blockchain technology, are identified via a series of security and threat analyses performed mainly against NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System (NAS) which is one of the solutions currently implemented in the industry with centralized architecture. A set of fundamental system requirements are set out for developing a blockchain-enabled autonomous and decentralized solution for supply chain anti-counterfeiting and traceability, as a secure and immutable scientific data provenance tracking and management platform in which provenance records, providing compelling properties on data integrity of luxurious goods, are recorded and verified automatically, for supply chain industry.

Xinyin Xiang, Mingyu Wang, Weiguo Fan

The growth of electronic healthcare (e-health) systems is promoted by the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, as this new environment provides a variety of alternatives for medical data collection. Traditional authentication models in e-health systems cannot be applied directly to scenarios requiring low-latency, real-time services. Providing a variety of means for data transmission is considered an important method to achieve effective control in e-health systems. However, this new approach also leads to security and privacy concerns as increasingly flexible communication services are introduced. Achieving effective authentication of medical data for different users while providing security guarantees in e-health systems is an interesting problem. In this paper, we present a permissioned blockchain-based identity management and user authentication (PBBIMUA) scheme for the e-health environment. Our scheme satisfies the extensive security requirements of medical data. An evaluation and security analysis show that performance, in terms of lightweight construction and lower network latency with high security standards, is improved in comparison to known methods. The experimental results show that the system has good efficiency.

Seunghwan Son, Joonyoung Lee, Myeonghyun Kim, Sungjin Yu · 6 authors

Telecare medical information system (TMIS) implemented in wireless body area network (WBAN) is convenient and time-saving for patients and doctors. TMIS is realized using wearable devices worn by a patient, and wearable devices generate patient health data and transmit them to a server through a public channel. Unfortunately, a malicious attacker can attempt performing various attacks through such a channel. Therefore, establishing a secure authentication process between a patient and a server is essential. Moreover, wearable devices have limited storage power. Cloud computing can be considered to resolve this problem by providing a storage service in the TMIS environment. In this environment, access control of the patient health data is essential for the quality of healthcare. Furthermore, the database of the cloud server is a major target for an attacker. The attacker can try to modify, forge, or delete the stored data. To resolve these problems, we propose a secure authentication protocol for a cloud-assisted TMIS with access control using blockchain. We employ ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to establish access control for health data stored in the cloud server, and apply blockchain to guarantee data integrity. To prove robustness of the proposed protocol, we conduct informal analysis and Burrows-Adabi-Needham (BAN) logic analysis, and we formally validate the proposed protocol using automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA). Consequently, we show that the proposed protocol provides more security and has better efficiency compared to related protocols. Therefore, the proposed protocol is proper for a practical TMIS environment.

Pascal Urien

This demonstration presents an innovative Bluetooth blockchain payment terminal (PBT), built over an Arduino AVR processor, with a touch screen, a smartcard reader socket and a Bluetooth module. The system is bare metal, i.e. firmware's (both BPT and Bluetooth module) can be fully uploaded on-demand. The demo shows an Ethereum blockchain transaction protocol (BTP), performed between a user equipped with a BPT and a merchant using a mobile phone connected to Internet.

Shohei Kakei, Yoshiaki Shiraishi, Masami Mohri, Toru Nakamura · 6 authors

In Internet of Things ecosystems, where various entities trade data and data analysis results, public key infrastructure plays an important role in establishing trust relationships between these entities to specify who trusts whose private keys. The owner of a private key is provided with a public key certificate issued by a certificate authority (CA) representing a trusted third party. Although this certificate ensures the reliability of the ecosystem by verifying the data source and preventing the denial of trading, it often causes an overconcentration of trust in a particular CA. Consequently, if that CA is infringed, all the related trust relationships become compromised. The paper proposes a distributed authentication infrastructure called Meta-PKI that decentralizes such overconcentration via a cross-certification procedure performed by multiple CAs. Although cross-certification is capable of establishing mutual trust relationships, it does not evaluate the trustworthiness of other CAs in a standardized manner. Therefore, this paper also proposes a new cross-certification method using a distributed ledger technology for building trust relationships based on unified criteria. It also describes the implementation of a Meta-PKI system for Hyperledger Fabric as a proof of concept. Once trust relationships have been established, it takes approximately 65.7 ms to validate them using the proposed system, which is secure against CA takeover and spoofing by outsider attackers.

Neha Garg, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Devesh Pratap Singh · 6 authors

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a kind of connected infrastructure of smart medical devices along with software applications, health systems and services. These medical devices and applications are connected to healthcare systems through the Internet. The Wi-Fi enabled devices facilitate machine-to-machine communication and link to the cloud platforms for data storage. IoMT has the ability to make accurate diagnoses, with fewer mistakes and lower costs of care. IoMT with smartphone applications permits the patients to exchange their health related confidential and private information to the healthcare experts (i.e., doctors) for the better control of diseases, and also for tracking and preventing chronic illnesses. Due to insecure communication among the entities involved in IoMT, an attacker can tamper with the confidential and private health related information for example an attacker can not only intercept the messages, but can also modify, delete or insert malicious messages during communication. To deal this sensitive issue, we design a novel blockchain enabled authentication key agreement protocol for IoMT environment, called BAKMP-IoMT. BAKMP-IoMT provides secure key management between implantable medical devices and personal servers and between personal servers and cloud servers. The legitimate users can also access the healthcare data from the cloud servers in a secure way. The entire healthcare data is stored in a blockchain maintained by the cloud servers. A detailed formal security including the security verification of BAKMP-IoMT using the widely-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool is performed to demonstrate its resilience against the different types of possible attack. The comparison of BAKMP-IoMT with relevant existing schemes is conducted which identifies that the proposed system furnishes better security and functionality, and also needs low communication and computational costs as compared to other schemes. Finally, the simulation of BAKMP-IoMT is conducted to demonstrate its impact on the performance parameters.

Emerson B. Tomaz, José Cláudio do Nascimento, Abdelhakim Hafid, José Neuman de Souza

The advent of miniaturized mobile devices with wireless communication capability and integrated with biosensors has revolutionized healthcare systems. The devices can be used by individuals as wearable accessories to collect health data regularly. This type of medical assistance supported by mobile devices to monitor patients and offer health services remotely is known as mobile health (mHealth). Although mHealth provides many benefits and has become popular, it can pose severe privacy risks. Many features in mHealth are managed through a smartphone. Thus, one of the most worrying issues involves communication between the monitoring devices and the smartphone. When communication uses Bluetooth, it is standard for a device to be paired with the smartphone; but generally, it is not exclusively associated with a specific mHealth app. This characteristic can allow a data theft attack by a malicious app or fake data injection by an illegitimate device. To address this issue, we present an authentication scheme based on Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof that is lightweight enough to run on mHealth devices with minimal resources. Our scheme ensures that legitimate devices interact exclusively with the official mHealth application. To ensure the patient's privacy-preserving throughout the system, we address the issues of storing, managing, and sharing data using blockchain. Since there is no privacy in the standard blockchain, we present a scheme in which the health data transmitted, stored, or shared are protected by Attribute-Based Encryption. The outcome is a system with fine-grained access control, entirely managed by the patient, and an end-to-end privacy guarantee.

Wenzheng Liu, Xiaofeng Wang, Wei Peng

Recently, application scenario of crowdsourcing IoT has covered to e-healthcare service, smart home, smart city, internet of vehicles due to the proliferation of smart devices such as smart mobile devices, smart wearable device, smart medical devices and smart furniture, etc. Patient's data collected by the smart devices send to the various remote medical servers. A group of medical professionals remote access patient data stored at the medical server database. Smart home users want to remote real-time access information of smart devices at home. All these operations need via wireless remote communication, which is suffering from various kinds of threat and attacks. Hence, there are a large number of multi-factor remote authentication and key agreement schemes designed for the application of crowdsourcing IoT. However, in most existing related multi-factor schemes, all factors for identity authentication only act as a parameter for encrypting the local secret key. In this paper, we propose a new secure remote multi-factor authentication scheme that includes three factors: 1) user identity; 2) password; and 3) user biometrics, which are authenticated by the remote server, act as a part of the secret key and participate in the key agreement process. We choose the chaotic map since it has a smaller key size and lower computational overhead, and then achieve remote multi-factor authentication and key agreement by artfully employ it to zero-knowledge technology and the fuzzy extractor technology. Our scheme is more secure and robust since the user revealing nothing sensitive information, and the adversary cannot impersonate any user even if he gets the server's master key. We have done security proof for our proposed scheme using the Random-Or-Real(ROR) model, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic, and ProVerif 2.00 to show that the presented scheme is secure. Also, we give an additional security analysis for other various attacks. Finally, according to the test and simulation result, the proposed scheme is very suitable for the power-constrained smart devices, and in the next generation 5G communication environment, its applicability and usability will be greatly enhanced.

Lewis Nkenyereye, Bayu Adhi Tama, Muhammad K. Shahzad, Yoon-Ho Choi

Basic safety message (BSM) are messages that contain core elements of a vehicle such as vehicle's size, position, speed, acceleration and others. BSM are lightweight messages that can be regularly broadcast by the vehicles to enable a variety of applications. On the other hand, event-driven message (EDM) are messages generated at the time of occurrence such as accidents or roads sliding and can contain much more heavy elements including pictures, audio or videos. Security, architecture and communication solutions for BSM use cases have been largely documented on in the literature contrary to EDM due to several concerns such as the variant size of EDM, the appropriate architecture along with latency, privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a secure and blockchain based EDM protocol for 5G enabled vehicular edge computing. To offer scalability and latency for the proposed scenario, we adopt a 5G cellular architecture due to its projected features compared to 4G tong-term evaluation (LTE) for vehicular communications. We consider edge computing to provide local processing of EDM that can improve the response time of public agencies (ambulances or rescue teams) that may intervene to the scene. We make use of lightweight multi-receiver signcryption scheme without pairing that offers low time consuming operations, security, privacy and access control. EDM records need to be kept into a distributed system which can guarantee reliability and auditability of EDM. To achieve this, we construct a private blockchain based on the edge nodes to store EDM records. The performance analysis of the proposed protocol confirms its efficiency.

Shijie Zhang, Jong‐Hyouk Lee

Blockchain-based mobile-edge computing (BMEC) is an innovative architecture, which is essential in the future fifth-generation (5G) network era. BMEC solves the problem of limited computing resources of devices in the mobile blockchain environment while ensuring the distributed deployment of computing resources and the traceable of transaction data. However, the blockchain technology has many security vulnerabilities, among which attacks against consensus algorithms are particularly serious, i.e., double-spend attacks, long-range attacks, and selfish mining. All of these attacks can break the integrity of BMEC, allowing the correct block record to be overwritten with a false one. In this article, we propose a group signature scheme designed for validating blocks of blockchain to address such issues. Each new block will be regarded as a valid block if it obtains a valid group aggregate signature of the group which the block creator belongs to. We describe in detail the process of authentication and key changes when mobile devices join and leave BMEC. We also provide a more efficient authentication scheme of authenticating mobile devices compared to traditional schemes in BMEC. Last, the security analysis is presented to prove that our proposed group signature scheme is effective.

Jeong Hoon Jo, Jong Hyuk Park

No abstract is available for this record.