In recent years, the rapid development of Cloud, Edge and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has accelerated the advancement trends forcing applications and information systems (IS) to evolve. In this new ecosystem, ISs are federated and usually highly distributed becoming complex and very dynamic that have to extend not only through the Cloud/Edge and IoT layers but also the federated organizational boundaries. In this context, Osmotic Computing (OC) is a new paradigm driven by the significant increase in capacity/capability of resources in highly distributed and federated environments, that solves problems related to the deployment, networking and security of microservices called MicroElements (MEL) that are composed and interconnected over Cloud/Edge and IoT infrastructures with specified levels of QoS and security constraints. In this federated collaborative system, each organization needs to have proper administration and security policies to maintain data security while allowing selective sharing of resources. Classical models of access control are not effective in protecting resources while allowing users to access to the resources within their privileges. Blockchain is an underlying technology that could help organizations to improve access control systems through consensus mechanisms, and underlying features of immutability, transparency, auditability, and cryptography. In this work, we propose a MELs orchestration approach through a Software Defined Membrane (SDMem) that leverages Blockchain facilities obeying the osmosis principles.
Digital marketing is any form of advertising, which utilizes digital mediums to offer goods or services to customers. Therefore, the businesses utilizing the internet for the promotions of their products and services, they are engaged in digital marketing. As we know that nowadays, no company can get success without digital marketing. As all of us recognize, the marketing industry is pretty dynamic and liable to change. By its very nature, it has to evolve to new technologies and consumer wishes. And now, we have a large alternate on the horizon that promises to shake up the advertising enterprise from top to bottom, along with several other industries as properly. We’re talking about the Blockchain. The technology has already made a few critical waves within the economic international. This article is an attempt to explain the role and impact of Blockchain in the digital marketing industry.
Traditional centralized PKIs are vulnerable due to the single point of failure. A feasible solution is to build a decentralized PKI without certificate authority (CA). Web of Trust is the first step toward realizing a decentralized PKI, but it still has some limitations such as missing incentive and leaking user's privacy. Blockchain's numerous desirable properties, such as cryptographical security, decentralized nature and unalterable transaction record, make it a suitable tool to implement a decentralized PKI. However, the latest research findings about blockchain-based PKI are still incompatible with the thin-clients which have limited storage ability to download the entire blockchain. To combat that, we firstly present a Privacy-preserving Thin-client Scheme (PTS) utilizing the idea of k-anonymity, which enables thin-clients to run normally as full node users and protect user's privacy simultaneously. After that, in order to reduce cost, we further propose an Efficient Privacy preserving Thin-client Scheme (EPTS) employing the method of PIR (private information retrieval). Then security analysis and functional comparison are performed to demonstrate the high security and comprehensive functionality of EPTS compared with existing schemes. Finally, extensive experiments are undertaken to confirm that EPTS can reduce computational cost and communication cost impressively.
Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), provenance is vital for assessing data's trustworthiness, detecting the misbehaviors conducted by adversaries or troubleshooting communication failures. The provenance can be encoded through fingerprinting the node IDs along a packet path where the packets are generated, forwarded and/or aggregated. Because WSNs are resource-tightened networks, most of the known provenance schemes applied in WSNs address the issues on how to reduce the provenance size with various compression techniques only. However, reducing the provenance size at a sensor node also costs too much energy. In addition, such schemes did not take the secure and persistant provenance storage for consideration in a long term. To fill the gap, we propose a blockchainbased data provenance scheme (BCP) of compression free, where the provenances are stored distributively on the nodes along the packet path and the BS can retrieve the provenance on demand through a query process. An edge computing based monitor network consisting of high performance nodes (H-nodes) is deployed above or nearby the WSNs, which keeps the WSN's provenance data in a blockchain-based database. The security and authenticity of the provenances are then protected. What's more, the WSN is released from consuming much energy in handling provenance data, which is more superior to all the previous schemes. Both the simulation and experiment results show that our scheme BCP is more energy efficient and secure than those of the known distributed data provenances.
Md. Adib Muhtasim, Syeda Ramisa Fariha, Rayhan Rashid, Nabila Islam · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network formed by electronic objects having embedded sensors, software and network connectivity in them. Although they can collect and exchange data, they are prone to both cyber-attack and physical tampering. Thus, it is essential to encrypt their communications, by addressing new challenges such as impersonating "things" or nodes, denial-of-sleep attacks that drain batteries, to denial-of-service attacks (DoS). A peer-to-peer model can eliminate the dependency of a centralized data center. A Blockchain is a model for a distributed database of records of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating nodes. In it, digital signatures are validated instead of physical signatures. With a decentralized approach implemented with cryptographic algorithms, blockchain oversees a secure transaction between IoT devices and coordinates them. This paper explores one of the processes of incorporating blockchain with a very vulnerable centralized IoT structure. IoT devices are represented as aircrafts in which the engine data and various data from the aircrafts' sensors are sent to the airports for analysis. After analysis, the analyzed data is sent to nearby airports and also to that particular aircraft. The paper analyzes how the blockchain network is created, the time latency of sending the data of the IoT devices through this blockchain network and some parts of the analysis process which is required for aircraft maintenance.
In present days, data security and citizen privacy are the vulnerable areas globally. Amongst them, healthcare systems are the most targeted ones. In Nepal, among the few e-health systems available, most are disconnected, fragmented and cyber security aspect is overlooked, creating even more risk. To effectively guide health care systems and make it more citizen-centric, centralized secured online healthcare system is essential. This study proposes a centralized, permissioned Blockchain based secured healthcare system using hyperledger for developing countries. This system follows distributed storage technology to facilitate better availability, redundancy and strong confidentiality using cryptographic encryption. Besides, this technique creates a transparent yet secure and immutable data storage and sharing platform. It optimally and effectively contributes to the transfer of health information that is cost effective. Regarding it, a pilot study was performed taking a tertiary care hospital; Hospital for Children, Eye, ENT and Rehabilitation Services (CHEERS) and its community hospital at Chapagaun. It was validated using the balanced scorecard to confirm its cost-effective performance. Nineteen most essential key progress indicators were chosen for study. From this study, it was deduced that transforming internal business process of a hospital setting by implementing proposed healthcare system results in 75% customer satisfaction as well as 63% financial gain. This approach uplifts the healthcare organizations and their financial status. It, in turn, sets a benchmark for a secured health care system of developing countries as a whole.
This paper introduces a system for providing integrity, authenticity, and privacy of data transactions for resource-limited Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices using blockchain (BC) and Multi-Party Computation (MPC). In particular, we introduce two mechanisms: one provides privacy and integrity protections on the data being collected by the smart devices, such as medical records or diagnostic data, and the other provides authenticity and integrity of data going into the smart devices, such as software updates. Our experimental results indicate that our proposed mechanisms incur small overhead in terms of storage, communication, and computation, indicating their feasibility to IoT devices with limited storage, computational, and communicational capabilities.
Abstract: Recent publications on the data protection aspects of blockchain technology focus on the characteristics of the initial public (Bitcoin) blockchain, and do so in a generalized manner. The authors then conclude that the characteristics of a public blockchain are profoundly incompatible at a conceptual level with the principles of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR requires identification of a central ‘controller’ who is responsible for compliance with the GDPR, while a public blockchain decentralizes the storage and processing of personal data, as a result whereof there is no such central point of control. For lack of a better alternative, the authors conclude that all ‘nodes’ involved in operating a blockchain qualify as a controller under the GDPR, raising enforcement and jurisdictional issues that make it impossible for individuals to enforce their rights. The transparency and immutability of a public blockchain would further not sit well with principles of data confidentiality, data minimization, data accuracy and the rights of individuals to correction and deletion of their data. I disagree with the analysis of these authors for a host of different reasons, the main one being that the authors focus on the shortcomings of the initial public (Bitcoin) blockchain when already many new types of permissioned private and consortium blockchain have been developed that significantly diverge from the original, permissionless public blockchain. In fact, these types of permissioned blockchain have been developed in response to the shortcomings of public blockchain. The authors further consider the data processing implications of blockchain as if this technology constitutes in itself a data processing activity for which a controller has to be identified. Controllership is, however, decided based on a specific use or deployment of a certain technology. Blockchain, like the internet, is a general-purpose technology that is subsequently deployed by actors for a certain purpose in a specific context. Applying the question of controllership to the internet at large would pose similar data protection issues under the GDPR as identified by the authors in respect of blockchain. This publication explains why none of these issues are currently hampering application of the GDPR to the internet and are equally unlikely to pose issues for blockchain applications. This publication describes the issues in their broader context, as well as how each of these issues can be addressed to ensure compliance with the GDPR. The conclusion is that the GDPR is also well able to regulate this new technology. This does not, however, mean that blockchain will thus be suitable for all use and deployment cases.
CPS (Cyber Physical Systems) have got wide application and research, and information security risk evaluation became the key for CPS greatly developing. In view of the physical structure and business characteristics of CPS, this paper constructs an information security risk evaluation system for CPS. In the process of risk evaluation, colligating the analysis results from experts and the analysis results of external data sources' related big data for information security risk evaluation of CPS, by experts confirming the index system and indexes' weight values for CPS information security risk evaluation, further through using evaluation model to realize the quantitative calculation to CPS information security risks. This paper proposes using blockchain technology to construct the data's authenticity and reliability guarantee system for CPS and CPS related external systems, and constructing blockchain's layered model structure based on CPS. In the part of case analysis, comparing and analysing the evaluation system based on blockchain and big data and the evaluation system based on traditional mode, to confirm the research value of this paper.
Blockchain technology on the platform business becomes a new paradigm which gets security, irreversibility, and trustfulness closer to both of clients and service providers (SPs) for providing a better quality of service. To provide an economic analysis of such blockchain-based platform business, a game theoretic approach is used to model a competitive market against the incumbent platform operated by a centralizer as a trusted third party. In this market, the platforms behave as a mediator to deliver the services provided by SPs to clients. The crucial factors for the success of blockchain-based platform business are (i) how SPs' participation is reflected on its quality of service (QoS) and (ii) how to incentivize SPs to contribute their resources such as computing/storage infrastructure. In our game formulation, a non-cooperative two-stage dynamic game is used, where the first stage models how to incentivize SPs in a blockchain-based platform and the second stage models the competition between platforms to attract clients. As a result, we provide an equilibrium analysis, which gives a useful insight into how much the service quality of blockchain-based platform affects the competition between platforms and the equilibrium incentive strategy for SPs. Moreover, our numerical analysis shows that the equilibrium incentive increases with proportional to the QoS of a blockchain-based platform whereas the incentive becomes negative if it provides a non-increasing QoS with the number of participated SPs.
Yuma Sakakibara, Yuta Tokusashi, Shin Morishima, Hiroki Matsutani
Blockchain is core technology for cryptocurrency and it is possible to become fundamental platform for industry and business. Especially, a blockchain-based digital asset transfer system using Internet of Things (IoT) products has recently been considered as a new practical platform, but the protocol limits performance. Previous research has improved performance by proposing new protocols, but further improvement is necessary for dealing with increasing transactions via IoT products. Therefore, we propose an in-Network Interface Card (in-NIC) processing approach using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to improve performance of a blockchain-based transfer system. To be more concrete, we design and implement a prototype NIC with a key-value data store written in a P4 language on the FPGA that has four 10Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network interfaces. The prototype system supports frequently-used commands (CREATE, ISSUE, TRANSFER and REFER) for transferring digital asset. It reduces time for processing a kernel network protocol stack and accessing the data store. In fact, we measured throughput and latency of our prototype system compared to those of a blockchain software application. As a result, we found that our solution is able to obtain throughput 6.04 times higher on average and latency 15.4 times lower on average for all typical blockchain operations.
Peer to Peer (P2P) is a dynamic and self-organized technology, popularly used in File sharing applications to achieve better performance and avoids single point of failure. The popularity of this network has attracted many attackers framing different attacks including Sybil attack, Routing Table Insertion attack (RTI) and Free Riding. Many mitigation methods are also proposed to defend or reduce the impact of such attacks. However, most of those approaches are protocol specific. In this work, we propose a Blockchain based security framework for P2P network to address such security issues. which can be tailored to any P2P file-sharing system.
Junseok Park, Seongkuk Park, Kwangmin Kim, Doheon Lee
We present a healthcare remedy evaluation system, called CORUS, using blockchain-based crowdsourcing on a cloud computing platform. Efficacy of healthcare remedies such as functional foods and dietary supplements usually spreads by subjective word of mouth. Though regular clinical trials could be employed, it requires significant cost in time and budget. We expect crowdsourcing can be an effective and efficient alternative to the costly clinical trials to achieve objective evaluation on healthcare remedies. The blockchain technology can alleviate the problem of information quality in most of crowdsourcing systems. Properly designed reward distribution schemes can motivate voluntary participants to provide with credible information. The distributed replication of blockchains can increase the information credibility by prohibiting malicious forgery. We also utilize the Amazon cloud system to enhance availability and scalability. To our knowledge, CORUS is the first system to utilize crowdsourcing, blockchains, and cloud computing for healthcare remedy evaluation. It is available at https://corus.kaist.edu.
The proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has opened up plethora of opportunities for smart networking and connected applications. The large distribution of IoT devices within a finite geographical area and the pervasiveness of wireless networking presents an opportunity for such devices to collaborate. This paper proposes the idea of opportunistic collaboration among mobile IoT devices to share their services and excess computing resources. Opportunistic collaboration among devices over wireless networking requires proper coordination and agreements among the devices in a purely distributed manner. To facilitate the distributive collaboration, we propose a decentralized architecture design using blockchain technology. Through experimental evaluation of a prototype collaborative mobile-IoT system involving RaspberryPis and a Dell IoT edge gateway, we show that our proposed distributed collaborative approach is feasible and comparable to a non-collaborative edge- computing approach from a latency perspective.
Mei Yu, Jie Zhang, Jianrong Wang, Jie Gao · 8 authors
Now, the security and privacy-preserving of Internet of Things are receiving more attention. This article proposes a new method of Internet of Things security and privacy preserving by combining differentiated nodes, precision clustering, RSA, multi-signature, and blockchain. To calculate the node rank value in Internet of Things, the number of nodes’ links is taken as the weight of nodes based on PageRank. This method increases the node rank values’ difference between nodes. Accurate clustering determines the initial central nodes of k-means based on the differentiated node rank values, which effectively differentiates the active and inactive nodes in Internet of Things and achieve different levels of protection. To ensure data’s reusability, we adopt the multi-signature. And considering node’s incoming nodes have certain decision on whether data can be transmitted, we filter out two nodes with the highest node rank value from active node’s incoming nodes to do 2/3 multi-signature which saves resources. We encrypt and sign the transmitted data with RSA, helping receivers to verify data. Data are transmitted safely through the blockchain. Successful validation indicates successful transmission. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively distinguish between active and inactive nodes, which increases the difficulty of attackers’ attack and effectively protects the security and privacy of Internet of Things nodes and data.
The study integrates blockchain technology which treats each mobile database as a block. Each block will first detect its own range of sensor data. The system then concatenates the sensor data for each block through the blockchain technology. In addition to their own measurement data, these concatenated sensor data also contain all the sensor data of the previous block. Therefore, when the system completes the connection of each block, each block node stores the sensor data of the entire wireless network. Mobile database is placed in an embedded hardware module like the Raspberry Pi. This module also establishes web server at the same time. The setting of this mobile web server is based on the Web of Things (WoT) structure. The advantage of this mobile database is easy information collection, while maintaining confidentiality and security. This mobile web server can draw figures with multiple chart types on the web page whilst delivering these web pages of charts to the cloud. The mobile web server is also built on the same embedded hardware module, and even the system can be a private cloud data center. The proposed system will visualize the data uploaded by these sensors and draw the relevant chart after performing big data analysis. This web page server of the system is built on an embedded operating system so that it is easy for the system to model and visualize the corresponding graphics using the Python or JavaScript programming language.
In this paper, we use the credit mechanism of E-commerce platform to evaluate the transaction subject as user reviews, and evaluate the credit degree of the blockchain nodes based on the consensus algorithm of the consortium blockchain as node reviews, then associate the node credit score consisting of user and node reviews with the transaction cost to substitute the incentive effect of the block reward for ledger maintenance. According to the score-pricing strategy we will introduce later, this incentive method can ameliorate the problem of too concentrated bookkeeping permissions and improve the initiative of the accounting node.
Railways around the world are moving towards digitalization to enhance their operations. The integration of railway data with other transport modes data becomes a vital part of the next generation of digital transport systems. One of the challenges for further digitization is data integration and security. This situation remains a challenge across organizations and industry boundaries. The blockchain is a new technology that might have the potential for acting as an enabler for the data integration and security challenge. In this paper a moderate literature review on the use of blockchain around different industries, in particular IoT applications, and in the railway context has been demonstrated. Opportunities and challenges that the blockchain technology can offer for the railway industry has been outlined.The paper has also looked at railway related blockchain current and potential applications. A simple analysis of the technology for the potential adoption rate has also been discussed. It was found that the blockchain can offer a number of benefits including added security and decentralization, however it will have a moderate technology adoption rate before it reaches it is transformative impact. In order to overcome some the adoption rate barriers in the railways, the author has developed a speech recognition and mobility based interface that can be utilized across different transport organizations, which can help in the data collection and pave the way for block chain applications. The solution was given the name of "inspectro".
Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast growing technology in the digitalised world where each device in the network interconnect and interact with other device to collect the information and automate tasks.A lot of vulnerabilities are exposed in IoT devices, which can be exploited to compromise the devices and an infected device can disrupt all other nodes in the network. The severeness of the vulnerabilities can vary from launching a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack to entirely draining the batteries of a heart pacemaker. Although IoT providers constantly working on reducing the vulnerabilities, an Intrusion Detection (ID) system can be built to find, whether the nodes are behaving abnormally or not. ID system can be built with a centralized architecture, but compromising the centralized entity can result in compromising the entire network. For storing data and running ID system in a decentralized manner, blockchain technology is executed to increase trust between the peers. With this decentralized blockchain architecture each node will be able to find out whether the peers in the group are malicious or not. So, we propose a architecture, IDBIoT (Intrusion Detector for Blockchain based IoT networks) for Intrusion detection in an IoT environment, that mainly focuses on the securing the network by detecting intruders, using statistical significance while preventing Goldfinger attack.
This paper proposes and implements a method to verify the blockchain healthiness and to detect a malicious node using data collected from the IoT blockchain such as the transaction generation interval, the blockchains generation rate, and the statistics of IoT data stored in the blockchain. Furthermore, this paper proposes, designs, and implements a visualization tool to efficiently monitor the blockchain healthiness and IoT data in a consistent view via visualization of real-time blockchain update events, blockchain network statistics, and finally the IoT sensing data stored in blockchain as a transaction.
Aiming at the problem that consortium blockchains cannot elect a leader peer intelligently against real-time transactions and cannot satisfy the stability requirement of the data trading platform, this paper presents a consortium blockchain dynamic leader election. Based on the consensus protocols of Hyperledger Fabric, a transaction evaluation module calculating user score for each peer is introduced into the consortium blockchain. Peers elect the leader peer of the consortium blockchain according to user score dynamically, which improves the stability and security of reaching a consensus within the data trading platform.
Chao Qiu, F. Richard Yu, Fangmin Xu, Haipeng Yao · 5 authors
Recently, rapid advances in information and communications technologies (ICTs) have improved the performance of software-defined industrial Internet of things (SDIIoT). Due to a variety of data, flows and smart devices in SDIIoT, a distributed SDN control plane is necessary. However, how to achieve consensus among controllers efficiently and safely is an intractable problem. In this paper, we use a permissioned blockchain approach to reach consensus in distributed SDIIoT. Since lots of data needs to be synchronized, and the throughput of traditional Byzantine fault tolerance protocol used in permissioned blockchain is limited by many aspects, i.e., the trust features of nodes in blockchain, the trust features of controllers in distributed SDIIoT, and the computing capacity of blockchain, we jointly consider these aspects to improve the throughput of permissioned blockchain. Accordingly, we formulate view change, access selection, and computing resources allocation as a joint optimization problem. This joint problem is highly dimensional, and is hard to be solved by traditional methods. Therefore, we propose a dueling deep Q-learning approach to address the problem. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.