Bruno Veloso, FĂĄtima Leal, Benedita Malheiro, Fernando Moreira
Crowdsourced repositories have become an increasingly important source of information for users and businesses in multiple domains. Everyday examples of tourism crowdsourcing platforms focusing on accommodation, food or travelling in general, influence consumer behaviour in modern societies. These repositories, due to their intrinsic openness, can strongly benefit from independent data quality modelling mechanisms. In this context, building trust & reputation models of contributors and storing crowdsourced data using distributed ledger technology allows not only to ascertain the quality of crowdsourced contributions, but also ensures the integrity of the built models. This paper presents a survey on distributed trust & reputation modelling using blockchain technology and, for the specific case of tourism crowdsourcing platforms, discusses the open research problems and identifies future lines of research.
Kurt Yaeger, Michael L. Martini, Jonathan J. Rasouli, Anthony Costa
With a growing trend in medicine towards individualized, patient-centric care, traditional health information technology limits progress. With high administrative costs and the lack of universal data access, contemporary electronic medical records serve more the institution rather than the patient. Blockchain technology, as presently described, was initially developed for use in financial markets, serving as a decentralized, distributed ledger of transactions. However, certain inherent characteristics of this technology suit it for use in the healthcare sector. Potential applications of the blockchain in medicine include interoperable health data access, data storage and security, value-based payment mechanisms, medical supply chain efficiency, amongst others. While the technology remains in nascent stages, it is essential that members of the healthcare community understand the fundamental concepts behind blockchain, and recognize its potential impact on the future of medical care.
Federico Matteo BenÄiÄ, Pavle SkoÄir, Ivana Podnar Ĺ˝arko
Supply chain management enhanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions integrate special tags (e.g., RFID, NFC, and QR-codes) with products to create Smart Tags, in addition to storing supplemental information about a product, which is also used to track products during their lifecycle. However, a product consumer has to implicitly trust the Smart Tag creator and other stakeholders within the supply chain that they are providing authentic data within a product's tag. The DL-Tags solution steps into this environment to offer a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and verifiable management of Smart Tags during a product's lifecycle. The solution is based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and uses the Ethereum blockchain to mediate interactions between the stakeholders during a product's exchange process. By reaching a consensus on the product's description and state logged on the blockchain, all involved stakeholders and product consumers can verify the product's authenticity without revealing their identity. The paper describes the DL-Tags solution and includes a cost analysis of all implemented transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The proposed solution provides evidence of the product's origin and its journey across the supply chain while preventing tag duplication and manipulation. It is among the first documented practical solutions using DLT and IoT for supply chain management, which is designed to be distributed ledger agnostic.
Michael Borkowski, Marten Sigwart, Philipp Frauenthaler, Taneli Hukkinen ¡ 5 authors
Current blockchain technologies provide very limited interoperability. Restrictions with regard to asset transfers and data exchange between different blockchains reduce the usability and comfort of users, and hinder novel developments within the blockchain space. As a first step towards blockchain interoperability, we propose the DeXTT cross-blockchain transfer protocol, which can be used to record a token transfer on any number of blockchains simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We provide a reference implementation using Solidity, and evaluate its performance. We show logarithmic scalability of DeXTT with respect to the number of participating nodes, and analyze cost requirements of the transferred tokens.
Although the blockchain-based applications are considered to be less vulnerable due to the nature of the distributed ledger, they did not become the silver bullet with respect to securing the information against different security risks. In this paper, we present a literature review on the security risks that can be mitigated by introducing the blockchain technology, and on the security risks that are identified in the blockchain-based applications. In addition, we highlight the application and technology domains where these security risks are observed. The results of this study could be seen as a preliminary checklist of security risks when implementing blockchain-based applications.
The lack of interoperability among IoT platforms has led to a fragmented environment, where the users and society as a whole suffer from lock-ins, lack of privacy, and reduced functionality. This paper presents SOFIE, a solution for federating the existing IoT platforms in an open and secure manner using Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and without requiring modifications to the IoT platforms, and describes how SOFIE is used to enable two complex real life pilots: food supply chain tracking from field to fork and electricity distribution grid balancing with guided electrical vehicle (EV) charging. SOFIE's main contribution is to provide interoperability between IoT systems while also enabling new functionality and business models.
Kentaroh Toyoda, Mojtaba Shakeri, Chi Xu, Allan N. Zhang
CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability) is getting more and more important in the cloud based manufacturing and IIoT (Industrial Internet-of-Things)/Indutry 4.0 domain. Recently, blockchain, a decentralized ledger technique, has attracted considerable attention to realize secure and robust data management systems for IIoT. Although several blockchain-based data management platforms for IIoT have been proposed, sensor data are stored outside of the blockchain, meaning that the data integrity and accessibility are not improved. In this paper, we take a different blockchain-based approach for sensor data management; any important sensor data are stored in the blockchain. For realizing this, a series of sensor data is compressed-then-stored in the blockchain by leveraging a fact that many sensor data often have a certain level of periodicity and stability. We have tested our idea against the real sensor data measured at our model factory, and evaluated several performance metrics such as compression ratio, compression/decompression time, process time required to store and retrieve sensor data from our Proof-of-Concept system with Ethereum and the expected blockchain size. From the results, it can be concluded that the proposed platform is viable for small factory cases but needs more technological advancement is required for large scale cases.
Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology to ensure trust between parties. By using this technology, we can establish a secure communication paradigm, where data integrity and immutability can be guaranteed. These inherited features underline blockchain as a suitable technology to optimise the adopted processing model in several domains, such as health, trade supply chain and food safety. In this paper, we present a detailed overview of the use of blockchain technology in (international) trade supply chains. Furthermore, the discussed proposals have been classified based on the target application scenarios. Our goal is to clarify the benefits of applying this technology to the trading domain and highlight the challenges that are associated with applying this technology to optimise the trading domain. Accordingly, we underline several issues that occur during the designing of the blockchain solution to optimise the (international) trade supply chain.
In recent times, two technology innovations have received significant attention not only from academia but also from industry and government: Digital Twins (DT) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). However, it appears that the literature is predominantly focusing on either one of these new pieces of technology in depth, and there is hardly any critique or review that creates lateral connections and links between the two. This paper starts to close this gap by asking, what can DT and DLT learn from each other?
Ravi Chandra Koirala, Keshav Dahal, Santiago Matalonga
The concept of openness and decentralization is one which people have desired since years. Everyone wants transactional data to be transparent. When sensitive data are on the hand of third-parties, it may be susceptible to frauds and misuse. The advent of blockchain, a decentralized technology in cryptocurrency, has revealed an appropriate solution to address such issues. Blockchain maintains the integrity of a transaction. It not only secures from tempering and fraud but also ensures transactions are verifiable without involvement of an intermediate. Therefore, blockchain is applied to different decentralized domains that require trusted computing. Supply chain is one of these domains, that can benefit from trustworthy decentralized transactions initiated by multiple stakeholders. This paper presents a general model for a blockchain enabled supply chain. We have implemented this model using three smart contracts on an Ethereum platform. We have provided evidence of our verification and validation efforts. Our results convey the feasibility of the approach, which can streamline the administrative processes, and automatize the transactions making the system more efficient and transparent.
Eman Daraghmi, YousefâAwwad Daraghmi, ShyanâMing Yuan
Although the blockchain technology was first introduced through Bitcoin, extending its usage to non-financial applications, such as managing electronic medical records, is an attractive mission for recent research to balance the needs for increasing data privacy and the regular interaction among patients and health providers. Various systems that adopts the blockchain in managing medical records have been proposed. However, there is a need for more work to better characterize, understand and evaluate the employment of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry. In this paper, a design of blockchain based system, namely MedChain, for managing medical records is proposed. MedChain is designed to improve the current systems as it provides interoperable, secure, and effective access for medical records by patients, health care providers, and other third parties, while keeping the patients' privacy. MedChain employs timed-based smart contracts for governing transactions and controlling accesses to electronic medical records. It adopts advanced encryption techniques for providing further security. This work proposes a new incentive mechanism that leverages the degree of health providers regarding their efforts on maintaining medical records and creating new blocks. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the MedChain performance, and results indicate the efficiency of our proposal in handling a large dataset at low latency.
Sin Kuang Lo, Yue Liu, Su Yen Chia, Xiwei Xu ¡ 7 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at connecting things to the Internet in a peer-to-peer paradigm for data collecting and data sharing in our daily life. A blockchain is an immutable append-only ledger maintained by a peer-to-peer network, where the whole network needs to reach a consensus on the transactional data stored on the ledger. With the decentralization nature, the design of IoT and blockchain aligns with each other well. Blockchain has been integrated with the IoT to solve the existing IoT problems. Our research focuses on analyzing the solutions proposed in academia and the methodologies used to integrate blockchain with the IoT. Through conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) on peer-reviewed, published articles on blockchain-based solutions for IoT, we gather the knowledge on current technical approaches implemented to integrate blockchain into the IoT. Majority of the research in this space is either at a conceptual level or at a very early stage. However, we only found 35 published papers with the real implementation of blockchain in the IoT platforms. We elicit the challenges of the IoT that were being addressed, and the detailed design of the blockchain-based solutions from two perspectives, namely data management and thing management. The evaluation methods and metrics used by those works are also being recorded and analyzed. In addition to the analysis of the literature, we provide our insights on improving the existing solutions and research methodology based on our expertise and experience on the blockchain.
By adopting the vision of Industry 4.0, many industrial sectors are eyeing the potential for advancing their systems to achieve higher productivity, cost-effectiveness, reliability, quality, and flexibility. One important sector that can greatly benefit from adopting Industry 4.0 principles and technologies is the manufacturing industry. This will help create the smart manufacturing era where advanced technologies and systems in Industry 4.0 will enhance the different processes within the manufacturing value chain and increase efficiency and profitability. However, Industry 4.0 requires effective integration of many technologies and systems and seamless operations across all components. This creates many challenges when creating applications for smart manufacturing including security, trust, traceability, reliability, and agreement automation within the manufacturing value chain. Several of these challenges can be addressed using blockchain. This paper discusses how blockchain can support smart manufacturing applications in manufacturing. In addition, the paper proposes a middleware approach for utilizing blockchain services and capabilities to enable more secure, trustable, traceable, reliable, and autonomous smart manufacturing applications. This approach will offer many advantages to secure and establish good trust among involved parties in the manufacturing value chain. In addition, this will enable a verity of new applications to realize the promising benefits of Industry 4.0 for smart manufacturing.
Blockchain is a distributed, immutable ledger technology introduced as the enabling mechanism to support cryptocurrencies. Blockchain solutions are currently being proposed to address diverse problems in different domains. This paper presents a scoping review of the scientific literature to map the current research area of blockchain applications in the biomedical domain. The goal is to identify biomedical problems treated with blockchain technology, the level of maturity of respective approaches, types of biomedical data considered, blockchain features and functionalities exploited and blockchain technology frameworks used. The study follows the PRISMA-ScR methodology. Literature search was conducted on August 2018 and the systematic selection process identified 47 research articles for detailed study. Our findings show that the field is still in its infancy, with the majority of studies in the conceptual or architectural design phase; only one study reports real world demonstration and evaluation. Research is greatly focused on integration, integrity and access control of health records and related patient data. However, other diverse and interesting applications are emerging, addressing medical research, clinical trials, medicines supply chain, and medical insurance.
Jan 1, 2019¡Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the fusion of the physical and digital world which enables assets on the edge to send data to a platform where it gets analyzed. Defined actions are then triggered to influence cross-functional edge activities. Furthermore, on the platform tier functionalities and relations need to be identified and implemented to realize assets operating autonomously and ubiquitously. The exploration of this paper results in the identification of autonomous characteristics and shows functional components to implement autonomous assets on the edge. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and its fusion with Machine Learning (ML) as an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides an integral part to realize the described outline. Thus, the recognition of DLTâs and MLâs usage in the IoT and the evaluation of the relevance as well as the synergies build the main focus of this paper.
The significant growth and adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions has led to tremendous increase in the generation of data. The need for high speed data processing has become very important to meet with the ever increasing volume and velocity of IoT data, due to the large scale and distributed nature of IoT infrastructure and networks. Present cloud based technologies are struggling to meet up with these needs for real time data processing in the midst of enormous amounts of data. The success of bitcoin has inspired more research in the application of Distributed ledger technologies in various domains. The decentralized nature of these platforms have enabled security and privacy of data in previous research and their architecture has a potential for enabling large scale decentralized data processing. In this paper, we identify some open areas of research in the use of distributed ledger technology and propose a framework for storing, analyzing and ensuring the security of large volumes of IoT data.
Yong Wang, Aiqing Zhang, Peiyun Zhang, Huaqun Wang
The sharing of electronic health records (EHRs) has great positive significance for research of disease and doctors' diagnosis. In recent years, cloud-based electronic medical record sharing scheme has brought a lot of conveniences, but the centralization of cloud exposes threats inevitably to data security and privacy preservation. Blockchain technology can be seen as a promising solution to address these problems on account of its unique propertis of decentration, anonymity, unforgeability and verifiability. In this paper, we propose a blockchain based secure and privacy-preserving EHR sharing protocol. Data requester can search desired keyword from data provider to find relevant EHRs on the EHR consortium blockchain and get the re-encryption ciphertext from cloud server after getting the data owner's authorization. The scheme mainly uses searchable encryption and conditional proxy re-encryption to realize data security, privacy preservation, and access control. Furthermore, proof of authorization is designed as the consensus mechanism for consortium blockchain to guarantee system's availability. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol can achieve security goals. Besides, we emulate the cryptographic primitives and implement the proposed scheme on Ethereum platform. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has high computational efficiency.
Edge computing is an important tool for smart computing, which brings convenience to data processing as well as security problems. In particular, the security of data storage under edge computing has become an obstacle to its widespread use. To solve the problem, the mechanism combing blockchain with regeneration coding is proposed to improve the security and reliability of stored data under edge computing. Our contribution is as follows. 1) According to the three-tier edge computing architecture and data security storage requirements, we proposed hybrid storage architecture and model specifically adapted to edge computing. 2) Making full use of the data storage advantages of edge network devices and cloud storage servers, we build a global blockchain in the cloud service layer and local blockchain is built on the terminals of the Internet of things. Moreover, the regeneration coding is utilized to further improve the reliability of data storage in blockchains. 3) Our scheme provides a mechanism for periodically validating hash values of data to ensure the integrity of data stored in global blockchain.
The modern intelligent transportation system brings not only new opportunities for vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) services but also new challenges for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Apart from enhanced network performance, a practical and reliable security scheme is needed to handle the trust management while preserving user privacy at the same time. The emerging 5G mobile communication system is viewed as a prominent technology for ultra-reliable, low-latency wireless communication services. Furthermore, incorporating software-defined network (SDN) architecture into the 5G-VANET enables global information gathering and network control. Hence, real-time IoT services on transportation monitoring and reporting can be well supported. Both pave the way for an innovative vehicular security scheme. This paper investigates the security and privacy issue in the transportation system and the vehicular IoT environment in SDN-enabled 5G-VANET. Due to the decentralized and immutable characteristics of blockchain, a blockchain-based security framework is designed to support the vehicular IoT services, i.e., real-time cloud-based video report and trust management on vehicular messages. This paper explicitly illustrates the SDN-enabled 5G-VANET model and the scheduling procedures of the blockchain-based framework. The numerical simulation results also show that malicious vehicular nodes or messages can be well detected while the overhead and impact on the network performance are acceptable for large-scale scenarios. Through case studies and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate our design substantially guarantees a secure and trustworthy vehicular IoT environment with user privacy preserved.
Hye-Young Paik, Xiwei Xu, H. M. N. Dilum Bandara, Sung Une Lee ¡ 5 authors
In a blockchain-based system, data and the consensus-based process of recording and updating them over distributed nodes are central to enabling the trustless multi-party transactions. Thus, properly understanding what and how the data are stored and manipulated ultimately determines the degree of utility, performance, and cost of a blockchain-based application. While blockchains enhance the quality of the data by providing a transparent, immutable, and consistent data store, the technology also brings new challenges from a data management perspective. In this paper, we analyse blockchains from the viewpoint of a developer to highlight important concepts and considerations when incorporating a blockchain into a larger software system as a data store. The work aims to increase the level of understanding of blockchain technology as a data store and to promote a methodical approach in applying it to large software systems. First, we identify the common architectural layers of a typical software system with data stores and conceptualise each layer in blockchain terms. Second, we examine the placement and flow of data in blockchain-based applications. Third, we explore data administration aspects for blockchains, especially as a distributed data store. Fourth, we discuss the analytics of blockchain data and trustable data analytics enabled by blockchain. Lastly, we examine the data governance issues in blockchains in terms of privacy and quality assurance.
Ayushi Sharma, Shashwat Tiwari, Nitin Arora, S. C. Sharma
Blockchain is an emerging technology that can radically improve transactions security at banking, supply chain, and other transaction networks. It's estimated that Blockchain will generate $3.1 trillion in new business value by 2030. Essentially, it provides the basis for a dynamic distributed ledger that can be applied to save time when recording transactions between parties, remove costs associated with intermediaries, and reduce risks of fraud and tampering. This book explores the fundamentals and applications of Blockchain technology. Readers will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, distributed ledger, and the trust model that defines Blockchain technology. They will also be introduced to the basic components of Blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain), its operations (hashing, verification, validation, and consensus model), underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Private and public Blockchain networks similar to Bitcoin and Ethereum will be introduced, as will concepts of Smart Contracts, Proof of Work and Proof of Stack, and cryptocurrency including Facebook's Libra will be elucidated. Also, the book will address the relationship between Blockchain technology, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity, Digital Transformation and Quantum Computing. Readers will understand the inner workings and applications of this disruptive technology and its potential impact on all aspects of the business world and society. A look at the future trends of Blockchain Technology will be presented in the book.