Blockchain is a shared and distributed ledger across an open or private processing system that expedites the process of recording transactions and data management in a business network. It empowers the design of decentralized transactions, smart contracts, and intelligent assets that can be managed over internet. It formulates the revolutionary decision-making governance systems with more egalitarian users, and autonomous organizations that can control over internet without any third-party involved. This disruptive technology has tremendous opportunities that open the doors to detract the power from centralized authorities in the sphere of communications, business, and even politics or law. This chapter outlines an introduction to the blockchain technologies and its decentralized architecture, especially from the perspective of challenges and limitations. The objective is to explore the current research topics, benefits, and drawbacks of blockchain. The study explores its potential applications for business and future directions that is all set to transfigure the digital world.
Blockchain and smart contracts (i.e., computer code that can be run on blockchain) are increasingly popular for healthcare applications. However, only very few implementations exist because of the complexity of the technologies. Although there are tutorials and reviews to introduce blockchain and smart contracts, a pragmatic comparison of such platforms is needed. In this study, we addressed practical considerations while building a healthcare blockchain and smart contract system, by (1) comparing technical features of platforms, (2) selecting three platforms, (3) constructing blockchain networks, (4) testing the blockchains, and (5) summarizing the experience and time used for implementation by students. We evaluated Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric, and MultiChain, and confirmed that the selection of a proper platform depends on the requirements of the application. The findings of our study can accelerate the process and reduce the risk of adopting blockchain technology in biomedical and healthcare domain.
The evolution of Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) boosts the amount of IIoT data. Machine learning promotes the progress of data analytics services. In order to facilitate the flow and explore the economic value of IIoT data, it is crucial to consider data packet transactions (DPTs) and data analytics service transactions (DASTs) simultaneously. Centralized data trading platforms emerge to realize transactions of data commodities. However, centralized platforms lack trust and robustness. How to realize DPTs and DASTs in a decentralized way is a challenging issue. In this paper, a new transaction solution based on the smart contract-enabled blockchain technology is proposed, which consists of the DPT smart contract and DAST smart contract. The DPT smart contract is implemented to trade data packets. The DAST smart contract provides a competitive way to trade data analytics services. Both smart contracts are designed to enable entities in IIoT to execute DPTs and DASTs automatically and honestly. Moreover, the transaction disputes between different IIoT entities are solved by the big data center off-chain, and the treatment results will be recorded on the blockchain by the big data center. The DPT smart contract and DAST smart contract are implemented and tested on Remix integrated development environment to achieve DPTs and DASTs. The gas costs of smart contracts are estimated and the security of the proposed solution is analyzed. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed solution is secure and feasible.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The drawbacks of the current centralized energy market render it necessary that a decentralized architecture - consisting of entities such as microgrids, utility companies, financial institutions, and consumers- is developed. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) provide an immutable, tamper-proof and secure way of automating and recording complex transactions. They can be used in conjunction with smart energy meters to create collaborative economy business models in energy, thus, energy production and consumption measurements can be authenticated in a secure way and the optimal balance between supply, demand and their pricing can be achieved. Moreover, the decentralized structure of blockchain enables business processes to become automated via smart contracts and decentralized applications, contributing to a viable energy market. This study attempts to technically evaluate different startup approaches in the Decentralized Energy Internet domain, review their current progress in engineering, security, regulatory and societal aspects, and examine their future challenges and the potential of using a Unified and Adaptable Model.
Jan 1, 2019·Proceedings of the VIth International Workshop 'Critical Infrastructures: Contingency Management, Intelligent, Agent-Based, Cloud Computing and Cyber Security' (IWCI 2019)
Konstantin Mironov, Sergey Trishin, Amir Makhmutov, Vadim Kartak · 5 authors
In this article we consider tasks related to ensuring the integrity and availability of information in the Internet of Things (IoT) sphere. Such systems include sensors and similar devices, which are the sources of data, access points, which transmit data from sensors to the Internet and servers, which store received data and grant access to users. When storing data on a server and providing access to it, it is necessary to ensure its integrity and availability to users. To this end, it is proposed to apply a distributed ledger technology (DLT). One of the applications of DLT for data protection is energetics. Here we consider a system for processing and storing data on the production and consumption of electricity in a decentralized power grid. A review of currently existing projects related to the use of distributed ledger technologies in the energy sector is carried out. An important obstacle to the use of DLT in the IoT is the contradiction between, on the one hand, high memory computational requirements of the DLT, and, on the other hand, limited resources of IoT nodes. Further research directions are proposed that are associated with overcoming this obstacle in applying distributed ledger technologies in the energetics.
Applications and uses cases of distributed ledger technology (DLT) are increasingly attracting interest in the construction industry. However, DLT in construction is still considered a nascent field of research and practical applications of DLT in construction are at the very early readiness stages. This paper builds on a previously developed socio-technical systems framework for DLT in construction (i.e. Li et al., 2019) built on four dimensions of technical, process, policy and social, and proposes a roadmap to achieving readiness for macro adoption of DLT in the construction industry. First, the paper reviews existing readiness and adoption models and technology roadmaps for new technological innovations in the context of DLT highlighting their strengths and detailing why they are not suitable for DLT. Then, drawing on experience of existing models as a basis, it proposes a four-stage roadmap to readiness for adoption of DLT in the construction industry. The four-stage DLT Roadmap incorporates Conceptualisation, Appraisal, Preparation and Implementation. This roadmap is intended to provide the industry with a comprehensive framework to support adoption and diffusion of DLT for specific use cases. Future work will involve proposal of guidelines for each of the four dimensions across the four-stage DLT Roadmap and testing through workshop-identified use cases of DLT in construction.
The main issues with drug safety in the counterfeit medicine supply chain, are to do with how the drugs are initially manufactured. The traceability of right and active pharmaceutical ingredients during actual manufacture is a difficult process, so detecting drugs that do not contain the intended active ingredients can ultimately lead to end-consumer patient harm or even death. Blockchain's advanced features make it capable of providing a basis for complete traceability of drugs, from manufacturer to end consumer, and the ability to identify counterfeit-drug. This paper aims to address the issue of drug safety using Blockchain and encrypted QR(quick response) code security.
Blockchain is the promising technology of recent years, which has attracted remarkable attention in both academic studies and practical industrial applications. The smart contract is a programmable transaction that can perform a sophisticated task, execute automatically, and store on the blockchain. The smart contract is the key component of the blockchain, which has made blockchain a technology beyond the scope of the cryptocurrencies and applicable for a variety of applications such as healthcare, IoT, supply chain, digital identity, business process management, and more. Although in recent years the progress toward improving blockchain technology with the focus on the smart contract has been impressive, there is a lack of reviewing the smart contract topic. This paper systematically reviews the key concepts and proposes the direction of recent studies and developments regarding the smart contract. The research studies are presented in three main categories: 1) security methods and tools; 2) performance improvement approaches; and 3) decentralized applications based on smart contracts.
Mazin Debe, Khaled Salah, Muhammad Habib ur Rehman, Davor Svetinović
Public fog nodes extend cloud services for the Internet of Things (IoT) clients and smart devices to provide additional computation capabilities, storage space, and reduce latency and response time. The openness and pervasiveness of public fog nodes leads to the requirement of using trust models to ensure reliability, security, privacy, and meet the service-level agreements (SLAs). Conventional trust models for public fog nodes are centrally configured, deployed, and maintained considering security, privacy, and SLA requirements. However, these trust models enforce centralized governance policies across the system which leads towards the single-point-of-failure and single-point-of-compromise over IoT devices' and users' personal data. This paper proposes a decentralized trust model in order to maintain the reputation of publicly available fog nodes. The reputation is maintained considering users' opinions about their past interactions with the public fog nodes. The proposed trust model is designed using public Ethereum blockchain and smart contract technologies in order to enable decentralized trustworthy service provisioning between IoT devices and public fog nodes. The proposed approach is tested and evaluated in terms of security, performance, and cost. The results show that using blockchain for decentralized reputation management could become more advantageous when compared to the existing centralized trust models.
Distributed ledgers provide many advantages over centralized solutions in IoT projects including but not limited to improved security, transparency and fault tolerance. However, in order to leverage them at scale, their well-known limitations, i.e., scalability and performance, should be adequately addressed. DAG-based distributed ledgers have been proposed to tackle the performance and scalability issues by design. The first among them, IOTA, has shown promising signs in terms of scalability and performability. In this thesis, we first conduct a comprehensive literature review on both distributed ledger technology applications in IoT and the performance evaluation of such decentralized systems. Then we present a detailed technical overview of IOTA, following a contractive review of different DAG-based distributed ledger technologies. Next, we propose a scalable transactive smart homes infrastructure by leveraging IOTA protocol and following the separation of concerns (SOC) design principle. Based on the proposed solution, an experiment with 40 home nodes is conducted to prove the concept at large scale in a cloud environment. The results show that our solution provides a high transaction speed and scalability, as well as good performance on micropayment which is important in IoT initiatives. We conduct an analysis and discuss how the new system breaks out the Blockchain Trilemma, which claims that it is almost impossible for a blockchain platform to simultaneously reach decentralization, scalability and security. Based on our findings on scalability and performance, we conclude that the proposed DAG-based distributed ledger is an effective solution for building an IoT infrastructure for smart communities, in which local residents can freely and securely transfer values. Finally, we rigorously study the performance of the ledger to examine its applicability for IoT projects in which a high throughput is required. More specifically, we investigate the IOTA system to answer two key research questions: 1) what is the confirmation rate in the system given the design parameters and 2) what will be the optimal waiting time for a user to resend its previously submitted but not yet confirmed transaction to the ledger? In order to answer these vital questions, we perform real experimentation, simulation and analytical modeling. Our findings reveal the impact of arrival rate of transactions, consensus algorithm, randomness of the weighted random walk for tip selection and network delay on the confirmation rate. By decomposing the transaction confirmations in each graph layer, we build an analytical layered model. Thanks to the analytical modeling, we shed some light on the distribution of confirmation process, which is leveraged to calculate the optimal time for resending the unconfirmed transaction to the distributed ledger. Our performance model can be used by IoT project designers to perform what-if analysis and capacity planning in advance of the real deployments, with high level of accuracy.
Lehlogonolo P. I. Ledwaba, Gerhard P. Hancke, Sherrin J. Isaac, Hein S. Venter
The ability for the smart microgrid to allow for the independent generation and distribution of electrical energy makes it an attractive solution towards enabling universal access to electricity within developing economies. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are being considered as an enabling technology for the secure energy trade market however the high processing, energy and data exchange requirements may make them unsuitable for the Industrial Internet of Things technologies used in the implementation of the microgrid and the limited connectivity infrastructure in developing technologies. This work serves to assess the suitability of DLTs for IIoT edge node operation and as a solution for the microgrid energy market by considering node transaction times, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory useage, in addition to mining effort and end user costs.
Nataša Živić, Christoph Ruland, Jochen Sassmannshausen
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are seen as data bases of the future, which reduce the cost of trust and revolutionize transactions between individuals, companies and governments. They are considered as one of the main drivers of future applications, especially in field of Machine to Machine (M2) communications which are one of the basic technologies for Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, Distributed Ledger Technologies with their inherent property to provide security, privacy and decentralized operation are engine for todays and future reliable, autonomous and trusted IoT platforms. For this reason, IoT using DLT can be considered as “Internet of Trusted Things”. This paper considers tree basic DLT technologies according to their architecture: blockchain, tangle and hashgraph. Their characteristics are compared considering number of criteria, with the aim to find a proper architecture for a specific M2M application.
Stefan Geißler, Thomas Prantl, Stanislav Lange, Florian Wamser · 5 authors
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have become more and more popular and widespread during recent years. After the initial hype about the technology and many cryptocurrency related use cases, the technology slowly starts to make its way into other domains like food tracking and document management. In order to further contribute to the search of what this technology can be used for, more detailed performance evaluations are required in order to investigate key performance indicators and general limits of the technology. To this end, we develop a discrete-time queueing model that allows a detailed evaluation of the characteristics of a blockchain system, such as the transaction waiting time distribution. Furthermore, we validate the model by comparing the results to values obtained from measurements in a closed lab environment based on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ali Shahaab, B. Lidgey, Chaminda Hewage, Imtiaz Khan
Advancement of consensus protocols in recent years has enabled distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) to find its application and value in sectors beyond cryptocurrencies. Here we reviewed 66 known consensus protocols and classified them into philosophical and architectural categories, also providing a visual representation. As a case study, we focus on the public sector and highlighted potential protocols. We have also listed these protocols against basic features and sector preference in a tabular format to facilitate selection. We argue that no protocol is a silver bullet, therefore should be selected carefully, considering the sector requirements and environment.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has emerged as one of the most disruptive technologies in the last decade. It promises to change the way people do their business, track their products, and manage their personal data. Though the concept of DLT was first implemented in 2009 as Bitcoin, it has gained significant attention only in the past few years. During this time, different DLT enthusiasts and commercial companies have proposed and developed several DLT platforms. These platforms are usually categorized as public vs private, general purpose vs application specific and so on. As a growing number of people are interested to build DLT applications, it is important to understand their underlying architecture and capabilities in order to determine which DLT platform should be leveraged for a specific DLT application. In addition, the platforms need to be evaluated and critically analyzed to assess their applicability, resiliency and sustainability in the long run. In this paper, we have surveyed several leading DLT platforms and evaluated their capabilities based on a number of quantitative and qualitative criteria. The comparative analysis presented in this paper will help the DLT developers and architects to choose the best platform as per their requirement(s).
Industry 4.0 is a concept devised for improving the way modern factories operate through the use of some of the latest technologies, like the ones used for creating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robotics, or Big Data applications. One of such technologies is blockchain, which is able to add trust, security, and decentralization to different industrial fields. This article focuses on analyzing the benefits and challenges that arise when using blockchain and smart contracts to develop Industry 4.0 applications. In addition, this paper presents a thorough review of the most relevant blockchain-based applications for Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, its aim is to provide a detailed guide for the future Industry 4.0 developers that allows for determining how the blockchain can enhance the next generation of cybersecure industrial applications.
Mohammad Dabbagh, Mehdi Sookhak, Nader Sohrabi Safa
Blockchain as emerging technology is revolutionizing several industries, and its abundant privileges have opened up a bunch of research directions in various industries; thereby, it has acquired many interests from the research community. The rapid evolution of blockchain research papers in recent years has resulted in a need to conduct research studies that investigate a detailed analysis of the current body of knowledge in this field. To address this need, a few review papers have been published to report the latest accomplishments and challenges of blockchain technology from different perspectives. Nonetheless, there has not been any bibliometric analysis of the state of the art in blockchain where Web of Science (WoS) has been taken into consideration as a literature database. Hence, a thorough analysis of the current body of knowledge in blockchain research through a bibliometric study would be needed. In this paper, we performed a bibliometric analysis of all Blockchain’s conference papers, articles, and review papers that have been indexed byWoS from 2013 to 2018. We have analyzed those collected papers against five research questions. The results revealed some valuable insights, including yearly publications and citations trends, hottest research areas, top-ten influential papers, favorite publication venues, and most supportive funding bodies. The findings of this paper offer several implications that can be used as a guideline by both fresh and experienced researchers to establish a baseline before initiating a blockchain research project in the future.
Fan Yang, Wei Zhou, Qingqing Wu, Rui Long · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has a wide range of applications in the fields of finance, credit reporting and intellectual property, etc. As the core of blockchain, consensus algorithm affects the security and performance of blockchain system directly. In the past 10 years, there have been about 30 consensus algorithms such as Proof of Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS), Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA) and AlgoRand. But their security, stability and operating efficiency still lag far behind our actual needs. This paper introduces the computing power competition of PoW into DPoS to design an improved consensus algorithm named Delegated Proof of Stake with Downgrade (DDPoS). Through the further modification, the impact of both computing resources and stakes on generating blocks is reduced to achieve higher efficiency, fairness, and decentralization in consensus process. Then a downgrade mechanism is proposed to quickly replace the malicious nodes to improve the security. The simulation experiments in blockchain system show that the proposed consensus algorithm is significantly more efficient than PoW and PoS, but slightly lower than DPoS. However, its degree of centralization remains far below that of DPoS. And through the downgrade mechanism, the proposed consensus algorithm can detect and downgrade the malicious nodes timely to ensure the security and good operation of system.
Toqeer Ali Syed, Ali Alzahrani, Salman Jan, Muhammad Shoaib Siddiqui · 6 authors
In the past few years, the implementation of blockchain technology for various applications has been widely discussed in the research community and the industry. There are sufficient number of articles that discuss the possibility of applying blockchain technology in various areas, such as, healthcare, IoT, and business. However, in this article, we present a comparative analysis of core blockchain architecture, its fundamental concepts, and its applications in three major areas: the Internet-of-Things (IoT), healthcare, business and vehicular industry. For each area, we discuss in detail, challenges and solutions that have been proposed from the research community and industry. This research studies also presented the complete ecosystem of blockchain of all the papers we reviewed and summarized. Moreover, analysis is performed of various blockchain platforms, their consensus models, and applications. Finally, we discuss key aspects that are required for the widespread future adoption of blockchain technology in these major areas.
Weilin Zheng, Zibin Zheng, Xiangping Chen, Kemian Dai · 6 authors
Blockchain, originated from Bitcoin system, has drawn intense attention from the academic community because of its decentralization, persistency, anonymity and auditability. In the past decade, the blockchain technology has evolved and became viable for various applications beyond the domain of finance. However, due to the complexity of blockchain technology, it is usually difficult and costly for most developers or teams to build, maintain and monitor a blockchain network that supports their applications. Most common developers or teams are unable to ensure the reliability and security of the blockchain system, which to a certain extent affects the quality of their applications. In this paper, we develop a BaaS platform called NutBaaS, which provides blockchain service over cloud computing environments, such as network deployment and system monitoring, smart contracts analysis and testing. Based on these services, developers can focus on the business code to explore how to apply blockchain technology more appropriately to their business scenarios, without bothering to maintain and monitor the system.