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.
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.
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.
The logging system records the logs generated by the software so that the administrator can handle the problems that occur. However, the traditional log system is not secure enough and the stored logs are easily falsified. As a decentralized distributed storage technology, the blockchain can ensure that the blockchain network works normally in the presence of a few malicious nodes or failed nodes. So we use the blockchain to store the logs, which improves the security of the log system. In order to improve the performance of the blockchain, we use a voting-based consensus algorithm as a blockchain consistency protocol. This article introduces the architecture and implementation of the log system and verifies the feasibility of the system through experiments.
Blockchain technology is emerging in various fields, to guarantee security of digital currency and internet of things. In this paper, we provide incentive to encourage edge servers to serve mobile users for the mobile blockchain application. We formulate the problem as a resource allocation problem, then we propose a three-stage auction to implement resource allocation specially designed for mobile blockchain, and introduce the group-buying mechanism to motivate mobile users. We prove that our auction scheme is truthful, individual rationality, and computational efficiency. We compare proposed scheme with TACD and HAF mechanisms, and simulation results show that the social welfare achieved by our scheme is higher than that of TACD and HAF mechanisms.
Beverley A. MacKenzie, Robert Ian Ferguson, Xavier Bellekens
In a few short years the Internet of Things has become an intrinsic part of everyday life, with connected devices included in products created for homes, cars and even medical equipment. But its rapid growth has created several security problems, with respect to the transmission and storage of vast amounts of customers data, across an insecure heterogeneous collection of networks. The Internet of Things is therefore creating a unique set of risk and problems that will affect most households. From breaches in confidentiality, which could allow users to be snooped on, through to failures in integrity, which could lead to consumer data being compromised; devices are presenting many security challenges to which consumers are ill equipped to protect themselves from. Moreover, when this is coupled with the heterogeneous nature of the industry, and the interoperable and scalability problems it becomes apparent that the Internet of Things has created an increased attack surface from which security vulnerabilities may be easily exploited. However, it has been conjectured that blockchain may provide a solution to the Internet of Things security and scalability problems. Because of blockchain's immutability, integrity and scalability, it is possible that its architecture could be used for the storage and transfer of Internet of Things data. Within this paper a cross section of blockchain consensus protocols have been assessed against a requirement framework, to establish each consensus protocols strengths and weaknesses with respect to their potential implementation in an Internet of Things blockchain environment.
With the development of information and storage technologies, electronic document recording has become an unalterable trend, which transforms the way that people store, access and operate the data generated in various applications. Healthcare is the leader application domain that pioneers in usage of electronic medical records (EMRs). Cross-organizational EMRs' sharing has many constructive effects in motivating the domain innovation, introducing better domain understanding and overall the domain intelligence. However, the privacy concern, trust issue as well as the sophisticated legal regulation of the sensitive EMRs' use leads to inefficiency in the data sharing process. In this paper, we propose a cross-organizational medical data sharing framework based on permissioned blockchain technology, named “EMRShare“, to resolve the trust concern existing in EMRs sharing practice among different participants like patients, clinicians and researchers, and other relevant parties such as the insurance agent and government, to make medical data sharing and access secure, efficient, transparent, immutable, traceable and auditable. A working prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the key features for the cross-organizational medical data sharing and access management. The objective of this work targets at explaining the essential design considerations along with the working principle and operation logics using the blockchain technology to facilitate the medical data sharing in a highly-cooperative healthcare ecosystem.
The problem with present tendering is its reach which is limited to number of people, though the internet is expanding and tendering is also not far from this, we have some online system for tendering but it is not secure as it should be because tendering has confidential data which is not supposed to be leaked and Blockchain solves that problem efficiently. The motive of this research is to find the better ways for tendering, as tendering is very essential part of businesses and development so improvement of this system leads to better development. Time efficiency, employment, fair system are some of the factors which can be improved by the proposed system of this research.
Motivated by the recent disruption in shaping industries through blockchain, this paper examines the effect of integrating blockchain and Enterprise Resource Planning systems on the relation among the different parties of the supply chain. For a seamless integration, distributors seek to automate payments with retailers under specific conditions, which can be achieved through smart contracts in a blockchain network. In this paper, we study the utilization of QR codes to handle such cases in the supply chain industry between the distributors and retailers in particular. Then, we analyze the contribution of using blockchain to handle these cases. Furthermore, to emphasize the advantages of blockchain on a supply chain, a prototype is implemented and developed using Hyperledger Composer. This prototype highlights the added value blockchain can have on the relation between the two supply chain parties, while providing additional features to build the needed trust between both parties.
The paper presents the concept of renewable energy management system. The idea behind the system is to exploit the potential of renewable energy generation sources so as to provide additional energy services and participation in a competitive energy market. These actions can significantly affect the shortening of the period of return on investment of individual customer in renewable energy sources. The paper contains a concept of Electricity Consumption and Supply Management System (ECSM) with application of blockchain technology. ECSM provides functionality to monitor and record continuously information about inbound and outbound energy to/from power grid. Except monitoring inbound and outbound energy, solution will provide the possibility to manage in automatic and manual way when energy should be sent to energy grid. Information about inbound/outbound energy will be part of smart contract which will be confirmed and stored in every node.
Daniela Mechkaroska, Aleksandra Popovska‐Mitrovikj, Vesna Dimitrova
BlockChain is a distributed database of records or public ledger of all time stamped transactions saved in all computers in one peer-to-peer network. It allows a secure and transparent transfer of digital goods including money and intellectual property. Bitcoin - a digital decentralized cryptocurrency, is the first application of BlockChain. The second application is an agreement called Smart contract that enables exchanging a value or assets between two owners based on a set of conditions included in the contract.
In this paper, we analyze the possibilities for application of BlockChain in Big Data and IoT. Implementation of BlockChain in Big Data confirms that data is accurate and secure and sharing of data will become more simple. In industries like financial services, government and healthcare there is a need to combine BlockChain and Big Data because these industries have repositories full of important data. They must store and share these large amounts of data. Implementation of BlockChain technology provides security of data and ensures its integrity when shared. BlockChain technology is also seen as a way to secure the Internet of Things (IoT). Application of BlockChain in IoT enables IoT devices to participate in BlockChain transactions and invents new styles of digital interactions. This technology will provide a simple infrastructure for devices to directly and securely transfer data or money using Smart contract.
With the development of mobile computing technology, there has higher demand for computation resource in mobile applications than before. Fog computing has emerged as a promising infrastructure to provide elastic resources at the proximity of mobile users. Mobile users can offload some computations from the mobile devices to the nearby Fog servers so as to release the workloads of mobile devices, and therefore improve mobile users' quality of experience. However, mobile users may mistakenly offload their computations to the nearby Fog servers which have been injected by some attackers, and therefore induce some privacy and security issues. As most of mobile devices have natural mobility feature, it is very necessary to check the veracity of a Fog server in a very short time before doing computation offloading. In view of this challenge, we bring blockchain technique into Fog environment so as to verify each Fog server's authenticity and propose a blockchain-based offloading approach in this paper. Concretely, the proposed approach constantly maintains a set of candidate authorized Fog servers by leveraging blockchain technology, and the offloading decision could be made in a real-time fashion. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated our method's feasibility and efficiency.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Fabio Antonelli
Within many industry verticals, the Internet of Things provides the means to collect and analyze crucial data for optimizing system performance. The technical evolution of IoT is shifting its computational capabilities away from centralized cloud platforms to a decentralized IoT edge. The IoT edge faces challenges in providing fully decentralized security mechanisms, as well as built-in guarantees for user-data privacy. In recent years, blockchain has been viewed as a potential fabric for a secure, decentralized IoT edge due to its inherent features of fault tolerance, transparency, and enforcement of service level agreements through smart contracts. Despite their virtues, blockchains have their fair share of challenges in being integrated into IoT. In this article, we discuss these challenges, as well as candidate solutions for integrating blockchains into the IoT edge.
Blockchain inspires many people across the globe and has started getting many adoptions after realizing its promising benefits through successful trials. Applications of blockchain range from cryptocurrency, smart contract, banking, healthcare and identity management, insurance, land registry to IoT industry. However, scalability and throughput issues are major challenges of blockchain and are less researched. Many lightweight nodes especially IoT devices depend and put much workload on blockchain servers since they cannot store the full blockchain due to its huge size. This paper investigates performance bottlenecks in blockchain and presents efficient high performance system for caching the blockchain data in the FPGA network interface controller (NIC) for improving scalability and throughput of blockchain applications. We design a customized SHA-256 hash core specific for efficient blockchain caching to save hashing executions and improve the performance. We built and use Jansson and Curl libraries to interface our system with real Bitcoin core. We finally evaluate the throughput performance of the Bitcoin core. The overall result revealed that our system improves the throughput performance by 103 times when cache hit. The design also offers small work area utilization, low power consumption and higher performance.
Áron Lászka, Scott Eisele, Abhishek Dubey, Gábor Karsai · 5 authors
Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy and improvements in battery technology. Prompted by the increasing complexity of power systems, decentralized IoT solutions are emerging, which arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. The core functionality of these solutions is to provide mechanisms for matching producers with consumers while ensuring system safety. However, there are multiple challenges that these solutions still face: privacy, trust, and resilience. The privacy challenge arises because the time series of production and consumption data for each participant is sensitive and may be used to infer personal information. Trust is an issue because a producer or consumer can renege on the promised energy transfer. Providing resilience is challenging due to the possibility of failures in the infrastructure that is required to support these market based solutions. In this paper, we develop a rigorous solution for transactive microgrids that addresses all three challenges by providing an innovative combination of MILP solvers, smart contracts, and publish-subscribe middleware within a framework of a novel distributed application platform, called Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid. Towards this purpose, we describe the key architectural concepts, including fault tolerance, and show the trade-off between market efficiency and resource requirements.
Innovations such as the Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics have already dramatically altered the customer experience in many, if not all, industries. Blockchain, as another emerging technology, is expected to be the next generation infrastructure to established trusted multiparty collaborations. In this paper, we investigated the convergence of aforementioned technologies, by presenting a prototype of fine-grained transportation insurance. Insurance premium were assessed based on vehicles usage and driver's behavior, which were deduced from streaming IoT data collected from mobile sensors. This incentive mechanism promotes fairness among drivers and encourages safer driving style. The prototype takes advantage of both private blockchain (e.g., high transaction rate in Hyperledger) and public blockchain (e.g., inbuilt cryptocurrency). Besides system architecture and implementation details, preliminary performance evaluations are presented and discussed.
The use of Blockchain Technology in the Internet of Things will let applications in numerous domains such as Smart home, Industrial Automation, Transportation etc thrive by easily monitoring, tracking and securing data. IoT solutions using blockchain helps in transferring and verifying transactions in a secure manner. However, there are many blockchain platforms available that vary in many ways such as their purpose, ease of participation, governance etc. To determine which blockchain implementation should be leveraged for applying to IoTs, there exists a need for comparing different blockchain platforms. One important aspect we can consider for comparison is the energy consumption of blockchains and analyzing energy-performance trade-offs. Towards this goal, we profile the impact of workloads and further quantify the power consumed by different operations performed on the Ethereum platform and Hyperledger Fabric platform. In contrast to existing approaches that are focused on performance, we characterize performance and energy consumption for real workloads and analyze energy-performance trade-offs. The insights from the study can be used in developing secure protocols for IoTs using blockchains.
Blockchain is a deliberately spreading set of data called as Blocks, which are associated and assured by the use of Cryptography. Each Block of this Blockchain consists of cryptographic hash of the preceding block, a timestamp and transaction information. Modification of Data by fraudsters is highly challenging in Blockchain by its design. It is an accessible shared register that can store activities between two internet users securely. Such a technology is an easy way for one person using internet to send fragment of digital property to other person who is also using internet, such that transfer of data or communication will be very secure and none of the sensitive details would be leaked. With the usage of Blockchain technology, several people can write the data into the Record and also sector of users can manage how the Record should be added with new entries. This technology is now being employed in a variety of applications like digital currency, supply chain management, medical information systems etc. In this paper, we have studied the technology behind Blockchain and the application of the same in several use cases. We have also implemented fund raise use case using Laravel PHP Framework to illustrate the steps of using Blockchain to assure secure transactions.
Shanto Roy, M. Ashaduzzaman, Mehedi Hassan, Arnab Rahman Chowdhury
The paper presents an in detailed case study of integrating BlockChain (BC) in IoT ecosystems in order to achieve security and privacy. Since the use in cryptocurrency, BlockChain has gained tremendous attraction due to the versatile application prospects it raises. As internet of things (IoT) is emerging towards the smart city requirements, device or data security seems to be a major concern. Therefore, BlockChain based decentralized and distributed system can meet the privacy preserving management in IoT ecosystems. In this paper, we discuss the necessity of utilizing BlockChain for IoT security, privacy, management. We present a literature overview of current progresses and security enhancement in sensor networks using BlockChain; their scope, prospects and limitations as well. Finally, we suggest some future directions to indicate further areas of improvement.
Min Kim, Ah Ra Lee, Hwi Jun Kwon, Ji Woong Kim · 5 authors
Hospitals provide a considerable amount of questionnaires to patients, and their result data can be one of the significant measures to check a patient's current health. In many cases, however, such data utilization in another kind of healthcare services is unsatisfactory because patients cannot manage the data by themselves. We propose a blockchain-based medical questionnaire management system for data sharing. This system guarantees the integrity of questionnaire result data using characteristics of the blockchain. Furthermore, data in this system can be in interoperable with other systems because it is generated based on the international standard Health Level 7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. This paper explores how to use medical questionnaire result data for the lifelong healthcare of patient and better quality of health care services and enhance the security of personal medical records.
Now a days many applications are being built using the immutability and robustness of blockchain. Blockchain is a new class of information technology which combines cryptography and distributed ledger that already exists. The model is composed of a group of computers that collaborate towards maintaining a secured database, without storing the data at any central unit. It is the technology behind all the crypto currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Etherum and now finding its way to record everything possible. This paper focuses on the basic framework of blockchain model, its development history, prerequisites and challenges of blockchain. Finally, various current real time applications of the technology are discussed.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques