Blockchain is the one of leading technology of this time; it has started to revolutionize several fields like, finance, business, industry, smart home, healthcare, social networks, Internet and the Internet of Things. It has many benefits like, decentralized network, robustness, availability, stability, anonymity, auditability and accountability. The applications of Blockchain are emerging, and it is found that most of the work is focused on its engineering implementation. While the theoretical part is very less considered and explored. In this paper we implemented the simulation of mining process in Blockchain based systems using queuing theory. We took the parameters of one of the mature Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin's real data and simulated using M/M/n/L queuing system in JSIMgraph. We have achieved realistic results; and expect that it will open up new research direction in theoretical research of Blockchain based systems.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Alice Ensor, Sigrid Schefer-Wenzl, Igor Miladinović
Blockchains and other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are a much-proposed solution for an Internet of Things (IoT) payment platform. Because of their decentralized networks, they are one of the few technologies which allow for true Machine-to-Machine financial transactions, considered essential for the IoT economy. In this paper, we examine the issues surrounding IoT payment systems, including their requirements and proposed specifications. We will also discuss limitations of blockchains to meet these specific requirements, and whether other DLTs or possible optimization solutions for blockchains can overcome these limitations. We present example IoT payment implementations using DLTs to illustrate the opportunities surrounding this technology. This paper aims to capture the breadth and depth of this topic to understand why IoT payment systems are essential to the IoT economy and how blockchains might provide the answer for implementing them in an effective manner.
This paper presents a blockchain-based architecture for electronic health record (EHR) systems. The architecture is built on top of existing databases maintained by health providers, implements a blockchain solution to improve interoperability of the current EHR systems, prevent tampering and malicious misuse of EHRs by means of tracking all events that happened to the data in the databases. This proposed architecture also introduces a new incentive mechanism for the creation of new blocks in the blockchain. The architecture is independent of any specific blockchain platforms and open to further extensions, hence potentially fits in with other electronic record systems that require protection against tampering and misuse.
The healthcare industry is constantly reforming and adopting new shapes with respect to the technological evolutions and transitions. One of the crucial requirements in the current smart healthcare systems is the protection of patients sensitive data against the potential adversaries. Therefore, it is vital to have secure data access mechanisms that can ensure only authorized entities can access the patients medical information. Hence, this paper considers blockchain technology as a distributed approach protect the data in healthcare systems. This research proposes a blockchain based secure and efficient data accessibility mechanism for the patient and the doctor in a given healthcare system. Proposed system able to protect the privacy of the patients as well. The security analysis of our scheme shows that it can resist to well-known attacks along with maintaining the integrity of the system. Moreover, an Ethereum based implementation has used to verify the feasibility of our proposed system.
Internet of Things (IoT) is the current technological breakthrough, enabling computing and sensing devices embedded in everyday processes to seamlessly exchange data, thus shaping the smart-everything concept. Alongside IoT, blockchain is transforming Internet by enabling Trustless, Distributed and Secure exchange of everything of value. In this paper, we propose a distributed sensor node system that utilizes IOTA protocol, a novel distributed ledger technology, to exchange data in an M2M fashion and establish a data monetization economy paradigm.
The Internet of Things aims at connecting everything, ranging from individuals, organizations, and companies to things in the physical and virtual world. The digital identity has always been considered as the keystone for all online services and the foundation for building security mechanisms such as authentication and authorization. However, the current literature still lacks a comprehensive study on the digital identity management for the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we firstly identify the requirements of building identity management systems for IoT, which comprises scalability, interoperability, mobility, security and privacy. Then, we trace the identity problem back to the origin in philosophy, analyze the Internet digital identity management solutions in the context of IoT and investigate recent surging blockchain sovereign identity solutions. Finally, we point out the promising future research trends in building IoT identity management systems and elaborate challenges of building a complete identity management system for the IoT, including access control, privacy preserving, trust and performance respectively.
Huma Pervez, Muhammad Muneeb, Muhammad Irfan, Irfan Ul Haq
Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger that promises tamper-proof secure transactions over the highly available and resilient network involving multiple participants. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) has revolutionized the blockchain technology. Owing to its optimized validation mechanism, high scalability, efficient provenance, support for IoT and multiparty involvement, DAG is rapidly over-shadowing traditional blockchain architecture. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of most popular DAG based blockchain architectures including Nxt, IOTA, Orumesh, DagCoin,Byteball, Nano and XDAG. The comparison is based on the functional data structures for maintaining the ledger, consensus algorithms, transaction validation, ledger size, scalability and popularity. Extracting the best features various DAG based blockchains, we move on to outline the best of all worlds DAG-based blockchain architecture.
Edward Yi Chang, Shih-Wei Liao, Chun‐Ting Liu, Wei-Chen Lin · 8 authors
This paper presents requirements to DeepLinQ and its architecture. DeepLinQ proposes a multi-layer blockchain architecture to improve flexibility, accountability, and scalability through on-demand queries, proxy appointment, subgroup signatures, granular access control, and smart contracts in order to support privacy-preserving distributed data sharing. In this data-driven AI era where big data is the prerequisite for training an effective deep learning model, DeepLinQ provides a trusted infrastructure to enable training data collection in a privacy-preserved way. This paper uses healthcare data sharing as an application example to illustrate key properties and design of DeepLinQ.
Lars Pilgaard Mikkelsen, Kasper Mortensen, Henrik Rasmussen, Hans-Peter Schwefel · 5 authors
Usage of IoT marketplaces as central components in distributed systems have become common, as they allow for easy exploitation of other services and data sources. When relying on a marketplace to be available in order for a system to be operational, it is critical that the marketplace operation is highly robust. Marketplaces are typically centralized components which means that single point of failure is a possible issue. Also users of the marketplace must trust the operator to be fair and follow a common set of rules. This work proposes to utilize blockchain technology to realize a distributed marketplace where both functionalities and storage are distributed and thereby increasing availability to users, while removing the need for a central operator. The blockchain also makes the operational rules transparent to the users of the marketplace. In this relation two core marketplace functionalities, offering creation and discovery, are realized using smart contracts on a private Ethereum blockchain and evaluated using an experimental testbed. The results demonstrate the feasibility of a blockchain based marketplace implementation.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger that gained a prevalent attention in many areas. Many industries have started to implement blockchain solutions for their application and services. It is important to know the key components, functional characteristics, and architecture of blockchain to understand its impact and applicability to various applications. The most well-known use case of blockchain is bitcoin: a cryptocurrency. Being a distributed ledger, consensus mechanism is needed among peer nodes of a blockchain network to ensure its proper working. Many consensus algorithms have been proposed in literature each having its own performance and security characteristics. One consensus algorithm cannot serve the requirements of every application. It is vital to technically compare the available consensus algorithms to highlight their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases. We have identified and discussed parameters related to performance and security of consensus in blockchain. The consensus algorithms are analyzed and compared with respect to these parameters. Research gap regarding designing an efficient consensus algorithm and evaluating existing algorithms is presented. This paper will act as a guide for developers and researchers to evaluate and design a consensus algorithm.
Nowadays, a combination between Internet of Things (IoT) technology and remote healthcare system is extensively researched due to its efficiency and convenience for human life. When the number of IoT devices in health care system is increased exponentially, the privacy and security issues of patients are becoming a concern. In order to protect personal and device-generated information, we propose to use blockchain-based smart contracts for managing patients' information and medical devices. In detail, using blockchain based on the Ethereum protocol, we create a remote healthcare system including healthcare provider (such as hospital), healthcare professionals (doctors) and patients. Health condition of patients is measured by sensors and such information is written into blockchain automatically. In addition, we propose a processing mechanism to store the medical device information efficiently and sparingly in accordance with health situation of patient. Concretely, we filter the data from sensors before deciding whether to write data into blockchain or not. Doing so we can reduce the size of blockchain as well as save amount of coins for transaction efficiently. However, the abnormal data from sensors will be written to blockchain immediately and trigger an emergency contact to doctor and hospital for on-time treatment. We have verified the proposed smart contract on Ethereum test environment called TESTRPC and implemented the system on an experimental environment with real devices. This system works well at small scale.
Blockchain is first introduced by Bitcoin in 2009 and developers all around the world have been trying to apply blockchain in different areas, like finance services, credit and ownership management, resource sharing, investment management, Internet of Things (IoT) etc. Ethereum is a Blockchain 2.0 platform that allows developers to build a Decentralized Application (DApp) without building a new blockchain from the scratch. IoT is the technology to embed all the physical devices with sensors and chips to provide automation process via machine-to-machine communication. Blynk is a platform that provides iOS and Android application for the users and developers to collect data from control microcontroller. This paper is aiming to build a system with Ethereum private Blockchain, Raspberry Pi (RPi), Blynk platform, DHT11 temperature and humidity sensors. The system is a proof-of-concept prototype to simulate smart home applications. It collects the real-time room temperature and humidity by DHT11 via Raspberry Pi. The sensor data will be updated to the Blynk App and stored on the smart contract deployed on the Ethereum private Blockchain. If the real-time temperature or humidity value exceeds the threshold value set by the users, red or green LEDs will be turned on as warnings. This system can be improved by some possible future work.
Today's commercial model for edge computing services consists in lightweight devices at the network edge connected through the Internet to remote cloud data centers. Microclouds are an alternative vision of edge computing, where the cloud infrastructure runs at the network edge leveraging decentralized resource contributions of a community. But current attempts to build such microclouds lack a collaborative governance system to operate successfully. In this paper we discuss the opportunity to implement with blockchain technologies key services to enable the decentralized collaborative governance of microclouds. A multiagent approach could further contribute to improve the efficiency in the decision making in the collaborative governance service.
In the present era of smart cities and homes, the private information of the patients such as their names, address, and disease is being breached on a regular basis, which indirectly related to the security of electronic health records (EHRs). The existing state-of-the-art schemes handling the security of EHRs have resulted in data being generally inaccessible to patients. These schemes struggle in providing the efficient balance between the data privacy, need for patients, and providers to regularly interact with data. Blockchain technology resolves the aforementioned issues because it shares the data in a decentralized and transactional fashion. This can be leveraged in the healthcare sector to maintain the balance between privacy and accessibility of EHRs. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based framework for efficient storage and maintenance of EHRs. This further provides the secure and efficient access to medical data by patients, providers, and third parties, while preserving the patient private information. The goals of this paper are to analyze how our proposed framework fulfills the needs of patients, providers, and third parties, and to understand how the framework maintains the privacy and security concerns in the healthcare 4.0.
IoT is leading a digital revolution in both academia and industry. It brings convenience to people's daily lives; however, the issues of security and privacy of IoT become challenges. Blockchain, a decentralized database based on cryptographic techniques, is promising for IoT security, which may influence a variety of areas including manufacture, finance, and trading. The blockchain framework in an IoT system is an intriguing alternative to the traditional centralized model, which is struggling to meet some specified demands in IoT. In this article, we investigate typical security and privacy issues in IoT and develop a framework to integrate blockchain with IoT, which can provide great assurance for IoT data and various functionalities and desirable scalability including authentication, decentralized payment, and so on. We also suggest some possible solutions to these security and privacy issues in IoT based on blockchain and Ethereum to show how blockchain contributes to IoT.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The requirement of supporting both latency sensitive and computing intensive Internet of Things (IoT) applications is consistently boosting the necessity for integrating Edge, Fog and Cloud infrastructure. Although there are a number of real-world frameworks attempt to support such integration, they have many limitations from various perspectives including platform independence, security, resource management and multi-application assistance. To address these limitations, we propose a simplified but effective framework, named FogBus for facilitating end-to-end IoT-Fog(Edge)-Cloud integration. FogBus offers a platform independent interface to IoT applications and computing instances for execution and interaction. It not only assists developers in building applications but also helps users in running multiple applications at a time and service providers to manage their resources. In addition, FogBus applies Blockchain, authentication and encryption techniques to secure operations on sensitive data. Because of its lightweight and cross platform software systems, it is easy to deploy, scalable and cost e_cient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by creating a computing environment with it that integrates finger pulse oximeter as IoT devices with Smartphone-based gateway and Raspberry Pi-based Fog nodes for Sleep Apnea analysis. We also run several experiments on this computing environment varying FogBus settings. The experimental results show that different FogBus settings can improve latency, energy, network and CPU usage of the computing infrastructure.
Proponents of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) claim it could have an impact greater than the internet; a breakthrough defying organisational boundaries by securely storing data across trustless entities. This would allow decisions to be made on verifiable data in an automated manner without the costs imposed by middlemen, with a corresponding economy-wide impact. Despite this potential, real-world application is embryonic with public and private sectors rapidly seeking exploitation opportunities. This research seeks to understand how DLT might apply to the Defence Support Network (DSN), the mechanism used to sustain UK Armed Forces with materiel and equipment. Drawing on academic and commercial models, a framework was produced for evaluating DLT use cases which measures utility, ease of implementation and impact. Using a functionalist research paradigm, interviews were conducted with DLT and DSN experts on potential use cases, the data from which was then analysed against a lightweight version of the evaluation framework. Results show that use cases involving codification, certification and supply chain provenance merit further investigation. The research concluded with recommendations that the DSN should pilot DLT use cases, but these should be carefully selected utilising an evaluation framework due to DLT's emergent nature.
Hans‐Arno Jacobsen, Mohammad Sadoghi, Mohammad Hossein Tabatabaei, Roman Vitenberg · 5 authors
Known for powering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is seen as a disruptive technology capable of revolutionizing a wide variety of domains, ranging from finance to governance, by offering superior security, reliability, and transparency founded upon a decentralized and democratic computational model. In this tutorial, we first present the original Bitcoin design, along with Ethereum and Hyperledger, and reflect on their design choices through the academic lens. We further provide an overview of potential applications and associated research challenges, as well as a survey of ongoing research directions related to byzantine fault-tolerance consensus protocols. We highlight the new opportunities blockchain creates for building the next generation of secure middleware platforms and explore the possible interplay between AI and blockchains, or more specifically, how blockchain technology can enable the notion of "decentralized intelligence." We conclude with a walkthrough demonstrating the process of developing a decentralized application using a popular Smart Contract language (Solidity) over the Ethereum platform
The blockchain is a safe, reliable and innovative mechanism for managing numerous vehicles seeking connectivity. However, following the principles of the blockchain, the number of transactions required to update ledgers pose serious issues for vehicles as these may consume the maximum available energy. To resolve this, an efficient model is presented in this letter which is capable of handling the energy demands of the blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles (IoV) by optimally controlling the number of transactions through distributed clustering. Numerical results suggest that the proposed approach is 40.16% better in terms of energy conservation and 82.06% better in terms of the number of transactions required to share the entire blockchain-data compared with the traditional blockchain.
Thomas Hepp, Matthew Sharinghousen, Philip Ehret, Alexander Schoenhals · 5 authors
Abstract Supply chains are the basis of most everyday life products. Both data integrity and authenticity of related information have severe implications for quality and safety of end-products. Hence, tamper-proof storage is necessary that prevents unauthorized modifications. We examine peer-reviewed blockchain technologies according to four criteria relevant to supply chains: On-chain storage, off-chain storage, verification cost and secure data sharing. Our evaluation yields an overview of concepts for modeling supply chain processes and points out that on-chain storage is currently not practical.
Blockchains and distributed ledger technology (DLT) that rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) typically show limited performance. Several recent approaches incorporate Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols in their DLT design as Byzantine consensus allows for increased performance and energy efficiency, as well as it offers proven liveness and safety properties. While there has been a broad variety of research on BFT consensus protocols over the last decades, those protocols were originally not intended to scale for a large number of nodes. Thus, the quest for scalable BFT consensus was initiated with the emerging research interest in DLT. In this paper, we first provide a broad analysis of various optimization techniques and approaches used in recent protocols to scale Byzantine consensus for large environments such as BFT blockchain infrastructures. We then present an overview of both efforts and assumptions made by existing protocols and compare their solutions.