Recent technological advances are creating possibilities for novel forms of interaction, collaboration, and organization of labor in Smart Cities. In this paper, we present a reward-driven, Blockchain-backed platform acting as the technological enabler for enactment of ad-hoc, decentralized neighborhood-scale co-creation, collaboration, and citizen engagement activities.
Yury Yanovich, Igor Shiyanov, Timur Myaldzin, Ivan Prokhorov · 6 authors
Counterfeit and unaccounted postage stamps used on mailings cost postal administrations a significant amount of money each year. Corporate and individual clients become victim to stamp fraud and incur losses when security teams investigate such mailings. The blockchain technology is supposed to be a solution to make postage stamps market transparent and to guarantee invariability of stamps volume produced and used. The blockchain-based supply chain for postage stamps is introduced in the article.
Diabetes Mellitus, usually called only Diabetes, is a worldwide chronic metabolic disorder that is characterized by abnormal oscillations in blood sugar levels. Such levels should be monitored by diabetes patients, which traditionally have had to take blood samples by finger-pricking, at least between twice and four times a day. Finger-pricking has a number of drawbacks that can be tackled by Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), which are able to determine blood sugar levels throughout the day and not only at specific time instants. In this paper, the design of an IoT CGM-based system is proposed, whose collected blood sugar sample values can be accessed remotely; thus being able to monitor patients, specifically dependent ones (e.g., children, elders, and pregnant women) and warn them in the case where a dangerous situation is detected. In order to create such a system, a fog computing system, based on distributed mobile smart phones, has been devised to collect data from the CGMs. Moreover, the use of a blockchain is proposed, to receive, validate, and store the collected data with the objective of avoiding untrusted sources and, thus, to provide a transparent and trustworthy data source of a population, which can vary in age, ethnicity, psychology, education, self-care, and/or geographic location, in a rapid, flexible, scalable, and low-cost way. These crowdsourced data can enable novel mHealth applications for diagnosis, patient monitoring, or even public health actions, which can help to advance in the control of the disease and raise global awareness on the increasing prevalence of diabetes.
Samuel Fosso Wamba, Jean Robert Kala Kamdjoug, Ransome Epie Bawack, John G. Keogh
This paper aims to bridge the knowledge gap in the existing literature on Bitcoin, Blockchain and Fintech. It begins by clarifying the definition of these concepts. Through a systematic review and case studies in the supply chain industry, this paper brings out the applications, the benefits/value, and the challenges/issues of Bitcoin, Blockchain and Fintech in several industries. It also presents the research methodologies/approaches used during such research. The classification framework developed and used to perform an analysis of 141 articles from five top academic databases serves as a baseline study. It offers the opportunity to evaluate the level of knowledge on Bitcoin, Blockchain and Fintech, and their evolution over time. The findings show that these technologies are evolving, and organizations are embracing them for competitive advantage. Thus, organizations need to leverage research on these technologies to better understand them, optimize their business strategies, and develop critical insights for decision-making.
Ahsan Manzoor, Madhusanka Liyanage, An Braeken, Salil S. Kanhere · 5 authors
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. Involvement of such third-party service provider requires also trust from both sensor owner and sensor data user. Moreover, the fees need to be paid for their services. To tackle both the scalability and trust issues and to automatize the payments, this paper presents a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme. The system stores the IoT data in a distributed cloud after encryption. To share the collected IoT data, the system establishes runtime dynamic smart contracts between the sensor and data user without the involvement of a trusted third party. It also uses a very efficient proxy re-encryption scheme which allows that the data is only visible by the owner and the person present in the smart contract. This novel combination of smart contracts with proxy re-encryption provides an efficient, fast and secure platform for storing, trading and managing of sensor data. The proposed system is implemented in an Ethereum based testbed to analyze the performance and the security properties.
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) implies new technical challenges such as managing a universally vast number of IoT devices. Despite the fact that there are already a variety of secure management frameworks for IoT, they are based on centralized models, which limits their applicability in scenarios with a large number of IoT devices. In order to overcome those limitations, we have developed a distributed IoT management system based on blockchain. In this paper, we compare the performance of our solution with the existing access management solutions in IoT. We study the delays and the throughput rate associated with the systems and analyze different configurations of our solution to maximize its scalability. The objective of this paper is to find out whether our solution can scale as well as the existing management systems in IoT.
Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Marco Steger, Roben Castagna Lunardi · 7 authors
There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation in a decentralized and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block is proposed to avoid large sized blocks. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
Phuc Thai, Laurent Njilla, Tuyet Duong, Lei Fan · 5 authors
Cryptocurrencies have recently gained huge popularity. It is desirable to come up with effective approaches to constructing better blockchain protocols. In this paper, inspired by the 2-hop design by Duong et al (ePrint 2016/716), we put forth a generic paradigm for blockchain design, called n-hop blockchain. It includes one main chain, which is supported by (n -- 1) supporting chains; hence, the main chain can achieve better security performance. In our paradigm, we show that our n-hop design can be easily extended to (n + 1)-hop design. To demonstrate the power of our paradigm, we showcase two instantiations: 2-hop blockchain variant, a combination of proof-of-stake and proof-of-work, and 3-hop blockchain variant, which is extended from 2-hop blockchain variant by adding Byzantine fault tolerance blockchain in 3rd hop.
Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used. 1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.
Blockchain is the notorious technology behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. A large industrial chain ecology is growing around innovations of blockchain. However, given that it is being developed exponentially the challenges businesses are facing finally have a solution - blockchain. Blockchain is undeniably revolutionary in a sense that it brings convenience to customers and companies. Due to its characteristics of decentralization, trustworthiness and collective maintenance, it provides a trustworthy platform in order to achieve a reliable peer-to-peer delivery of value without relying on a single centralized organization. With this in mind, blockchain is foundation businesses need to establish new relationships. The objective of this paper is to explore how blockchain plays a role in different business applications by illustrating what blockchain is as well as exactly how it can be applied to businesses in the current day.
It is a web and cellular-based app designed commonly for use in the meals & beverage enterprise. These apps solve the problems of labour cost in the restaurants and food court resulting in an increase in overall business. It also provides the owner to manage and make changes as per the requirements in the shop. The customer can order their food by accessing the food app through their mobile. The shopkeeper can easily complete the order in time, as there will be a regular check-in for the availability of ingredients. In this paper, we will be representing the overall description and software requirement specification of the entire system designed for use in different food courts. Our apps will provide the restaurant employees to manage their online menu and keep track of all the orders placed by their customers. The customers will be able to access the menu from anywhere so they can order their food and collect it immediately after it is ready. Inside this paper, we have depicted a general model of the framework, layouts of functional and non-functional prerequisites, and a definite portrayal of the UI. Eventually, this idea represents an account of the expansion of the device alongside predicted protection.
With the increasing number of connected devices and the number of online transactions today, managing all these transactions and devices and maintaining network security is a research issue. Current solutions are mainly based on cloud computing infrastructures, which require servers high-end and broadband networks to provide data storage and computing services. These solutions have a number of significant disadvantages, such as high maintenance costs of centralized servers, critical weakness of Internet Of Things applications, security and trust issues, etc. The blockchain is seen as a promising technique for addressing the mentioned security issues and design new decentralization frameworks. However, this new technology has a great potential in the most diverse technological fields. In this paper, we focus on presenting an overview of blockchain technology, highlighting its advantages, limitations and areas of application. The originality of this work resides in the comparison between the different blockchain systems and their security schemes and the perspective of integrating this technology into secured systems models for our comfort and our private life.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain as a new technique has attracted attentions from industry and academics for sharing data across organizations. Many blockchain-based data sharing applications, such as Internet of Things devices management, need privacy-preserving access services over encrypted data with dual capabilities. On one hand, they need to keep the sensitive data private such that others cannot trace and infer sensitive data stored in the block. On the other hand, they need to support fine-grained access control both from time and users’ attributes. However, to the best of our knowledge, no blockchain systems can support time-bound and attributes-based access with high efficiency. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving Internet of Things devices management scheme based on blockchain, which provides efficient time-bound and attribute-based access and supports key automatic revocation. The analysis and experiments show that our scheme is quite efficient and deployable.
Sorin Zoican, Marius Vochin, Roxana Zoican, Dan Galațchi
this paper focuses on the performance evaluation of consensus algorithms used in a blockchain system for Internet of Things (IoT). In such systems the time necessary to achieve consensus should be small. Three most used consensus algorithms (modified proof of work, practical byzantine fault tolerance and binary consensus) are evaluated in different situations – type of motes, number of nodes participating in consensus algorithm and radio propagation model. An integrated solution is proposed to adapt an IoT node to different consensus algorithm. The simulations in Contiki IoT operating system show good performance (time to achieve consensus less than seconds)
This paper introduces a small Java application named ChainTutor for learning basic Blockchain concepts. Although the term Blockchain is widely known and Blockchain technologies are finding applications in various areas such as banking, health care and Internet of Things, some concepts of Blockchain are not easy for beginners to understand. Fully text-based tutorials are often difficult to follow. General picture of Blockchain operations gets lost in lengthy textual descriptions. With the Java application introduced in this paper, users can experiment with key Blockchain concepts through a graphical user interface. They can generate keys, hashes, transactions, blocks and wallets. They can see the low level details of a blockchain such as encryption keys and hashes. They can see how mining works and how blocks are added to a blockchain. Parameters of a blockchain can also be varied in order to observe their impact on performance or even to make a blockchain invalid. The Java application is intended to be used in classroom environment by instructors when they teach introductory Blockchain courses.
Sandi Rahmadika, Bruno Joachim Kweka, Cho Nwe Zin Latt, Kyung-Hyune Rhee
Blockchain technology combined with IoT to improve the reliability of the supply chain system is one of the topics in great demand lately. Due to the nature of blockchain, it is suitable to be applied in the supply chain to improve the level of service with security guarantees. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of blockchain in the supply chain using Ethereum smart contract to maintain ownership of digital assets and to track the origin of a product. By leveraging the proposed model, the user can be protected by minimizing the fake online trading activity because product assets that have been recorded by blockchain can be guaranteed since the data cannot be changed by anyone (tamper-proof). Further research needs to be developed, especially the connection between IoT devices and the blockchain network to improve the reliability and effectiveness of the decentralized supply chain system.
The underlying or core technology of Bitcoin cryptocurrency has become a blessing for human being in this era. Everything is gradually changing to digitization in this today's epoch. Bitcoin creates virtual money using Blockchain that's become popular over the world. Blockchain is a shared public ledger, and it includes all transactions which are confirmed. It is almost impossible to crack the hidden information in the blocks of the Blockchain. However, there are certain security and technical challenges like scalability, privacy leakage, selfish mining, etc. which hampers the wide application of Blockchain. In this paper, we briefly discuss this emerging technology namely Blockchain. In addition, we extrapolate in-depth insight on Blockchain technology.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Kebira Azbeg, Ouail Ouchetto, Said Jai Andaloussi, Leila Fetjah · 5 authors
Diabetes is one of the most common disease over the world which requires a daily self-care in order to be controlled. Nowadays, diabetes self-management can benefit from the recent advanced technologies such as Internet of things (wearables and medical sensors) to take measurements and track health data. In this paper, we present a platform architecture based on the IoT and Blockchain to facilitate the follow-up of diabetes and to help patients to self-manage it properly. Our architecture combines the IoT with the Blockchain technology in order to collect patients' data, share it with their healthcare teams in a near real-time and in a secure manner while preserving patient's privacy.
Swarm robotics is a research field in which a group of autonomous robots execute tasks through cooperative works. Sharing information among robots is a central function for an optimal performance of the system. Given that the swarm network structure constantly changes when robots move, it becomes difficult to guarantee on information sharing by all swarm members. We, in this work, propose an approach for information sharing on swarm robotic systems by using Blockchain technology. A function of distributed ledger in Blockchain technology has possibility to solve the information sharing problem and to easily synchronize their state. However, because Blockchain persistently keeps past transactions, the increase of its chain size is one of the serious issues to manage Blockchain technology. In this paper, we introduce a methodology to share information among autonomous robots and demonstrate through experiments that how the differences in data size recorded in the blockchain affect the chain size. As a result, compared with our previous approach, we succeeded in suppressing increase in chain size by using the proposal approach; it was reduced the amount of increase in chain size about 73.0% when each node repeatedly shared about 2.8KB image data by 100 times.
The aim of this paper is to propose an Internet of Things system that collects, sends, stores, and publishes relevant data using a Raspberry Pi as the smart sensor. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) from BigchainDB and IOTA are used to store data in a blockchain-like database, and to publish a temporal statistic data summary respectively, in addition to store the data streams in a SQL database. The collection, storage, and publication of the data is free and almost instantaneous. This system can become a source of evidences to different types of stakeholders all around specific businesses getting benefits from keeping the level of trust along its value chain.
There has been increased interest in the use of blockchains to control Internet of Things devices either directly, or through smart contracts. Many blockchains, such as Ethereum and Fabric, have support for smart contracts. The use of public blockchains while attractive due to their decentralization and availability, do pose challenges, such as unpredictable transaction latencies and cryptocurrency price fluctuations. Transactions in the Ethereum network, such as invokations of smart contracts used to control an IoT device, have no fairness or eventuality guarantees. In this work we describe a “spam attack” method available to parties with sufficient cryptocurrency reserves to delay a statistically significant portion of transactions submitted to the Ethereum network. This paper derives estimations on the costs and effects of such an attack, and is based on an analysis of historical transactions.