Jiemin Zhong, Haoran Xie, Di Zou, Dickson K.W. Chui
The blockchain technology has been a hot topic recently due to the skyrocketed price of Bitcoin, and many people have noticed the underlying technology of this cryptocurrency and applied it in diverse areas like finance or commerce industry. However, the application of blockchain in education is limited, which is a pity as the blockchain technology can address many issues like insufficient user interactivity and system interoperability in the e-learning systems. This paper aims to propose a conceptual model for e-learning systems and use word-learning community as an example by adopting the blockchain technology to address the above issues. The potential applications of blockchain are introduced and discussed, and a system evaluation is conducted based on an ISO quality model to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Daniela Mechkaroska, Vesna Dimitrova, Aleksandra Popovska‐Mitrovikj
Bitcoin and Smart Contract are the first major applications of the BlockChain technology. But, with increasing the number of transactions, the process of verification on every transaction is very slow. This is the reason for a third major innovation called a BlockChain scaling. The scalability is a process of taking certain steps in accelerating the performing of transactions in this new technology. In this paper we analyze the possibilities for BlockChain scalability and we examine the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solutions.
Majed M. Alblooshi, Khaled Salah, Yousof Al-Hammadi
Recently, blockchain has been foreseen by industry and research community as a transformational and disruptive technology that is poised to play a major role in transforming the way we transact, trade, bank, track and register assets, and do business. Blockchain can potentially be used to provide trusted authenticity, origin, and ownership for IoT devices, in a way that is secure and decentralized without the involvement of a Trusted Third Parties (TTP) or centralized authorities and services. A TTP can be a subject to a single point of failure, and it can be disrupted, compromised or hacked. A TTP can potentially misbehave and become corrupt in the future, even if it is trustworthy now. This paper shows how Ethereum blockchain (with the powerful feature of programmability through smart contracts) can provide a trusted ownership management for medical IoT (MIoT) devices. Tracking the true ownership of MIoT devices is of a paramount importance as using counterfeited MIoT devices can be life-threatening to patients. The paper presents a general framework and solution to manage and trace back the true origin of ownership for an MIoT; whereby an MIoT device can be owned by multiple parties during its life cycle. The paper presents a detailed overview of our proposed system architecture, design, entity relationship, and interactions among all involved parties. The source code of the Ethereum smart contracts is made publicly available. Key aspects related to the algorithms, interactions, implementation and testing are discussed in the paper. Furthermore, we provide security analysis of our proposed solution in terms of satisfying the general security goals and also resiliency against popular attacks as those of DDoS, eavesdropping and replay attacks.
Fahad Alkurdi, Ibrahim Elgendi, Kumudu S. Munasinghe, Dharmendra Sharma · 5 authors
Blockchain shows a huge prospective in the coming future. It is atechnology that provides the possibility of generating and sharing transaction ledgers that are tamper proof. Use cases of Blockchain are enlarging in numbers and width in multiple areas like, Internet of Things (IoT), finance and security. Even though many public and private sectors are introducing this technology, it remains a fear to others due to their lack of familiarity and the point of it not taking any big role in any major security enterprises till now. In this paper we will explain what is a blockchain and define its characteristics, benefits, and the differences between them. And help in choosing the suitable type that accommodates your needs. Then we present the immutability aspect of blockchain and its benefits and compare it with a traditional database. And finally, we will discuss blockchain security (For public and private blockchains) and compare it with a standard cyber security environment and discuss both of them in different cyber-attack scenarios.
Blockchains, a decentralized storage technique, have many applications, including in reengineering cloud datacenters. This article proposes a conceptual model for fusing blockchains and cloud computing for additional value creation. The proposed model comprises three deployment modes: Cloud over Blockchain (CoB), Blockchain over Cloud (BoC), and Mixed Blockchain-Cloud (MBC). The article also highlights the potential benefits of such a fusion and outlines a number of future research directions.
The growth of technology has brought upon a slew of devices that have the ability to connect to the internet. This has led to much more opportunistic and easier ways to perform tasks but it also opens the doors for new attacks. Blockchaining is a new technology that was introduced with the creation of Bitcoin in 2008. Blockchaining has mostly been implemented in the field of cryptocurrency but there are many other useful applications of blockchaining. It allows for a decentralized ledger of data that can securely keep a network honest and prevent from possible attacks. Blockchains are based on a consensus algorithm and the proof of stake algorithm bases consensus between nodes based on the stake that the nodes have in the system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Recently, the interest in using Blockchain as a secure and distributed ledger has increased dramatically. Although the main purpose of Blockchain by means of Bitcoin was about cryptocurrency and peer to peer transactions, its application to other systems has been widely used. One of the fields that has potential possibilities to benefit from BlockChain features is telecommunication. BlockChain can be applied in case of management of various networks to reduce some expenses. In this position paper, we apply a BlockChain network with smart contract in the cellular mobile networks. The Blockchain can provide a distributed HSS in a way that the core networks of different operators can use it in a secure manner. Moreover, the smart contract can act as a distributed Self Organizing Network features to handle self-transactions among mobile operators in return of sharing small cells' infrastructure.
This paper enlightens the stipulation of blockchain beyond the bitcoin and identifies the key challenges in the implementation of blockchain on a small scale or newly implemented projects based on the literature review, furthermore it also introduces Block maturity level (BML) as a Consensus protocol, which eliminates the 51% attack, the hardfork problem and small-scale problem by introducing sub-blocks as a defense mechanism against attackers. This technique can be used in the implementation of blockchain where the hash power and difficulty is lower and easy to match-up. This proposed consensus protocol would immensely secure the implementation of the blockchain on different projects.
An increased incidence of food mislabeling and handling in recent years has led to consumers demanding transparency in how food items are produced and handled. The current traceability solutions suffer from issues such as scattering of information across multiple silos and susceptibility in recording erroneous data and thus are often unable to produce reliable farm to fork stories of products. Blockchain (BC) is a promising technology that could play an important role in providing data transparency and integrity due to its salient features which include decentralisation, immutability and auditability. In this paper, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework which is governed by a consortium of key Food Supply Chain (FSC) entities including government and regulatory bodies to promote food provenance. We propose to use a sharded, three-tiered architecture which ensures availability of data to consumers, limits access to competitive partners and provides scalability for handling transaction load. We also propose a transaction vocabulary and access rights to manage read and write privileges to BC supported by the consortium. The framework, ProductChain, ensures that trade flows are kept confidential when provenance information is retrieved by consumers and stakeholders. Simulation results show that query time for a product ledger is of the order of a few milliseconds even when the information is collated from multiple shards. ProductChain is generalised and applicable to supply chains in diverse industries.
Nov 1, 2018·B. Varghese et al., "Realizing Edge Marketplaces: Challenges and Opportunities," in IEEE Cloud Computing, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 9-20, Nov./Dec. 2018
Blesson Varghese, Massimo Villari, Omer Rana, Philip James · 7 authors
The edge of the network has the potential to host services for supporting a variety of user applications, ranging in complexity from data preprocessing, image and video rendering, and interactive gaming, to embedded systems in autonomous cars and built environments. However, the computational and data resources over which such services are hosted, and the actors that interact with these services, have an intermittent availability and access profile, introducing significant risk for user applications that must rely on them. This article investigates the development of an edge marketplace, which is able to support multiple providers for offering services at the network edge, and to enable demand supply for influencing the operation of such a marketplace. Resilience, cost, and quality of service and experience will subsequently enable such a marketplace to adapt its services over time. This article also describes how distributed-ledger technologies (such as blockchains) provide a promising approach to support the operation of such a marketplace and regulate its behavior (such as the GDPR in Europe) and operation. Two application scenarios provide context for the discussion of how such a marketplace would function and be utilized in practice.
Nowadays, numerous applications of smart home systems provide recommendations for users, including reducing their energy consumption, warnings of defective devices, selecting reliable devices and software, diagnoses, etc [1]. The internet connected, dynamic and heterogeneous nature of the smart home environment creates new security, authentication, and privacy challenges [2]. To solve those challenges, an approach to data privacy in smart home using blockchain technology, which is called smart home based the IoT-Blockchain (SHIB), is proposed in this paper. In order to demonstrate the proposed architecture, an experimental scenario using Ganache, Remix, and web3. js is built among the user, service provider, and smart home to evaluate the performance of the smart contract in the SHIB. Based on the experiment results, the SHIB architecture brings the advantages like data privacy, trust access control, and high extension ability. In addition, the comparison between the proposed architecture and existing models in different parameters such as smart contract, the privacy of data, usage of tokens, updating the policies, and misbehavior judging are performed.
An increasing number of people, organizations and corporations are expressing their interest in the decentralization technology of the blockchain. The creation of the blockchain marks the time when we start building distributed peer-to-peer networks consisting of non-trusting members that interact with each other without a trusted intermediary but in a verifiable manner. In this paper, we propose a decentralized application (DApp) based on blockchain technology for sharing Internet of Things (IoT) sensors' data, and demonstrate various challenges addressed during the development process. This application combines blockchain technology with IoT and operates through smart contracts that are executed on the Ethereum blockchain. More specifically the application is a platform for sharing (buying and selling) measurements of IoT weather sensors and operates on the Ethereum blockchain, acting as a marketplace for IoT sensor data. This application applies the Sensing-as-a-Service (S2aaS) business model combined with blockchain.
Information asymmetry exists amongst stakeholders in the current food supply chain. Lack of standardization in data format, lack of regulations, and siloed, legacy information systems exasperate the problem. Global agriculture trade is increasing creating a greater need for traceability in the global supply chain. This paper introduces Harvest Network, a theoretical end-to-end, vis a vie “farm-to-fork”, food traceability application integrating the Ethereum blockchain and IoT devices exchanging GS1 message standards. The goal is to create a distributed ledger accessible for all stakeholders in the supply chain. Our design effort creates a basic framework (artefact) for building a prototype or simulation using existing technologies and protocols [1]. The next step is for industry practitioners and researchers to apply AGILE methods for creating working prototypes and advanced projects that bring about greater transparency.
Ethereum smart contract makes developers can deploy decentralized applications to inherit features from blockchain, such as decentralization and openness. Although Ethereum provided a decentralized platform, Ethereum Virtual Machine for smart contracts, it lacks of ability to fetch off-chain data. The general solution is Oracle data carrier. However, Oracle results in rising deployment costs. It requires Ethereum smart contract developers to follow format in programing contract, this constraint decreases the readability of smart contract. This paper proposes an off-chain data fetching architecture which is cost-effective and highly elastic for smart contract. It also compatible with exited contract, which makes Ethereum smart contract owner able to automate the reply process.
George Suciu, Carmen Nădrag, Cristiana Istrate, Alexandru Vulpe · 6 authors
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) refers to a digital method for registering virtual transactions and other similar data in multiple locations simultaneously. The main characteristic of distributed ledgers is that they do not have a central administration component, due to advanced algorithms and methods used for record-keeping. Thus, transactions are faster and reasonable, as they do not require a central authority to validate them. The network is formed by multiple nodes through which the participant can access recordings, making the network become less vulnerable when referring to cyberattacks. After several years of technological development in this area, different distributed ledger technologies are available. This article presents Blockchain and Tangle technologies along with their main characteristics, in order to make an extended comparison of their approaches. In addition to this, the paper contains experimentation details and results for each technology presented.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly part of daily life. However, the development of IoT applications still faces many problems, such as heterogeneity, complex management, and other difficulties. In this paper, first, the open source technologies of IoT are surveyed. We compare these technologies from the point of view of different levels of technical requirements, such as device management, data management, communication, intelligent data processing, security and privacy protection; we also look at requirements of application development and deployment. Second, an IoT integrated development platform architecture for IoT applications based on open source ecosystem is proposed and evaluated in an industrial setting. We applied P2P technology to distributed resource management and blockchain-based smart contract mechanics for resource billing management. The results show that the IoT gateway based on an open source ecosystem had a stable and reliable system performance with a certain data size and concurrency scale. These conditions satisfy the application requirements of the IoT in most sensing environments.
The revolution of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and wearable technology has opened up great possibilities in remote patient monitoring. To streamline the diagnosis and treatment process, healthcare professionals are now adopting the wearable technology. However, these technologies also pose grave privacy risks and security concerns about the transfer and the logging of data transactions. One solution to protect privacy in healthcare is the use of blockchain technology. However, one of the primary problems with blockchain is its highly limited scalability. In this work here, we propose the utilization of a blockchain based protocol to provide secure management and analysis of data. In this paper we use recently introduced PoW based protocol GHOSTDAG, that generalizes Satoshi's blockchain to a direct acyclic graph of blocks (blockDAG) and provides high throughput while also avoiding the security-scalability problem. We use two blockchains based on the original GHOSTDAG protocol, one that is private and one that is public. Using a private blockchain, we create a system where we use smart contracts to analyze patient health data. If the smart contract for any reason issues an alert for an abnormal reading then the system makes the record of that event to the public blockchain. This would resolve the privacy and security vulnerabilities associated with remote patient monitoring and also the limited scalability problem of Satoshi's original blockchain.
In the traditional educational understanding, individuals follow the path of getting graduate or post-graduate education if they wish, after continuing their education from kindergarten to high school. Today, by getting out of this stereotype, every literate person can choose different learning environments. Now, learning any subject is up to the tip of the fingers of an individual without depending on a school building with four walls or on certain time frame. In this study, it is aimed to verify digital certificates given to the participants at the Turkish stage of the International Informatics and Computational Thinking event by using Ethereum Block Chain based smart contract. The tasks in the event were transmitted to the students in Turkey via using exam module of the Moodle Learning Management System. For this study, first a smart contract was developed in which the certificate information could be stored on the Ethereum blockchain and could be check for control purposes if necessary. Then the certificate module developed by the researcher in 2014 which uses block structure in the Moodle Learning Management System was updated and then provided to work in accordance with the smart contract in the Ethereum blockchain.
Blockchain is steadily becoming a disruptive technology, capable of profoundly impacting a wide range of industries. Established applications such as cryptocurrency (e.g., Bitcoin, etc.) have brought blockchain into the limelight. Blockchains, as one implementation of distributed ledgers, promises the ability to maintain critical information in a trustworthy repository without any centralized management. The reliability of blockchain-enabled applications is based on the innate immutability of stored data, maintained through cryptographic means, which enables blockchains to provide transparency, efficiency, auditability, trust, and security. Technological additions such as smart contract capabilities and various consensus algorithms have allowed novel blockchain use cases in both the public sector (e.g., identity governance, regulations, healthcare, etc.) and the private sector (e.g., finance, supply chain management, etc.).
Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming necessities of people's daily life and establishing itself as an essential part of future Internet. One of the challenges for using IoT is the security of data collected by trillions of IoT devices and used by millions of services. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) provides a distributed security method which can benefit IoT. Yet challenges are put forward when integrating DLT with IoT, such as scalability and heterogeneous capability of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for integrating DLT in IoT by using edge computing technology, taking the scalability and heterogeneous capability of IoT devices into consideration. IoT devices are clustered dynamically into groups based on various proximity context information.
Chao Qiu, F. Richard Yu, Fangmin Xu, Haipeng Yao · 5 authors
Nowadays, in order to support flexibility, agility, and ubiquitous accessibility among vehicles, software defined networking has been proposed to integrate with vehicular networks, known as software defined vehicular network (SDVN). Due to a variety of data, flows, and vehicles in SDVN, a distributed SDVN is necessary. However, how to reach consensus in distributed SDVN efficiently and safely is an intractable problem. In this paper, we use a permissioned blockchain approach to reach consensus in distributed SDVN. The existing permissioned blockchain has a number of drawbacks, such as low throughput. We virtualize the underlying resources (e.g., computing resources and networking resources), jointly considering the trust features of blockchain nodes to improve the throughput. Accordingly, we formulate view change, computing resources allocation, and networking resources allocation as a joint optimization problem. In order to solve this joint problem, we use a novel deep Q-learning approach. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
Marc Alier, Daniel Amo-Filvà, Francisco José García‐Peñalvo, David Fonseca Escudero · 5 authors
Learning Analytics collect sensitive data from students. In some cases, the ethics behind the use or access by third parties are not clear. This situation raises adverse reactions and feelings of fear that generates a negative perception towards the use of Learning Analytics. In consequence, it is questioned whether privacy and security can be preserved when collecting educational data. As a result, some policies and good practices are set to frame how student data should be used in the application of this analytical approach. Its objective is to increase confidence in the application of Learning Analytics. However, some of these legal actions, which are limited to the areas in which they are originated, are the result of allegations of data leakage. Hence, these initiatives can do little to insure the use of sensitive data of students in unknown situations. To ensure continuity and an increase of confidence in the application of Learning Analytics is necessary to bind to legality a new approach to safeguard privacy of students' data in its current and future uses. Considering the above, it is possible to add a technological layer above these policies that ensures its viability. Some emerging technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts are strong candidates to ensure privacy and secure sensible data of students. The use of smart contracts allows the automation of legal actions so that they are executed as soon as irregularities in the use or data collection are detected. In this work, we propose a series of actions to preserve the identity of students and secure their data with emerging technologies such as blockchain.
Daniel Amo-Filvà, Francisco José García‐Peñalvo, Marc Alier, David Fonseca Escudero · 5 authors
The collection of students' sensible data raises adverse reactions against Learning Analytics that decreases the confidence in its adoption. The laws and policies that surround the use of educational data are not enough to ensure privacy, security, validity, integrity and reliability of students' data. This problem has been detected through literature review and can be solved if a technological layer of automated checking rules is added above these policies. The aim of this thesis is to research about an emerging technology such as blockchain to preserve the identity of students and secure their data. In a first stage a systematic literature review will be conducted in order to set the context of the research. Afterwards, and through the scientific method, we will develop a blockchain based solution to automate rules and constraints with the aim to let students the governance of their data and to ensure data privacy and security.
A blockchain is a decentralized ledger where all transactions are recorded. For having a reliable blockchain and double-spending prevention, we need a decentralized consensus and agreement on a blockchain. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW). It is a cryptographic puzzle that is difficult to solve but easy to verify. However, because of significant latency of proof-of-work for transactions confirmation, this consensus mechanism is vulnerable against double-spending. On the other hand, PoW consumes a significant amount of energy that by growing the network, it becomes a major problematic of this consensus mechanism. In this paper, we introduce an alternative to PoW, because of all its major problems and security issues that may lead to collapsing decentralization of the blockchain, while a full decentralized system is the main purpose of using blockchain technology. The approach we introduce is based on a distributed voting process and called "RDV: Register, Deposit, Vote". Since in RDV algorithm, there is no mining process, so it is appropriate for low-level energy devices and Internet of Things (IoT).
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques