Data provenance and data integrity are among the key concerns in IoT based environments such as smart cities, smart grids, and vehicular networks etc. Many IoT devices suffer from both impersonation and data tampering attacks due to their architectural and computational limitations, which are unable to provide adequate level of security. This paper aims to provide and enforce data provenance and data integrity in IoT environments by using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Ethereum, a blockchain variant with smart contracts. PUFs provide unique hardware fingerprints to establish data provenance while Ethereum provides a decentralized digital ledger which is able to withstand data tampering attacks.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Roberto Casado‐Vara, Fernando De la Prieta, Javier Prieto, Juan M. Corchado
Smart home presents a challenge in control and monitoring of its wireless sensors networks (WSN) and the internet of things (IoT) devices which form it. The current IoT architectures are centralized, complex, with poor security in its communications and with upstream communication channels mainly. As a result, there are problems with data reliability. These problems include data missing, malicious data inserted, communications network overload, and overload of computing power at the central node. In this paper a new architecture is presented. This architecture based in blockchain introduce the edge computing layer and a new algorithm to improve data quality and false data detection.
Distributed Ledger Technologies have promising applications in the Internet of Things. However, scalability and support for micropayments remain problems for blockchain-based applications, therefore other alternatives such as IOTA should be considered. This work reports on an experimental evaluation of IOTA on several different IoT platforms. We show that even though the communication overhead to join the IOTA network can be significantly reduced by adapting a proxy-based architecture, the computational overhead remains high. We conclude that IOTA is not currently suitable for battery-powered IoT devices.
Simona Ibba, Andrea Pinna, Maria Ilaria Lunesu, Michele Marchesi · 5 authors
An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is an innovative way to fund projects based on blockchain. The funding is based on the selling of tokens by means of decentralized applications called smart contracts written in Solidity, a programming language specific for Ethereum blockchain. The ICOs work in a volatile context and it is crucial that the team is capable of handling constant changes. The Agile methods, proven practices enabling to develop software in presence of changing requirements, could be a means for managing uncertainty. The main goals of this work are to understand software engineering activities related to ICOs, recognize the ICOs developed using Agile methods, and make a comparison between ICOs and Agile ICOs. In addition, we perform a deeper analysis of Agile ICOs concerning project planning, software development, and code features. Our work shows that the roles of the people involved in an ICO can be compared to the typical roles of the SCRUM methodology. The majority of Agile ICOs use tool of testing before storing smart contract on blockchain. Finally, the application of volumetric and complexity software metrics shows that the files of Agile ICOs is on average shorter and less complex than in other smart contracts.
Ramón Alcarria, Borja Bordel, Tomás Robles, Diego R. Martín · 5 authors
Resource consumption in residential areas requires novel contributions in the field of consumer information management and collaborative mechanisms for the exchange of resources, in order to optimize the overall consumption of the community. We propose an authorization system to facilitate access to consumer information and resource trading, based on blockchain technology. Our proposal is oriented to the Smart communities, an evolution of Community Energy Management Systems, in which communities are involved in the monitoring and coordination of resource consumption. The proposed environment allows a more reliable management of monitoring and authorization functions, with secure data access and storage and delegation of controller functions among householders. We provide the definition of virtual assets for energy and water resource sharing as an auction, which encourages the optimization of global consumption and saves resources. The proposed solution is implemented and validated in application scenarios that demonstrate the suitability of the defined consensus mechanism, trustworthiness in the level of provided security for resource monitoring and delegation and reduction on resource consumption by the resource trading contribution.
Tomás Robles, Borja Bordel, Ramón Alcarria, Diego Sánchez-de-Rivera
Blockchain enables the creation of distributed ledgers as a type of database that is shared, replicated, and synchronized among the members of a network. In this paper we analyze how distributed ledgers can be used for empowering end-users to self-manage their own data, enabling third parties to access those data under a cryptographic management model. We propose a use case where both blockchain and smart contracts are employed by using cryptographic technology to enable user empowerment of data management in AmI. Finally, we analyze strengths and weaknesses of the proposed scenario.
Cryptocurrency has been a trending topic over the past decade, pooling tremendous technological power and attracting investments valued over trillions of dollars on a global scale. The cryptocurrency technology and its network have been endowed with many superior features due to its unique architecture, which also determined its worldwide efficiency, applicability and data intensive characteristics. This paper introduces and summarises the interactions between two significant concepts in the digitalized world, i.e., cryptocurrency and Big Data. Both subjects are at the forefront of technological research, and this paper focuses on their convergence and comprehensively reviews the very recent applications and developments after 2016. Accordingly, we aim to present a systematic review of the interactions between Big Data and cryptocurrency and serve as the one stop reference directory for researchers with regard to identifying research gaps and directing future explorations.
Blockchain and Tangle are data structures used to create an immutable public record of data insured by a network of peer-to-peer participants who maintain a set of constantly growing data records known as ledgers. Blockchain and Tangle technologies are a decentralized solution that guarantees the exchange of large amounts of trusted messages, among billions of connected IoT devices, which are very valuable as they are valid and complete. This highly encrypted and secure peer-to-peer messaging mechanism is adopted in this project to manage the processing of IoT transactions and the coordination between the devices that interact with the process. To maintain private transactions, secure and trustless, the distributed consensus algorithms are responsible for validating and choosing transactions and recording them in the global ledger. The results showed that the speed of the consensus algorithms can affect the creation in real time of reliable stories that track the events of the IoT networks. After incorporating Complex Event Processing that allows selecting only those high level events, it is possible to get an improvement in many situations. The result is a Middleware system that provides a framework for the construction of large-scale computer applications that use Complex Events Processing and different decentralized ledgers such as the blockchain of Ethereum or IOTA Tangle, for secure data storage.
Blockchain has emerged as a decentralized and trustable ledger for recording and storing digital transactions. The mining process of Blockchain, however, incurs a heavy computational workload for miners to solve the proof-of-work puzzle (i.e., a series of the hashing computation), which is prohibitive from the perspective of the mobile terminals (MTs). The advanced multi-access mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables the MTs to offload part of the computational workloads (for solving the proof-of-work) to the nearby edge-servers (ESs), provides a promising approach to address this issue. By offloading the computational workloads via multi-access MEC, the MTs can effectively increase their successful probabilities when participating in the mining game and gain the consequent reward (i.e., winning the bitcoin). However, as a compensation to the ESs which provide the computational resources to the MTs, the MTs need to pay the ESs for the corresponding resource-acquisition costs. Thus, to investigate the trade-off between obtaining the computational resources from the ESs (for solving the proof-of-work) and paying for the consequent cost, we formulate an optimization problem in which the MTs determine their acquired computational resources from different ESs, with the objective of maximizing the MTs' social net-reward in the mining process while keeping the fairness among the MTs. In spite of the non-convexity of the formulated problem, we exploit its layered structure and propose efficient distributed algorithms for the MTs to individually determine their optimal computational resources acquired from different ESs. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the performance of our proposed multi-access MEC for Blockchain.
Blockchain has become another new information revolution after the Internet, and to a certain extent, like the Internet, will change the existing production relations and business logic. With the advent of blockchain, smart contracts have become one of the most sought-after technologies. Its high customizability becomes the key to implement blockchain technology in multiple fields ranging from financial services, life sciences and healthcare to energy resources and voting. However, due to the infancy, challenges are put forward as smart contracts widespread deployment. This study aims to contribute a comprehensive overview on smart contract within blockchain technology. Based on systematic mapping study, we offer a broad perspective of current academic research and application areas of smart contracts. First, by using bibliometric mining on 158 smart contract-related papers, we identified publication profiles, research hot trends and research topic clustering. Then, we provide a summary of the areas where smart contracts are used and analyze the pain points, they address. Finally, we identify the bottlenecks that need to be broken and propose research outlook for the future development of this topic. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.
Kai Fan, Shangyang Wang, Yanhui Ren, Kan Yang · 7 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) has been developed rapidly to make our life easier. In many IoT applications (e.g., smart homes, healthcare, etc.), all the IoT devices should be synchronized in time. However, some malicious nodes located in the IoT network can influence the time synchronization, which may interrupt the IoT system and lead to serious accidents. Therefore, it is critical and challenging to guarantee the accuracy and consistency of time during the time synchronization among all the IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based scheme to assure the security during time synchronization in IoT. Specifically, a publicly verifiable ledger is utilized to record and broadcast time, which can minimize many attacks from external environments. The use of multiple time sources can avoid the vulnerabilities caused by the centralized generation of accurate time. Moreover, the decentralized structure of this scheme has the advantage of adapting the changes of network topology. By employing an improved practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanism, time synchronization can be implemented efficiently. At last, the analysis results show that our proposed scheme can achieve the desired security with high efficiency.
The rapid growth of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has brought huge challenges for large data storage, intelligent management, and information security for the entire system. The traditional centralized management approach for IoV faces the difficulty in dealing with real-time response. The blockchain, as an effective technology for decentralized distributed storage and security management, has already showed great advantages in its application of Bitcoin. In this paper, we investigate how the blockchain technology could be extended to the application of vehicle networking, especially with the consideration of the distributed and secure storage of big data. We define several types of nodes such as vehicle and roadside for vehicle networks and form several sub-blockchain networks. In this paper, we present a model of the outward transmission of vehicle blockchain data, and then give detail theoretical analysis and numerical results. This paper has shown the potential to guide the application of blockchain for future vehicle networking.
Deep neural network (DNN) applications require heavy computations, so an embedded device with limited hardware such as an IoT device cannot run the apps by itself. One solution is to offload DNN computations from the client device to nearby edge servers [1] to request an execution of the DNN computations with their powerful hardware. However, there are several issues with the solution. One is an availability issue that how we can provide the edge server with some incentives to run the client' apps. The other is a scalability issue that how we can use more servers when there are more DNN requests. Finally, there is an integrity issue that how the client can trust the result coming from anonymous edge servers. We think the blockchain technology can solve these issues to make edge computing more practical. This paper proposes a novel architecture for DNN edge computing based on the blockchain technology. Existing blockchains such as Ethereum do not support execution of a complex program, so we propose a modified blockchain structure and protocol to overcome the limitation.
Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain (BC) technologies have been dominating their respective research domains for some time. IoT offers automation at the finest level in different fields, while BC provides secure transaction processing for asset exchanges. The capability of IoT devices to generate transactions prompts their integration with BC as the next logical step. The biggest challenges in this integration are the scalability of ledger and rate of transaction execution in BC. On one hand, due to their large numbers, IoT devices will generate transactions at a rate which current block chain solutions cannot handle. On the other hand, implementing BC peers onto IoT devices is impossible due to resource constraints. This prohibits direct integration of both technologies in their current state. In this paper, we propose a solution to address these challenges by using a local peer network to bridge the gap. It restricts the number of transactions which enters the global BC by implementing a scalable local ledger, without compromising on the peer validation of transactions at local and global level. The testbed evaluations show significant reduction in the block weight and ledger size on global peers. The solution also indirectly improves the transaction processing rate of all peers due to load distribution.
With the continuous development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the surge in data generated by sensors and smart devices has caused data overload in designated centralized data centers. However, centralized data centers, such as cloud storage, cannot afford to manage these gigantic data in the suitable way. Due to the lots of devices and senors continuously creating data, traditional IoT architectures must address many challenges that are not designed to provide trust, security, resiliency, and low latency. To solve theses problems, we propose a decentralized architecture named MicrothingsChain based on blockchain with smart contract, which enables edge computing nodes storing corresponding domain IoT data and interacting with each other safely. It brings computing and storage capabilities to the edge of the IoT network and realizes distributed storage of large amounts of data. Specially, MicrothingsChain adopts publish-subscribe mode, in which users can access the data across domain. Furthermore, we present one cryptographic currency for our ecology named MicroCoin. The security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that MicrothingsChain is suitable in practice.
Internet of Things devices is more common and the growth of LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) technology is unavoidable. However, the regulation for this kind of technology is lack behind even though there will be multiple licensing and certification from national regulator and from industry. It will not easy to maintain and check the device's licensing for user and regulator, moreover if the product already had another type of licensing from abroad. It often happens that the vendor files a fake license claims of his products to fulfill the procurement. Therefore, licensing management is required for everyone goodness in the IoT industry. Blockchain implementation assessment framework can be used for assessing this case.
We present an energy-efficient, security-enhanced consensus algorithm to compensate for the security weaknesses that may arise when a node that generates a block is vulnerable in a closed blockchain environment. Consensus algorithms, which are usually used in blockchain environments, use a large amount of hash to create a new block, producing significant energy waste. The consensus algorithm that is proposed in this paper reduces energy waste by generating new blocks in a single operation according to the defined rules of all miner nodes that can generate blocks and converging them into blocks with many identical block values, forming a blockchain.
ChangHyung Lee, Lewis Nkenyereye, Nak-Myoung Sung, JaeSeung Song
With the growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT), Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is a key factor to enable the IoT paradigm. Several Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) including oneM2M are working on specifications that will enable interoperability for the M2M within the IoT ecosystem. However, the transactions within the IoT platform are not trustworthy due to its centralized structure. In the meanwhile, blockchain technologies have emerged as a revolutionary technology with a wide range of applications. In this paper, we present an architectural framework that aims at enabling blockchain in IoT platform. We consider a oneM2M-based IoT platform and an existing blockchain system namely Logchain that uses the blind voting algorithm as a consensus rule to ensure the integrity of the blocks. We discuss the proposed framework by highlighting the key points that are achieved through the architecture. We then present the concluding remarks and our future work.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Security of the Internet of Things represents a field that strongly attracts academia and industry since it represents one of the main obstacles in its adoption. In this area, authentication and authorization methods holds a golden place in priority rank. Indeed, current approaches suffers from numerous limits. Moreover, generally, deployment systems use separately two methods one dedicated to the authentication and the other to the authorization, while the number of methods that combine both requirements is limited. In this work we propose an adaptive blockchain based authentication and authorization approach for IoT use cases. We provided a real implementation of our approach using Java language. The extensive evaluation provided, shows clearly the ability of our scheme in meeting the different requirements, as well as its ability in ensuring a very lightweight cost.
In this world of digitalization, if you want to deliver digital services of any kind, Cloud Computing has emerged as an invincible technology. It anticipates on shared computing resources instead of setting up local servers to manage, store and process data. It is in preference these days because of its convenience, scalability, low cost, easy accessibility and high availability. There are few security concerns which arise while using Cloud Computing. This paper analyses Cloud Computing using framework of blockchain for different problems faced in Cloud computing. A block chain is an uninterrupted list of records, called blocks that are associated with each other and secured by making the use of cryptography. The risks and difficulties associated with Cloud Computing are manifested so as to explain why block chain is disruptive and justified technology in solving the concern and how electronic wallets which work on principle of blockchain in cloud computing environments preserves user data integrity. A detailed indexing of applications is also being presented, keeping in mind the recent progress in the field of technologies.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In the rapidly growing digital and technological world, Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming very popular and widely implemented. As more and more IoT devices are deployed in an uncontrolled, complex and often hostile environment, securing the IoT devices, systems and data exchange presents numerous unique challenges. With data sensitive IoT applications, there is an utmost need to protect and explore user privacy, access control, third party involvement, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) information exchange in order to avoid critical security breach and cyberattacks. Most of the security and privacy issues of the interconnected heterogeneous resource constrained smart IoT devices are unable to be solved efficiently by traditional security practices. On the other hand, Blockchain technology is well-thought-out as emerging and revolutionary concept, initiated from cryptocurrency, and now making way to enhance various scenarios in digital paradigm, mainly due to its decentralized nature and transparency. This paper reviews the adoption of IoT in various fields and its applications to automate and improve living conditions, along with security and privacy risks arising from organization and functioning of different IoT components. Moreover, the study is specifically based on how effectively the Blockchain technology can be leveraged for strengthening IoT security and privacy implications, and possible limitations of embedding Blockchain with IoT framework.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) and block chain technology are growing rapidly. Particularly, there is an attempt to change the centralized access control method of IoT into a distributed method using a block chain. With the access control method currently presented, data communication between physically separated IoT devices is impossible. In addition, a policy corresponding to a number of dynamic IoT scenarios must be generated in advance in order for data exchanges to be performed. In this paper, we propose a dynamic access control scheme to solve the problems of the existing access control method for direct data communication between devices and to cope with the dynamic environment of IoT.