The need to process the verity, volume and velocity of data generated by today's Internet of Things (IoT) devices has pushed both academia and the industry to investigate new architectural alternatives to support the new challenges. As a result, Edge Computing (EC) has emerged to address these issues, by placing part of the cloud resources (e.g., computation, storage, logic) closer to the edge of the network, which allows faster and context dependent data analysis and storage. However, as EC infrastructures grow, different providers who do not necessarily trust each other need to collaborate in order serve different IoT devices. In this context, EC infrastructures, IoT devices and the data transiting the network all need to be subject to identity and provenance checks, in order to increase trust and accountability. Each device/data in the network needs to be identified and the provenance of its actions needs to be tracked. In this paper, we propose a blockchain container based architecture that implements the W3C-PROV Data Model, to track identities and provenance of all orchestration decisions of a business network. This architecture provides new forms of interaction between the different stakeholders, which supports trustworthy transactions and leads to a new decentralized interaction model for IoT based applications.
Since it first appears in 2008 as the underlying technology of the Bitcoin payment system, Blockchain has gained further interests, since it offers a distributed peer-to-peer ledger where non-trusting members can interact with each other, in addition, members can now run applications without the need for a central authority with the same level of certainty. however blockchain suffers from certain limitations and challenges, specifically, when combined with Internet of things (iot) infrastructure, namely the high cost needed in the mining process due to restricted computation resources of iot devices, in this paper we will focus on a survey on three of most relevant papers that discuss resources management in mobile blockchain then we we will propose a matching model based on graph theory for optimal resources allocation between services offered by an Edge service provider and demands from miners of a blockchain network.
Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari, Christian Rondanini
Today, most of the services one may think of are based on a collaborative paradigm (e.g., social media services, IoT-based services, etc.). One of the most relevant representative of such class of services are inter-organizational processes, where an organized group of joined activities is carried out by two or more organizations to achieve a common business goal. Inter-organizational processes are therefore vital to achieve business partnerships among different organizations. However, they may also pose serious security and privacy threats to the data each organization exposes. This is mainly due to the weak trust relationships that may hold among the collaborating parties, which result in a potential lack of trust on how data/operations are managed. In this paper, we discuss, how blockchain, one of today hottest technology, can be used in support of secure inter-organizational processes. We further point out which additional security issues the use of blockchain can bring, illustrate the ongoing research projects in the area and discuss future research directions.
Andreas Martin Seitz, Dominic Henze, Daniel Miehle, Bernd Bruegge · 6 authors
Fog Computing, Augmented Reality (AR) and Blockchain are technologies that have been receiving more attention in recent years. Fog Computing for on-site data analysis and Blockchain as a decentralized framework are used to establish security and trust. AR enables new interactive scenarios with devices in the industrial environment and provides user interfaces for devices that had previously lacked one. The combination of these technologies in an industrial environment opens up new possibilities and opportunities. We present the IIoT Bazaar, a decentralized marketplace for industrial edge applications that relies on Blockchain to create transparency for all stakeholders involved and to enable the traceability of app installations on edge devices. With Fog Computing, resource-limited edge devices can be integrated into the IIoT Bazaar ecosystem. Fog Nodes enable the provisioning of applications on edge devices and their integration into a decentralized Blockchain network. AR serves as an interface between the users and the machines, allowing people to interact intuitively with the edge devices. With a case study, we demonstrate the design and prototypical implementation of the IIoT Bazaar and its applications which bring software developers and users together using a combination of Fog Computing, AR, and Blockchain. We share the challenges we faced and our experiences we made during the case study.
With the rapid development of information and communication technology, a vast amount of personal health data is generated, stored, and utilized in healthcare related services. However, there are many issues remained to be solved, such as data interoperability, security, and privacy concerns. On the other hand, blockchain, a decentralized peer-to-peer digital ledger, has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as a promising technology to protect privacy of personal data. By adopting blockchain, individuals can take advantage of personal health data for better healthcare. In this paper, after briefly summarizing the major features of blockchain, we describe blockchain-empowered solutions for utilization of personal health data in healthcare and discuss issues and challenges. We further propose i-Blockchain, an individual-centric framework for use of personal health data based on an extension of permissioned blockchain, present the basic architecture and protocols, and show several application scenarios.
Deepak K. Tosh, Sachin Shetty, Peter Foytik, Laurent Njilla · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) technology is emerging to advance the modern defense and warfare applications because the battlefield things, such as combat equipment, warfighters, and vehicles, can sense and disseminate information from the battlefield to enable real-time decision making on military operations and enhance autonomy in the battlefield. Since this Internet-of-Battlefield Things (IoBT) environment is highly heterogeneous in terms of devices, network standards, platforms, connectivity, and so on, it introduces trust, security, and privacy challenges when battlefield entities exchange information with each other. To address these issues, we propose a Blockchain-empowered auditable platform for IoBT and describe its architectural components, such as battlefield-sensing layer, network layer, and consensus and service layer, in depth. In addition to the proposed layered architecture, this paper also presents several open research challenges involved in each layer to realize the Blockchain-enabled IoBT platform.
Oct 1, 2018·2018 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced & Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing & Communications, Cloud & Big Data Computing, Internet of People and Smart City Innovation (SmartWorld/SCALCOM/UIC/ATC/CBDCom/IOP/SCI)
The ubiquitous ID (uID) architecture provides dynamic and flexible context-awareness frameworks necessary in ubiquitous computing. Its basic idea is to assign 128 bit unique identifiers, each of which is called a ucode (ubiquitous code), to real-world entities. To guarantee the uniqueness of ucodes, current ucode ownreships are maintained by a hierarchical structure like DNS. In this traditional system, processing ucode transactions between organizations is cumbersome and inefficient because the reliability of owner information is dependent on individual organizations. To solve this problem, we designed a ucode ownership management system on a blockchain which is a decentralized platform. In this system, we proposed a blockchain-based ucode allocation method, which requires a simple procedure and only one transaction. This proposed method is user-friendly and efficient compared with ucode allocation methods to which we simply apply current blockchain-based name registration methods requiring a complex procedure and at least two transactions. Finally, we conducted a case study about these ucode allocation methods built on the Ethereum blockchain. From this result, we compared the usability and security of each ucode allocation method in Ethereum.
Avelino F. Zorzo, Henry C. Nunes, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Regio A. Michelin · 5 authors
In the last few years, novel approaches for using blockchain to solve Internet of Things (IoT) security and dependability issues have been proposed. Currently, different solutions were applied to Smart Homes, Smart Cities, Smart Grids, Supply Chains, Industry, and Vehicular Networks scenarios. Despite of that, the main advantages on the adoption of different architectures, models and algorithms proposed in the state of art of blockchain in IoT scenarios are not yet clear. This paper presents some discussion about the usage of blockchain technology in IoT environments and proposes a layer model of blockchains for IoT. In addition, we present an overview of the latest research regarding network architectures, consensus algorithms, data management, and applications. Finally, this paper presents open issues and future trends about blockchain in IoT.
Bitcoin holds the largest market share among all digital currencies. Transaction security is secured in Bitcoin by using blocks with a hash-based Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. Bitcoin PoW takes an average of 10- minutes to complete and 6 consecutive blocks are recommended for a single transaction in the system. PoW is a functional protocol that validates every incoming data to overcome spam attacks and DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service). Selfish miner is an attack on the integrity of the Bitcoin network. The selfish miner succeeds because the honest miners are forced to spend part of their computing cycle on blocks that are destined not to be in the public chain. To achieve higher scalability, network latency must be low, that is the time required for the protocol to confirm the transaction should be effectively reduced. In this study, the author will make a simulation of the effect of latency on block receive time on Bitcoin with selfish-miner attack using NS3. The experimental results show the use of the latency variation and the more number of generated blocks, the lower the MBRT value. The average MBRT of each parameter shows the required receive time by the block number of about 15 minutes to 16 minutes. This amount exceeds the PoW's tolerance time limit when making a transaction. This is due of selfish-miner attack and Latency.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Chanhyung Lee, Nak-Myoung Sung, Lewis Nkenyereye, JaeSeung Song
The Internet of things(IoT) is predicted to connect millions of devices. Therefore, standardized IoT technologies play a crucial role connecting massive IoT devices with interoperability. Various Standards Development Organizations (SDO) are working towards a horizontal solution that would fit several vertical platforms including oneM2M global IoT service layer standards initiative. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology which is being applied in diverse applications such as crypto currency and smart contract. In this demo, we develop a blockchain-enabled IoT service layer platform based on oneM2M IoT standards and an blockchain hybrid application. We use a blockchain system named Logchain that is suitable for IoT due to its consensus algorithm. The hybrid application and oneM2M optional attribute added to the IoT platform enables the IoT users to either store their data in a conventional database or distributed ledger database.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain-based cryptocurrency systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have attracted much attention during the last decade. In recent years, a trend of combining Internet of Things (IoT) devices with blockchain technology has emerged. Digital payments can be made on front-end IoT devices, while a back-end blockchain serves as a distributed ledger to ensure the validity of payments across the system. Nevertheless, fast payments are usually on demand in such a scenario, but an open problem still remains on how to protect blockchain-based systems from double-spending attacks in the context of fast payment. Off-chain techniques, such as Lightning Network and Raiden Network, act as countermeasures to this problem, but they all suffer from the hidden transactions problem. To combat this problem, we propose FastPay, a solution for achieving secure fast payments in blockchain-backed edge-IoT systems. Preliminary evaluation on our prototype demonstrates the effectiveness of FastPay.
In the recent years, there has been a boom in the number of connected devices due to developments in the field of Internet of things. This has also increased the requirements of security specification. The proposed method is introducing a secure information transmission system by using Blockchain technology. Blockchain is a relatively new technology which was introduced by stoshi nakamoto, which was also the basis for developing crypto currency [bitcoin]. Crypto currencies are made transparent and secure using their network architecture, which is a combo of a decentralized and distributed network. In this paper is try to exploit the same methodology used in crypto currencies to develope an IOT network, where the devices can talk to their peers in a secure manner. They explored all the different networks and features of developing a Decentralized application that is named as Dapp.
Henry Rossi Andrian, Novianto Budi Kurniawan, Suhardi Suhardi
As research on blockchain continues to grow, blockchain technology was adopted to develop several information systems. There are many opportunities to examine the utilization of blockchain technology to be used in developing systems as needed. This paper summarizes the conditions of blockchain research in terms of technology and its implementation. This paper was written using a systematic literature review (SLR) as one of the methodologies used to solve problems by tracing the results of previous studies. The problem that you want to study in SLR is usually referred to as a research question (RQ). The defined RQ is related to the topic and clarifies each question by tracing previous research papers indexed in reputable journal databases such as IEEE Xplore, Springerlink, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. After synthesizing 41 articles, the result is: blockchain can be used in many applications, some applications that adopt blockchain technology are banking applications, e-voting applications and digital forensic applications. Often, applications that use blockchain technology only focus on developing one of the blockchain technologies that suits their needs. Some developers maximize the components of the contract on the blockchain, some further develop the data structure of the blockchain itself. The use of blockchain technology is still wide open for the implementation of other information systems. The expected contribution of this paper is to provide a general overview for researchers who want to build applications that use blockchain as a basis for researching so they can conduct further studies to better understand whether the applications they will develop are suitable for using blockchain technology as a basis.
Rakesh Shrestha, Rojeena Bajracharya, Seung Yeob Nam
With the evolution of vehicle technology, VANET plays an important role in saving life and property of the drivers by disseminating critical event information. However, the traditional VANET faces several security issues. We propose a new type of blockchain to resolve critical message dissemination issues in VANET. We create a local blockchain for real world event messages exchanged between the vehicles within the scope of the countries. In this paper, we discuss a blockchain suitable for VANET. We present a public blockchain that stores the node trustworthiness and message trustworthiness in a distributed ledger that is appropriate for secure message dissemination.
Nowadays, the development of the Internet of Things is growing rapidly. This condition raises security problems because of the many violations of security policies. In addition, the development of blockchain is also growing rapidly since it was first popularized in Bitcoin. Security issues on this IoT can be solved using blockchain. One way that can be done is to make secure communication between IoT devices. In this study, an IoT system will be created without and using blockchain which will then be compared between the two. The communication protocol used in IoT systems without blockchain is MQTT. Meanwhile, the blockchain platform used is Ethereum along with a smart contract. Both of these IoT systems will be analyzed for their security level by simulating attacks and observing their security aspects. The test results show that the IoT system based on blockchain technology has a higher level of security than the IoT system without blockchain technology.
Ulfah Nadiya, Kusprasapta Mutijarsa, Cahyo Y Rizqi
Blockchain is a distributed database that has advantage of being irreversible, transparent and decentralized. However, beside of its advantages, blockchain still face several challenges, one of them is scalability. One of the scalability challenges is increasing block size for every new transaction. The size of blockchain reached more than 180 GB. The block size will burden the node in conducting transaction verification. To overcome this problem, this paper has an objective to make summary blocks and compression for the summary blocks so that it can increase the space saving of blockchain and make it easier for nodes to verify transactions. The proposed method used for transactions whose entities can be transferred. This method combines block summarization algorithm and deflate compression algorithm. The proposed method applied to Bitcoin blockchain. Space saving is calculated by comparing the total size of original block with the total size of block that has been summarized and the total size of summary block which has been compressed. From the experiment results, the value of space saving for summary blocks is 22.318% and space saving for summary blocks that have been compressed is 78.104%.
Randa Almadhoun, Maha Kadadha, Maya Alhemeiri, Maryam R. Al-Shehhi · 5 authors
These days, IoT devices are deployed at a massive scale, with Cisco predicting 20 billion devices by the year 2020. As opposed to endpoint devices, IoT devices are resource-constrained devices, incapable of securing and defending themselves, and can be easily hacked and compromised. Fog computing can augment such capacity limitations by providing localized compute, storage, and networking for a group of IoT devices. As fog nodes are deployed in close proximity to IoT devices, fog computing can be more effective than cloud computing. Furthermore, Blockchain has emerged as technology with capabilities to provide secure management, authentication and access to IoT devices and their data, in decentralized manner with high trust, integrity, and resiliency. In this paper, we propose a user authentication scheme using blockhain-enabled fog nodes in which fog nodes interface to Ethereum smart contracts to authenticate users to access IoT devices. The fog nodes are used to provide scalability to the system by relieving the IoT devices from carrying out heavy computation involving tasks related to authentication and communicating with the blockchain. We describe system components, architecture and design, and we discuss key aspects related to security analysis, functionality, testing and implementation of the smart contracts. The full code of the smart contracts for authentication registry, lists, rules and logic is also made publicly available at Github.
Mobile network operators can expand their capacity by aggregating their licensed spectrum with the spectrum discovered opportunistically, i.e., spatiotemporally unused spectrum by other primary users. For an accurate identification of the spectral opportunities, the mobile network has to deploy multiple sensors or it can offload this task to nearby nodes with sensing capabilities, so called helpers. Unfortunately, incentives are limited for helpers to perform energy-wasteful spectrum sensing. Instead, we envision spectrum sensing as a service (Spass) in which a smart contract running on a blockchain (BC) describes the required sensing service parameters and the contracted helpers receive payments only if they perform sensing accurately as agreed in the contract. In this paper, we first introduce Spass and derive a closed formula defining the profitability of a Spass-based business as a function of the spectral efficiency, cost of helpers, and cost of the service. Moreover, we propose two-threshold based voting (TTBV) algorithm to ensure that the fraudulent helpers are excluded from Spass. Via numerical analysis, we show that TTBV causes almost zero false alarms and can exclude malicious users from the contract after only a few iterations. Finally, we develop a running prototype of Spass on Ethereum BC and share the related source code on a publicly-available repository.
Oct 1, 2018·2018 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced & Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing & Communications, Cloud & Big Data Computing, Internet of People and Smart City Innovation (SmartWorld/SCALCOM/UIC/ATC/CBDCom/IOP/SCI)
Saqib Ali, Guojun Wang, Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Hai Jiang
Mission-critical applications such as industrial control, smart grids, security and surveillance systems are highly dependent on cloud-centric IoT networks. In such networks, the diverse IoT devices harvest the data from the remote environments and relay it to multiple intermediate agents over the wireless links towards the cloud for storage, analysis and decision making. Such systems require highly trustworthy data to guarantee accurate and timely decisions. However, in most of the cases, the IoT data becomes dubious during the transmission towards the cloud. Ensuring data provenance in such a heterogeneous multi-layered system is a critical security issue. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a secure data provenance framework for cloud-centric IoT network by utilizing the immutable, deterministic and public nature of the blockchain smart contracts with the traditional cloud infrastructure. In the framework, the cryptographic hash of the device metadata is stored in the blockchain whereas actual data is stored off-chain i.e., in the cloud, making it highly scalable for a dense deployment of IoT devices in the network. Multiple smart contracts are stationed in the blockchain to guarantee the provenance receipt to the data stored in the cloud. The initial evaluation revealed that the proposed framework is highly acceptable in achieving the data provenance for large-scale cloud-centric IoT networks.
Blockchain technology has gained immense popularity because many researchers believe that it could solve numerous problems and could be applied in various fields of study. Unfortunately, behind its potentials, blockchain also possessed many challenges and limitations. The highlighted problem is the usability aspect of blockchain technology examined from developer and user perspective. This paper tried to address this problem by proposing query functionalities, with the help of query layer system, to facilitate the developer and the user to access blockchain data easily. There are three main query functionalities that will be discussed in this paper: (1) finding blockchain data based on multiple search parameters (retrieval query), (2) providing simple statistical analysis from a collection of blockchain data (aggregate query) and (3) sorting blockchain data according to its blockchain component (ranking query). For the implementation stage, Ethereum is used as platform to provide blockchain network, MongoDB is used as cloud storage service and REST API is used as web services. For the testing stage, throughput and time response are used to evaluate the performance of the developed query functionalities in the query layer system. The results are: (1) the throughput of query layer system is lower than Ethereum service for blockchain data retrieval and (2) the time response of query layer system is affected by the number of thread and the amount of data stored in cloud storage.
Application of IoT (Internet of Things) is expanding rapidly as internet connects things in our homes and our personal devices and even our body, provides ease, entertainment and comfort to our daily lives. However, as everything personal is connected, security and privacy becomes a major challenge. Blockchain-based IoT can provide a completely trusted and transparent environment with its tamper-resistant data structure, timestamp, data encryption and distributed consensus. Since cryptocurrency is the first application of blockchains, most blockchain mechanisms like Ethereum provides token-based peer-to-peer payment system that allows payment using a custom currency which enables IoT devices to pay or receive token without a third-party inclusion. In this paper we proposed to apply blockchain mechanism to education/discipline of children at home by through token-based parental control in which parent can encourage good behaviors and discourage bad behaviors of children via tokens transferred via blockchain network. Current parental control is implemented in operating systems of smartphones that only prohibits the abuse of smartphone games or inappropriate web sites. However, this token-based parental control pay tokens to children with good behaviors that allow them to play or watch the proper contents as their rewards. Devices at home like television and computer are connected to the blockchain and accessible only when the user have a sufficient amount of tokens. Children are given incentives in term of token by their parents if they do their homework properly or help their parents. Besides that, smart contract feature in Ethereum allows application to be programmed in a blockchain enables monitoring the activities of children through blockchain. This paper introduces the design of the token-based parental control by using smart contract schemes of Ethereum blockchain with a simple smart home setup as a proof of concept.