Blockchain has proved itself to be tamper resistant and secure. It is increasingly getting attention from companies changing from centralized to decentralized systems. This paper proposes a system for identity and access management using blockchain technology to support authentication and authorization of entities in a digital system. A prototype demonstrates the application of blockchain in identity and access management using the Hyperledger Fabric framework. It provides a proof of concept based on a use case concerning Electronic Health Records from the healthcare domain where an immutable and auditable history is desired for data concerning patients. Basic authentication and authorization operations are able to execute in 2-3 seconds with an initial size of blockchain of about 3.8 MB covering physicians in Denmark.
Muniba Memon, Syed Shahbaz Hussain, Umair Ahmed Bajwa, Asad Ikhlas
In the world of Internet of Things, social media, and cloud computing, blockchain is the latest addition to the technology. The swift development of blockchain and its respected applications has made it a force to be recognized. But the scope of blockchain is not limited to bitcoin or the cryptocurrencies implementation. This paper enlightens the stipulation of blockchain beyond the bitcoin. Furthermore, this paper reveals the insights of blockchain technology concepts, evolution, mechanisms and challenges based on literature review. This paper identified the complications or challenges in implementation of blockchain technology in real-world applications. Secure implementation of blockchain technology on small scale applications is the key problem that still need to be addressed. The proposed consensus mechanism would be useful for secure implementation of the blockchain on small-scale application or projects.
Aug 1, 2018·2018 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/ 12th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Mohammad Jabed Morshed Chowdhury, Alan Colman, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Jun Han · 5 authors
In recent times, Bitcoin has gained special attention both from industry and academia. The underlying technology that enables Bitcoin (or more generally crypto-currency) is called blockchain. At the core of the blockchain technology is a data structure that keeps record of the transactions in the network. The special feature that distinguishes it from existing technology is its immutability of the stored records. To achieve immutability, it uses consensus and cryptographic mechanisms. As the data is stored in distributed nodes this technology is also termed as "Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)". As many researchers and practitioners are joining the hype of blockchain, some of them are raising the question about the fundamental difference between blockchain and traditional database and its real value or potential. In this paper, we present a critical analysis of both technologies based on a survey of the research literature where blockchain solutions are applied to various scenarios. Based on this analysis, we further develop a decision tree diagram that will help both practitioners and researchers to choose the appropriate technology for their use cases. Using our proposed decision tree we evaluate a sample of the existing works to see to what extent the blockchain solutions have been used appropriately in the relevant problem domains.
Xueping Liang, Sachin Shetty, Deepak K. Tosh, Daniel Bowden · 6 authors
Enabled by mobile and wearable technology, personal health data delivers immense and increasing value for healthcare, benefiting both care providers and medical research. The secure and convenient sharing of personal health data is crucial to the improvement of the interaction and collaboration of the healthcare industry. Faced with the potential privacy issues and vulnerabilities existing in current personal health data storage and sharing systems, as well as the blockchain integration concerns summarized in this paper, an innovative user-centric health data sharing solution by utilizing a decentralized but permissioned blockchain is proposed to protect privacy and enhance access management, with the help of channel formation scheme supported by the blockchain. By developing a web application for Personal Health Data Management (PHDM) systems, the individuals are capable of synchronizing sensor data from wearable devices with online account and controlling data access from any third parties. A mobile application is deployed to collect health data from personal wearable devices, manual input, and medical devices, and synchronize data to the cloud for data sharing with healthcare providers and health insurance companies. To preserve the integrity of health data, a proof of integrity and validation, is made available to each record, which is permanently retrievable from cloud database and is anchored to the blockchain network. Moreover, for scalable and performance considerations, a tree-based data processing and batching method is adopted to deal with large data sets of personal health data collected and uploaded by the mobile platform. To enable a trusted data access record, the Intel Software Extensions technology is utilized to ensure the accountability for data access and token based access control scheme is enhanced with the trusted hardware. Analysis shows that the proposed approach provides user privacy and accountability with acceptable overhead and scalability.
Interest in green energy has increased worldwide. Therefore, smart grid projects to form a more efficient and eco-friendly intelligent grid by combining information technology (IT) technology with the existing grid are actively being conducted. In Korea, a national-level smart grid project road map has been confirmed, and an action plan has been prepared. Despite such actions, there may appear various threat scenarios in the application of the IT to the grid as a reverse function. Security technology is a measure to respond to such threats effectively. The security technology of a smart grid is an important factor that is directly related to the success or failure of the smart grid project. A smart grid is a new type of next-generation grid born of the fusion with IT. If the smart grid, the backbone of the power supply, is damaged by a cyberattack, it may cause huge damage, such as a nationwide power outage. In fact, there is an increasing cyberattack threat, and the cyber security threat to the smart grid is not insignificant. Furthermore, the legal system related to information protection is also important in order to support it systematically. In this paper, the necessity of the smart grid is examined, and the industry’s initiative toward the smart grid security threat and threat response is examined. In this paper, we also suggest a security plan of applying Rainbowchain, the Blockchain technology, to the smart grid and energy exchange. We propose achieving superior performance and security functions by using Rainbowchain, which contains seven authentication techniques among existing Blockchain technologies, and propose the ecosystem and architecture necessary for its application.
1Food safety is becoming more and more serious topic worldwide. To tackle the food safety issues from the technical aspect, people need a trusted food traceability system that can track and monitor the whole lifespan of food production, including the processes of food raw material cultivation/breeding, processing, transporting, warehousing, and selling etc. In this paper, we propose a trusted, self-organized, open and ecological food traceability system based on blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, which involves all parties of a smart agriculture ecosystem, even if they may not trust each other. We use IoT devices to replace manual recording and verification as many as possible, which can reduce the human intervention to the system effectively. Furthermore, we plan to use the smart contract technology to help the law-executor to find problems and process them timely.
As an emerging decentralized architecture and distributed computing paradigm underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain has attracted intensive attention in both research and applications in recent years. The key advantage of this technology lies in the fact that it enables the establishment of secured, trusted, and decentralized autonomous ecosystems for various scenarios, especially for better usage of the legacy devices, infrastructure, and resources. In this paper, we presented a systematic investigation of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Related fundamental rationales, technical advantages, existing and potential ecosystems of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are discussed, and a six-layer reference model of the blockchain framework is proposed with detailed description for each of its six layers. Potential applications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies are also addressed. Our aim here is to provide guidance and reference for future research along this promising and important direction.
While the smart surveillance system enhanced by the Internet of Things (IoT) technology becomes an essential part of Smart Cities, it also brings new concerns in security of the data. Compared to the traditional surveillance systems that is built following a monolithic architecture to carry out lower level operations, such as monitoring and recording, the modern surveillance systems are expected to support more scalable and decentralized solutions for advanced video stream analysis at the large volumes of distributed edge devices. In addition, the centralized architecture of the conventional surveillance systems is vulnerable to single point of failure and privacy breach owning to the lack of protection to the surveillance feed. This position paper introduces a novel secure smart surveillance system based on microservices architecture and blockchain technology. Encapsulating the video analysis algorithms as various independent microservices not only isolates the video feed from different sectors, but also improve the system availability and robustness by decentralizing the operations. The blockchain technology securely synchronizes the video analysis databases among microservices across surveillance domains, and provides tamper proof of data in the trustless network environment. Smart contract enabled access authorization strategy prevents any unauthorized user from accessing the microservices and offers a scalable, decentralized and fine-grained access control solution for smart surveillance systems.
Pietro Danzi, Anders E. Kalør, Čedomir Stefanović, Petar Popovski
The emerging blockchain protocols provide a decentralized architecture that is suitable of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) interactions. However, keeping a local copy of the blockchain ledger is infeasible for low-power and memory-constrained devices. For this reason, they are equipped with lightweight software implementations that only download the useful data structures, e.g. state of accounts, from the blockchain network, when they are updated. In this paper, we consider and analyze a novel scheme, implemented by the nodes of the blockchain network, which aggregates the blockchain data in periodic updates and further reduces the communication cost of the connected IoT devices. We show that the aggregation period should be selected based on the channel quality, the offered rate, and the statistics of updates of the useful data structures. The results, obtained for the Ethereum protocol, illustrate the benefits of the aggregation scheme in terms of a reduced duty cycle of the device, particularly for low signal-to-noise ratios, and the overall reduction of the amount of information transmitted in downlink (e.g., from the wireless base station to the IoT device). A potential application of the proposed scheme is to let the IoT device request more information than actually needed, hence increasing its privacy, while keeping the communication cost constant. In conclusion, our work is the first to provide rigorous guidelines for the design of lightweight blockchain protocols with wireless connectivity.
Information from surveillance video is essential for situational awareness (SAW). Nowadays, a prohibitively large amount of surveillance data is being generated continuously by ubiquitously distributed video sensors. It is very challenging to immediately identify the objects of interest or zoom in suspicious actions from thousands of video frames. Making the big data indexable is critical to tackle this problem. It is ideal to generate pattern indexes in a real-time, on-site manner on the video streaming instead of depending on the batch processing at the cloud centers. The modern edge-fog-cloud computing paradigm allows implementation of time sensitive tasks at the edge of the network. The on-site edge devices collect the information sensed in format of frames and extracts useful features. The near-site fog nodes conduct the contextualization and classification of the features. The remote cloud center is in charge of more data intensive and computing intensive tasks. However, exchanging the index information among devices in different layers raises security concerns where an adversary can capture or tamper with features to mislead the surveillance system. In this paper, a blockchain enabled scheme is proposed to protect the index data through an encrypted secure channel between the edge and fog nodes. It reduces the chance of attacks on the small edge and fog devices. The feasibility of the proposal is validated through intensive experimental analysis.
Paolo Missier, Shaimaa Bajoudah, Angelo Capossele, Andrea Gaglione · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) data are increasingly viewed as a new form of massively distributed and large scale digital assets, which are continuously generated by millions of connected devices. The real value of such assets can only be realized by allowing IoT data trading to occur on a marketplace that rewards every single producer and consumer, at a very granular level. Crucially, we believe that such a marketplace should not be owned by anybody, and should instead fairly and transparently self-enforce a well defined set of governance rules. In this paper we address some of the technical challenges involved in realizing such a marketplace. We leverage emerging blockchain technologies to build a decentralized, trusted, transparent and open architecture for IoT traffic metering and contract compliance, on top of the largely adopted IoT brokered data infrastructure. We discuss an Ethereum-based prototype implementation and experimentally evaluate the overhead cost associated with Smart Contract transactions, concluding that a viable business model can indeed be associated with our technical approach.
Modern power systems are rapidly evolving into complex cyber-physical systems. The increasingly complex interaction among different energy entities calls for a secure, efficient, and robust cyber infrastructure. As an emerging distributed computing technology, Blockchain provides a secure environment to support such interactions. This paper gives a prospective on using Blockchain as a secure, distributed cyber infrastructure for the future grid. Firstly, the basic principles of Blockchain and its state-of-the-art are introduced. Then, a Blockchain based smart grid cyber-physical infrastructure model is proposed. Afterwards, some promising application domains of Blockchain in future grids are presented. Following this, some potential challenges are discussed.
Gihan J. Mendis, Yifu Wu, Jin Wei, Moein Sabounchi · 5 authors
Thanks to the advances in machine learning, data-driven analysis tools have become valuable solutions for various applications. However, there still remain essential challenges to develop effective data-driven methods because of the need to acquire a large amount of data and to have sufficient computing power to handle the data. In many instances these challenges are addressed by relying on a dominant cloud computing vendor, but, although commercial cloud vendors provide valuable platforms for data analytics, they can suffer from a lack of transparency, security, and privacy-perservation. Furthermore, reliance on cloud servers prevents applying big data analytics in environments where the computing power is scattered. To address these challenges, a decentralize, secure, and privacy-preserving computing paradigm is proposed to enable an asynchronized cooperative computing process amongst scattered and untrustworthy computing nodes that may have limited computing power and computing intelligence. This paradigm is designed by exploring blockchain, decentralized learning, homomorphic encryption, and software defined networking(SDN) techniques. The performance of the proposed paradigm is evaluated via different scenarios in the simulation section.
Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Marco Steger · 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 for fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block to avoid large sized blocks is proposed. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
Ruinian Li, Tianyi Song, Bo Mei, Hong Li · 6 authors
With the dramatically increasing deployment of IoT devices, storing and protecting the large volume of IoT data has become a significant issue. Traditional cloud-based IoT structures impose extremely high computation and storage demands on the cloud servers. Meanwhile, the strong dependencies on the centralized servers bring significant trust issues. To mitigate these problems, we propose a distributed data storage scheme employing blockchain and cetrificateless cryptography. Our scheme eliminates the traditional centralized servers by leveraging the blockchain miners who perform “transaction” verifications and records audit with the help of certificateless cryptography. We present a clear definition of the transactions in a non-cryptocurrency system and illustrate how the transactions are processed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work designing a secure and accountable IoT storage system using blockchain. Additionally, we extend our scheme to enable data trading and elaborate how data trading can be efficiently and effectively achieved.
Currently, blockchain technology, which is decentralized and may provide tamper-resistance to recorded data, is experiencing exponential growth in industry and research. In this paper, we propose the MIStore, a blockchain-based medical insurance storage system. Due to blockchain's the property of tamper-resistance, MIStore may provide a high-credibility to users. In a basic instance of the system, there are a hospital, patient, insurance company and n servers. Specifically, the hospital performs a (t, n)-threshold MIStore protocol among the n servers. For the protocol, any node of the blockchain may join the protocol to be a server if the node and the hospital wish. Patient's spending data is stored by the hospital in the blockchain and is protected by the n servers. Any t servers may help the insurance company to obtain a sum of a part of the patient's spending data, which servers can perform homomorphic computations on. However, the n servers cannot learn anything from the patient's spending data, which recorded in the blockchain, forever as long as more than n - t servers are honest. Besides, because most of verifications are performed by record-nodes and all related data is stored at the blockchain, thus the insurance company, servers and the hospital only need small memory and CPU. Finally, we deploy the MIStore on the Ethererum blockchain and give the corresponding performance evaluation.
Most of the existing RFID based ownership transfer protocols are in need of TTP or require reader to reader communication in a centralized system. In the post supply chain, the products are to be tracked to prove their originality in a distributed environment. This paper aims to provide a verifiable ownership transfer of products attached with an RFID tag using blockchain technology to address various security requirements. The proposed protocol consists of two phases; in the first phase the buyer commits to buy the product and in the second phase actual ownership is transferred from the seller to the buyer. Analysis of the proposed protocol is carried out and it shows that our protocol is relatively better than the existing related schemes with respect to security requirements.
Existing service ecosystems typically rely on some centralized service registries (e.g., ProgrammableWeb.com) as "middle people" to record service behaviors thus to provide service ranking and recommendation. Excessive centralization increasingly becomes the bottleneck and hinders the further growth of the service ecosystems. As the first attempt to apply the fundamental technique underneath the emerging Bitcoin network into the field of service oriented computing, this paper proposes to build a service ecosystem as a decentralized blockchain-oriented service network, called Decentralized Service Eco-System (DSES). Whenever any activity occurs in the system (e.g., APIs are used together in a published mashup), all involved parties will individually store and maintain a copy of the detailed record (provenance) at their local databases. Such a distributed database-oriented solution will enable services who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states. In this way, service discovery and recommendation can be realized in a distributed manner that promises higher scalability and maintainability. As a proof of concept, a prototyping system of DSES is constructed using the real-world data from ProgrammableWeb.com, based on the INKchain, a newly open-source consortium blockchain mechanism extending the Hyperledger Fabric.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The number of deployed Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been increasing rapidly, and security has become significantly important in IoT environments. However, security issues remain challenging due to constraints of IoT devices. One critical security issue is that attacks tamper the firmware of IoT devices. Once the firmware is tampered, it is difficult to notice and recover the tampered firmware. For the integrity of firmware, this paper proposes a new blockchain-based firmware verification system, called Chain Veri. We overcome vulnerabilities of previous studies such as fudging firmware verification. Furthermore, unlike previous studies that presented only the concepts and ideas, we implement Chain Veri from scratch and carry out performance evaluation on storage consumption and CPU cycles to run Chain Veri on IoT device. Our results show that only 1.2MB of storage is used to verify 2,845 devices. Also, 1,692 CPU cycles are to generate a palette in ChainVeri.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The rapid development of Internet of Things technology has led to the sharp increase of the number of interconnected devices. A large amount of data is generated by large-scale loT devices. In this paper, we propose PDash with parallel distributed architecture, a scalable blockchain-based platform for loT data storage and sharing. PDash aims to solve the bottleneck problem of blockchain system: scalability, and makes it possible for users to keep ownership of their own data as well as share data securely with economic feedback. PDash integrates decentralized blockchain network and distributed storage network to achieve secure data storage, validation and sharing, and utilizes multiple encryption technologies to enable efficient interaction between two parallel distributed networks.
Blockchain technology has been recently applied in many applications including cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Internet of Things, healthcare, and supply chain management. The essential properties are the capabilities in doing verification and maintaining data integrity which would be hardly guaranteed in other systems. As millions of packages are daily sent, information related to those packages must be protected since they are prone to attacks such as phishing. In addition, current package delivery systems are mostly implemented on a centralized platform which would be vulnerable to different kind of attacks. In this paper, we propose a package delivery system based on the blockchain technology which would help enhance the security with data integrity and the verification of both users and data. We evaluate the performance of our system using two operations: insertions and reads/writes under high workload. We found that our system performance for both insertions and reads/writes is highly sensitive to the number of chains rather than the number of transactions per chain. But, the time spent for reads/writes is much higher than the time spent for insertions.