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 immense promise of reinventing business processes has led to the development of alternative blockchain technologies, such as consortium blockchain, that can deal with some of the issues of public blockchains such as used in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. However, a consortium blockchain, where its tokens have no market value, suffers from a lack of a method for payment for services, since the authority is concentrated with the entities that secure payment. Here, we describe Niji, a new cross-chain payment protocol that allows parties to perform Bitcoin payment securely on a consortium chain, without any trusted third-party or mediator. Niji introduces templatization of a transaction to validate Bitcoin payments efficiently on different consortium blockchains. The process from payment to service provision runs autonomously without any interaction between parties. An experiment measuring the computational cost and latency demonstrates the feasibility and efficacy of our implementation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Using blockchain as a decentralized backend infrastructure has been attracting many startups entrepreneurs' and developers' attention. Blockchain records transactions permanently and protects them from undesirable tampering. It provides a reliable tamper-proof database which can be considered as a trustable resource for tracking previous system's state. In this paper, we present our access control application based on Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain and Hyperledger Composer to control access to physical places. The system components and modular architecture are illustrated, and we have extracted metadata include historian transactions' details arising from our demo test. Finally, the performance metrics and resources consumption are provided using Hyperledger Caliper, a benchmark framework for measuring Hyperledger blockchains performance.
Γεώργιος Σπαθούλας, Anastasija Collen, Pankaj Pandey, Niels Alexander Nijdam · 10 authors
The European research project GHOST challenges the traditional cyber security solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector by exploiting novel technologies, such as blockchain, to provide resilience and integrity of decision making on the communication exchange in a smart home context. When it comes to novel cyber security solutions for extremely heterogeneous environments like IoT and smart homes, the key focus is typically given to the understanding of network activities and elimination of suspicious traffic. The GHOST project adds an extra dimension to this approach by integrating blockchain technology at its core decision mechanism. On a daily basis, each GHOST installation is encountering malicious behaviour and suspicious IoT communications, where easy information sharing with other installations, as well as decentralised decision making, are mandatory features for the efficient protection of the end-user. GHOST's Smart Contracts (SC) are designed to tackle in an easy, yet productive way, the reporting on suspicious IP addresses which the IoT devices in a smart home are trying to communicate with. Two variations of blacklisting smart contracts are presented in this paper, covering a diverse spectrum of possible attack vectors while closely following the Privacy by Design (PbD) principles. A reputation scoring scheme for malicious IPs reporting is integrated in the SC, uncovering the implementation details on the penalisation of existing entries in case of malicious behaviour of reporting devices.
The Blockchain is an emerging paradigm that could solve security and trust issues for Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. We recently introduced in an IETF draft (“Blockchain Transaction Protocol for Constraint Nodes”) the BIoT paradigm, whose main idea is to insert sensor data in blockchain transactions. Because objects are not logically connected to blockchain platforms, controller entities forward all information needed for transaction forgery. Never less in order to generate cryptographic signatures, object needs some trusted computing resources. In previous papers we proposed the Four-Quater Architecture integrating general purpose unit (GPU), radio SoC, sensors/actuators and secure elements including TLS/DTLS stacks. These secure microcontrollers also manage crypto libraries required for blockchain operation. The BIoT concept has four main benefits: publication/duplication of sensors data in public and distributed ledgers, time stamping by the blockchain infrastructure, data authentication, and non repudiation.
Alexandre Carvalho Barbosa, Thays A. Oliveira, Vitor N. Coelho
The smart city debate will still be the scope of business, policy-making and territorial planning in the following years. Based on that, the paper aims to propose an interdisciplinary conceptualization of smart territories. The goal is to promote the contrary movement of megacities creation and also consolidate the geographical aspect of smartness. The concept was formulated based on the elements of sustainable territorial development, strategic spatial planning and smart governance. In addition, taking hand of a parallel literature review, the study explores the potential of creating complementary cryptocurrencies as a strategy of territorial planning. This term was built based on already existing complementary currency systems in distributed ledger technologies scope. The idea provided presents a great potential for poverty alleviation by bringing together financial and digital inclusion.
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)
As the deployments of IoT systems grow for a wide range of applications, there are new use-cases emerging where the organizations or individuals that own sensor devices are different from the individuals or organizations that have use for the data from those devices. In such settings it is helpful for the data consumer to be able to effortlessly get data streams in return for monetary payments. The advent of cryptocurrency technologies have made the establishment of bidirectional automatic data micro-payment channels (with data flowing in one direction and micro-payments in the other) feasible. We present an application layer protocol called the streaming data payment protocol (SDPP) which embodies this very idea. The protocol also makes provisions for the data provider to send automated invoices and the data consumer to provide signed receipts for data to be stored on an immutable distributed ledger for auditing and dispute resolution purposes. We present an implementation of SDPP using TCP for data transport and IOTA as both cryptocurrency and a distributed ledger.
Kolbeinn Karlsson, Weitao Jiang -, Stephen B. Wicker, Danny Adams · 7 authors
While the intersection of blockchains and the Internet of Things (IoT) have received considerable research interest lately, Nakamoto-style blockchains possess a number of qualities that make them poorly suited for many IoT scenarios. Specifically, they require high network connectivity and are power-intensive. This is a drawback in IoT environments where battery-constrained nodes form an unreliable ad hoc network such as in digital agriculture. In this paper we present Vegvisir, a partition-tolerant blockchain for use in power-constrained IoT environments with limited network connectivity. It is a permissioned, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-structured blockchain that can be used to create a shared, tamperproof data repository that keeps track of data provenance. We discuss the use cases, architecture, and challenges of such a blockchain.
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)
Hoang Tam Vo, Ziyuan Wang, Dileban Karunamoorthy, John Wagner · 6 authors
Recently, we have witnessed a trend that many industries are forming consortiums and attempting to accelerate efficiency and reduce cost by using blockchain technology. Nevertheless, there is a clear missing capability of cross-industry and cross-blockchain interoperability. Currently, most blockchain business networks operate in isolation without external data transfer or multi-blockchain interactions. For blockchain technology to ultimately deliver on its promise, blockchain networks must be able to scale from networks addressing individual business processes to very large scale networks of interconnected decentralized autonomous organizations addressing much larger business problems at the level of entire industries and across industries. In this paper, we envision the inception of Internet of Blockchains (IoB), where homogeneous and heterogeneous decentralized networks communicate to facilitate cross-chain transactions of value, data and state transition. In addition, we also discuss interledger techniques that are essential for enabling industry-scale blockchain networks as well as achieving scalable interconnectivity between disparate, distributed ledgers.
C. Kouzinopoulos, Konstantinos M. Giannoutakis, Konstantinos Votis, Dimitrios Tzovaras · 10 authors
The H2020 European research project Safe-Guarding Home IoT Environments with Personalised Real-time Risk Control (GHOST) aims to develop a cyber-security layer on IoT smart home installations. The proposed system analyses packet-level data flows for building patterns of communications between IoT devices and external entities. To ensure non-repudiation, integrity and authentication of the data captured, they are stored in a Blockchain, a distributed ledger network, as digitally-signed transactions. Since the data can potentially include sensitive user information, it is imperative to promote trust by informing users about the operating principles of the network as well as to request the acceptance of a consent form by them. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Forms of Consent application, a Distributed Application that interacts with a set of Smart Contracts deployed on a private Ethereum network. The application is being developed as part of the GHOST project.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has already reshaped and transformed our lives in many ways, ranging from how we communicate with people or manage our health to how we drive our cars and manage our homes. With the rapid development of the IoT ecosystem in a wide range of applications, IoT devices and data are going to be traded as commodities in the marketplace in the near future, similar to cloud services or physical objects. Developing such a trading platform has previously been identified as one of the key grand challenges in the integration of IoT and data science. Deployment of such a platform raises concerns about the security and privacy of data and devices since their ownership is hard to trace and manage without a central trusted authority. A central trusted authority is not a viable solution for a fully decentralized and distributed IoT ecosystem with a large number of distributed device vendors and consumers. Blockchain, as a decentralized system, removes the requirement for a trusted thirdparty by allowing participants to verify data correctness and ensure its immutability. IoT devices can use blockchain to register themselves and organize, store, and share streams of data effectively and reliably. We demonstrate the applicability of blockchain to IoT devices and data management with an aim of providing end-to-end trust for trading. We also give a brief introduction to the topics and challenges for future research toward developing a trustworthy trading platform for IoT ecosystems.
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 Internet of Things (IoT) is a name coined to the digital ecosystem of numerous internet connected devices. It brings the physical world closer to the digital one and as a result, allows for new applications and services. The emergence of Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, presents a possible solution to ensure trust in decentralized systems. Blockchain brings trust, immutability, and verifiability of a distributed ledger in a decentralized network which could be useful to build trust in IoT. However, the integration of IoT with Blockchain involves a number of challenges. The use of Blockchain within the IoT is a recent and a fast paced topic. Therefore, conducting a systematic literature review is essential to understand what has been proposed on the topic. Recent work has provided a systematic review with a focus on Bitcoin. In this paper, we present a systematic review of more recent work on Blockchain and IoT, with a broader focus on Blockchain platforms beyond Bitcoin. Our work provides an overview of what has been done so far on the use of Blockchain and IoT.
Uchi Ugobame Uchibeke, Kevin A. Schneider, Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Ralph Deters
In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has not only resulted in an explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields, but also given rise to concerns in the security and protection of data during storage, transmission, processing, and access. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions in a secure, flexible, verifiable and permanent way. Transactions in a blockchain can be an exchange of an asset, the execution of the terms of a smart contract, or an update to a record. In this paper, we have developed a blockchain access control ecosystem that gives asset owners the sovereign right to effectively manage access control of large data sets and protect against data breaches. The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric blockchain is used to run the business network while the Hyperledger composer modeling tool is used to implement the smart contracts or transaction processing functions that run on the blockchain network.
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)
Blockchain based supply chain systems benefit from immutability and auditability properties. We develop and implement a blockchain based supply chain system in Ethereum platform. We find and address several challenges both in system design and performance issues. We focus on system design for transaction validation, information retrieval efficiency and fault-tolerant query mechanism. We describe our implementation details to bypass some of the limitations in Ethereum and smart contracts. We design a smart contract to efficiently organize miners' local data structure for transaction validation and information retrieval. We design Ethereum smart contract that allows transaction validation based on a priori knowledge of product life cycle. Our system achieves constant time latency per query independent of the blockchain length. We also consider supply chain systems with malicious miners that respond with false data upon query. We develop a sampling query and majority voting method accordingly. We evaluate our system's performance in emulated setting and show that even with 30% malicious miners, we still achieve reasonable accuracy in only 0.0723 seconds response time on average.
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)
Yiyun Zhou, Meng Han, Liyuan Liu, Yan Wang · 6 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) global market is growing significantly fast in recent years, from a wearable small watch to a giant airplane. The Smart-home is one of the most popular applications which can improve the resident's life quality. However, the security and privacy issues of homeowner bring emerging challenges while more and more data are collecting and sharing by the instances of different IoT devices within the Smart-home. Confront the challenge, an emerging charming technology blockchain provides a private, secure, and decentralized mechanism for the data usage. But, there are still many challenges for the application of blockchain such as the efficiency, storage, and energy cost, etc. This paper proposes IoT architecture in Smart-home environment based on blockchain and smart contract with the comprehensive consideration of the primary challenges. Our approach exemplifies the three core components in Smart-home: smart contract, private blockchain, and public blockchain. Each Smart-home contains their unique private chain. We present the application scenarios in our architecture and discuss the principles of blockchain smart contract application for Smart-home.
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)
Kwame-Lante Wright, Martin Martinez, Uday Chadha, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Edge computing has emerged as an effective offloading strategy for constrained devices. It enables low-capability devices to leverage nearby resources for assistance with computationally-intensive tasks. We envision a future where Internet of Things (IoT) devices may autonomously transact with other more powerful devices to request such offloading services. We believe blockchain-based technologies can help facilitate this process by tracking usage and managing payments. In this work we introduce SmartEdge, an Ethereum-based smart contract for edge computing and show that it is a low-cost, low-overhead tool for compute-resource management.
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)
Internet of Things (IoT) devices proliferation is on the rise, where the number of connected devices has surpassed 7 billion devices in 2017, whereas insights foresee a number of 20-50 billion connections by year 2020. Most of those devices are deployed in heterogeneous and complex networks which imposes many challenges on the devices management functionality. Among those challenges is the identity management which pertains to how devices' identities are authenticated and verified in addition to how devices establish the means for authorizing and controlling access to data and services. Blockchain as a distributed ledger technology positions itself as a suitable candidate to address this challenge. That is mainly attributed to Blockchain's use of cryptographic identifiers, records immutability, and provenance. These features, together, provide a platform to implement the functions of IoT devices identity management that can ensure a global and unique identity for the devices, and also provide the mechanism to maintain it throughout the device life cycle. This paper presents a semi-decentralized Blockchain-based IoT identity management framework that provides features of identity creation and transfer of ownership, along with the capability of identity portability among networks visited by the devices. For validation, we describe a set of smart contracts that provide the functions of the registrar and management contracts.
This review focuses on the evolution of cloud computing and distributed ledger technologies (blockchains) over the last decade. Cloud computing relies mainly on a conceptually centralized service provisioning model, while blockchain technologies originate from a peer-to-peer and a completely distributed approach. Still, noteworthy commonalities between both approaches are often overlooked by researchers. Therefore, to the best of the authors knowledge, this paper reviews both domains in parallel for the first time. We conclude that both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of centralized service provisioning approaches are often the disadvantages of distributed ledger approaches and vice versa. It is obviously an interesting question whether both approaches could be combined in a way that the advantages can be added while the disadvantages could be avoided. We derive a software stack that could build the foundation unifying the best of these two worlds and that would avoid existing shortcomings like vendor lock-in, some security problems, and inherent platform dependencies.
Distributed blockchain ledgers are on the verge of becoming a disruptive technology, profoundly impacting a wide range of industries and established applications, such as cryptocurrency, and allowing for novel use cases in both the public sector (e.g., eGovernment, eHealth, etc.) and the private sector (e.g., finance, supply chain management, etc.). Blockchains promise 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. As the technology is still in its infancy, a number of pain points must be addressed in order to make distributed ledgers more dependable, scalable, and pervasive. In this paper, we present the research landscape in distributed ledger technology (DLT). To do so, we describe a taxonomy of blockchain applications called blockchain generations. We also present the DCS properties (Decentralization, Consistency, and Scalability) as an analogy to the CAP theorem. Furthermore, we provide a general structure of the blockchain platform which decomposes the distributed ledger into six layers: Application, Modeling, Contract, System, Data, and Network. Finally, we classify research angles across three dimensions: DCS properties impacted, targeted applications, and related layers.
Blockchain, as a mechanism to decentralize services, security, and verifiability, offers a peer-to-peer system in which distributed nodes collaboratively affirm transaction provenance. In particular, blockchain enforces continuous storage of transaction history, secured via digital signature, and affirmed through consensus. In this study, we consider the recent surge in blockchain interest as an alternative to traditional centralized systems, and consider the emerging applications thereof. In particular, we assess the key techniques required for blockchain implementation, offering a primer to guide research practitioners. We first outline the blockchain framework in general, and then provide a detailed review of the component data and network structures. Additionally, we consider the breadth of applications to which blockchain has been applied, broadly implicating Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Cloud and Edge computing paradigms, along with many other emerging applications. Finally, we assess the various challenges to blockchain implementation for widespread practical use, considering the security vulnerabilities to majority attacks, selfish mining, and privacy leakage, as well as performance limitations of blockchain platforms in terms of scalability and availability.
Chao Qu, Ming Tao, Jie Zhang, Xiaoyu Hong · 5 authors
With the fast development of mobile Internet, Internet of Things (IoT) has been found in many important applications recently. However, it still faces many challenges in security and privacy. Blockchain (BC) technology, which underpins the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, has played an important role in the development of decentralized and data intensive applications running on millions of devices. In this paper, to establish the relationship between IoT and BC for device credibility verification, we propose a framework with layers, intersect, and self-organization Blockchain Structures (BCS). In this new framework, each BCS is organized by Blockchain technology. We describe the credibility verification method and show how it provide the verification. The efficiency and security analysis are also given in this paper, including its response time, storage efficiency, and verification. The conducted experiments have been shown to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method in satisfying the credible requirement achieved by Blockchain technology and certain advantages in storage space and response time.
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing blockchain protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. We start by describing the blockchains and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with blockchain technologies. Then, we provide an overview of the application domains of blockchain technologies in IoT, e.g., Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Energy, Internet of Cloud, Edge computing, etc. Moreover, we provide a classification of threat models, which are considered by blockchain protocols in IoT networks, into five main categories, namely identity-based attacks, manipulation-based attacks, cryptanalytic attacks, reputation-based attacks, and service-based attacks. In addition, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward secure and privacy-preserving blockchain technologies with respect to the blockchain model, specific security goals, performance, limitations, computation complexity, and communication overhead. Based on the current survey, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions in the blockchain technologies for IoT.