Popularly known for powering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchains is seen as a disruptive technology capable of impacting a wide variety of domains, ranging from finance to governance, by offering superior security, reliability, and transparency in a decentralized manner. In this tutorial presentation, we first study the original Bitcoin design, as well as Ethereum and Hyperledger, and reflect on their design from an academic perspective. We provide an overview of potential applications and associated research challenges, as well as a survey of ongoing research projects. We mention opportunities blockchain creates for event-based systems. Finally, we conclude with a walkthrough showing the process of developing a decentralized application (ĐSApp), using a popular Smart Contract language (Solidity) for the blockchain platform of Ethereum.
Jianli Pan, Jianyu Wang, A. MARIA HESTER, Ismail AlQerm · 6 authors
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On the one hand, IoT devices are "weak" and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively "vulnerable" facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we design and prototype an edge-IoT framework named "EdgeChain" based on blockchain and smart contracts. The core idea is to integrate a permissioned blockchain and the internal currency or "coin" system to link the edge cloud resource pool with each IoT device' account and resource usage, and hence behavior of the IoT devices. EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management system to control how much resource IoT devices can obtain from edge servers, based on pre-defined rules on priority, application types and past behaviors. Smart contracts are used to enforce the rules and policies to regulate the IoT device behavior in a non-deniable and automated manner. All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into blockchain for secure data logging and auditing. We implement an EdgeChain prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ideas. The results show that while gaining the security benefits of blockchain and smart contracts, the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is within a reasonable and acceptable range.
Pradip Kumar Sharma, Shailendra Rathore, Jong Hyuk Park
The winds of change are blowing toward the multibillion dollar global consumer electronics (CE) industry, which includes companies that are engaged in the manufacturing of smart devices to enable smartconnected vehicles, transportation, health-care systems, home automation, and smart industry in the smart-city network. The rapid increase in the number and diversity of smart devices connected to the Internet has given rise to concerns about scalability, efficiency, flexibility, and availability in the existing smart-city network. The imminent energy crisis, radiofrequency spectrum, and constraints on the lifetime of smart devices have also emerged as critical challenges. To address these challenges, this article presents DistArch-SCNet, the efficient, scalable, blockchain-based distributed smart-city network architecture enabled by the light-fidelity (Li-Fi) communication technique.
A blockchain is a datastructure that is an append-only chain of blocks. Each\nblock contains a set of transaction and has a cryptographic link back to\nits predecessor. The cryptographic link serves to protect the integrity of\nthe blockchain. A key property of blockchain systems is that it allows mu-\ntually distrusting entities to reach consensus over a unique order in which\ntransactions are appended. The most common usage of blockchains is in\ncryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.\nIn this thesis we use blockchain technology to design a scalable architec-\nture for a storage system that can provide strong data integrity and ensure the\npermanent availability of the data. We study recent literature in blockchain\nand cryptography to identify the desired characteristics of such a system. In\ncomparison to similar systems, we are able to gain increased performance by\ndesigning ours around a permissioned blockchain, allowing only a predefined\nset of nodes to write to the ledger. A prototype of the system is built on top\nof existing open-source software. An experimental evaluation using different\nquorum sizes of the prototype is also presented.
Bled eConference, organized by University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, has been shaping electronic interactions since 1988. Bled eConference is the oldest, most traditional and well renowned conference in the field with more than 30 years of tradition. The theme of this year’s conference is dedicated to “Digital Transformation – Meeting the Challenges”. The evolution of digital technologies and solutions has significantly impacted the way in which business is conducted and have big implications on our lives. Nowadays digital economy calls for transformation of businesses, governments, education and societies as whole. It also calls for enabling policies and politics for cross border and global digital business. In this year’s conference, we address various aspects of digital transformation and provide directions and guidelines for organizations to meet and overcome these challenges on their way towards successful digital transformation. Themes covered in the papers of these proceedings are focused on: digital transformation; business model innovation; blockchain and social media; big data, data science, and decision support systems; e-health, digital wellness and wellbeing; new applications and organizational models; and novel approaches and cases in education in digital economy.
Hashgraph is data structure and consensus algorithm that is fast, with a very high throughput and low consensus latency, secure because of the asynchronous byzantine fault tolerant and fair due to the fairness of access, ordering, and timestamps. These properties enable new decentralized applications such as a stock market, improved collaborative applications, games, and auctions. Hashgraph is a new consensus protocol that has garnered attention lately by being projected as a technology that will make blockchains obsolete. Hashgraph currently scales only in the number of transactions processed but does not scale with the number of nodes in the network. Hashgraph will face the same issues that other public blockchains are facing today and may not be able to maintain its security and performance. In fact, scalability is still an open problem for public blockchains.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Supply Chain monitoring applications rely on messaging protocols for exchanging data. Contemporary IoT deployments widely use the publish-subscribe messaging model because of its resource-efficiency. However, the systems with publish-subscribe messaging model employ a centralized architecture, wherein the data from all the devices in the application network flows via a central broker to the subscribers. Such a centralized architecture make publish-subscribe messaging model susceptible to a central point of failure. Besides, it provides an opportunity for the organization that owns the broker to tamper with the data. In this work, we contribute Trinity, a novel distributed publish-subscribe broker with blockchain-based immutability. Trinity distributes the data published to one of the brokers in the network to all the brokers in the network. The distributed data is stored in an immutable ledger through the use of the blockchain technology. Furthermore, Trinity executes smart contracts to validate the data before saving the data on the blockchain. Through the use of a blockchain network, Trinity can guarantee persistence, ordering, and immutability across trust boundaries. Our evaluation results show that Trinity consumes minimal resources, and the use of smart contracts enable the stakeholders to automate the data management processes. To the best of our knowledge, Trinity is the first framework that combines the components of the blockchain technology with the publish-subscribe messaging model.
Hany F. Atlam, Ahmed Alenezi, Madini O. Alassafi, Gary Wills
The Internet of Things (IoT) has extended the internet connectivity to reach not just computers and humans, but most of our environment things. The IoT has the potential to connect billions of objects simultaneously which has the impact of improving information sharing needs that result in improving our life. Although the IoT benefits are unlimited, there are many challenges facing adopting the IoT in the real world due to its centralized server/client model. For instance, scalability and security issues that arise due to the excessive numbers of IoT objects in the network. The server/client model requires all devices to be connected and authenticated through the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, moving the IoT system into the decentralized path may be the right decision. One of the popular decentralization systems is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management processes which can solve many of IoT issues, especially security. This paper provides an overview of the integration of the blockchain with the IoT with highlighting the integration benefits and challenges. The future research directions of blockchain with IoT are also discussed. We conclude that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.
Roberto Di Pietro, Xavier Salleras, Matteo Signorini, Erez Waisbard
One of the biggest challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) is to bridge the currently fragmented trust domains. The traditional PKI model relies on a common root of trust and does not fit well with the heterogeneous IoT ecosystem where constrained devices belong to independent administrative domains. In this work we describe a distributed trust model for the IoT that leverages the existing trust domains and bridges them to create end-to-end trust between IoT devices without relying on any common root of trust. Furthermore we define a new cryptographic primitive, denoted as obligation chain designed as a credit-based Blockchain with a built-in reputation mechanism. Its innovative design enables a wide range of use cases and business models that are simply not possible with current Blockchain-based solutions while not experiencing traditional blockchain delays. We provide a security analysis for both the obligation chain and the overall architecture and provide experimental tests that show its viability and quality.
Zijian Bao, Wenbo Shi, Debiao He, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
There has been increasing interest in the potential of blockchain in enhancing the security of devices and systems, such as Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we present a blockchain-based IoT security architecture, IoTchain. The three-tier architecture comprises an authentication layer, a blockchain layer and an application layer, and is designed to achieve identity authentication, access control, privacy protection, lightweight feature, regional node fault tolerance, denial-of-service resilience, and storage integrity. We also evaluate the performance of IoTchain to demonstrate its utility in an IoT deployment.
Blockchain technologies, such as smart contracts, present a unique interface for machine-to-machine communication that provides a secure, append-only record that can be shared without trust and without a central administrator. We study the possibilities and limitations of using smart contracts for machine-to-machine communication by designing, implementing, and evaluating AGasP, an application for automated gasoline purchases. We find that using smart contracts allows us to directly address the challenges of transparency, longevity, and trust in IoT applications. However, real-world applications using smart contracts must address their important trade-offs, such as performance, privacy, and the challenge of ensuring they are written correctly.
Jun 1, 2018·2018 5th IEEE International Conference on Cyber Security and Cloud Computing (CSCloud)/2018 4th IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Scalable Cloud (EdgeCom)
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency that was introduced to the world in 2008. The underlying technology behind bitcoin as well as the other cryptocurrencies which followed it is blockchain technology. Nowadays, collaborative engineering is gaining tremendous popularity, especially in the information technology industry. In the future, technological giants may have to work with each other to complete large projects of great importance and significance. In such projects, trust management is crucial. With multiple parties involved in such projects, it is important that no party monopolizes the project and adds patches which are not known to the other parties. In addition, no party should have the authority to disclose the full contents of the work to a third party. In this paper, we propose a blockchain based solution to the above issues. The only authentic version of the project would be the one maintained in the blockchain. Collaborators would broadcast the changes they make, and it would be added to the blockchain only after consensus from all parties. We use a threshold key system on private keys so that consensus is achieved. Our proposed system guarantees secure release of the project as well as non-repudiation to collaborators.
Florentina Magda Enescu, Nicu Bizon, Andrei Cirstea, Cosmin Ştirbu
In increasingly diverse areas of activity, the notion of block technology appears more and more often. What benefits and how they can be applied in the health sector will be presented in this article. This system is decentralized and cannot be controlled, and records cannot be modified. Blockchain technology offers efficiency and low health costs. In this way, the health of the population is monitored worldwide, by using an encryption program for the storage of patients' databases in diagnosis, laboratory analysis, medical imaging, medicine etc. Users are encouraged to use such a platform in a peer-to- peer market to have permanent access to medical history, and last but not least, to support the medical act for a correct diagnosis, research system and pharmaceutical industry. The objective of this paper is to achieving a technology that will make the medical system more efficient by decentralization, faster access to information and the creation of a solid database that will bring essential predictability to the system.
Carlos Melo, Jamilson Dantas, Danilo Oliveira, Iure Fé · 8 authors
The blockchain shared ledger emerged as an alternative to the bureaucratic banking system that may take days to confirm a payment or a transfer between clients. The blockchain concept evolved and became viable for various applications beyond the domain of financial transactions. Blockchains become a way to reach better relationships through contract validation, documents transfer, and personal and business data security. Recently, the blockchain-as-a-service has debuted on Microsoft Data Centers, and now many share an infrastructure that can change and improve their security routines. This paper evaluates the feasibility of a blockchain-as-a-service infrastructure and helps those who plan to deploy or sell blockchains. A modeling methodology based on Dynamical Reliability Block Diagrams (DRBD) is adopted to evaluate two dependability attributes: system's reliability and availability. The proposed infrastructure contains the minimum requirements to deploy the Hyperledger Cello, a platform to create and manage blockchains. The availability results pointed out a system downtime of 121 hours per year and reliability issues that must be addressed when building blockchain-as-a-service infrastructures.
The evidence has three properties including relevance, authenticity and legitimacy. For evidence, once implemented, it must not be tampered with and can always be traced back. For trust, the content can be forensics, so the relationship between each other is trustworthy and exchangeable value. Blockchain is a tamper-proof and unforgeable decentralized shared ledger that chunks data blocks chronologically into specific data structures and is cryptographically guaranteed. In this paper, we use the key technologies of blockchain to investigate and achieve collaborative security for IoT devices. This approach uses distributed crowd-sourcing to make tampering of critical data evidence (security). Combination of theoretical research and empirical validation, the paper tries to provide a technical operational and cost-effective solution for collaborative security with blockchain services and promoting the key data stability and self-healing ability.
Marcin Płóciennik, Mario Drobics, Ivana Podnar Žarko, Konstantinos V. Katsaros · 6 authors
In the current Internet of Things (IoT), centralized IoT structures greatly limit the direct, efficient and privacy preserving interaction with the locally available resources. A sustainable path for the future development of Smart Urban Environments, from Smart Homes and Offices, to Smart Neighborhoods and Cities, requires next-generation IoT solutions which are interoperable and decentralized. Building on direct device-to-device interactions and the existing infrastructure operated by open and interoperable platforms, a novel decentralized IoT architecture is required to offer both privacy-preserving and smart real-time interactions in Smart Spaces, leading thus to truly trustful ambient intelligence serving ordinary citizens in everyday situations. We present the key interoperability and security-related aspects which are designed and implemented within the H2020 project symbIoTe to pave the way for such decentralized IoT solutions. Furthermore, we analyze the requirements and technologies, namely Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), intelligent agents and edge technologies, as the building blocks for the next-generation IoT solutions.
Jun 1, 2018·2018 IEEE 20th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 16th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 4th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS)
The construction of smart city involves multiple corporate organizations and government agencies, while smart city operations often require data across organizations. This paper describes a blockchain-based approach to exchange information in smart cities that assists sharing data across multiple, non-trusted organizations. The proposed method enables an organization safely use data from another organization to participate in business operations without accessing the data. The data that participates in operations is in an encrypted form stored only in the executor sandbox. Consensus calculations are performed on multiple nodes by smart contract. After the confirmation through multiple nodes, the result of the calculation will be returned to the applicant. Thus, the risk of data leakage could be avoided. Our proposed method can effectively prevent the access to the information from being illegally obtained, used, and tampered. Also it ensures the reliable use of the data which enables the effective information sharing and protection of information among multiple organizations in the smart city applications.
Carlos Kamienski, João Henrique Kleinschmidt, Juha-Pekka Soininen, Kari Kolehmainen · 8 authors
The intensive use of technology in precision irrigation for agriculture is getting momentum in order to optimize the use of water, reduce the energy consumption and improve the quality of crops. Internet of Things (IoT) and other technologies are the natural choices for smart water management applications, and the SWAMP project is expected to prove the appropriateness of IoT in real settings with the deployment of on-site pilots. At the same time, the more intense the use of technology is, agriculture turns new security risks, which may affect both crop development and the commodities market. A security breach may irreversibly compromise a crop and data eavesdropping may compromise price and contracts exposing sensitive data such crop quality, development or management. This paper discusses security challenges and technologies for the application of IoT in agriculture and indicates that one of the most relevant challenges to be handled in SWAMP project is dealing with the multitude of behaviors from IoT application and what would be considered as normal and what would be considered as a threat.
This paper presents an innovative solution to manage security and trustiness in Osmotic Computing. Osmotic Computing dynamically manages Cloud, Edge and IoT resources across federated environments set up by different and cooperating stakeholders. In this context, the Software Defined Membrane (SDMem) is the main component responsible to orchestrate the osmotic transfer of microelements (MELs) across different environments straightening the security needs of such a complex ecosystem. The basic idea presented in this paper is to leverage Private Blockchain technologies in SDMem implementation over federated systems. Data access activities will be logged in a private distributed Blockchain-based ledger. This will allow to have a certified, non-repudiable record of all the data accessed performed by distributed computing, thus assuring the overall ownership and integrity of data and processes running in MELs. The resulting SDMem solution allow us to isolate data and workflows in distributed environments where heterogeneous resources and devices are exploited.
Jun 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering and 2018 IEEE Industrial and Commercial Power Systems Europe (EEEIC / I&CPS Europe)
Pierluigi Gallo, Suporn Pongnumkul, Uy Quoc Nguyen
The growing demand for safety in urban environments is supported by monitoring using video surveillance. The need to analyze multiple video-flows from different cameras deployed around the city by heterogeneous owners introduces vulnerabilities and privacy issues. Video frames, timestamps, and camera settings can be digitally manipulated by malicious users; the positions of cameras, their orientation and their mechanical settings can be physically manipulated. Digital and physical manipulations may have several effects, including the change of the observed scene and the potential violation of neighbors' privacy. To face these risks, we introduce BlockSee, a blockchain-based video surveillance system that jointly provides validation and immutability to camera settings and surveillance videos, making them readily available to authorized users in case of events. The encouraging results obtained with BlockSee pave the way to new distributed city-wide monitoring systems.
The use of distributed ledger technologies introduces new security and privacy challenges. These challenges are dependent on properties of the ledgers, such as transaction latency and throughput. Some use cases may be outright impossible to implement securely, or in a privacy-retaining manner. Consequently, it is important that these concerns are taken into account when distributed ledger technologies are evaluated and selected as building blocks for higher-level systems. In this paper, we illustrate these concerns through use case examples. We discuss the implications these concerns on the use of distributed ledgers within higher-level systems, such as in SOFIE, a DLT-based approach to securely and openly federate IoT systems.