Juah C Song, Mevlüt Demir, John J. Prevost, Paul Rad
The use of Blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to provide an avenue of decentralized, fault-resistant management and data immutability. The wide range of research on blockchain, focused on how to improve upon its drawbacks of latency and resource consumption, demonstrates that the blockchain design has flexibility. Almost every aspect of blockchain can be tailored to fit the requirements of a desired application. However, the wide range of options in configuring blockchains presents challenges in the adoption of blockchains to secure IoT. In this paper, we present the opportunities and challenges of implementing blockchains and present a use case of integrating blockchain into an IoT framework for securing sensor data acquisition.
In a Smart City scenario, the authors envisioned an IoT-Cloud framework for the management of boards and resources scattered over a geographic area. It can also become a tool to let device owners contribute freely to the infrastructure. In comparison to datacenter-oriented Cloud middleware, the administrator and the owner of the infrastructure are not one and the same. This translates into the requirement to support delegation-enabled authorization. In this paper, the authors investigate an authorization and delegation model for the IoT-Cloud based on blockchain technology. In particular, the scheme is implemented in the form of smart contracts over the Ethereum platform. Indeed, this approach represents an enhancement, over a function previously designed in a centralized fashion, by enabling the user to audit authorization operations and inspect how access control is actually performed, without blindly trusting the Cloud as a proxy for access to resources.
Dongpo Zhang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Luan Chen, S. Li · 6 authors
Internet of Energy, a combination of power grid and Internet, contains many energy forms. Different form of energy is distributed in Internet of energy, which means that it is closely related to distributed technology. Different forms of energy needs to interconvert, so it is necessary to make power trading in this distributed system, the current power trading model is not adaptive to distributed power trading, so a new distributed trading model is important to Internet of energy. Blockchain technology with distribution and decentralization features is widely used in electronic currency transactions, Hyperledger-Fabric is the one of typical framework of blockchain, which could provide a platform for distributed ledger, it has distributed blocks and ledgers to make decentralized trading by using blockchain technology for Internet of energy.
Internet of Things (IoT) has been experiencing exponential growth in recent years, but still faces many serious challenges. The distributed ledger technology (DLT), e.g., Blockchain, not only appears to be promising to address these technical challenges, but also brings tremendous opportunities for new application and business models. However, the convergence of IoT and DLT is yet a goal far beyond our reach today. Among many problems that have not been sufficiently understood, a fundamental one is how to design appropriate consensus mechanisms for DLT applied to IoT, which is the theme of this paper. We first discuss the potential benefits of applying DLT to IoT, and identify major challenges posed to DLT by IoT. Then we make a survey of existing DLT consensus mechanisms, to summarize major principles and discuss their pros and cons when applied in IoT.
The Blockchain is evolving as one of the most promising and resourceful technologies of cloud infrastructure security. Blockchain is meant to store, read and validate transactions in a distributed database system. It has the ability to enhance security and confidentiality through undisputable shared distributed ledger on cloud nodes. Tampering of Blockchain is enormously thought-provoking due to the use of cryptographic data structures. In this paper we present Blockchain and compare the various platforms on which blockchain can be implemented. The paper illustrates the use of Blockchain applications for building secure infrastructure of cloud computing.
This paper describes the use of blockchain technology as a data provider in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Blockchain is a novel technology, which has gained a lot of attention in the last years, mainly due to its use as a backbone for cryptocurrencies. The main purpose of blockchain technology is to provide anonymous transactions between participants, over a peer-to-peer network, using a decentralized distributed ledger. The goal of this novel approach is to eliminate any 3rdparty validation and replace the trust of a central authority for transaction validation with cryptographic proof. While most applications of the blockchain revolve around cryptocurrencies, the blockchain can be used in many other fields, such as finance, distributed data storage, health and medicine, automation, etc. By creating an open, decentralized network, the blockchain can be used to develop decentralized applications and enable data access and sharing on a much higher level than the common implementations of client-server architectures which are in use today. In this paper, we will present a proof of concept method for field devices to store and share data using a distributed ledger built on the IOTA tangle, as well as provide means of access to the data which can be used in IoT and decentralized applications.
Kazım Rıfat Özyılmaz, Mehmet Ug̃ur Dog̃an, Arda Yurdakul
Today, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are the powerhouse of data generation with their ever-increasing numbers and widespread penetration. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions are getting integrated to all kinds of services, making products significantly more "smarter". The centerpiece of these technologies is "data". IoT device vendors should be able keep up with the increased throughput and come up with new business models. On the other hand, AI/ML solutions will produce better results if training data is diverse and plentiful. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based, decentralized and trustless data marketplace where IoT device vendors and AI/ML solution providers may interact and collaborate. By facilitating a transparent data exchange platform, access to consented data will be democratized and the variety of services targeting end-users will increase. Proposed data marketplace is implemented as a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain and Swarm is used as the distributed storage platform.
Healthcare is a big application scenario of blockchain, and blockchains used in healthcare are called health blockchain. In general, blockchain blocks are open and the transactions in them are public. If some privacy data are involved in these transactions, they will be leaked. Owing to healthcare system involving a great deal of privacy data, certain security mechanisms must be built to protect these privacy data in health blockchain. Furthermore, because the core of security mechanisms is the key management schemes, the appropriate key management schemes should be designed before blockchains can be used in healthcare system. Here, according to the features of health blockchain, the authors use a body sensor network to design a lightweight backup and efficient recovery scheme for keys of health blockchain. The authors’ analyses show that the scheme has high security and performance, and it can be used to protect privacy messages on health blockchain effectively and to promote the application of health blockchain.
Seong Seok Choi, Jin Wook Burm, Wonjin Sung, Ju Wook Jang · 5 authors
We implement a scheme to securely control IoT devices using smart contracts which resides on blockchain. Our implementation provides guaranteed authentication, nonrepudiation and integrity without any central administration. We illustrate how a smart contract works in conjunction with a blockchain to prevent any tempering from possible intruders. We implement ethereum nodes on Raspberry Pi using node.js and web3 library.
Juanjuan Li, Yong Yuan, Shuai Wang, Fei–Yue Wang
Bitcoin is a novel protocol with the potential of enabling a decentralized and trustless cryptographic currency, and its underlying technology named blockchain operates on a worldwide basis via a complex set of rules originally proposed by Nakomoto in 2008. In Bitcoin blockchain, miners provide computational services (i.e. mining) to get profits from the fixed rewards of newly found block and also transaction fees from recording the users’ transactions to the blocks. With the decreasing of the fixed new block reward, transaction fees will play the role as the main profit source of miners, thus provide important supports for the sustainability and vitality of the Bitcoin system. Therefore, it is of great necessity to research transaction fees. In this paper, we investigate transaction fees in a queuing game with non-preemptive priority, in which both the miners’ mining rewards and the users’ time cost are highlighted. Then, we conduct theoretical analysis of the game, getting five types of Nash equilibria of the game. We also find that the over-long waiting time will bring negative marginal profits on transaction fees to some users with low time cost, therefore, they will not be willing to offer transaction fees.
Yue Hao, Yi Li, Xinghua Dong, Li Fang · 5 authors
Blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization, security and non-modifiable. The consensus algorithm is the core of blockchain framework, which solves the problem of mutual trust among nodes in the distributed network. Selecting the appropriate consensus algorithm or not directly affects the performance of blockchain. However, existing private blockchain platform lacks theory and data support for the performance analysis of the consensus algorithm. This paper proposes a method to evaluate the performance of consensus algorithm in private blockchain platforms of Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Through quantitative analysis of latency and throughput, we obtain the performance evaluation results of consensus algorithms with different numbers of transactions. The results show that the consensus mechanism induces performance bottleneck. Besides, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consistently outperforms Proof-of-Work (PoW) in terms of latency and throughput under varying workloads. This paper contributes to providing not only the quantitative data support for the further research of consensus algorithm, but also the guidance to the blockchain practitioners in the selection of consensus mechanism.
Nowadays, a great number of healthcare data are generated every day from both medical institutions and individuals. Healthcare information exchange (HIE) has been proved to benefit the medical industry remarkably. To store and share such large amount of healthcare data is important while challenging. In this paper, we propose BlocHIE, a Blockchain-based platform for healthcare information exchange. First, we analyze the different requirements for sharing healthcare data from different sources. Based on the analysis, we employ two loosely-coupled Blockchains to handle different kinds of healthcare data. Second, we combine off-chain storage and on-chain verification to satisfy the requirements of both privacy and authenticability. Third, we propose two fairness-based packing algorithms to improve the system throughput and the fairness among users jointly. To demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of BlocHIE, we implement BlocHIE in a minimal-viable-product way and evaluate the proposed packing algorithms extensively.
This poster describes an ongoing research project that builds an IoT data management experimental environment based on Ethereum Blockchain and smart contracts. The goal of the project is to simulate the application of IoT devices in smart city initiatives, and explore how IoT data management could benefit from Blockchain technology. In this project, there are three basic questions we are attempting to answer. 1) How do you link various kinds of IoT devices to the Blockchain, as they have different computing capabilities? 2) How do you store data on Blockchain from different IoT devices, and retrieve data for further utilization? 3) To what extent, smart contracts can be designed to implement automated data access management?
Low power communication is a major milestone for the Internet of Things (IoT). Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies seek to provide a large coverage area and long battery life at the cost of a reduced bandwidth compared to traditional networks. Commercially-available LPWAN solutions typically involve the usage of a wireless infrastructure from a network provider; with the notable exception of crowd-sourced networks, which use gateways from other users for wireless communication to end-devices. In this paper, we analyse the feasability of a fully decentralized LPWAN infrastructure and build a working prototype based on the LoRaWAN protocol.
This paper makes the case for the use of blockchains in emerging intelligent transportation systems applications. Specifically, we argue for the use of blockchains to settle contracts and transactions in a variety of intelligent transportation scenarios. We argue that mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum have the foundations to sustain transactions with fine tunable granularity at large scale and in a near-realtime manner. The paper analyzes the refueling scenario for autonomous electric vehicles and proposes an algorithm to guarantee the execution of energy recharges.
Zhimin Gao, Lei Xu, Glenn Turner, B. Patel · 7 authors
Blockchain is a powerful and distributed platform for transactions which require a unified, resilient, transparent and consensus-based record keeping system. It has been applied to scenarios like smart city, supply chain, medical data storing and sharing, and etc. Many works have been done on improving the performance and security of such systems. However, there is a lack of the mechanism of identity binding when a human being is involved in corresponding physical world, i.e., if one is involved in an activity, his/her identity in the real world should be correctly reflected in the blockchain system. To mitigate this gap, we propose BlockID, a novel framework for people identity management that leverages biometric authentication and trusted computing technology. We also develop a prototype to demonstrate its feasibility in practice.
Liam Bell, William J. Buchanan, Jonathan Cameron, Owen Lo
There are several areas of healthcare and well-being that could be enhanced using blockchain technologies. These include device tracking, clinical trials, pharmaceutical tracing, and health insurance. Within device tracking, hospitals can trace their asset within a blockchain infrastructure, including through the complete lifecycle of a device. The information gathered can then be used to improve patient safety and provide after-market analysis to improve efficiency savings. This paper outlines recent work within the areas of pharmaceutical traceability, data sharing, clinical trials, and device tracking. Keywords: Asset Tracking, Blockchain, Drug tracking, Ethereum, Healthcare, Internet of Things, IoT
Christopher Ehmke, Florian Wessling, Christoph M. Friedrich
The expansion of blockchain technologies from financial applications to other fields intensifies the problem of an increasing size of data stored in the blockchain. Unfortunately, new participants of the blockchain network are required to download the whole blockchain to gain an overview about the state of the system and to validate incoming transactions. Approaches like IOTA, SegWit or the Lightning Network try to solve the scalability issues of blockchain applications. Unfortunately, they focus on strategies slowing down the blockchain's growth instead of reducing the problems arising from a growing chain or introduce new concepts to oust the linear blockchain altogether. The approach proposed in this paper is based on the idea of Ethereum to keep the state of the system explicitly in the current block but further pursues this by including the relevant part of the current system state in new transactions as well. This enables other participants to validate incoming transactions without having to download the whole blockchain initially. Following this idea use cases can be supported that require scalable blockchain technology but not necessarily an indefinite and complete transaction history.
Blockchain systems, with the characteristics of decentralization, irreversibility and traceability, have attracted a lot of attentions recently. However, the current performance of blockchain is poor, which becomes a major constraint of its applications. Additionally, different blockchain systems lack standard performance monitoring approach which can automatically adapt to different systems and provide detailed and real-time performance information. To solve this problem, we propose overall performance metrics and detailed performance metrics for the users to know the exact performance in different stages of the blockchain. Then we propose a performance monitoring framework with a log-based method. It has advantages of lower overhead, more details, and better scalability than the previous performance monitoring approaches. Finally we implement the framework to monitor four well-known blockchain systems, using a set of 1,000 open-source smart contracts. The experimental results show that our framework can make detailed and real-time performance monitoring of blockchain systems. We also provide some suggestions for the future development of blockchain systems.
This paper addresses a secure caching scheme for information-centric network (ICN)-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In order to achieve the above mechanism, we utilize both the public-key cryptography technique and the blockchain technique, which enable data to be safely gathered and the decentralized and crossverified sensing data to be copied and stored. In addition, we propose a protocol design for introducing the proposed structure into an ICN-based WSN system. Furthermore, we formulate statistical models and demonstrate numerical results by performing computer simulations and hardware-based experiments.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, conventional devices become smart and autonomous. This vision is turning into a reality thanks to advances in technology, but there are still challenges to address, particularly in the security domain e.g., data reliability. Taking into account the predicted evolution of the IoT in the coming years, it is necessary to provide confidence in this huge incoming information source. Blockchain has emerged as a key technology that will transform the way in which we share information. Building trust in distributed environments without the need for authorities is a technological advance that has the potential to change many industries, the IoT among them. Disruptive technologies such as big data and cloud computing have been leveraged by IoT to overcome its limitations since its conception, and we think blockchain will be one of the next ones. This paper focuses on this relationship, investigates challenges in blockchain IoT applications, and surveys the most relevant work in order to analyze how blockchain could potentially improve the IoT.
During the normal operation of a Cloud solution, no one usually pays attention to the logs except technical department, which may periodically check them to ensure that the performance of the platform conforms to the Service Level Agreements. However, the moment the status of a component changes from acceptable to unacceptable, or a customer complains about accessibility or performance of a platform, the importance of logs increases significantly. Depending on the scope of the issue, all departments, including management, customer support, and even the actual customer, may turn to logs to find out what has happened, how it has happened, and who is responsible for the issue. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper the logs to hide their fault. Given the number of logs that are generated by the Cloud solutions, there are many tampering possibilities. While tamper detection solution can be used to detect any changes in the logs, we argue that critical nature of logs calls for immutability. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based log system, called Logchain, that collects the logs from different providers and avoids log tampering by sealing the logs cryptographically and adding them to a hierarchical ledger, hence, providing an immutable platform for log storage.
A problem facing healthcare record systems throughout the world is how to share the medical data with more stakeholders for various purposes without sacrificing data privacy and integrity. Blockchain, operating in a state of consensus, is the underpinning technology that maintains the Bitcoin transaction ledger. Blockchain as a promising technology to manage the transactions has been gaining popularity in the domain of healthcare. Blockchain technology has the potential of securely, privately, and comprehensively manage patient health records. In this work, we discuss the latest status of blockchain technology and how it could solve the current issues in healthcare systems. We evaluate the blockchain technology from the multiple perspectives around healthcare data, including privacy, security, control, and storage. We review the current projects and researches of blockchain in the domain of healthcare records and provide the insight into the design and construction of next generations of blockchain-based healthcare systems.