Blockchain Papers

Samantha L. S. Almeida, Adriano Bessa Albuquerque, Andreia Silva

No abstract is available for this record.

Magnus Westerlund, Nane Kratzke

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.

Oded Leiba, Yechiav Yitzchak, Ron Bitton, Asaf Nadler · 5 authors

The prevalence of IoT devices makes them an ideal target for attackers. To\nreduce the risk of attacks vendors routinely deliver security updates (patches)\nfor their devices. The delivery of security updates becomes challenging due to\nthe issue of scalability as the number of devices may grow much quicker than\nvendors' distribution systems. Previous studies have suggested a permissionless\nand decentralized blockchain-based network in which nodes can host and deliver\nsecurity updates, thus the addition of new nodes scales out the network.\nHowever, these studies do not provide an incentive for nodes to join the\nnetwork, making it unlikely for nodes to freely contribute their hosting space,\nbandwidth, and computation resources. In this paper, we propose a novel\ndecentralized IoT software update delivery network in which participating nodes\nreferred to as distributors) are compensated by vendors with digital currency\nfor delivering updates to devices. Upon the release of a new security update, a\nvendor will make a commitment to provide digital currency to distributors that\ndeliver the update; the commitment will be made with the use of smart\ncontracts, and hence will be public, binding, and irreversible. The smart\ncontract promises compensation to any distributor that provides\nproof-of-distribution, which is unforgeable proof that a single update was\ndelivered to a single device. A distributor acquires the proof-of-distribution\nby exchanging a security update for a device signature using the Zero-Knowledge\nContingent Payment (ZKCP) trustless data exchange protocol. Eliminating the\nneed for trust between the security update distributor and the security\nconsumer (IoT device) by providing fair compensation, can significantly\nincrease the number of distributors, thus facilitating rapid scale out.\n

Gabriel Kamau, Caroline Boore, Elizaphan Maina, Stephen Njenga

The burden of disease is higher by far in developing countries than in the developed world. Developing countries today are turning to technology as the silver bullet or remedy. Indeed, Information and Communication Technology has turned into a key-enabling tool in the enhanced healthcare management. The electronic health records or electronic medical records (EMR) a key component of medical informatics symbolize potential solutions for enhanced healthcare. However, interoperability and security of EMR systems has been the two main challenges of EMR in the healthcare industry. By analyzing existing literature using scoping review research approach this paper explored the potential use of blockchain technology in improving the interoperability and security of EMR systems for the benefit of different stakeholders in health sector in developing countries such as Kenya. To achieve our main objective, five databases were searched and 204 papers screened for inclusion. As a result of the search and screen process, we identified 25 relevant articles.

Gowri Ramachandran, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

Blockchain technology has been transforming the financial industry and has created a new crypto-economy in the last decade. The foundational concepts such as decentralized trust and distributed ledger are promising for distributed, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the applications of Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies in this domain are few and far between because of the lack of understanding and inherent architectural challenges. In this paper, we describe the opportunities for applications of blockchain for the IoT and examine the challenges involved in architecting Blockchain-based IoT applications.

Juan M. Román-Belmonte, Hortensia De la Corte‐Rodríguez, E. Carlos Rodríguez‐Merchán

Although the best-known use of blockchain technology (BCT) is in the field of economics and cryptocurrencies in general, its usefulness is extending to other fields, including the biomedical field. The purpose of this article is to clarify the role that BCT can play in the field of medicine. We have performed a narrative review of the literature on BCT in general and on medicine in particular. The great advantage of BCT in the health arena is that it allows development of a stable and secure data set with which users can interact through transactions of various types. This environment allows the entry and operation of clinical data without compromising other sensitive data. Another important advantage of BCT is that the entire network is decentralized and is maintained by the users themselves; thus, there is no need to rely on organizations for storage. The Blockchain code is open source and can be used, modified and revised by its users. BCT literature is scarce so far. This article describes the basics of this technology and summarizes the various aspects in which BCT could change the paradigm of current medicine. The great potential of BCT, as well as its many applications in the field of health sciences, encompasses the fields of legal medicine, research, electronic medical records, medical data analysis (big data), teaching and the regulation of payment for medical services. If technological advances continue along these lines, it could bring about a revolution in medicine as we know it.

Jian Yang, Zhihui Lu, Jie Wu

No abstract is available for this record.

Pradip Kumar Sharma, Jong Hyuk Park

No abstract is available for this record.

Hsing‐Chung Chen, Shyi-Shiun Kuo, Han-Mi Chen

Due to the popularity of multimedia and constantly growing capacity of network, digital media demanding is increasingly high in last decade. The digital media with copyrighted contents, such as pictures, videos, audios, and 3D-model materials, etc., are more important in today's e-commerce. In recent years, the digital media content service by using OTT (over-the-top) platform is an emerging e-commerce model. The traditional website of the digital media content (DMC) always provides the transaction platform for both content producer and content provider to upload their DMC products. Then, clients (consumers) could browse their interesting products on the website, and download DMCs after payment. However, the transaction of these copyrighted DMCs on the platform is still carried out by means of the traditional payment, e.g. credit cards, debit cards and the ACH (Automated Clearing House). This paper proposes an innovative secure private OTT (p-OTT) platform in which the transaction process could deal with the credible and customizable services by adopting blockchain technology. One of the key features of the blockchain technique is smart contract. Thus, each DMC product could be pre-defined a template of data contract. After negotiation process by using the smart contract, the real data contract (RDC) will be created and outputted by smart contract. According to the predefined template of data contract, the content producer or provider could easily implement his transaction policy. In addition, we design an online authentication key for each member and a shadow key pair for each booked DMC during a transaction period. Therefore, this paper presents a secure OTT model with blockchain technology. Finally, we shows that it is not only a secure OTT platform but also a flexible transaction via preforming smart contract.

Chenhan Xu, Kun Wang, Guoliang Xu, Peng Li · 6 authors

With the emergence of edge computing in various applications domains, end users are now surrounded by a fast growing volume of data from edge devices belonging to different stakeholders. However, these edge devices cannot cooperate to share big data because of the distrust among them. In this paper, the blockchain is deployed in collaborative edges by exploiting the non-repudiation and non-tampering properties to enable trust. First, we develop a blockchain based big data sharing framework in collaborative edges for adapting to the limited computational and storage resources in edge devices. Then, a consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Collaboration (PoC) is proposed for computational resources reduction in our proposed framework, where edge devices offer their credits of PoC to compete for the block generation. Moreover, we put forward a futile transaction filter algorithm for transaction offloading, greatly reducing the storage resources occupied by the blockchain in edges. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposal.

Wenlin Xie, Wei Zhou, Lanju Kong, Xiangdong Zhang · 7 authors

Improving efficiency and performance is an important topic in the world today. As it is well-known, cooperative computing is an effective and traditional approach, and it is widely used in various fields. Inspired by this idea, take E-commerce for example, Security is one of its important indicators. In E-commerce, the security technology has become a major issue restricting the rapid development and popularization of E-commerce. Existing solutions leverage blockchain protocols to improve the credibility of transactions, but most of them have some limitations, such as a lower throughput and higher consensus latency, and these problems make blockchain technology difficult to be widely used. This paper presents a trusted framework (ETT F) using blockchain protocol in E-commerce to achieve a higher credible trading. ETTF includes a peer blockchain protocol (PBP) based on a peer blockchain architecture to support the storage of massive transactions and instant transactions. In PBP, the throughput scales are nearly linearly increased with the computation: the more computing power available, the more blocks are selected per unit time. Besides, in order to ensure a higher security of transactions we have introduced a strong consensus algorithm(ECA) in E-commerce. ETTF is also efficient because the number of messages it requires is nearly linear in the network size. Compared to Bitcoin-derived blockchain, ETTF shows better performance on throughput, latency, and capacity in E-commerce.

Shi-Cho Cha, Kuo‐Hui Yeh

In this study, we utilize a blockchain network as the underlying communication architecture to construct an ISO/IEC 15408-2 compliant security auditing system. The proposed system is an evolutionary paradigm not only seamlessly integrating the advantages, i.e., de-centralization, robustness and tamper-resistance, of the blockchain network, but fulfilling the critical auditing requirements identified by ISO/IEC 15408-2. Versatile intelligent applications, including IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) robots, are highly suitable to adopt our security auditing system.

Libo Feng, Hui Zhang, Liqi Lou, Yong Chen

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) interconnects thousands of sensor nodes to support the services of Internet of Things (loT). However, data collected from sensor nodes may be tempered, forged and divulged. Traditional WSN data process platform handle the data centralized in terminal devices which is vulnerable to attacks and reduce the security of the system. Blockchain is a kind of distributed databases. It has been successfully applied in finance, securities, digital currency and other fields. We first propose a blockchain-based distributed collocation storage architecture for data security process platform of WSN with consensus protocol and asymmetric signature scheme. The security and efficiency are verified on the simulation to enable blockchain as a good solution.

Nikolay Teslya, Igor Ryabchikov

There are a lot of blockchain platform implementations available today. To be integrated into the smart space for Industrial IoT the blockchain platform should support not only token exchange but also smart contract distribution and launching, fault tolerance consensus mechanism and equivalence between participants to create and implement new blocks and contracts. The paper provides analysis of the most used consensus mechanisms, specific features of public (permissionless) and private (permissioned) blockchains. Also a description of blockchain platforms that satisfy the requirements for the IIoT platform development is provided. By the result of the analysis the platform and specific modules have been selected for implementation of blockchain for industrial IIoT platform.

Gultekin Berahan Mermer, Engin Zeydan, Şuayb S. Arslan

Blockchain is a recently emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way society interacts and trades between each other. The main advantage this technology provides is its ability to exchange transactions without relying on a trusted third party entities of any means. It can also provide data integrity, in-built authenticity and user transparency. Blockchain is envisioned to be the new internet on which many revolutionary applications will be based. In this work, we provide an overview of blockchain technologies including their principles, opportunities and challenges ahead.

Mark Gaynor, Betsy Tuttle, Allison Roe

In this paper, we present the applications of blockchain technology in healthcare. Furthermore, we evaluate the choice and deployment of Blockchain technology in such applications, review the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach. We review the Estonian system, which is the first blockchain-based health system at the national level, in detail and discuss its ramifications to Turkey. This paper is one of the first papers in this domain and, to the best of authors' knowledge, the first in Turkish.

Caciano dos Santos Machado, Antônio Augusto Fröhlich

Blockchain technologies can enable decentralized and trustful features for the Internet of Things (IoT). Although, existing blockchain based solutions to provide data integrity verification for semi-trusted data storages (e.g. cloud providers) cannot respect the time determinism required by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Additionally, they cannot be applied to resource-constrained IoT devices. We propose an architecture that can take advantage of blockchain features to allow further integrity verification of data produced by IoT devices even in the realm of CPS. Our architecture is divided into three levels, each of them responsible for tasks compatible with their resources capabilities. The first level, composed of sensors, actuators, and gateways, introduces the concept of Proof-of-Trust (PoT), an energy-efficient, time-deterministic and secure communication based on the Trustful Space-Time Protocol (TSTP). Upper levels are responsible for data persistence and integrity verification in the Cloud. The work also comprises a performance evaluation of the critical path of data to demonstrate that the architecture respect time-bounded operations demanded by the sense-decide-actuate cycle of CPSs. The additional delay of 5.894us added by our architecture is negligible for a typical TSTP with IEEE 802.15.4 radios which has communication latencies in the order of hundreds of milisseconds in each hop.

Vishal Sharma, Ilsun You, Francesco Palmieri, Dushantha Nalin K. Jayakody · 5 authors

Modern fog network architectures, empowered by IoT applications and 5G communications technologies, are characterized by the presence of a huge number of mobile nodes, which undergo frequent handovers, introducing a significant load on the involved network entities. Considering the distributed and flat nature of these architectures, DMM can be the only viable option for efficiently managing handovers in these scenarios. The existing DMM solutions are capable of providing smooth handovers, but lack robustness from the security point of view. Indeed, DMM depends on external mechanisms for handover security and uses a centralized device, which has obvious security and performance implications in flat architectures where hierarchical dependencies can introduce problems. We propose a new DMM schema based on the blockchain, capable of resolving hierarchical security issues without affecting the network layout, and also satisfying fully distributed security requirements with less consumption of energy.

Hong Liu, Yan Zhang, Tao Yang

EVCE computing is an attractive network paradigm involving seamless connections among heterogeneous vehicular contexts. It will be a trend along with EVs becoming popular in V2X. The EVs act as potential resource infrastructures referring to both information and energy interactions, and there are serious security challenges for such hybrid cloud and edge computing. Context-aware vehicular applications are identified according to the perspectives of information and energy interactions. Blockchain-inspired data coins and energy coins are proposed based on distributed consensus, in which data contribution frequency and energy contribution amount are applied to achieve the proof of work. Security solutions are presented for securing vehicular interactions in EVCE computing.

Miguel Pincheira, Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Raffaele Giaffreda

The recent, exponential rise in adoption of the most disparate Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technologies has reached also Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chains, drumming up substantial research and innovation interest towards developing reliable, auditable and transparent traceability systems. Current IoT-based traceability and provenance systems for Agri-Food supply chains are built on top of centralized infrastructures and this leaves room for unsolved issues and major concerns, including data integrity, tampering and single points of failure. Blockchains, the distributed ledger technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, represent a new and innovative technological approach to realizing decentralized trustless systems. Indeed, the inherent properties of this digital technology provide fault-tolerance, immutability, transparency and full traceability of the stored transaction records, as well as coherent digital representations of physical assets and autonomous transaction executions. This paper presents AgriBlockIoT, a fully decentralized, blockchain-based traceability solution for Agri-Food supply chain management, able to seamless integrate IoT devices producing and consuming digital data along the chain. To effectively assess AgriBlockIoT, first, we defined a classical use-case within the given vertical domain, namely from-farm-to-fork. Then, we developed and deployed such use-case, achieving traceability using two different blockchain implementations, namely Ethereum and Hyperledger Sawtooth. Finally, we evaluated and compared the performance of both the deployments, in terms of latency, CPU, and network usage, also highlighting their main pros and cons.

Yuma Sakakibara, Shin Morishima, Kohei Nakamura, Hiroki Matsutani

Engineers and researchers have recently paid attention to Blockchain. Blockchain is a fault-tolerant distributed ledger without administrators. Blockchain is originally derived from cryptocurrency, but it is possible to be applied to other industries. Transferring digital asset is called a transaction. Blockchain holds all transactions, so the total amount of Blockchain data will increase as time proceeds. On the other hand, the number of Internet of Things (IoT) products has been increasing. It is difficult for IoT products to hold all Blockchain data because of their storage capacity. Therefore, they access Blockchain data via servers that have Blockchain data. However, if a lot of IoT products access Blockchain network via servers, server overloads will occur. Thus, it is useful to reduce workloads and improve throughput. In this paper, we propose a caching technique using a Field Programmable Gate Array-based (FPGA) Network Interface Card (NIC) which possesses four 10Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) interfaces. The proposed system can reduce server overloads, because the FPGA NIC instead of the server responds to requests from IoT products if cache hits. We implemented the proposed hardware cache to achieve high throughput on NetFPGA-10G board. We counted the number of requests that the server or the FPGA NIC processed as an evaluation. As a result, the throughput improved by on average 1.97 times when hitting the cache.

Jun Woo Jeong, Bo Youn Kim, Ju Wook Jang

Fog computing has emerged due to the problem that it becomes difficult to store every data to the cloud system as the number of Internet of Things increases. In this fog computing, a vast amount of data generated from the Internet of Things is transmitted to the cloud system located at a remote place, and is processed by a fog computer such as a sensor or a router located nearby, so that only the necessary data is transmitted to the cloud system. However, the above-mentioned fog computer has some drawbacks like being shut down due to an attack by a malicious user in advance, and a method of processing when a fog computer is down or restored. In this paper we describe a fog computing with blockchain that enables fog computers to share transaction generated by processing transaction information of a device controlled by a blockchain method to a security and device control method of a fog computer utilizing the technology. Furthemore by using security properties of blockchain such as authentication, non-repudiation and data integrity, fog computing using blockchain has advantage of security comparing to previous Cloud and fog computing system using centralized database or P2P networks.

Kaijun Leng, Ya Bi, Linbo Jing, Han-Chi Fu · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Yutao Jiao, Ping Wang, Dusit Niyato, Kongrath Suankaewmanee

As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as miners, in the network with incentives for confirming new block of transactions through a process of “block mining” by solving a cryptographic puzzle. Under the circumstance of limited local computing resources, e.g., mobile devices, it is natural for rational miners, i.e., consensus nodes, to offload computational tasks for proof of work to the cloud/fog computing servers. Therefore, we focus on the trading between the cloud/fog computing service provider and miners, and propose an auction-based market model for efficient computing resource allocation. In particular, we consider a proof-of-work based blockchain network, which is constrained by the computing resource and deployed as an infrastructure for decentralized data management applications. Due to the competition among miners in the blockchain network, the allocative externalities are particularly taken into account when designing the auction mechanisms. Specifically, we consider two bidding schemes: the constant-demand scheme where each miner bids for a fixed quantity of resources, and the multi-demand scheme where the miners can submit their preferable demands and bids. For the constant-demand bidding scheme, we propose an auction mechanism that achieves optimal social welfare. In the multi-demand bidding scheme, the social welfare maximization problem is NP-hard. Therefore, we design an approximate algorithm which guarantees the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Through extensive simulations, we show that our proposed auction mechanisms with the two bidding schemes can efficiently maximize the social welfare of the blockchain network and provide effective strategies for the cloud/fog computing service provider.