Arlindo Flávio da Conceição, Flávio Soares Corrêa da Silva, Vladimir Rocha, Angela Locoro · 5 authors
Data privacy refers to ensuring that users keep control over access to information, whereas data accessibility refers to ensuring that information access is unconstrained. Conflicts between privacy and accessibility of data are natural to occur, and healthcare is a domain in which they are particularly relevant. In the present article, we discuss how blockchain technology, and smart contracts, could help in some typical scenarios related to data access, data management and data interoperability for the specific healthcare domain. We then propose the implementation of a large-scale information architecture to access Electronic Health Records (EHRs) based on Smart Contracts as information mediators. Our main contribution is the framing of data privacy and accessibility issues in healthcare and the proposal of an integrated blockchain based architecture.
Srinivasan Ananthanarayanan Bragadeesh, A. Umamakeswari
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) has brought about a myriad of applications to life which range from smart homes, smart energy, smart buildings, smart cities to almost smart everything. This has been made possible by fully exploiting the services of cloud infrastructure, communication technologies, improved sensing devices and advancements in embedded devices which helps in incorporating intelligence even on tiniest of chips. Blockchain is a decentralised distributed approach that can facilitate management, control and also provide security. The application of blockchain is not restricted to cryptocurrency and security. It is perceived that Blockchain in Convergence with Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Computing and Mobile Edge Computing can provide numerous prospects for framing solutions for IoT. Any application or system which deploys a IoT network can make use of Blockchain to achieve simplicity, transparency, security and cost efficiency. This paper tries to identify some key areas in which Blockchain can be used to exploit the IoT infrastructure and overcome the challenges faced. Few possible application domains in which blockchain can revolutionize the outcomes have been highlighted. A real-time case study in which Blockchain has been used to provide valuable benefits is discussed.
Abstract The recent advances in information technology for mobile devices have increased the work efficiency of users, the mobility of compact mobile devices, and the convenience of location independence. However, mobile devices have limited computing power and storage capacity, so mobile cloud computing is being researched to overcome these limitations in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing is divided into two methods: the use of external cloud services and the use of mobile resource management without a cloud server (MRM), which integrates the computing and storage resources of nearby mobile devices. Because mobile devices can freely participate in MRM, it is critical to have authentication technology to determine the correctness of information regarding resources. Conventional technologies require strong authentication techniques because they have vulnerabilities that can easily be tampered with via man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. This paper proposes the Secure Authentication Management human-centric Scheme (SAMS) to authenticate mobile devices using blockchain for trusting resource information in the mobile devices that are participating in the MRM resource pool. The SAMS forms a blockchain based on the resource information of the subordinate client nodes around the master node in the MRM. Devices in the MRM that have not been authorized through the SAMS cannot access or falsify data. To verify the SAMS for application with MRM, it was tested for data falsification by a malicious user accessing the SAMS, and the results show that data falsification is impossible.
The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) allows heterogeneous embedded smart devices to collaboratively provide smart services with or without human intervention. While leveraging the large-scale IoT-based applications like Smart Gird or Smart Cities, IoT also incurs more concerns on privacy and security. Among the top security challenges that IoT face, access authorization is critical in resource sharing and information protection. One of the weaknesses of today's access control (AC) is the centralized authorization server, which can be the performance bottleneck or the single point of failure. In this paper, BlendCAC, a blockchain-enabled decentralized capability-based AC is proposed for the security of IoTs. The BlendCAC aims at an effective access control processes to devices, services and information in large scale IoT systems. Based on the blockchain network, a capability delegation mechanism is suggested for access permission propagation. A robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed, which takes advantage of a smart contract for registration, propagation and revocation of the access authorization. In the proposed BlendCAC scheme, IoT devices are their own master to control their resources instead of being supervised by a centralized authority. Implemented and tested on a Raspberry Pi device and on a local private blockchain network, the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed BlendCAC approach to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight and fine-grained AC solution to IoT systems.
Blockchain technology enables the creation of a decentralized environment, where transactions and data are not under the control of any third party organization. Any transaction ever completed is recorded in a public ledger in a verifiable, secure, transparent and permanent way, with a timestamp and other details. Introduced in 2009 as the core mechanism for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and its worldwide payment system, blockchain has had many applications in domains such as IoT, finance, business, management, health and education. Also new platforms and tools for blockchain implementation were developed. As education becomes more open, diversified, democratised, and decentralised, the blockchain technology is taken in consideration by researchers, teachers and institutions, to maintain reputation, trust in certification, and proof of learning. In the first part of the paper, we explore the blockchain technology. Next, existing global and governmental initiatives, together with potential applications of blockchain in different domains are presented. The need to learn about this emerging technology is demonstrated, together with pioneering cases in different universities. Then we propose a public blockchain called OpenEduChain, designed as a repository for open educational assets (Open Educational Resources - OERs, Massive Open Online Courses - MOOCs, open pedagogies and scenarios), but also to deliver issued certificates and open badges by universities and other educational and training institutions. At university level, OpenEduChain, implemented on Ethereum, is used to store data about the open educational items created by faculty members and students. Also digital certificates or open badges are provided to the participants in the trainings and workshops. After a period of tests, OpenEduChain usage could be extended at national level, but also for new purposes such as e-portfolios or assessment.
Summary Fog computing is a new computing paradigm that can provide flexible resources and services at the edge of network. It is an extension of cloud computing and usually cooperated with cloud computing. Therefore, end users, fog nodes, and cloud servers can form a three‐layer service model in practical application. In this model, they should have an agreement on a service contract, which contains every party's rights and obligations before the beginning of the service. However, due to lack of trust, it will suffer from some fairness problems during signing a service contract. Contract signing protocol allows two or more mutual distrust entities to sign a predefined digital contract in a fair and effective way. In this paper, we propose a fair three‐party contract signing protocol based on the primitive of blockchain, which can be applied to the scenario of fog computing. Our proposed construction allows the participants to sign a contract in a fair way without the involvement of an arbitrator. Moreover, the privacy of the contract content can be preserved on the public chain. Finally, we realize the proposed protocol through the private blockchain and provide the experimental simulation that analyzes the efficiency and effectiveness.
Emanuel Ferreira Jesus, Vanessa R. L. Chicarino, Célio Albuquerque, Antônio A. de A. Rocha
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly a reality today. Nevertheless, some key challenges still need to be given particular attention so that IoT solutions further support the growing demand for connected devices and the services offered. Due to the potential relevance and sensitivity of services, IoT solutions should address the security and privacy concerns surrounding these devices and the data they collect, generate, and process. Recently, the Blockchain technology has gained much attention in IoT solutions. Its primary usage scenarios are in the financial domain, where Blockchain creates a promising applications world and can be leveraged to solve security and privacy issues. However, this emerging technology has a great potential in the most diverse technological areas and can significantly help achieve the Internet of Things view in different aspects, increasing the capacity of decentralization, facilitating interactions, enabling new transaction models, and allowing autonomous coordination of the devices. The paper goal is to provide the concepts about the structure and operation of Blockchain and, mainly, analyze how the use of this technology can be used to provide security and privacy in IoT. Finally, we present the stalker, which is a selfish miner variant that has the objective of preventing a node to publish its blocks on the main chain.
Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Leonardo da Costa, André Avelino da Silva Neto, Billy Pinheiro, Roberto Araújo · 6 authors
In blockchain, full nodes (FNs) are peers that store and verify entire chains of transactions, and light clients (LCs) are those which outsource chain verification to FNs (as they lack computing resources required to do so). In general, LCs perform simpler verification protocols, e.g. Simple Payment Verification (SPV), by offloading the execution of blockchain operations to FNs. To cope with byzantine faults (like malicious behavior), a current approach for blockchain transaction verification is requiring that LCs outsource their requests to multiple FNs, and compare received results. This approach, however, requires that LCs establish secure connections to each FN, which leads to client-side complexity and slower verification. To tackle this issue, we propose Distributed Lightweight Client Protocol (DLCP), a protocol for secure verification in blockchain. In summary, DLCP requires LCs to encrypt a request once, allowing a pre-determined set of FNs to access and process it. Through DLCP, LCs become able to verify whether FNs have agreed on the operation outcome. From some preliminary evaluation, we observed that DLCP decreased computing and communication overhead in LCs, while providing lower latency.
The exponential growth of wireless services with diversity of devices and applications has inspired the research community to come up with novel concepts to improve the efficiency of resource use. It is cost efficient and practical to be able to evaluate and analyze expected value of use cases before actual implementation of the solution. This paper presents blockchain network slice brokering use case value analysis and results in the industrial automation application scenario. The use case value was assessed applying resource configuration framework against blockchain and smart contracts characteristics and capabilities. According to the findings, expected value of blockchain network slice brokering use case was proven and in general feasibility of blockchain technology for novel resource configurations use cases for various network functions was stated. The use case enables industrial automation processes and related manufacturing equipment to autonomously and dynamically acquire the slice needed for most efficient operations. The resource configuration framework provides a dynamic framework for analyzing and developing the blockchain enabled novel use cases and business models.
Arman Pouraghily, Md Nazmul Islam, Sandip Kundu, Tilman Wolf
Over past two decades, the idea of Internet of Things has been adopted widely as a solution to many societal problems in different areas. These areas include but are not limited to healthcare, transportation, environment, etc. Low cost overhead of Internet connectivity feature has been the main contributing factor in the widespread use of such devices in building different IoT solutions. The original stovepipe architecture of IoT systems limits the possibility of sharing the hardware infrastructure of IoT solutions and therefore is the main barrier against novel solutions. In recent year, however, there have been efforts to come up with solutions for sharing the hardware infrastructure and therefore pave the way for innovative solutions by amortizing the capital cost of setting up the hardware. In this work, we propose an architectural guideline for blockchain enabled IoT devices which facilitates sharing them between multiple blockchain ecosystems and at the same time, ensures the exclusive access to them seamlessly through blockchain smart contracts.
Ali Mohammad Saghiri, Monireh Vahdati, Kamran Gholizadeh HamlAbadi, Mohammad Reza Meybodi · 6 authors
Internet of Things, cognitive systems, and blockchain technology are three fields which have created numerous revolutions in software development. It seems that a combination among these fields may results in emerging a high potential and interesting field. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a framework for Internet of Things based on cognitive systems and blockchain technology. To the best of our knowledge, there is no framework for Internet of Things based on cognitive systems and blockchain. In order to study the applicability of the proposed framework, a recommender system based on the proposed framework is suggested. Since the proposed framework is novel, the suggested recommender system is novel. The suggested recommender system is compared with the existing recommender systems. The results show that the suggested recommender system has several benefits which are not available in the existing recommender systems.
Mengting Liu, F. Richard Yu, Yinglei Teng, Victor C. M. Leung · 5 authors
Blockchain is widely deemed as a key enabling technology of current digital currency. However, the application of blockchain to wireless mobile networks is challenged by a computational difficult problem called proof-of-work puzzle. Accordingly, mobile edge computing (MEC) appears to be a promising solution by offloading the computation-intensive mining tasks to nearby edge computing nodes. Meanwhile, caching is also popular due to its capability in handling the ever-increasing Internet traffic. In this paper, we study computation offloading and content caching in wireless blockchain networks with MEC. Specifically, offloading mode selection (offloaded to a nearby access point (AP) or a group of device-to-device (D2D) users) and caching strategy (whether to cache the requested content and computation results or not) are jointly investigated and formulated as an optimization problem. Further, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem in a distributed way. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by simulation results with different system parameters.
The distributed ledger technology presents a very innovative and secure way of managing transactions online. Hailed as one of the greatest inventions after the Internet, blockchain is set to pioneer changes in the way businesses are conducted today through its promise of secure, tamper-proof, peer-to-peer decentralized networks with distributed consensus. These fundamental features built into the very fabric bring in a host of additional dimensions and present greater challenges in their testing. Not only are the technological changes significant, but also significant are changes from a business standpoint. A new wave of blockchain oriented software development is emerging at an unprecedented rate. This places an additional responsibility on the Quality Assurance teams to deliver first-time quality while minimizing the impact of testing on the teams delivery. This paper highlights the challenges currently faced in testing such applications. It also acknowledges the need to devise specialized tools and techniques for blockchain oriented software testing in order to ensure high standards of quality.
With the success of Bitcoin, the technique behind it, Blockchain, is catching massive attention recently. Blockchain is a collection of several techniques like cryptology, P2P and distributed consensus protocol. The main idea of Blockchain is that nodes in the network keep the same distributed ledger. Because of this immutable ledger, a trusted bridge is built among parties without fully trust. Blockchain can be used in variety of areas, especially in financial fields, like supply chain management, cross-border payment and global bank settlement. Meanwhile, we can observe that mobile network is growing rapidly and nibbling the PC market. However, the current public Blockchain applications like Bitcoin or Ethereum require the nodes to store the whole ledger which exceeds the capacity of the mobile devices. Thus, we need to develop a blockchain platform to support mobile devices. In this demo, we introduce Jupiter, a mobile-based Blockchain platform which provides a novel concept called consensus unit (CU) to alleviate the storage problem of mobile. We present the system architecture and demonstrate several CU scenarios via Jupiter.
The two major roadblocks for state of the art Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure like smart buildings, smart cities, etc. are lack of trust between various entities of system and single point of failure which is a vulnerability causing extreme damage to the whole system. This paper proposes a blockchain based IoT security solution where, trust is established through the immutable and decentralized nature of blockchain. The distributed nature of blockchain makes the system more robust and immune to single point of failure. We propose a mechanism to establish continuous security in the system by evaluating legitimate presence of user in valid IoT-Zone continuously without user intervention. Every user interaction in an IoT environment is stored in blockchain as a transaction and series of these transactions represent a user's IoT-trail. A unique digital crypto-token is required for a user interaction to be legitimate. This token is used as an access control mechanism to prevent any unauthorized access to the system. Tokens are pre-generated using a prediction model based on user's IoT-trail in the blockchain. By using blockchain as an underlying framework in IoT environment and through the method of continuous security, we made the system more secure, robust and interoperable.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are receiving much attention. As discussion focuses on the potential applications of DLTs, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) offerings are emerging to provide the underlying supporting infrastructure. BaaS entails a service provider supplying and managing aspects of a DLT infrastructure to facilitate and bring efficiencies regarding the development, experimentation, deployment, and the ongoing management of DLT applications. However, much of the interest in DLTs stems from their potential to decentralise, disintermediate, and enable `trustless' interactions. At first sight, BaaS - being offered by a provider - appears to run counter to this. In practice, whether BaaS raises substantive trust concerns depends on the nature of the offering, the application's specifics, and the participants' goals and risk appetite. This paper elaborates the nature of BaaS and explores the trust considerations it raises, particularly regarding the role of providers as part of a wider infrastructure.
Maged M. Eljazzar, Mohamed Amr, Sally Kassem, Mohamed Ezzat
Technology has been playing a major role in our lives. One definition for technology is all the knowledge, products, processes, tools,methods and systems employed in the creation of goods or in providing services.This makes technological innovations raise the competitiveness between organizations that depend on supply chain and logistics in the global market. With increasing competitiveness, new challenges arise due to lack of information and assets tractability. This paper introduces three scenarios for solving these challenges using the Blockchain technology. In this work, Blockchain technology targets two main issues within the supply chain, namely, data transparency and resource sharing. These issues are reflected into the organizations strategies and plans.
The Internet of Things (IoT) network of connected devices currently contains more than 11 billion devices and is estimated to double in size within the next four years. The prevalence of these devices makes them an ideal target for attackers. To reduce the risk of attacks vendors routinely deliver security updates (patches) for their devices. The delivery of security updates becomes challenging due to the issue of scalability as the number of devices may grow much quicker than vendors' distribution systems. Previous studies have suggested a permissionless and decentralized blockchainbased network in which nodes can host and deliver security updates, thus the addition of new nodes scales out the network. However, these studies do not provide an incentive for nodes to join the network, making it unlikely for nodes to freely contribute their hosting space, bandwidth, and computation resources. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized IoT software update delivery network in which participating nodes (referred to as distributors) are compensated by vendors with digital currency for delivering updates to devices. Upon the release of a new security update, a vendor will make a commitment to provide digital currency to distributors that deliver the update; the commitment will be made with the use of smart contracts, and hence will be public, binding, and irreversible. The smart contract promises compensation to any distributor that provides proof-of-distribution, which is unforgeable proof that a single update was delivered to a single device. A distributor acquires the proof-of-distribution by exchanging a security update for a device signature using the Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP) trustless data exchange protocol. Eliminating the need for trust between the security update distributor and the security consumer (IoT device) by providing fair compensation, can significantly increase the number of distributors, thus facilitating rapid scale out.
Roben Castagna Lunardi, Regio A. Michelin, Charles V. Neu, Avelino F. Zorzo
Due to increased number of attacks on the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the security of IoT networks became critical. Some recent researches proposed the adoption of blockchain in IoT networks without a thorough discussion on the impact of the solution on the devices performance. Furthermore, blockchain employment in the context of IoT can be challenging due to the devices hardware limitations. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an IoT ledger-based architecture to ensure access control on heterogeneous scenarios. This research applies conventional devices used on IoT networks, such as Arduino, Raspberry and Orange Pi boards. Finally, we perform performance evaluation focused on access control of IoT devices and on information propagation through peers on a private IoT network scenario.
Davide Frey, Marc X. Makkes, Pierre-Louis Roman, François Taı̈ani · 5 authors
Blockchains have a storage scalability issue. Their size is not bounded and they grow indefinitely as time passes. As of August 2017, the Bitcoin blockchain is about 120 GiB big while it was only 75 GiB in August 2016. To benefit from Bitcoin full security model, a bootstrapping node has to download and verify the entirety of the 120 GiB. This poses a challenge for low-resource devices such as smartphones. Thankfully, an alternative exists for such devices which consists of downloading and verifying just the header of each block. This partial block verification enables devices to reduce their bandwidth requirements from 120 GiB to 35 MiB. However, this drastic decrease comes with a safety cost implied by a partial block verification. In this work, we enable low-resource devices to fully verify subchains of blocks without having to pay the onerous price of a full chain download and verification; a few additional MiB of bandwidth suffice. To do so, we propose the design of diet nodes that can securely query full nodes for shards of the UTXO set, which is needed to perform full block verification and can otherwise only be built by sequentially parsing the chain.
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure timestamping service. Although Bitcoin participants which create new blocks cannot modify their order, they can manipulate timestamps almost undetected. This undermines the Bitcoin protocol as a reliable timestamping service. In particular, a newcomer that synchronizes the entire blockchain has a little guarantee about timestamps of all blocks. In this paper, we present a simple yet powerful mechanism that increases the reliability of Bitcoin timestamps. Our protocol can provide evidence that a block was created within a certain time range. The protocol is efficient, backward compatible, and surprisingly, currently deployed SSL/TLS servers can act as reference time sources. The protocol has many applications and can be used for detecting various attacks against the Bitcoin protocol.