The use of Internet of Things devices is an integral part of our modern society. Communication with internet of things devices is secured with asymmetric key encryption that is handled by the centralized certificate authority infrastructure. The emerging Blockchain technology now provides a safe way to change ownership of digital resources through a decentralized system that challenges the traditional centralized view of trust in digital systems. This project studies the security of building public key infrastructures and access communication protocols on Blockchain technology for IoT devices. An informal cryptographic analysis that used proof by contradiction showed that it is cryptographically safe to build Blockchain based Public Key Infrastructures. The analysed Blockchain based public key infrastructure was implemented with smart contracts and tested on the Ethereum platform along with a dynamic access control protocol ensuring dynamic authentication and distributed logging. The project also concluded that advancements in the software clients of nodes are required before Blockchain can be used in Internet of Things devices. This is due to the high storage demands required by currently available nodes.
Internet of Things (IoT) means that physical objects will be able to interact and communicate via embedded systems. This will lead to a distributed network of devices that can communicate with both humans and each other. One application area is in improving supply chain management. The goal in supply chains is to move a product or a service from the producer to the customer as efficient as possible. Implementation of IoT will have many benefits but it also raises security issues that can affect integrity, security and privacy for both individuals and companies. In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin and more importantly, blockchain. Blockchain is a ledger of facts, data is not stored in only one network with a common processor, but it is distributed among all the clients on the network. This technology may be a solution to some problems that IoT are facing. This paper looks into up to date research of blockchain and IoT with the purpose to study blockchain as a potential solution to secure IoT data management within supply chains. Both blockchain and IoT are relatively new research areas with little existing research, which support our use of a qualitative inductive method. Semi-structured interviews, which will be further explained in the methodology section, have been conducted with people working within the fields of blockchain, IoT and supply chain. The result indicates that blockchain can be used to secure data management within any given supply chain that uses IoT technology, but blockchain should be seen as a tool, and not as a complete solution. Many of the security issues within IoT are related to the devices and blockchain will not be able to provide a solution to these problems. Blockchain can however be used for handling information, securing identities, traceability of goods, transactions being made without human interaction, automated storage management and time stamped actions to name some examples. There are still barriers to make these benefits work in reality but there is a lot of research currently on-going, trying to make it happen.
In our current society both the demand for electricity is increasing and the demand for electrical energy as energy carrier is increasing. Renewable sources will play an important role in future energy generation due to societal developments. These distributed energy resources introduce new challenges to our current electrical power system. One of these challenges imposed on our current electrical power system is the introduction of a new grid user, the prosumer, who consumes and produces electrical energy. Another challenge is the intermittent nature of renewable sources such as solar and wind energy. During the past year Blockchain gained momentum as a technology mainly through the evolving industry of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether. Application of the Blockchain to the electrical power system could oer solutions to some of these challenges that the future electrical power system will face. The main goal of this thesis is to identify the opportunities, advantages and technical challenges of applying the Blockchain to the electrical power system. First, as part of the literature study the Blockchain has been studied and the operation of the Blockchain has been analyzed. The Blockchain has been dened as a collective of technologies that can be described as a database, which is distributed among a peer to peer network, combined with securitization elements relying on multiple cryptographic technologies. Second, the opportunities where the Blockchain could be applied in the current electrical power system were identied. In order to study the application of the Blockchain to the electrical power system four case studies have been introduced. These case studies dierentiate themselves in the level of adoption of the Blockchain and the functionality which could be provided to the electrical power system. Ranging from a local peer to peer trading infrastructure to the entire market being operated via the Blockchain with advanced features such as the control of power ows. Third, the various advantages of applying the Blockchain to the electrical power system have been explored based on the proposed case studies. A distinction has been made between advantages which are inherently linked to the characteristics of the Blockchain and the provided functionality to the electrical power system. Fourth, the challenges of applying the Blockchain to the electrical power system have been analyzed and discussed. Based on the dierent case studies a segregation has been made between challenges attributable to the characteristics of the Blockchain and challenges specically linked to the implementation of the case studies. Last, the practical application of the Blockchain to the electrical power system of the dierent case studies have been discussed. Explanation is given how the dierent case studies could be implemented within the electrical power system and what the role will be of dierent parties currently involved within the electrical power system.<br/>
Nabil Rifi, Nazim Agoulmine, Nada Chendeb Taher, Elie Rachkidi
In the past few years, the number of wireless devices connected to the Internet has increased to a number that could reach billions in the next few years. While cloud computing is being seen as the solution to process this data, security challenges could not be addressed solely with this technology. Security problems will continue to increase with such a model, especially for private and sensitive data such as personal data and medical data collected with more and more smarter connected devices constituting the so called Internet of Things. As a consequence, there is an urgent need for a fully decentralized peer‐to‐peer and secure technology solution to overcome these problems. The blockchain technology is a promising just‐in‐time solution that brings the required properties to the field. However, there are still challenges to address before using it in the context of IoT. This paper discusses these challenges and proposes a secure IoT architecture for medical data based on blockchain technology. The solution introduces a protocol for data access, smart contracts and a publisher‐subscriber mechanism for notification. A simple analytical model is also presented to highlight the performance of the system. An implementation of the solution as a proof of concept is also presented.
Doaa Mohey El-Din M. Hussein, Mohamed Hamed, Nour Eldeen
A Blockchain is considered the main mechanism for Bitcoin concurrency. A Blockchain is known by a public ledger and public transactions stored in a chain. The properties of blockchain demonstrate in decentralization as distribution blocks, stability, anonymity, and auditing. Blockchain can enhance the results of network efficiency and improve the security of network. It also can be applied in several fields like financial and banking services, healthcare systems, and public services. However, the research is still opening at this point. It includes a big number of technical challenges which prevents the wide application of blockchain, for example, scalability problem, privacy leakage, etc. This paper shows a proposed comprehensive study of blockchain technology. It also examines the research efforts in blockchain. It presents a proposed blockchain lifecycle which refers to an evolution and a linked ring between business process management improvement and Internet-of-Things concepts. Then, this paper presents a practical proof of this relationship for smart city. It presents a new algorithm and a proposed blockchain framework for 38 blocks (which recognized as smart-houses). Finally, the future directions are well presented in blockchain field.
With the development of the Internet of Things, a complex CPS system has emerged and is becoming a promising information infrastructure. In the CPS system, the loss of control over user data has become a very serious challenge, making it difficult to protect privacy, boost innovation, and guarantee data sovereignty. In this article, we propose HyperNet, a novel decentralized trusted computing and networking paradigm, to meet the challenge of loss of control over data. HyperNet is composed of the intelligent PDC, which is considered as the digital clone of a human individual; the decentralized trusted connection between any entities based on blockchain as well as smart contract; and the UDI platform, enabling secure digital object management and an identifier-driven routing mechanism. HyperNet has the capability of protecting data sovereignty, and has the potential to transform the current communication-based information system to the future data-oriented information society.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are both crucial and sensitive as they contain essential information and are frequently shared among different parties including hospitals, pharmacies or private clinics. This information must remain correct, up to date, private, and accessible only to the authorized people. Moreover, the access must also be assured under special conditions mass crises like hurricanes or earthquakes where disruption, decentralized responses, and chaos could potentially lead to wrong procedures or even malicious behaviors. The introduction of blockchain a distributed ledger where the records are stored in a linked sequence of blocks and are theoretically difficult to delete or tamper with made possible to design and implement new solutions for more failure-resistant EHRs applications adopting a distributed and decentralized philosophy, in contrast with the central ones based on cloud infrastructures or even local solutions. In this context, this work provides a systematic study to understand whether permissioned blockchain implementations could be of any benefit to managing health records in emergency situations caused by natural disasters. After the design and implementation of a basic prototype for an EHRs management system in Hyperledger Fabric and the execution of a set of test cases based on the simulation of the Haiti earthquake of 2010, it was possible to discuss the benefits and tradeoffs that the system entails. The discussion focused on the performance parameters like throughput, latency, memory and CPU usage. The system allowed the patients and practitioners to share and access EHRs and be able to detect and react to the crisis situations. Moreover, it behaved correctly in the presence of malicious nodes assuring throughputs and latencies still lower, compared to current centralized systems like credit card payments, but already up to two orders of magnitude higher than permissionless blockchain implementations. Even though there is still a lot of work to do, the system represented by the prototype could be an interesting alternative for networks of healthcare companies to help ensuring the continuity of treatment while preserving privacy and confidentiality in extreme situations.
Uddin Md Ashraf, Andrew Stranieri, Iqbal Gondal, Balasubramanian Venki
Continuous monitoring of patient's physiological signs has the potential to augment traditional medical practice, particularly in developing countries that have a shortage of healthcare professionals. However, continuously streamed data presents additional security, storage and retrieval challenges and further inhibits initiatives to integrate data to form electronic health record systems. Blockchain technologies enable data to be stored securely and inexpensively without recourse to a trusted authority. Blockchain technologies also promise to provide architectures for electronic health records that do not require huge government expenditure that challenge developing nations. However, Blockchain deployment, particularly with streamed data challenges existing Blockchain algorithms that take too long to place data in a block, and have no mechanism to determine whether every data point in every stream should be stored in such a secure way. This article presents an architecture that involves a Patient Agent, coordinating the insertion of continuous data streams into Blockchains to form an electronic health record.
Jan 1, 2018·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Gianluca Salviotti, Leonardo Maria De Rossi, Nico Abbatemarco
Blockchain is emerging as a game changing technology in many industries. Although it is increasingly capturing the business community’s attention, a comprehensive overview of commercially available applications is lacking to date. This paper aims to fill this gap. Firstly, we propose a structured approach to assess the application landscape of blockchain technologies. To build our framework, we relied on largely accepted classifications of blockchains, based on protocols, consensus mechanisms and ownership, as well as on the most cited application areas emerging from the literature. Secondly, we applied the framework on a database of 460 released blockchains. The analysis confirms a dominance of applications for cryptocurrencies, financial transactions and certification purposes, with a prevalence of permissionless platforms. We also found new application fields that go far beyond the seven initial areas addressed by the current body of knowledge, leading to some interesting takeaways for both practitioners and IS researchers.