Jan 1, 2018·International Conference on International Conference on Emerging Technologies in Computing 2018 (iCETiC '18) , 23rd -24th August, 2018, at London Metropolitan University, London, UK, Published by Springer-Verlag
Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system, is starting to be adopted for ensuring enhanced security and privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Fervent research is currently being focused in both academia and industry in this domain. Proof of Work (PoW), a cryptographic puzzle, plays a vital role in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which are considered to be incorruptible. Furthermore, BC uses a changeable Public Key (PK) to record the identity of users, thus providing an extra layer of privacy. Not only in cryptocurrency has the successful adoption of the BC been implemented, but also in multifaceted non-monetary systems, such as in: distributed storage systems, proof of location and healthcare. Recent research articles and projects or applications were surveyed to assess the implementation of the BC for IoT Security and identify associated challenges and propose solutions for BC enabled enhanced security for the IoT ecosystem.
This article discusses the possibility and validity of the use of blockchain in health care. When it comes to managing public health the biggest problems that have so far been encountered are data security, sharing and compatibility. If patient information is isolated and stored in several systems that do not allow for the smooth exchange of information, the population health data sets for different patient sets will be insufficient. Blockchain, according to the author, provides a reliable solution to this particular problem. The article discusses in detail the three basic principles of the blockchain: cryptography, distributed books and authentication. The distributed blockchain technology with such properties as immutability, reliability and decentralization, provides the healthcare sector with opportunities to detect fraud, reduce operating costs, smooth processes, eliminate duplication of work, and apply transparency in the health ecosystem. If used correctly, the blockchain will improve security, data exchange, compatibility, data integrity and update, and real-time access. The author of this article points out the importance of using the blockchain for data security in clinical trials, which always require a huge amount of data sets.
Recently, Blockchain is considered as one of the main powerful techniques in security and privacy domains. It is considered as the promised security concept for replacing the current third parities trusting solutions. This could be achieved by mixing some cryptography techniques, consensus algorithms alongside with some peer-to-peer communication protocols. In this paper, to meet the requirement of distributed structure in the eHealth Records (EHRs) system, we propose a novel protocol to achieve a perfect privacy preserving for the patient namely Pseudonym Based Encryption with Different Authorities (PBE-DA) by applying the concept of Blockchain on the healthcare communication entities in an e-health platform. Therefore, PBE-DA will be used to help the patient anonymously to access, check or update his sensitive data on EHRs system. Moreover, we analyzed not only the public blockchain tier between the different EHRs cloud provider but also another Blockchain tier between the patient sensors (IoT devices used to do some patient measurements) and the patient system as a gateway for the whole healthcare platform.
Md. Abdur Rahman, M. Shamim Hossain, George Loukas, Elham Hassanain · 7 authors
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is being introduced and leveraged in many domains, but few studies have addressed MEC for secure in-home therapy management. To this end, this paper presents an in-home therapy management framework, which leverages the IoT nodes and the blockchain-based decentralized MEC paradigm to support low-latency, secure, anonymous, and always-available spatiotemporal multimedia therapeutic data communication within an on-demand data-sharing scenario. To the best of our knowledge, this non-invasive, MEC-based IoT therapy platform is first done by our group. This platform can provide a full-body joint range of motion data for physically challenged individuals in a decentralized manner. With MEC, the framework can provide therapy diagnostic and analytical data on demand to a large portion of humanity who are either born with disabilities or became disabled due to accidents, war-time injuries, or old age. For security, the framework uses blockchain–Tor-based distributed transactions to preserve the therapeutic data privacy, ownership, generation, storage, and sharing. Our initial test results from a complete implementation of the framework show that it can support a sufficiently large number of users without considerable increase in mean processing time.
Atin Angrish, Benjamin Craver, Mahmud Hasan, Binil Starly
With product customization an emerging business opportunity, organizations must find ways to collaborate and enable sharing of information in an inherently trust-less network. In this paper, we propose – “FabRec”: a decentralized approach to handle manufacturing information generated by various organizations using blockchain technology. We propose a system in which a decentralized network of manufacturing machines and computing nodes can enable automated transparency of an organization’s capability, third party verification of such capability through a trail of past historic events and automated mechanisms to drive paperless contracts between participants using ‘smart contracts’. Our system decentralizes critical information about the manufacturer and makes it available on a peer-to-peer network composed of fiduciary nodes to ensure transparency and data provenance through a verifiable audit trail. We present a testbed platform through a combination of manufacturing machines, system-on-chip platforms and computing nodes to demonstrate mechanisms through which a consortium of disparate organizations can communicate through a decentralized network. Our prototype testbed demonstrates the value of computer code residing on a decentralized network for verification of information on the blockchain and ways in which actions can be autonomously initiated in the physical world. This paper intends to expose system elements in preparation for much larger field tests through the working prototype and discusses the future potential of blockchain for manufacturing IT.
The increasing demand for mobile network capacity driven by Internet of Things (IoT) applications results in the need for understanding better the potential and limitations of 5G networks. Vertical application areas like smart mobility, energy networks, industrial IoT applications, and AR/VR enhanced services all pose different requirements on the use of 5G networks. Some applications need low latency, whereas others need high bandwidth or security support. The goal of this paper is to identify the requirements and to understand the limitations for 5G driven applications. We review application areas and list the typical challenges and requirements posed on 5G networks. A main challenge will be to develop a network architecture being able to dynamically adapt to fluctuating traffic patterns and accommodating various technologies such as edge computing, blockchain based distributed ledger, software defined networking, and virtualization. To inspire future research, we reveal open problems and highlight the need for piloting with 5G applications, with tangible steps, to understand the configuration of 5G networks and the use of applications across multiple vertical industries.
Distributed ledger technology has gained wide popularity and adoption since the emergence of bitcoin in 2008 which is based on proof of work (PoW). It is a distributed, transparent and immutable database of records of all the transactions or events that have been shared and executed among the participants. All the transactions are verified and maintained by multiple nodes across a network without a central authority through a distributed cryptographic mechanism, a consensus protocol. It forms the core of this technology that not only validates the information appended to the ledger but also ensures the order in which it is appended across all the nodes. It is the foundation of its security, accountability and trust. While many researchers are working on improving the current protocol to be quantum resistant, fault-tolerant, and energy-efficient. Others are focused on developing different variants of the protocol, best suited for specific use cases. In this paper, we shall review different consensus protocols of distributed ledger technologies and their implementations. We shall also review their properties, concept and similar-work followed by a brief analysis.
Qi Zhang, Petr Novotny, Salman Baset, Donna N. Dillenberger · 6 authors
The rise of crypto-currencies has spawned great interest in their underlying technology, namely, Blockchain. The central component in a Blockchain is a shared distributed ledger. A ledger comprises series of blocks, which in turns contains a series of transactions. An identical copy of the ledger is stored on all nodes in a blockchain network. Maintaining ledger integrity and security is one of the crucial design aspects of any blockchain platform. Thus, there are typically built-in validation mechanisms leveraging cryptography to ensure the validity of incoming blocks before committing them into the ledger. However, a blockchain node may run over an extended period of time, during which the blocks on the disk can may become corrupted due to software or hardware failures, or due to malicious activity. This paper proposes LedgerGuard, a tool to maintain ledger integrity by detecting corrupted blocks and recovering these blocks by synchronizing with rest of the network. The experimental implementation of LedgerGuard is based on Hyperledger Fabric, which is a popular open source permissioned blockchain platform.
Jawad Ali, Toqeer Ali Syed, Shahrulniza Musa, Ali Zahrani
The Internet of Things (IoT) is undergoing rapid growth in the IT industry, but, it continues to be associated with several security and privacy concerns as a result of its massive scale, decentralised topology, and resource-constrained devices. Blockchain (BC), a distributed ledger technology used in cryptocurrency has attracted significant attention in the realm of IoT security and privacy. However, adopting BC to IoT is not straightforward in most cases, due to overheads and delays caused by BC operations. In this paper, we apply a BC technology known as Hyperledgder Fabric, to an IoT network. This technol-ogy introduces an execute-order technique for transactions that separates the transaction execution from consensus, resulting in increased efficiency. We demonstrate that our proposed IoT-BC architecture is sufficiently secure with regard to fundamental se-curity goals i.e., confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Finally, the simulation results are highlighted that shows the performance overheads associated with our approach are as minimal as those associated with the Hyperledger Fabric framework and negligible in terms of security and privacy.
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one of the latest in a long list of digital technologies, which appear to be heading towards a new industrial revolution. DLT has become very popular with the publication of the Bitcoin Blockchain in 2008. However, when we consider its suitability for dynamic networking environments, such as the Internet of Things, issues like transaction fees, scalability, and offline accessibility have not been resolved. The IOTA Foundation has designed the IOTA protocol, which is the data and value transfer layer for the Machine Economy. IOTA protocol uses an alternative blockless Blockchain which claims to solve the previous problems: the Tangle. This thesis first inquires into the theoretical concepts of both technologies Tangleand Blockchain, to understand them and identify the reasons to be compatible or not with the Internet of Things networking environments. After the analysis, the thesis focuses on the proposed implementation as a solution to address the connectivity issue suffered by the IOTA network. The answer to the problem is the development of a Neighbor Discovery algorithm, which has been designed to fulfill the requirements demanded by the IOTA application. Dealing with IOTA network setup can be very interesting for the community that is looking for new improvements at each release. Testing the solution in a peer-to-peer specific protocol (PeerSim), with different networking scenarios, allowed us to get valuable and more realistic information. Thus, after analyzing the results, we were able to determine the appropriate IOTA network configuration to build a more reliable and long-lasting network.
Gokhan Sagirlar, Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari, John Sheehan · 5 authors
From its early days the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved into a decentralized system of cooperating smart objects with the requirement, among others, of achieving distributed consensus. Yet, current IoT platform solutions are centralized cloud based computing infrastructures, manifesting a number of significant disadvantages, such as, among others, high cloud server maintenance costs, weakness for supporting time-critical IoT applications, security and trust issues. Enabling blockchain technology into IoT can help to achieve a proper distributed consensus based IoT system that overcomes those disadvantages. While this is an ideal match, it is still a challenging endeavor. In this paper we take a first step towards that goal by designing Hybrid-IoT, a hybrid blockchain architecture for IoT. In Hybrid-IoT, subgroups of IoT devices form PoW blockchains, referred to as PoW sub-blockchains. Then, the connection among the PoW sub-blockchains employs a BFT inter-connector framework, such as Polkadot or Cosmos. In this paper, we focus on the PoW sub-blockchains formation, guided by a set of guidelines based on a set of dimensions, metrics and bounds. In order to prove the validity of the approach we carry on a performance and security evaluation.
There are several distributed ledger protocols potentially suitable for the Internet of things (IoT), including the Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and IOTA. This paper briefly presents and compares them from the IoT application development perspective. The IoT applications based on blockchain (BC) can incorporate the on-chain logic –the smart contracts– and Web, mobile or embedded client front-end application parts. We present three possible architectures for the IoT front-end BC applications. They differ in positioning of Ethereum blockchain clients (local device, remote server) and in positioning of key store needed for the management of outgoing transactions. The practical constraints of these architectures, which utilize the Ethereum network for trusted transaction exchange, are the data volumes, the location and synchronization of the full blockchain node and the location and the access to the Ethereum key store. Results of these experiments indicate that a full Ethereum node is not likely to reliably run on a constrained IoT devices. Therefore the architecture with remote Ethereum clients seems to be a viable approach, where two sub-options exist and differ in key store location/management. In addition, we proposed the use of architectures with a proprietary communication between the IoT device and remote blockchain client to further reduce the network traffic and enhance security. We expect it to be able to operate over low-power, low-bitrate mobile technologies, too. Our research clarifies differences in architectural approaches, but final decision for a particular ledger protocol and front-end application architecture is at strongly based on the particular intended use case.
The concept of Bitcoin was first introduced by an unknown individual (or a group of people) named Satoshi Nakamoto before it was released as open-source software in 2009. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and a decentralized worldwide payment system for digital currency where transactions take place among users without any intermediary. Bitcoin transactions are performed and verified by network nodes and then registered in a public ledger called blockchain, which is maintained by network entities running Bitcoin software. To date, this cryptocurrency is worth close to U.S. $150 billion and widely traded across the world. However, as Bitcoin's popularity grows, many security concerns are coming to the forefront. Overall, Bitcoin security inevitably depends upon the distributed protocols-based stimulant-compatible proof-of-work that is being run by network entities called miners, who are anticipated to primarily maintain the blockchain (ledger). As a result, many researchers are exploring new threats to the entire system, introducing new countermeasures, and therefore anticipating new security trends. In this survey paper, we conduct an intensive study that explores key security concerns. We first start by presenting a global overview of the Bitcoin protocol as well as its major components. Next, we detail the existing threats and weaknesses of the Bitcoin system and its main technologies including the blockchain protocol. Last, we discuss current existing security studies and solutions and summarize open research challenges and trends for future research in Bitcoin security.
Industry 4.0 will enable the development of hyper-efficient plants, which facilitate the implementation of emerging production models such as Made-to-Order and Configure-to-Order. In this direction, the H2020 FAR-EDGE project has introduced a reference architecture and an accompanying platform that facilitates the implementation of digital automation solutions based on edge computing and distributed ledger technologies, which enable fast, reliable and responsive automation. In this paper, we illustrate the use of these technologies for the implementation and deployment of a practical use case in the white appliances industry. Specifically, we present how a sorter component can be automatically programmed in order to ensure that items arriving at a conveyor are optimally placed in various bays. The use case leverages the edge computing paradigm in order to ensure that each physical item is able to communicate its status to all the others. At the same time, distributed ledger technologies enable the modelling of the sorting process as a reliable smart contract among all physical entities. The benefits of the deployment include tangible improvements in productivity, along with a significant reduction in the effort and time needed for the reconfiguration of the sorter.
The advent of Industry4.0 has given rise to a large number of digital manufacturing systems, which are currently used to digitize industry and transform industrial processes like automation, maintenance and quality control. The present paper introduces a first-of-a-kind reference architecture for developing industrial automation systems based on edge computing and blockchain technologies. It also presents the design of a platform that implements this reference architecture with a view to providing functionalities in three complementary domains, namely automation, production systems’ virtualization and data analytics. The presented platform is destined to provide some distinct performance and reliability advantages, based on its edge computing and blockchain foundations.