Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system, is considered to be both alluring and critical for ensuring enhanced security and (in some implementations, non-traceable) privacy for diverse applications in many other domains - including in the Internet of Things (IoT) eco-system. Intensive research is currently being conducted in both academia and industry applying the Blockchain technology in multifarious applications. Proof-of-Work (PoW), a cryptographic puzzle, plays a vital rôle in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which is considered to be incorruptible. Furthermore, BC uses a changeable Public Key (PK) to record the users’ identity, which provides an extra layer of privacy. Not only in cryptocurrency has the successful adoption of BC been implemented but also in multifaceted non-monetary systems such as in: distributed storage systems, proof-of-location, healthcare, decentralized voting and so forth. Recent research articles and projects/applications were surveyed to assess the implementation of BC for enhanced security, to identify associated challenges and to propose solutions for BC enabled enhanced security systems.
With the help of the Internet of Things (IoT), an evolving technology, issues may be solved in the fields of research and engineering without the involvement of a human workforce. It allows for the creation of interactions between machines and people, or smart work force. Although there may be advantages to integrating blockchain technology with IoT, doing so also creates additional difficulties, such as scalability issues when designing blockchains for IoT applications. In this chapter, we examine the main advantages, design considerations, and possible blockchain applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). A central server model is dropped and blockchain (BC) technology is added as a component of IoT to solve such security and privacy problems. This study examines how the distributed ledger-based blockchain technology affects potential security and privacy concerns related to the interplay of IoT components. Applications of BC with regard to the targeted industries and categories were obviously examined here. To comprehend the role of blockchain technology, certain issues unique to IoT and IoT with BC were also explored.
The technology that has had the most impact on our lifestyles in the last decade is Blockchain. A word that often arises when talking about Blockchain is Bitcoin. Many people still confuse Blockchain with Bitcoin; however, they are not the same. Bitcoin is just one of many applications that use Blockchain technology. In this paper, the authors conduct a survey of Blockchain applications using Blockchain technology and the challenges these face.
Peng Zhang, Jules White, Douglas C. Schmidt, Gunther Lenz · 5 authors
Secure and scalable data sharing is essential for collaborative clinical decision making. Conventional clinical data efforts are often siloed, however, which creates barriers to efficient information exchange and impedes effective treatment decision made for patients. This paper provides four contributions to the study of applying blockchain technology to clinical data sharing in the context of technical requirements defined in the “Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap” from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). First, we analyze the ONC requirements and their implications for blockchain-based systems. Second, we present FHIRChain, which is a blockchain-based architecture designed to meet ONC requirements by encapsulating the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard for shared clinical data. Third, we demonstrate a FHIRChain-based decentralized app using digital health identities to authenticate participants in a case study of collaborative decision making for remote cancer care. Fourth, we highlight key lessons learned from our case study.
Interoperability in healthcare has traditionally been focused around data exchange between business entities, for example, different hospital systems. However, there has been a recent push towards patient-driven interoperability, in which health data exchange is patient-mediated and patient-driven. Patient-centered interoperability, however, brings with it new challenges and requirements around security and privacy, technology, incentives, and governance that must be addressed for this type of data sharing to succeed at scale. In this paper, we look at how blockchain technology might facilitate this transition through five mechanisms: (1) digital access rules, (2) data aggregation, (3) data liquidity, (4) patient identity, and (5) data immutability. We then look at barriers to blockchain-enabled patient-driven interoperability, specifically clinical data transaction volume, privacy and security, patient engagement, and incentives. We conclude by noting that while patient-driving interoperability is an exciting trend in healthcare, given these challenges, it remains to be seen whether blockchain can facilitate the transition from institution-centric to patient-centric data sharing.
The paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for a world, where many of our daily objects will be interconnected and will interact with their environment in order to collect information and automate certain tasks. Such a vision requires, among other things, seamless authentication, data privacy, security, robustness against attacks, easy deployment, and self-maintenance. Such features can be brought by blockchain, a technology born with a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. In this paper, a thorough review on how to adapt blockchain to the specific needs of IoT in order to develop Blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) applications is presented. After describing the basics of blockchain, the most relevant BIoT applications are described with the objective of emphasizing how blockchain can impact traditional cloud-centered IoT applications. Then, the current challenges and possible optimizations are detailed regarding many aspects that affect the design, development, and deployment of a BIoT application. Finally, some recommendations are enumerated with the aim of guiding future BIoT researchers and developers on some of the issues that will have to be tackled before deploying the next generation of BIoT applications.
Blockchain has numerous benefits such as decentralisation, persistency, anonymity and auditability. There is a wide spectrum of blockchain applications ranging from cryptocurrency, financial services, risk management, internet of things (IoT) to public and social services. Although a number of studies focus on using the blockchain technology in various application aspects, there is no comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology in both technological and application perspectives. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive survey on the blockchain technology. In particular, this paper gives the blockchain taxonomy, introduces typical blockchain consensus algorithms, reviews blockchain applications and discusses technical challenges as well as recent advances in tackling the challenges. Moreover, this paper also points out the future directions in the blockchain technology.
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 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 offerings, exploring the role of the provider as part of a wider infrastructure, and related issues of trust.
Ahmed Abdullah Ali, Iman A. El-Dessouky, Mahmoud Abdallah, Azza K. Nabih
The evolution of the business networks is fostering the demand for more connected devices to execute tangled and sophisticated business operations. This leverages complicated business networks space to include scalable network layers, more devices, and platforms relying on Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Despite the fact that traditional IoT platforms usually target the technical side for IoT applications, they are not prepared enough to be easily integrated with pluggable and executable business logic or smart contracts. This makes it difficult to control a collection of shared business network resources in a standard and decentralized manner. With the rise of FinTech due to blockchain technology, it becomes possible to seamlessly engage business networks with financial digital assets. Consequently, combining IoT platforms with blockchain will drive new ways for better services consuming, transparency and products that depend on crowd-based economy [12]. In this paper, Sitechain is proposed as a new architecture to integrate IoT platforms with blockchain technology. The proposed architecture is not locked to specific IoT platforms but it can be extended to support different platforms in a standard, systematic and easy way. Sitechain is demonstrated by integrating Sitewhere and FIWARE IoT platforms with Hyperledger Fabric as a private blockchain network manager. Moreover a modeling language supported by Hyperledger composer is used to easily develop smart contracts and generate RESTful APIs, therefore any smart contract transaction events can be mapped into actions on remote devices.
Blockchain technology has been known as the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies, but nowadays it is further considered as a functional technology for improving existing technologies and creating new applications previously never practical. In this paper, we are focused on utilizing blockchain technology to introduce a new ID as a service (IDaaS) for digital identity management. The proposed blockchain-based ID as a service (BIDaaS) is explained with one practical example that shows how the proposed BIDaaS works as an identity and authentication management infrastructure for mobile users of a mobile telecommunication company.
Mobile security has become more and more important due to the boom of mobile commerce (m-commerce). However, the development of m-commerce is facing many challenges regarding data security problems. Recently, blockchain has been introduced as an effective security solution deployed successfully in many applications in practice, such as, Bitcoin, cloud computing, and Internet-of-Things. However, the blockchain technology has not been adopted and implemented widely in m-commerce because its mining processes usually require to be performed on standard computing units, e.g., computers. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new m-commerce application using blockchain technology, namely, MobiChain, to secure transactions in the m-commerce. Especially, in the MobiChain application, the mining processes can be executed efficiently on mobile devices using our proposed Android core module. Through real experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed model and show that blockchain will be an efficient security solution for future m-commerce.
Ali Dorri, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak, Praveen Gauravaram
BlockChain (BC) has attracted tremendous attention due to its immutable nature and the associated security and privacy benefits. BC has the potential to overcome security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). However, BC is computationally expensive, has limited scalability and incurs significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited to the IoT context. We propose a tiered Lightweight Scalable BC (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements. We explore LSB in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Low resource devices in a smart home benefit from a centralized manager that establishes shared keys for communication and processes all incoming and outgoing requests. LSB achieves decentralization by forming an overlay network where high resource devices jointly manage a public BC that ensures end-to-end privacy and security. The overlay is organized as distinct clusters to reduce overheads and the cluster heads are responsible for managing the public BC. LSB incorporates several optimizations which include algorithms for lightweight consensus, distributed trust and throughput management. Qualitative arguments demonstrate that LSB is resilient to several security attacks. Extensive simulations show that LSB decreases packet overhead and delay and increases BC scalability compared to relevant baselines.
K.W. Yeow, Abdullah Gani, Raja Wasim Ahmad, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues · 5 authors
With the exponential rise in the number of devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) is geared toward edge-centric computing to offer high bandwidth, low latency, and improved connectivity. In contrast, legacy cloud-centric platforms offer deteriorated bandwidth and connectivity that affect the quality of service. Edge-centric Internet of Things-based technologies, such as fog and mist computing, offer distributed and decentralized solutions to resolve the drawbacks of cloud-centric models. However, to foster distributed edge-centric models, a decentralized consensus system is necessary to incentivize all participants to share their edge resources. This paper is motivated by the shortage of comprehensive reviews on decentralized consensus systems for edge-centric Internet of Things that elucidates myriad of consensus facets, such as data structure, scalable consensus ledgers, and transaction models. Decentralized consensus systems adopt either blockchain or blockchainless directed acyclic graph technologies, which serve as immutable public ledgers for transactions. This paper scrutinizes the pros and cons of state-of-the-art decentralized consensus systems. With an extensive literature review and categorization based on existing decentralized consensus systems, we propose a thematic taxonomy. The pivotal features and characteristics associated with existing decentralized consensus systems are analyzed via a comprehensive qualitative investigation. The commonalities and variances among these systems are analyzed using key criteria derived from the presented literature. Finally, several open research issues on decentralized consensus for edge-centric IoT are presented, which should be highlighted regarding centralization risk and deficiencies in blockchain/blockchainless solutions.
Purpose This paper aims to describe a method for Internet-of-Things-devices to achieve industrial grade reliability for information transfer from wireless sensor systems to production systems using blockchain technologies. Design/methodology/approach An increased security and reliability of submitted data within the sensor network could be achieved on an application level. Therefore, a lightweight, high-level communication protocol based on blockchain principles was designed. Findings Blockchain mechanisms can secure the wireless communication of Internet-of-Things-devices in a lightweight and scalable manner. Originality/value The innovation of this research is the successful application of general blockchain mechanisms to increase security of a wireless sensor system without binding to a dedicated blockchain technology.
Dec 1, 2017·2017 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications and 2017 IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Communications (ISPA/IUCC)
Lei Zhou, Guojun Wang, Tongshuai Cui, Xiaofei Xing
Untrusted Computing in cloud is the main obstacle to promote cloud computing services, even users get an initial trusted execution environment, the events of dynamic software deployment are easy to cause a risk of compromised system. TTP and ACS are the common strategies to reach an agreement of valid application list and operations, however, extra entity should be added into the origin network and the reliability of system rely on the trust operation of third party.,,,, ,,,, Consider this network computing model, the directly remote controlled security strategy is lacking for terminal users, while the security of user computing applications are controlled by its resources owner like cloud manager which might be not trusted in whole time. In this paper, we address this problem and propose a consortium blockchain based cleanroom security service protocol (CSSP), to track the deployment and usage of the user's software in a secure and tamper-resistant measure, to prevent running of error or illegal software in user computing environment. Unlike the traditional methods, CSSP is a two side protocol: service provider and user computing node, which reduce the redundant safety hazards nodes and its invalidation problem. Consortium Blockchain is an effectively method to reduce the energy consumption and keep the software service protocol between the manager and the user in safety state. The security analysis and evaluation shows that the approach has major potential in trusted network computing system and provide a higher secure level environment for users.
M. Saravanan, R. Shubha, Achsah Mary Marks, Vishakh Iyer
Wearable health devices, mobile apps and diagnostic tools revolutionize the medical field by introducing new assisting devices for patients in a way to create comfort, communication and augmented intelligence. Internet of Things involved in this transformation to provide an environment where a patient's vital parameters get transmitted by sensor devices via a gateway onto secure cloud-based platforms where it is stored, aggregated and analyzed. It also helps to store data for millions of patients and performs analysis in real time, ultimately promoting an evidence-based medicine system. Privacy and security are concerns in this environment. Based on the latest trends, this paper introduces a new healthcare paradigm named as SMEAD by developing an end-to-end secured system for assisting diabetic patients. It includes wearables to monitor different parameters thus observe and predict the diabetes status of the patient. The proposed system employs a MEDIBOX which is used to configure the dosage required and provides an alert to the users reminding them to take medication on time. In this case, the insulin dosage is maintained at suitable cooling conditions and is continuously monitored using the mentioned system. To keep all the data secure and to enable access to this data by the doctor and other trusted parties, a Blockchain-based disruptive technology is implemented which facilitates cryptographic security and formalized data access through smart contracts for medical communities. In case of an emergency like missing a dosage, abnormal blood sugar levels or any security lapse, an alert is sent to the caretakers via social networks like Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp using mobile as a gateway which can continuously communicate the data over the internet that could save patients from fatal effects of the disease.
Shinsaku Kiyomoto, Anirban Basu, Mohammad Shahriar Rahman, Sushmita Ruj
This paper proposes a new conceptual architecture for authorization of mobile services based on blockchain technologies, and presents a design of procedures for heterogeneous mobile communication services. Furthermore, an extension of the procedures is considered in order to enhance privacy protection for users. The new architecture realizes the separation of mobile communication infrastructure and billing functions and multiple use of several mobile communication services under a single contract with a billing operator.
Military operations enabled using networks involves generation, transmission, collection and analysis of mission critical data to enable better decision making capabilities to commanders at all levels to achieve the objectives. This data is generated by variety of heterogeneous elements like humans and equipment in the battlefield. It is of utmost importance to ensure high level of integrity, confidentiality and availability of this data in such an environment and to ensure its sustainability in hostile environments. This paper presents scope and detailed analysis of the idea of utilizing Blockchain technology as a viable solution for ensuring integrity and provenance of data to suit military operations using networks and maintaining sustainability of these networks. The core concepts of Blockchain are presented in a comprehensive manner along with its variations. Military operations enabled using networks are modeled using Network Enabled Military Operations (NEMO) model. The viable framework and architecture for incorporating Blockchain technology to suit security requirements has been analyzed using three case studies relevant in today's scenario.
This paper proposes an education blockchain technology based on learning outcome, which is based on graduation requirement index of university, with professional certification and uses automated evaluation software as a tool. The course-learning outcome achievement values, which is based on the quantitative and qualitative combination of grades, process and evidence, the course name, learning outcome name (graduation requirement indicator) and the weight of the course, etc. are all record in the block. The conversion from evaluation of students' achievement to the post-job competence evaluation results is completed, and counterforces of student competency evaluation is send to the curriculum, which realize the continuous improvement of the curriculum.
Online wallet has become an important method to manage Bitcoin. In a Bitcoin transaction, online wallet manages the private key automatically, and stores the encrypted private key in remote to ensure the accessibility of Bitcoin anywhere. In the traditional online wallet, the private key is stored centrally in a storage unit. However, if the storage unit is collapsed or hacked, users will suffer the risk of losing their Bitcoins. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a new online wallet architecture: HA-eWallet. In HA-eWallet, the transaction of Bitcoin is signed by multiple private keys rather than one, and private keys are stored separately in different places. In addition, we introduce a second service unit to construct the Active-Active architecture to rotate the capability and workload. Besides, we adopt a disaster recovery strategy in our proposed architecture in case of any disaster. According to the running states of each service unit, HA-eWallet have three operation models, and can be switched smoothly. Theoretical analyses and experiments show that: HA-eWallet can achieve higher availability compared with the traditional online wallet architecture, and users will not suffer a loss as long as the number of lost private keys are less than 50% of the users' total number of private keys.
Zhiqing Huang, Xiongye Su, Yanxin Zhang, Changxue Shi · 6 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) plays an important role in the development of various fields. The increasing scale and scope of applications make a great demand of IoT data exchange in recent years. Meanwhile, a number of IoT data exchange platforms which dedicated to connecting various and distributed data sources are emerging. In such a platform, service providers can search and exchange the data sets that they need. However, the centralized infrastructure cannot provide enough trust as the third-party intermediaries for data exchange. As a result, most platforms unable to satisfy the complex requirements due to few institutions and individuals are willing to share their IoT data sets in such an untrustworthy environment. This paper proposes a decentralized solution based on the blockchain for IoT data trusted exchange. Specifically, In this paper, the basic principles of blockchain and corresponding key technologies are expounded through in-depth analysis of three main reliable requirements in IoT data exchange. Besides, this paper provides an architecture of above solution and detailed design of its main trust component. Finally, it realizes a prototype by using Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts and presents its auditable, transparent, decentralized features visually.