Blockchain and Internet of things are the most promising and upcoming technologies. Blockchain is a distributed, peer to peer database forming a chain between multiple blocks of data. The internet of things works on a similar paradigm where multiple devices are connected to the internet forming a network of networks. Combined together they offer solutions for various problems, especially in the field of healthcare where quick reporting of data or results is of utmost importance. Recent studies have proven that delays in providing healthcare are directly linked to patient confidence and chances of recovery. An unreliable storage of health records has only aggravated the problem. Our paper aims to provide a solution for these issues by proposing a Blockchain-Internet of things model where a bio-sensor measures and collects real time data with respect to a patient's medical status and stores it in the blockchain. In this way quick reporting and tamper proof storage of data occurs. By deploying a smart contract the final hospital bill can be calculated along with insurance coverage. This would negate the need of third party providers and create a transparent system. Our paper also proposes the use of Inter planetary file system to store discharged patients records thus reducing the load on the actual blockchain. Overall this will surely benefit patients and doctors alike by creating a safe and transparent environment along with quick response to a patient's need.
Bitcoin has not only attracted many users but also been considered as a technical breakthrough by academia. However, the expanding potential of Bitcoin is largely untapped due to its limited throughput. The Bitcoin community is now facing its biggest crisis in history as the community splits on how to increase the throughput. Among various proposals, Bitcoin Unlimited recently became the most popular candidate, as it allows miners to collectively decide the block size limit according to the real network capacity. However, the security of BU is heatedly debated and no consensus has been reached as the issue is discussed in different miner incentive models. In this paper, we systematically evaluate BU's security with three incentive models via testing the two major arguments of BU supporters: the block validity consensus is not necessary for BU's security; such consensus would emerge in BU out of economic incentives. Our results invalidate both arguments and therefore disprove BU's security claims. Our paper further contributes to the field by addressing the necessity of a prescribed block validity consensus for cryptocurrencies.
Zhen Hong, Zehua Wang, Wei Cai, Victor C. M. Leung
Device-to-device (D2D) communication is becoming an increasingly important technology in future networks with the climbing demand for local services. For instance, resource sharing in the D2D network features ubiquitous availability, flexibility, low latency and low cost. However, these features also bring along challenges when building a satisfactory resource sharing system in the D2D network. Specifically, user mobility is one of the top concerns for designing a cooperative D2D computational resource sharing system since mutual communication may not be stably available due to user mobility. A previous endeavour has demonstrated and proven how connectivity can be incorporated into cooperative task scheduling among users in the D2D network to effectively lower average task execution time. There are doubts about whether this type of task scheduling scheme, though effective, presents fairness among users. In other words, it can be unfair for users who contribute many computational resources while receiving little when in need. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based credit system that can be incorporated into the connectivity-aware task scheduling scheme to enforce fairness among users in the D2D network. Users’ computational task cooperation will be recorded on the public blockchain ledger in the system as transactions, and each user’s credit balance can be easily accessible from the ledger. A supernode at the base station is responsible for scheduling cooperative computational tasks based on user mobility and user credit balance. We investigated the performance of the credit system, and simulation results showed that with a minor sacrifice of average task execution time, the level of fairness can obtain a major enhancement.
Zehui Xiong, Yang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Ping Wang · 5 authors
Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized approach for resource and transaction management. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications, e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics, its application in mobile environments is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new transactions to the blockchain. Solving the proof-of-work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious option to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then, we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a demonstrative prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.
Zehui Xiong, Yang Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Ping Wang · 5 authors
Blockchain, as the backbone technology of the current popular Bitcoin digital currency, has become a promising decentralized data management framework. Although blockchain has been widely adopted in many applications (e.g., finance, healthcare, and logistics), its application in mobile services is still limited. This is due to the fact that blockchain users need to solve preset proof-of-work puzzles to add new data (i.e., a block) to the blockchain. Solving the proof of work, however, consumes substantial resources in terms of CPU time and energy, which is not suitable for resource-limited mobile devices. To facilitate blockchain applications in future mobile Internet of Things systems, multiple access mobile edge computing appears to be an auspicious solution to solve the proof-of-work puzzles for mobile users. We first introduce a novel concept of edge computing for mobile blockchain. Then we introduce an economic approach for edge computing resource management. Moreover, a prototype of mobile edge computing enabled blockchain systems is presented with experimental results to justify the proposed concept.
Hoang Tam Vo, Lenin Mehedy, Mukesh Mohania, Ermyas Abebe
In this paper, we demonstrate a blockchain-based solution for transparently managing and analyzing data in a pay-as-you-go car insurance application. This application allows drivers who rarely use cars to only pay insurance premium for particular trips they would like to travel. One of the key challenges from database perspective is how to ensure all the data pertaining to the actual trip and premium payment made by the users are transparently recorded so that every party in the insurance contract including the driver, the insurance company, and the financial institution is confident that the data are tamper-proof and traceable.
Pietro Danzi, Anders E. Kalør, Čedomir Stefanović, Petar Popovski
Blockchain is a technology uniquely suited to support massive number of transactions and smart contracts within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, thanks to the decentralized accounting mechanism. In a blockchain network, the states of the accounts are stored and updated by the validator nodes, interconnected in a peer-to-peer fashion. IoT devices are characterized by relatively low computing capabilities and low power consumption, as well as sporadic and low-bandwidth wireless connectivity. An IoT device connects to one or more validator nodes to observe or modify the state of the accounts. In order to interact with the most recent state of accounts, a device needs to be synchronized with the blockchain copy stored by the validator nodes. In this work, we describe general architectures and synchronization protocols that enable synchronization of the IoT endpoints to the blockchain, with different communication costs and security levels. We model and analytically characterize the traffic generated by the synchronization protocols, and also investigate the power consumption and synchronization trade-off via numerical simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that rigorously models the role of wireless connectivity in blockchain-powered IoT systems.
Ao longo dos ltimos anos, a tecnologia da informao contribuiu significativamente para a evoluo dos mercados financeiros, sem, no entanto, revolucionar a forma como as instituies financeiras interagem uma com as outras. Isso pode comear a mudar, uma vez que alguns participantes do mercado financeito esto prevendo que as novas tecnologias de armazenamento de dados, como o blockchain e outras tecnologias de registros distribudos ( distributed ledger technologies ), podero ser a fonte de uma revoluo iminente. Este trabalho analisa as principais caractersticas das chamadas DLTs ( distributed ledger technologies ), a sua relevncia para a Internet of Things, os indicativos do seu potencial de adoo pelas instituies financeiras e como o uso dessas tecnologias podem afetar alguns servios do mercado financeiro.
The IoT presents opportunities in all industrial sectors and is integral to the future of goods and services. The IoT includes the old Internet, but is substantially different from the old Internet for at least one very simple reason: the devices at the periphery of the network are not operated by people. These devices may be semi-or fully automated. And they will vastly outnumber the human operated devices in a short period of time. Blockchain is the basis technology for crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. But Blockchain can have far larger applications in the IoT, because Blockchain is highly distributed and publically viewable system of sequentially linked cryptographically. This in turn means that the Blockchain can be used to build trusted connections without an intermediary. This paper presents a concept of application.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Muhammad Reza Rizky Fauzi, Surya Michrandi Nasution, Marisa W. Paryasto
The present study discusses the workings of blockchain bitcoin in the transactions sector, on the development of today's emerging computers in the financial sector of blockchain bitcoin traction. In this case the author analyzes how the transaction is running, as well as how blockchain bitcoin is doing work in transactions on the system to make transactions. Transaction is a data structure that encodes the transfer of values between users with in a bitcoin system. Every transaction is a public entry in this bitcoin blockchain. And become a large transaction bookkeeping global.
The majority of business activity of our integrated and connected world takes place in networks based on cloud computing infrastructure that cross national, geographic and jurisdictional boundaries. Such an efficient entity interconnection is made possible through an emerging networking paradigm, Software Defined Networking (SDN) that intends to vastly simplify policy enforcement and network reconfiguration in a dynamic manner. However, despite the obvious advantages this novel networking paradigm introduces, its increased attack surface compared to traditional networking deployments proved to be a thorny issue that creates skepticism when safety-critical applications are considered. Especially when SDN is used to support Internet-of-Things (IoT)-related networking elements, additional security concerns rise, due to the elevated vulnerability of such deployments to specific types of attacks and the necessity of inter-cloud communication any IoT application would require. The overall number of connected nodes makes the efficient monitoring of all entities a real challenge, that must be tackled to prevent system degradation and service outage. This position paper provides an overview of common security issues of SDN when linked to IoT clouds, describes the design principals of the recently introduced Blockchain paradigm and advocates the reasons that render Blockchain as a significant security factor for solutions where SDN and IoT are involved.
The increasing trend of people moving to urban areas and the associated urbanization process require facing challenges regarding city infrastructures capability to cover citizens needs for energy, water, transportation, healthcare. education, safety. The smart urban technologies represent an important contribution to the sustainable development of cities, making smart cities a reality. The concept of Home Automation must be considered in relation to the new technologies and the new smart users and the house will no longer be regarded as a single entity, but as a fundamental part of the new concept of city. The idea of smart cities is developing extremely rapidly, integrating smart grid, services, building, house and appliances, these subsystems must be able to interact, connect, and control remotely, collaboratively, to achieve a better quality of life, sustainability, energy saving, social and economic development. The widespread of Smart City depends heavily on the capability of users to understand and handle the ICT, IoT and BC. The paper designs a smart district model that is the step necessary to build a Smart City using new technologies and the role of an efficient energy management system integrated into a platform based on an IoT and BC approach for a replicable model and can be implemented.
Jere Backman, Seppo Yrjölä, Kristiina Valtanen, Olli Mämmelä
5G Network Slice Broker concept aims to enable mobile virtual network operators, over-the-top providers, and industry vertical market players to request and lease resources from infrastructure providers dynamically according to needs. In the future digital factory, the leasing of resources could also happen autonomously by manufacturing equipment. This paper presents Blockchain Slice Leasing Ledger Concept and analysis of its applicability in the Factory of the Future. The novel concept utilizes 5G Network Slice Broker in a Blockchain to reduce service creation time and enable manufacturing equipment autonomously and dynamically acquire the slice needed for more efficient operations.
Chun-Feng Liao, Ching-Ju Cheng, Kung Chen, Chen-Ho Lai · 6 authors
In recent years, Blockchain technology has been highly valued, and the related applications have begun to be developed in large numbers. A smart contract is a software component encompass business logics and transactions that run on a blockchain. Thus, verifying whether the contract logics fully reflect the business requirements are one of the most important software engineering issues in blockchain application development. Currently, developing smart contracts is still a challenging task even for experienced programmers due to the lacking of an integrated tool for developing and testing. In response to this challenge, this paper presents a service platform that supports BDD-style (Behavior-Driven Development) smart contract development, testing, and deployment for the Ethereum-based blockchains. This platform focuses on providing and resolving the cross-cutting concerns across the life-cycle of smart contract development. The feasibility of this platform is shown by demonstrating how an application scenario, namely, loyalty points exchange, can be implemented using the proposed platform. Our experiences indicate that the burdens of developers when developing smart contracts can be effectively reduced and thus increases the quality of contracts.
Nowadays, more and more companies migrate business from their own servers to the cloud. With the influx of computational requests, datacenters consume tremendous energy every day, attracting great attention in the energy efficiency dilemma. In this paper, we investigate the energy-aware resource management problem in cloud datacenters, where green energy with unpredictable capacity is connected. Via proposing a robust blockchain-based decentralized resource management framework, we save the energy consumed by the request scheduler. Moreover, we propose a reinforcement learning method embedded in a smart contract to further minimize the energy cost. Because the reinforcement learning method is informed from the historical knowledge, it relies on no request arrival and energy supply. Experimental results on Google cluster traces and real-world electricity price show that our approach is able to reduce the datacenters cost significantly compared with other benchmark algorithms.
Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in various domains, which are home, agricultural, healthcare, tourism, transportation and education. The more of its development, the more we need to consider about its security and privacy issues. In this paper, we consider smart home system (SHS) as a case study. SHS is an integration of home appliances together with sensors to get automatic operations of heating, lighting, air conditioning, home security, health care systems, etc. Moreover, SHS allows homeowner to monitor and perform appliances functions remotely at any instant time via the Internet. Due to the widespread availability and proliferation of the SHS, attackers can impersonate as a homeowner to steal important data (e.g., vital signs) for doing extortion and life threatening. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach of private Blockchain implementation for SHS to cope of its privacy and security issues. We review Ethereum Blockchain packages for SHS according to its smart contract features for handling access control policy, data storage and data flow management.
With the accelerated iteration of technological innovation, blockchain has rapidly become one of the hottest Internet technologies in recent years. As a decentralized and distributed data management solution, blockchain has restored the definition of trust by the embedded cryptography and consensus mechanism, thus providing security, anonymity and data integrity without the need of any third party. But there still exists some technical challenges and limitations in blockchain. This paper has conducted a systematic research on current blockchain application in cybersecurity. In order to solve the security issues, the paper analyzes the advantages that blockchain has brought to cybersecurity and summarizes current research and application of blockchain in cybersecurity related areas. Through in-depth analysis and summary of the existing work, the paper summarizes four major security issues of blockchain and performs a more granular analysis of each problem. Adopting an attribute-based encryption method, the paper also puts forward an enhanced access control strategy.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchains as a technology emerged to facilitate money exchange transactions and eliminate the need for a trusted third party to notarize and verify such transactions as well as protect data security and privacy. New structures of Blockchains have been designed to accommodate the need for this technology in other fields such as e-health, tourism and energy. This paper is concerned with the use of Blockchains in managing and sharing electronic health and medical records to allow patients, hospitals, clinics, and other medical stakeholder to share data amongst themselves, and increase interoperability. The selection of the Blockchains used architecture depends on the entities participating in the constructed chain network. Although the use of Blockchains may reduce redundancy and provide caregivers with consistent records about their patients, it still comes with few challenges which could infringe patients' privacy, or potentially compromise the whole network of stakeholders. In this paper, we investigate different Blockchains structures, look at existing challenges and provide possible solutions. We focus on challenges that may expose patients' privacy and the resiliency of Blockchains to possible attacks.
Mandrita Banerjee, Junghee Lee, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly being found in civilian and military contexts, ranging from smart cities and smart grids to Internet-of-Medical-Things, Internet-of-Vehicles, Internet-of-Military-Things, Internet-of-Battlefield-Things, etc. In this paper, we survey articles presenting IoT security solutions published in English since January 2016. We make a number of observations, including the lack of publicly available IoT datasets that can be used by the research and practitioner communities. Given the potentially sensitive nature of IoT datasets, there is a need to develop a standard for sharing IoT datasets among the research and practitioner communities and other relevant stakeholders. Thus, we posit the potential for blockchain technology in facilitating secure sharing of IoT datasets (e.g., using blockchain to ensure the integrity of shared datasets) and securing IoT systems, before presenting two conceptual blockchain-based approaches. We then conclude this paper with nine potential research questions.
Ultra-dense wireless networks require on-demand nodes which can trust each other and relay information despite the difference in their service providers. This paper presents the secure utilization of drones as on-demand nodes for inter-service operability between multiple vendors by exploiting the features of the blockchain. Various components and strategies for driving blockchain-based drones are also presented. Further, this paper features the threat implications of the blockchain-based drones and compares the deployment issues with the centralized and traditional drone-assisted wireless networks.
Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization problem for the edge computing service provider.