Muhamed Turkanović, Marko Hölbl, Kristjan Košič, Marjan Heričko · 5 authors
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 and permanent way. Based on the blockchain technology, we propose a global higher education credit platform, named EduCTX. This platform is based on the concept of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). It constitutes a globally trusted, decentralized higher education credit, and grading system that can offer a globally unified viewpoint for students and higher education institutions (HEIs), as well as for other potential stakeholders, such as companies, institutions, and organizations. As a proof of concept, we present a prototype implementation of the environment, based on the open-source Ark Blockchain Platform. Based on a globally distributed peer-to-peer network, EduCTX will process, manage, and control ECTX tokens, which represent credits that students gain for completed courses, such as ECTS. HEIs are the peers of the blockchain network. The platform is a first step toward a more transparent and technologically advanced form of higher education systems. The EduCTX platform represents the basis of the EduCTX initiative, which anticipates that various HEIs would join forces in order to create a globally efficient, simplified, and ubiquitous environment in order to avoid language and administrative barriers. Therefore, we invite and encourage HEIs to join the EduCTX initiative and the EduCTX blockchain network.
Paolo Missier, Shaimaa Bajoudah, Angelo Capossele, Andrea Gaglione · 5 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) data are increasingly viewed as a new form of massively distributed and large scale digital assets, which are continuously generated by millions of connected devices. The real value of such assets can only be realized by allowing IoT data trading to occur on a marketplace that rewards every single producer and consumer, at a very granular level. Crucially, we believe that such a marketplace should not be owned by anybody, and should instead fairly and transparently self-enforce a well defined set of governance rules. In this paper we address some of the technical challenges involved in realizing such a marketplace. We leverage emerging blockchain technologies to build a decentralized, trusted, transparent and open architecture for IoT traffic metering and contract compliance, on top of the largely adopted IoT brokered data infrastructure. We discuss an Ethereum-based prototype implementation and experimentally evaluate the overhead cost associated with Smart Contract transactions, concluding that a viable business model can indeed be associated with our technical approach.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Koustabh Dolui, Fabio Antonelli
Blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin, can prove to be essential towards realizing the vision of a decentralized, secure, and open Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. There is a growing interest in many research groups towards leveraging blockchains to provide IoT data privacy without the need for a centralized data access model. This paper aims to propose a decentralized access model for IoT data, using a network architecture that we call a modular consortium architecture for IoT and blockchains. The proposed architecture facilitates IoT communications on top of a software stack of blockchains and peer-to-peer data storage mechanisms. The architecture is aimed to have privacy built into it, and to be adaptable for various IoT use cases. To understand the feasibility and deployment considerations for implementing the proposed architecture, we conduct performance analysis of existing blockchain development platforms, Ethereum and Monax.
The ever-increasing number of IoT devices necessitates a secure and scalable infrastructure to store and process generated data. Blockchain is an ideal choice with its decentralized, trustless architecture. However, low-power IoT end-devices do not possess enough horsepower to run a software client for intensive blockchain calculations. The purpose of this paper is to create a proof of concept to enable low-power, resource-constrained IoT end-devices accessing a blockchain-based infrastructure. To achieve this aim, an IoT gateway is configured as a blockchain node and an event-based messaging mechanism for low-power IoT end-devices is proposed. A demonstration of such a system is realized using LoRa nodes and gateway in a private Ethereum network.
We summarize the results and perspectives from a companion article, where we presented and evaluated an alternative architecture for data storage in distributed networks. We name the bio-inspired architecture RAIN, and it offers file storage service that, in contrast with current centralized cloud storage, has privacy by design, is open source, is more secure, is scalable, is more sustainable, has community ownership, is inexpensive, and is potentially faster, more efficient, and more reliable. We propose that a RAIN-style architecture could form the backbone of the Internet of Things that likely will integrate multiple current and future infrastructures ranging from online services and cryptocurrency to parts of government administration.
The mining process in blockchain requires solving a proof-of-work puzzle, which is resource expensive to implement in mobile devices due to the high computing power and energy needed. In this paper, we, for the first time, consider edge computing as an enabler for mobile blockchain. In particular, we study edge computing resource management and pricing to support mobile blockchain applications in which the mining process of miners can be offloaded to an edge computing service provider. We formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game to jointly maximize the profit of the edge computing service provider and the individual utilities of the miners. In the first stage, the service provider sets the price of edge computing nodes. In the second stage, the miners decide on the service demand to purchase based on the observed prices. We apply the backward induction to analyze the sub-game perfect equilibrium in each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For the uniform pricing where the same price is applied to all miners, the existence and uniqueness of Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best response strategies of the miners. For the discriminatory pricing where the different prices are applied to different miners, the Stackelberg equilibrium is proved to exist and be unique by capitalizing on the Variational Inequality theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our proposed model.
Public blockchain networks using proof of work (PoW)-based consensus protocols are considered as a promising platform for decentralized resource management with financial incentive mechanisms. In order to maintain a secured, universal state of the blockchain, PoW-based consensus protocols financially incentivize the nodes in the network to compete for the privilege of block generation through cryptographic puzzle solving. For rational consensus nodes, i.e., miners with limited local computational resources, offloading the computation load for PoW to the cloud/fog providers (CFPs) becomes a viable option. In this paper, we study the interaction between the CFPs and the miners in a PoW-based blockchain network using a game theoretic approach. In particular, we propose a lightweight infrastructure of the PoW-based blockchains, where the computation-intensive part of the consensus process is offloaded to the cloud/fog. We formulate the computation resource management in the blockchain consensus process as a two-stage Stackelberg game, where the profit of the CFP and the utilities of the individual miners are jointly optimized. In the first stage of the game, the CFP sets the price of offered computing resource. In the second stage, the miners decide on the amount of service to purchase accordingly. We apply backward induction to analyze the subgame perfect equilibria in each stage for both uniform and discriminatory pricing schemes. For uniform pricing where the same price applies to all miners, the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium is validated by identifying the best response strategies of the miners. For discriminatory pricing where the different prices are applied, the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium is proved by capitalizing on the variational inequality theory. Further, the real experimental results are employed to justify our proposed model.
Adam Brinckman, Donal Luc, Jarek Nabrzyski, Gary L. Neidig · 8 authors
The Cloud computing paradigm is built on the concept of virtualization, allowing multiple virtual machines to cohabit on one physical device to enable the scaling up and down of applications through elastic on-demand provisioning. More recently containers e.g. Docker, have been shown to enable a more lightweight mechanism than hypervisors and proved to be a viable alternative for virtualization, based on shared operating systems. The advent of such lightweight environments has brought a multitude of application uses in research, science and industry, enabling pre-configured operating environments to be shared, reused and instantiated on demand. The sharing of containers has currently been exposed using centralized repositories (e.g. Dockerhub), which allows containers to be shared and to form the building blocks for further development. In this paper, we take a look at the next evolution of this lifecycle and consider whether it is viable to securely share container-based applications within a decentralized group of individuals and to provide an audit trail recording exactly who has shared what, and with whom. For this purpose we consider the use of Blockchain technologies, and consequently perform a comparative analysis of Blockchain technologies for this use case. The paper provides mostly a review and taxonomy of different ledger systems, which we believe may be of interest to the SafeData Workshop participants.
To achieve privacy requirements, IoT application providers may need to spend a lot of money to replace existing IoT devices. To address this problem, this study proposes the Blockchain Connected Gateways (BC Gateways) to protect users from providing personal data to IoT devices without user consent. In addition, the gateways store user privacy preferences on IoT devices in the blockchain network. Therefore, this study can utilize the blockchain technology to resolve the disputes of privacy issues. In conclusion, this paper can contribute to improving user privacy and trust in IoT applications with legacy IoT devices.
The ever-increasing number of IoT devices necessitates a secure and scalable infrastructure to store and process generated data. Blockchain is an ideal choice with its decentralized, trustless architecture. However, low-power IoT end-devices do not possess enough horsepower to run a software client for intensive blockchain calculations. The purpose of this paper is to create a proof of concept to enable low-power, resource-constrained IoT end-devices accessing a blockchain-based infrastructure. To achieve this aim, an IoT gateway is configured as a blockchain node and an event-based messaging mechanism for low-power IoT end-devices is proposed. A demonstration of such a system is realized using LoRa nodes and gateway in a private Ethereum network.
IoT (Internet of Things) has a large portion of our life. This is manifested by the large number of connected devices. With the exponential growth of IoT devices, IoT security is becoming important. In particular, Smart Door Lock system is extremely important because it is closely related to the safety of the user. However, the data sent and received of existing Smart Door Lock system is vulnerable to forgery and hacking. To improve these security issues, we propose a Smart Door Lock system based on blockchain. Also, this provides data integrity and non-repudiation. Lastly, we propose an algorithm that the Smart Door Lock system judge some situations around itself and operates based on data sent from sensors.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies are recently gaining wide adoption since the introduction of Bitcoin, being distributed, authority-free, and secure. Proof of Work (PoW) is at the heart of blockchain's security, asset generation, and maintenance. Although simple and secure, a hash-based PoW like Bitcoin's puzzle is often referred to as “useless”, and the used intensive computations are considered “waste” of energy. A myriad of Proof of “something” alternatives have been proposed to mitigate energy consumption; however, they either introduced new security threats and limitations, or the “work” remained far from being really “useful”. In this work, we introduce Proof of eXercise (PoX): a sustainable alternative to PoW where an eXercise is a real world matrix-based scientific computation problem. We provide a novel study of the properties of Bitcoin's PoW, the challenges of a more “rational” solution as PoX, and we suggest a comprehensive approach for PoX.
In the last decade, we have seen the emergence of the Bitcoin crypto-currency, where the Blockchain technology builds trust transaction after transaction through a validation process. Academics focused their research on security flaws or improvement, but we identify a lack of literature on how the validation of transaction and block proceeds. In fact, understanding the validation will help the conception of new blockchain features and allow users to recognize all security risks. This paper aims at a deep comprehension and detailed analysis of the validation in the Bitcoin protocol.
In the year 2009, a new virtual currency called Bitcoin was introduced to the world. Bitcoin generation and transactions are based on hashes and asymmetric encryption algorithms. Bitcoin is the first attempt at creating a decentralized virtual currency with no central bank or financial entity controlling it and is very attractive to different demographies of users. A lot of misunderstanding and doubt surrounds Bitcoin. Based on studying the few years of Bitcoin's circulation and usage, we presented the strengths and weaknesses of Bitcoin and analyzed what opportunities and threats it faces in the current financial environment. We summarized the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for Bitcoin in an SWOT analysis. We concluded that the most important factors to influence the future of Bitcoin circulation and price are technological advances and people's openness to Bitcoin, the intervention of governments and financial powers by creating laws around cryptocurrencies and external events that are closely tied to the Bitcoin community.
Nabil Rifi, Elie Rachkidi, Nazim Agoulmine, Nada Chendeb Taher
eHealth is a technology that is growing in importance over time, varying from remote access to Medical Records, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), or Electronic Medical Records (EMR), to real-time data exchange from different on-body sensors coming from different patients. With this huge amount of critical data being exchanged, problems and challenges arise. Privacy and confidentiality of this critical medical data are of high concern to the patients and authorized persons to use this data. On the other hand, scalability and interoperability are also important problems that should be considered in the final solution. This paper illustrates the specific problems and highlights the benefits of the blockchain technology for the deployment of a secure and a scalable solution for medical data exchange in order to have the best performance possible.
After years of tremendous development and research in digital currency, the most famous Bitcoin industry chain has been gradually completed including mining, exchange, currency exchange, ATM, pervasive digital wallet design and so on. Especially, its blockchain technology has become FinTech organizations' emerging business and research directions, also been applied in the interdisciplinary medical science, supply chain and Internet of things. Digitizing currency can solve many problems in physical currency, such as the rampant counterfeit banknotes. Thus, not only the transparency can be cost-effectively preserved in store's ledger, but also customer's rights and interests can be protected while using the digital wallet. For the government, the regulation and auditing of financial transaction can be made simpler and more convenient for tax collection issue. Digitized transaction details can be much easier to audit by any computing device than manually audit the conventional ledger books. Furthermore, to make merchandise store to use digitized currency much easier, in this paper, we propose and deploy a Bitcoin collection supervision system called BPCSS based on blockchain technology with cloud databases for customers and merchandise stores. The preliminary experimental results via the well-known pervasive digital wallet of Testnet Bitcoin demonstrate the proposed BPCSS can cost-effectively collect payment and supervise the transactions between customer and merchandise store running the implemented NFC-enabled Android Apps.
Data assurance and resilience are crucial security issues in cloud-based IoT applications. With the widespread adoption of drones in IoT scenarios such as warfare, agriculture and delivery, effective solutions to protect data integrity and communications between drones and the control system have been in urgent demand to prevent potential vulnerabilities that may cause heavy losses. To secure drone communication during data collection and transmission, as well as preserve the integrity of collected data, we propose a distributed solution by utilizing blockchain technology along with the traditional cloud server. Instead of registering the drone itself to the blockchain, we anchor the hashed data records collected from drones to the blockchain network and generate a blockchain receipt for each data record stored in the cloud, reducing the burden of moving drones with the limit of battery and process capability while gaining enhanced security guarantee of the data. This paper presents the idea of securing drone data collection and communication in combination with a public blockchain for provisioning data integrity and cloud auditing. The evaluation shows that our system is a reliable and distributed system for drone data assurance and resilience with acceptable overhead and scalability for a large number of drones.
Peng Zhang, Michael A. Walker, Jules White, Douglas C. Schmidt · 5 authors
Blockchain is a decentralized, trustless protocol that combines transparency, immutability, and consensus properties to enable secure, pseudo-anonymous transactions. Smart contracts are built atop a blockchain to support on-chain storage and enable Decentralized Apps (DApps) to interact with the blockchain programatically. Programmable blockchains have generated interest in the healthcare domain as a potential solution to resolve key challenges, such as gapped communications, inefficient clinical report delivery, and fragmented health records. This paper provides evaluation metrics to assess blockchain-based DApps in terms of their feasibility, intended capability, and compliance in the healthcare domain.
Xueping Liang, Juan Zhao, Sachin Shetty, Jihong Liu · 5 authors
Enabled by mobile and wearable technology, personal health data delivers immense and increasing value for healthcare, benefiting both care providers and medical research. The secure and convenient sharing of personal health data is crucial to the improvement of the interaction and collaboration of the healthcare industry. Faced with the potential privacy issues and vulnerabilities existing in current personal health data storage and sharing systems, as well as the concept of self-sovereign data ownership, we propose an innovative user-centric health data sharing solution by utilizing a decentralized and permissioned blockchain to protect privacy using channel formation scheme and enhance the identity management using the membership service supported by the blockchain. A mobile application is deployed to collect health data from personal wearable devices, manual input, and medical devices, and synchronize data to the cloud for data sharing with healthcare providers and health insurance companies. To preserve the integrity of health data, within each record, a proof of integrity and validation is permanently retrievable from cloud database and is anchored to the blockchain network. Moreover, for scalable and performance considerations, we adopt a tree-based data processing and batching method to handle large data sets of personal health data collected and uploaded by the mobile platform.
A BlockChain is an open record of all digital money exchanges that have ever been executed. It is constantly growing as ‘completed’ blocks are added to it with a new set of recordings. The blocks are added to the blockchain in a linear, chronological order. Each PC associated with the Bitcoin systematize a customer that plays out the task of approving and handing-off exchanges gets a duplicate of the blockchain, which gets downloaded naturally after joining the Bitcoin arrange. The blockchain has finish data about the addresses and their adjusts ideal from the beginning piece to the most as of late finished square. Transactions between individuals have always been a part and parcel of human society for the division of labour made people interdependent. The medium of transaction has also been evolving along with the evolution of society and human consciousness from barter system to commodity money to fiat currency and now to digital currency or cryptocurrency. But as the evolution is a form of error correction, the problem of double spending in digital currency was solved by a distributed ledger system called BlockChain. Since 2008 onwards the blockchain technology has been separated from Bitcoins to be injected to many other problems related especially to banking transactions. Blockchain innovation empowers the production of decentralized monetary forms, savvy contracts and clever resources that can be controlled over the Internet.
The recent expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the consequent explosion in the volume of data produced by smart devices have led to the outsourcing of data to designated data centers. However, to manage these huge data stores, centralized data centers, such as cloud storage cannot afford auspicious way. There are many challenges that must be addressed in the traditional network architecture due to the rapid growth in the diversity and number of devices connected to the internet, which is not designed to provide high availability, real-time data delivery, scalability, security, resilience, and low latency. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel blockchain-based distributed cloud architecture with a software defined networking (SDN) enable controller fog nodes at the edge of the network to meet the required design principles. The proposed model is a distributed cloud architecture based on blockchain technology, which provides low-cost, secure, and on-demand access to the most competitive computing infrastructures in an IoT network. By creating a distributed cloud infrastructure, the proposed model enables cost-effective high-performance computing. Furthermore, to bring computing resources to the edge of the IoT network and allow low latency access to large amounts of data in a secure manner, we provide a secure distributed fog node architecture that uses SDN and blockchain techniques. Fog nodes are distributed fog computing entities that allow the deployment of fog services, and are formed by multiple computing resources at the edge of the IoT network. We evaluated the performance of our proposed architecture and compared it with the existing models using various performance measures. The results of our evaluation show that performance is improved by reducing the induced delay, reducing the response time, increasing throughput, and the ability to detect real-time attacks in the IoT network with low performance overheads.
Michael A. Walker, Abhishek Dubey, Áron Lászka, Douglas C. Schmidt
With the advent of blockchain-enabled IoT applications, there is an increased\nneed for related software patterns, middleware concepts, and testing practices\nto ensure adequate quality and productivity. IoT and blockchain each provide\ndifferent design goals, concepts, and practices that must be integrated,\nincluding the distributed actor model and fault tolerance from IoT and\ntransactive information integrity over untrustworthy sources from blockchain.\nBoth IoT and blockchain are emerging technologies and both lack codified\npatterns and practices for development of applications when combined. This\npaper describes PlaTIBART, which is a platform for transactive IoT blockchain\napplications with repeatable testing that combines the Actor pattern (which is\na commonly used model of computation in IoT) together with a custom Domain\nSpecific Language (DSL) and test network management tools. We show how\nPlaTIBART has been applied to develop, test, and analyze fault-tolerant IoT\nblockchain applications.\n