Geetanjali Rathee, Farhan Ahmad, Fatih Kurugöllü, Muhammad Ajmal Azad · 6 authors
Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) is considered as a viable solution on Internet of Vehicle (IoV) where objects equipped with cognition make decisions intelligently through the understanding of both social and physical worlds. However, the spectrum availability and data sharing/transferring among vehicles are critical improving services and driving safety metrics where the presence of Malicious Devices (MD) further degrade the network performance. Recently, a blockchain technique in CRN-based IoV has been introduced to prevent data alteration from these MD and allowing the vehicles to track both legal and illegal activities in the network. In this paper, we provide the security to IoV during spectrum sensing and information transmission using CRN by sensing the channels through a decision-making technique known as Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), a technique that evokes the trust of its Cognitive Users (CU) by analyzing certain predefined attributes. Further, blockchain is maintained in the network to trace every activity of stored information. The proposed mechanism is validated rigorously against several security metrics using various spectrum sensing and security parameters against a baseline solution in IoV. Extensive simulations suggest that our proposed mechanism is approximately 70% more efficient in terms of malicious nodes identification and DoS threat against the baseline mechanism.
This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one block at a time and assign a reward to the first place winner of a computation race. To reduce the mining-related energy consumption, we propose to compensate the computation effort of the runner(s)-up of a mining round, by granting them exclusivity of solving the upcoming block in the next round. This will considerably reduce the number of competing nodes in the next round and consequently, the consumed energy. Our proposed scheme divides time into epochs, where each comprises two mining rounds; in the first one, all network nodes can participate in the mining process, whereas in the second round only runners-up can take part. Thus, the overall mining energy consumption can be reduced to nearly $50\%$. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed scheme is the first to considerably improve the energy consumption of the original PoW algorithm. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our scheme in reducing energy consumption, the probability of fork occurrences, the level of mining centralization presented in the original PoW algorithm, and the effect of transaction censorship attack.
Blockchain is an immutable database which is decentralized and distributed. This blockchain is shared by all the nodes in the network and every node has the same state. The transactions in this open distributed ledger are verified and confirmed with the help of consensus algorithms. The transactions, once executed and entered, can never be changed or erased. Bitcoin, the first usecase of blockchain, as a digital money, is based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol. PoW has worked tremendously well and can be useful for many industries. The opportunities are high in this innovative technology, and evolution in this area is just a beginning. This paper has described blockchain technology, the underlying concepts of blockchain and the implementation of Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm along with its performance analysis.
Conventional certificate verification, whether paper-based or backed by a centralized digital registry, remains exposed to forgery, single points of failure, and slow manual cross-checking between issuers, holders, and verifiers. This paper presents a decentralized, blockchain-based framework for issuing, storing, and verifying academic and professional certificates that addresses these weaknesses without placing the full document on-chain. Each certificate is reduced to a SHA-256 hash, signed with the issuing institution's RSA private key, and recorded through an Ethereum smart contract, while the original file is retained off-chain on IPFS and referenced by its Content Identifier. Only institutions that pass a unanimous, vote-based onboarding process administered by a validator consortium are permitted to issue certificates, which constrains the system to a trusted-issuer model while preserving decentralization across the validator set. A hash-mapped Bloom Filter sits in front of the blockchain query path and performs a fast probabilistic existence check, allowing forged or non-existent certificates to be rejected before an on-chain lookup is triggered. A prototype was implemented with Solidity smart contracts on the Ethereum Sepolia testnet, a Node.js/Web3.js application layer, and a React.js frontend with MetaMask-based authentication. Evaluation on the testnet shows that the Bloom Filter pre-check lowers the average lookup time for invalid certificates by roughly 87%, keeps verification of valid certificates under two seconds end-to-end, holds the false-positive rate below 0.5% for up to 50,000 stored certificate hashes, and reduces the gas cost of issuing a certificate to approximately 4.57 USD. These results indicate that combining consortium governance, cryptographic hashing, and probabilistic filtering yields a certificate validation pipeline that is simultaneously tamper-resistant, low-cost, and fast enough for real-time institutional use.
Nishant Kumar, C Parangjothi, Sankarshan Guru, K. V. D. Kiran
The term `Blockchain', commonly referred to as the brain behind the Bitcoin network, works on the simple principle of the presence of a distributed and decentralized ledger in a public or private network. Since blockchain is decentralized, it is the duty of the Consensus Algorithm to substantiate the details in the blockchain. Traditional consensus algorithms such as Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), although widely used, are a matter of concern due to computationally expensive operations and convergence towards a monopolized system respectively. Though optimizations of PoW and PoS algorithms were subsequently introduced, their features precincts. This paper aims to provide a solution by presenting a consensus algorithm based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology while maintaining the fairness of the system. A Healthcare based system was set up on top of the blockchain network to generate the dataset about the miners in order to train our neural network. On the whole, it incorporated the advantages of the state of the art consensus models which can increase the efficiency of the healthcare industry while diminishing their demerits.
Furqan Jameel, Uzair Javaid, Wali Ullah Khan, Muhammad Naveed Aman · 6 authors
Blockchain is emerging as a promising candidate for the uberization of Internet services. It is a decentralized, secure, and auditable solution for exchanging, and authenticating information via transactions, without the need of a trusted third party. Therefore, blockchain technology has recently been integrated with industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT) networks to help realize the fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. Though blockchain-enabled IIoT networks may have the potential to support the services and demands of next-generation networks, the gap analysis presented in this work highlights some of the areas that need improvement. Based on these observations, the article then promotes the utility of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to address some of the major issues of blockchain-enabled IIoT networks such as block time minimization and transaction throughput enhancement. This is followed by a comprehensive case study where a Q-learning technique is used for minimizing the occurrence of forking events by reducing the transmission delays for a miner. Extensive simulations have been performed and the results have been obtained for the average transmission delay which relates to the forking events. The obtained results demonstrate that the Q-learning approach outperforms the greedy policy while having a reasonable level of complexity. To further develop the blockchain-enabled IIoT networks, some future research directions are also documented. While this article highlights the applications of RL techniques in blockchain-enabled IIoT networks, the provided insights and results could pave the way for rapid adoption of blockchain technology.
The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has recently seen an exponentially rise with the number of IoT devices been connected increasing in billions, but with such rapid demand and growth, IoT still faces few issues like data security, privacy, data integrity, authentication. The Distributed Ledger Technology like Blockchain also opens a wide range of opportunities, and it proves to be one solution for overcoming multiple issues. This paper highlights the use of Blockchain technology in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) and its practical limitations. The paper focuses on a new distributed ledger technology based on Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG) approach called IOTA, its working and features are discussed in detail. IOTA technology can overcome the practical limitations of classical Blockchain, and the implementation of IOTA for secure transferring of IoT sensor data is also discussed.
Carlos A. Velasco, Ricardo Colomo‐Palacios, Ramon Cano
The neural distributed ledger so lution presented here adopts a ledger-of-ledgers approach to perform the interconnection of multiple ledgers. Beyond interledger operability, it also enables the development of custom blockchain-based solutions, providing controlled costs and scalability while retaining decentralization and security.
Yu-Tse Lee, Jhan-Jia Lin, Jane Yung-jen Hsu, Ja‐Ling Wu
This paper presents a blockchain-based time bank system on the basis of the Hyperledger Fabric framework, which is one of the permissioned blockchain networks. Most of the services provided by existing Time Bank systems were recorded and conducted manually in the past; furthermore, jobs for matching services with receivers were managed by people. Running a time bank in this way will cost lots of time and human resources and, worse, it lacks security. This work designs and realizes a time bank system enabling all the service-related processes being executed and recorded on a blockchain. The matching between services’ supply-and-demand tasks can directly be done through autonomous smart contracts. Building a time bank system on blockchain benefits the transaction of time credit which plays the role of digital currency on the system. In addition, the proposed time bank also retains a grading system, allowing its members to give each other a grade for reflecting their degrees of satisfaction about the results provided by the system. This grading system will incentivize the members to provide a better quality of service and adopt a nicer attitude for receiving a service, which may positively endorse the development of a worldwide time bank system.
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides insights for difficulty adjustment rules for PoW based blockchains. The proposed algorithm consists a two-layer neural network. It has low memory cost, meanwhile satisfying the fast-updating and low volatility requirements for difficulty adjustment. Real data from Ethereum are used in the simulations to prove that the proposed algorithm has better performance for the control of the block difficulty.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Guntur Dharma Putra, Salil S. Kanhere · 5 authors
Within the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain research, there is a growing interest in decentralizing health monitoring systems, to provide improved privacy to patients, without relying on trusted third parties for handling patients' sensitive health data. With public blockchain deployments being severely limited in their scalability, and inherently having latency in transaction processing, there is room for researching and developing new techniques to leverage the security features of blockchains within healthcare applications. This paper presents a solution for patients to share their biomedical data with their doctors without their data being handled by trusted third party entities. The solution is built on the Ethereum blockchain as a medium for negotiating and record-keeping, along with Tor for delivering data from patients to doctors. To highlight the applicability of the solution in various health monitoring scenarios, we have considered three use-cases, namely cardiac monitoring, sleep apnoea testing, and EEG following epileptic seizures. Following the discussion about the use cases, the paper outlines a security analysis performed on the proposed solution, based on multiple attack scenarios. Finally, the paper presents and discusses a performance evaluation in terms of data delivery time in comparison to existing centralized and decentralized solutions.
Xiuqing Chen, Hong Zhu, Deqin Geng, Wei Liu · 6 authors
The proliferation of physiological signals acquisition and monitoring system, has led to an explosion in physiological signals data. Additionally, RFID systems, blockchain technologies, and the fog computing mechanisms have significantly increased the availability of physiological signal information through big data research. The driver for the development of hybrid systems is the continuing effort in making health-care services more efficient and sustainable. Implantable medical devices (IMD) are therapeutic devices that are surgically implanted into patients' body to continuously monitor their physiological parameters. Patients treat cardiac arrhythmia due to IMD therapeutic and life-saving benefits. We focus on hybrid systems developed for patient physiological signals for collection, storage protection, and monitoring in critical care and clinical practice. In order to provide medical data privacy protection and medical decision support, the hybrid systems are presented, and RFID, blockchain, and big data technologies are used to analyse physiological signals.
Blockchain is picking up footing and one of the omnipresent themes these days can be named. Despite the fact that faultfinders are challenging its durability, safety and stability, it has officially changed the way of life of numerous people in a few territories due to its overwhelming impact on projects, moreover, organizations. Giving that the highlights of blockchain innovation ensure more solid and convenient administrations, it is imperative to think about the security furthermore, protection concerns and complications behind the inventive innovation. The range of blockchain applications extends to open and public services including health, financial, automotive, Internet of Things (IoT) and risk management. Many talk about using the blockchain data system for various applications in the spotlight. Nonetheless, a comprehensive review on the point of view of specialized applications and applications has not yet been an expert. In this paper, we seek to perform a thorough study on the technology of blockchain by analyzing its architecture of varying consensus algorithms over and above challenges and opportunities for security and data protection within blockchains.
Saraju P. Mohanty, Venkata P. Yanambaka, Elias Kougianos, Deepak Puthal
This is an extended abstract for the research demo of a novel hardware-assisted scalable blockchain called PUFChain. This work presents a scalable energy-efficient private/permissioned blockchain (integrated with Physical Unclonable Functions or PUFs) which can be deployed in the IoT. PUFs have a multiple of roles in the blockchain: higher security, lower latency, and reduced energy consumption. Experimental validations of PUFChain show a transaction time of 198ms. To the best of authors knowledge this is the first ever work that presents a comprehensive framework integrating PUFs in a blockchain.
Mausam Agrawal, Divya N. Amin, Harshal Dalvi, Riken Gala
Loyalty Programs are reward programs offered by a company to customers who frequently make purchases. However, there are major issues with traditional loyalty programs like low redemption rates, expiring of points, customer acquisition costs, and the nuisance of keeping track of multiple loyalty programs. Blockchain provides a solution to a number of these issues. This paper explores the issues of the current loyalty programs and how Blockchain technology can be used to tackle the underlying issues of traditional loyalty programs. Finally, we propose our own Blockchain-based universal loyalty platform, which aims at making loyalty programs more beneficial for customers, thereby increasing customer retention rates as well as more convenient for companies to have their own loyalty program. This system aims to integrate individual loyalty programs into a unified platform that will allow transfer and exchange of loyalty points between users and promote co-branding among various companies located worldwide.
Omar Alamir, Ramakrishnan Raman, Amal Faisal Alhashimi, Fatima Ali Almoaber · 5 authors
The purpose of this research is to highlight the usage of blockchain technology for the maintaining the health records of the patients across visiting hospitals in a highly secured environment. A blockchain is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) in which the blockchain is separated into blocks that contain a list of digital records that are secured by using encryption technology (cryptography). The blockchain is a data structure that show the way the data are stored and logically joined together in a peer to peer (P2P) network. Sharing health records between the various hospitals is a vital and life-saving during emergency. This will greatly reduce the time needed for the physicians to prescribe and take preventive actions required as quickly as possible. This helps to attend the patients on-time and save their life during the emergency situations. MBlocks stands for medical blocks with sequence of blocks having the patient's information shared and stored across various entities in a secured Hyperledger environment.
Spyros Voulgaris, Nikos Fotiou, Vasilios A. Siris, George C. Polyzos · 6 authors
In the last few years, we have been witnessing the convergence of the physical with the digital world. The Internet of Things (IoT) is progressing at a fast pace, and IoT devices are becoming pervasive in our physical environments, bringing the vision of Intelligent Environments closer to reality. At the same time, the newly-introduced blockchain technology is offering for the first time ever cryptographically proven trust based on a set of mutually untrusted nodes. Blockchain technology thus has the potential to become a key component of many IoT systems, offering them an unprecedented level of accountability, transparency, and reliability. This paper first lays out the principles on which blockchain systems are operating, along with descriptions of the most noteworthy blockchain implementations. It then presents a number of systems through which blockchains may interact with external systems and third-party data sources. Finally, it provides a survey of the state-of-the-art blockchain-based systems targeting IoT applications.
Sena Yakut, Özlem Şeker, Ertugrul Batur, Gökhan Dalkılıç
Blockchain is a public ledger without a central authority. Immutable and inalterable data blocks prove reliability and security which are the deficiencies of the current Internet of things (IoT) devices. IoT devices are hardware constrained devices which have specific functions but create large network to gather different data. Because of the security issues of the IoT devices, industrial use is limited. Generally, secure data transaction and storage are the main concerns over IoT devices and in order to solve the problem various solutions are being tested. However, decentralized and secure structure like the blockchain could be a solution. In this study, challenges of blockchain implementation on hardware constraint devices are discussed. Studies regarding blockchain implementation methods and blockchain implemented projects are mentioned. Experiments on frameworks used by blockchain are conducted and with the test results of the experiments, feasibility of implementing the blockchain on IoT devices are discussed.