In this paper, we will present a new model of distributed ledger-based IoT network, in which we combined Hyperledger Sawtooth as blockchain with Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) as a distributed storage system. The combination of these two types of distributed ledger technologies can allow more efficient data storage than in other blockchain implementations. This work was initiated by the automotive manufacturer Renault based on the idea of a new ecosystem of smart vehicles containing IoT devices. We will focus on an accident use case. After the accident, the cars send their data to a dedicated smart contract. We will also describe furthermore our implementation, the characteristics of Hyperledger Sawtooth and IPFS and finally, we demonstrate the realistic feasibility of this implementation by latency measurements.
This paper describes a simulation study on security attacks over Distributed\nLedger Technologies (DLTs). We specifically focus on attacks at the underlying\npeer-to-peer layer of these systems, that is in charge of disseminating\nmessages containing data and transaction to be spread among all participants.\nIn particular, we consider the Sybil attack, according to which a malicious\nnode creates many Sybils that drop messages coming from a specific attacked\nnode, or even all messages from honest nodes. Our study shows that the\nselection of the specific dissemination protocol, as well as the amount of\nconnections each peer has, have an influence on the resistance to this attack.\n
The full-replication data storage mechanism, as commonly utilized in existing blockchains, is the barrier to the system's scalability, since it retains a copy of entire blockchain at each node so that the overall storage consumption per block is O(n) with n participants. Yet another drawback is that this mechanism may limit the throughput in permissioned blockchain. Moreover, due to the existence of Byzantine nodes, existing partitioning methods, though widely adopted in distributed systems for decades, cannot suit for blockchain systems directly, so that it is critical to devise new storage mechanism for blockchain systems. This article proposes a novel storage engine, called BFT-Store, to enhance storage scalability by integrating erasure coding with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol. The first property of BFT-store is that the storage consumption per block can be reduced to O(1) for the first time, which enlarges overall storage capability when more nodes attend the blockchain. Second, we design an efficient online re-encoding protocol for storage scale-out and a hybrid replication scheme to enhance reading performance. Analysis in theory and extensive experimental results illustrate the scalability, availability and efficiency of BFT-Store via the implementation in an open-source permissioned blockchain Tendermint.
To enable roaming of users, the cellular ecosystem integrates many entities and procedures, including specific infrastructure to connect Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), business partnerships or the use of third-party Data Clearing Houses (DCHs) for billing. Many of these rely on specifications rooted in dated and arcane practices, involving long waiting periods for financial clearing, complex billing models, and disparate mechanisms for dealing with inter-MNO disputes. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, DICE (Dynamic Interconnections for the Cellular Ecosystem), aimed at facilitating dynamic collaboration between MNOs, and sustain fluid interconnection models between the end-users and MNOs. DICE uses distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enable MNOs to interact directly, and offer customizable services to their users through the use of crypto-currencies. We leverage real-world data from a major operational MNO in Europe to support our claims, and to extract the requirements for the DICE system. We introduce the DICE protocol, and discuss real-world implementation considerations.
Recently, blockchain has elicited escalating attention from academia to industry. However, blockchain is still in its initial stage, and remains a great number of non-trivial problems to be delved before being used as a generic platform. The most intractable one is the scalability problem. The deep reinforcement learning empowered adaptivity can help the blockchain network break through the bottleneck. In this paper, we study a deep reinforcement learning empowered adaptivity approach for future blockchain networks, so as to improve the scalability and meet the requirements of different users. Specifically, rather than using one consensus protocol as the best fit one, the blockchain networks launch different consensus protocols, based on users’ quality of service (QoS) requirements. To this end, we quantify four consensus protocols. Additionally, the blockchain networks are heavily hampered by the limited computation and bandwidth resources. We also dynamically allocate computation and bandwidth resources to the blockchain networks. Then we formulate these thress items, i.e., the selection of consensus protocols, computation resource, and network bandwidth resource, as a joint optimization problem. A deep reinforcement learning approach is used to solve this problem. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
With the growth of Internet of Things (IoT), users develop many different IoT applications in web cloud platforms. However, cloud-based web services do not usually apply to the constrained networks because of HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). In addition, distributed mechanisms to achieve identity authentication or data confidentiality are becoming more and more important when the number of devices located in IoT networks increases. The paper proposes the IoT Framework based on IoTtalk. IoTtalk is a web platform for users to quickly develop IoT applications. To enhance the applicability of IoTtalk in IoT networks and support identity authentication as well as data confidentiality, we introduce CoAP-based IoT Proxy and smart contract-based IoT Chain respectively. The IoT Proxy promotes the applicability of IoTtalk in IoT networks through the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). The IoT Chain provides identity authentication as well as data confidentiality to IoTtalk through the blockchain and the smart contract. Our experiments show that the IoT Framework promotes the security of the IoTtalk and keeps the performance of IoTtalk.
Ben Weintraub, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Stefanie Roos
Payment channel networks (PCN) enable scalable blockchain transactions without fundamentally changing the underlying distributed ledger algorithm. However, routing a payment via multiple channels in a PCN requires locking collateral for potentially long periods of time. Adversaries can abuse this mechanism to conduct denial-of-service attacks. Previous work focused on source routing, which is unlikely to remain a viable routing approach as these networks grow. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of attacks in PCNs that use routing algorithms based on local knowledge, where compromised intermediate nodes can delay or drop transactions to create denial-of-service. We focus on SpeedyMurmurs as a representative of such protocols. We identify two attacker node selection strategies; one based on the position in the routing tree, and the other on between-ness centrality. Our simulation-driven study shows that while they are both effective, the centrality-based attack approaches near-optimal effectiveness. We also show that the attacks are ineffective in less centralized networks and discuss incentives for the participants in PCNs to create less centralized topologies through the payment channels they establish among themselves.
Ariba Aslam Zahoor, Muhammad Mubashir Khan, Junaid Arshad
Distributed ledger technologies represent decentralized databases, without the requirement for a central authority to authenticate and validate transactions. Blockchain technology is one of these technologies that provides a record of digital transactions that have been executed and validated by consensus of a majority of participants in the system. It uses software that processes on the order of the newly created and connected blocks via cryptographic means to ensure security and integrity. It has a verified record of each transaction that has been executed till date, which cannot be removed from the system, thereby ensuring the integrity of information. Although Bitcoin is the most popular application of blockchain, it has been used in diverse application domains such as healthcare, logistics, and security. While blockchain enables fairness and prevention from denial-of-service attacks, it lacks in transaction processing time as compared with credit cards and other online services. Hashgraph, another distributed ledger technology, has emerged recently, which focuses on addressing this limitation, promising extraordinary improvement in transaction processing times. Although hashgraph was initially deployed in private settings, public deployment has been recently launched, enabling its adoption for wider application domains. Within this context, this chapter is focused on presenting a comparative study of these distributed ledger technologies, identifying strengths and weaknesses to highlight potential application domains.
Muhammad Baqer Mollah, Jun Zhao, Dusit Niyato, Yong Liang Guan · 8 authors
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging concept that is believed to help realize the vision of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). IoV has become an important research area of impactful applications in recent years due to the rapid advancements in vehicular technologies, high throughput satellite communication, the Internet of Things, and cyber-physical systems. IoV enables the integration of smart vehicles with the Internet and system components attributing to their environments, such as public infrastructures, sensors, computing nodes, pedestrians, and other vehicles. By allowing the development of a common information exchange platform between vehicles and heterogeneous vehicular networks, this integration aims to create a better environment and public space for the people as well as to enhance safety for all road users. Being a participatory data exchange and storage, the underlying information exchange platform of IoV needs to be secure, transparent, and immutable in order to achieve the intended objectives of ITS. In this connection, the adoption of blockchain as a system platform for supporting the information exchange needs of IoV has been explored. Due to their decentralized and immutable nature, IoV applications enabled by blockchain are believed to have a number of desirable properties, such as decentralization, security, transparency, immutability, and automation. In this article, we present a contemporary survey on the latest advancement in blockchain for IoV. Particularly, we highlight the different application scenarios of IoV after carefully reviewing the recent literature. We also investigate several key challenges where blockchain is applied in IoV. Furthermore, we present the future opportunities and explore further research directions of IoV as a key enabler of ITS.
Henry Kim, Hjalmar Turesson, Marek Laskowski, Amir Fard Bahreini
Blockchains can be public, permissionless networks implementing novel cryptocurrency-based technology features or permissioned, interorganizational networks championed by industry consortia. Some ventures operationalize a hybrid of these two network types to enhance adoption of their blockchain platforms by broadening their base of stakeholders or facilitating interoperability between heterogeneous blockchains. In this article, we synthesize literature and industry writings to identify four hybrid blockchain architectures: hybrid blockchain approach, connected hybrid blockchain, interoperable blockchain architecture, and hard-forked blockchain for enterprise use. We then analyze these architectures along dimensions of semantic modeling support between private and public networks, data connectivity between networks, syntactic interoperability support between networks with heterogeneous codebases, governance model, and technical features. We find that hybrid blockchain ventures make trade-offs: support API's, tools, and customized development so that a codebase is useful for private and public networksorprovide such support for interoperation between heterogeneous codebases. We then conduct a case study of an exemplar for a hybrid blockchain approach, the startup Insolar. We identify characteristics that have led Insolar to be idiosyncratically agile and effective in its blockchain development, which together with our architecture analysis may be timely and prescriptive as enterprises grow interested in addressing blockchain hybridity and interoperability.
Jun Li, Alex Grintsvayg, Jeremy D. Kauffman, Charles B. Fleming
Despite the critical need of publishing and consuming content online, a centralized content platform such as Amazon or YouTube may not always have their policy and practice aligned with the interest of their users and could be rent-seeking, censorious, and frequently exploitative, whereas a peer-to-peer solution such as BitTorrent may suffer from issues of content discovery, legitimacy, monetization, verifiable publisher identity, and poor user experience. In this paper, to improve significantly over both options, we propose a new approach called LBRY that enables a decentralized online content marketplace. In particular, it uses a blockchain to build a decentralized content platform controlled by the community, and allows its users to publish, host, find, access, download, and pay for content with ease. LBRY introduces a new naming scheme that gives users the full control of the names of their content, and uses a blockchain to not only support a digital currency (LBC) and transparent decentralized ledger, but also allow every user to access a synchronized name space and a global index of content metadata, thus supporting a new paradigm of digital content distribution. We detail how LBRY works in this paper, including how it designs its data structures for content, content metadata, and a novel content naming space; how it uses the blockchain to manage and synchronize the name space and implement an index for content metadata in order to support content sharing and purchase; and how it handles several issues in running LBRY.
Universal connectivity is still unavailable or expensive for half of the global population, despite being critical for social participation. The deployment of crowdsourced networking infrastructures creates an opportunity for local development, where anyone can deploy a new device. In such infrastructures connectivity offer can expand incrementally and be sustainable through investment and fees resulting from the demand and consumption of content and services, including Internet access, that compensate the cost of the underlying network. While routing coordinates network data flows, economic flows can be coordinated by smart contracts built over a local distributed ledger. We define crowdsourced networks, the concept, architecture, and implementation using a local Ethereum PoA blockchain with Solidity smart contracts that compensate the data traffic contribution and consumption recorded by a traffic monitoring system, on a wireless mesh network. The prototype software has been validated in a controlled mesh network environment. Functional tests show its ability to account and route economic flows with small resource consumption, and therefore confirms these networks can develop organically by the addition of consumer and provider participants to reach the typical scale of most wireless mesh access networks and deliver networking services that aim to be socially and economically sustainable.
Meng Li, F. Richard Yu, Pengbo Si, Wenjun Wu · 5 authors
Recently, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) provides plenty of opportunities and challenges in various fields. As an essential part of IoT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications open a novel way that the machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) are connected and communicated without any human intervention. Meanwhile, delay-tolerant data play an important role in M2M communications-based IoT, and it puts more emphasis on powerful data caching, computing, and processing, as well as the security and stability of data transmission. To meet these requirements in M2M communications networks, in this article, we introduce some promising technologies, such as edge computing and blockchain, and propose a joint optimization framework about caching, computation, and security for delay-tolerant data in M2M communications networks based on dueling deep Q-network (DQN). According to the dynamic decision process by DQN, the optimal selection and decision of caching servers, computing servers, and blockchain systems can be made to achieve maximum system rewards, which includes higher efficiency of data processing, lower network costs, and better security of data interaction. Extensive simulation results with different system parameters show that our proposed framework can effectively improve the system performance for blockchain-enabled M2M communications compared to the existing schemes.
There is a great interest in many approaches towards blockchain in providing a solution to record transactions in a decentralized way. However, there are some limitations when storing large files or documents on the blockchain. In order to meet the requirements of storing relatively large data, a decentralized storage medium is produced. IPFS is a distributed file system which is content-addressable. It works very similar to the blockchain network. There are some attempts which take advantage of the blockchain concept and IPFS to design new approaches. Unfortunately, there are some inefficiencies in sharing data using the combination of IPFS and blockchain. In this paper, we proposed a secure file sharing system that brings a distributed access control and group key management by the adoption of the IPFS proxy. The IPFS proxy which plays an important role in the design is adopted to take responsibility for the control policies. The combination of the IPFS server and the blockchain network with the adoption of the IPFS proxy make a secure file sharing system which the members on the system can create new groups or join different groups by their own choice. Although there is no access control mechanism in IPFS server and blockchain network, the secure file sharing system manages the access control policies. The members access files only belong to the group they authorized.
Blockchain is a promising technology, which may change the way of transactions and affect our lives in the future, and has attracted the attention of more and more scholars recently. This paper provides an overview of the important issues of blockchain and the aim is to lead researchers to comprehensive understand applications, challenges and evaluation from the technical perspective. The basic technology including authorization, incentive and consensus is presented, focusing on their latest methods. Then, a wide range of blockchain applications are described. Specially, some of the latest intersection and integration areas with blockchain are introduced. Moreover, research challenges of blockchain are summarized and analyzed. Finally, evaluation metrics of blockchain are presented and as far as we know, these metrics are first designed for evaluating blockchain performance.
As online sources are becoming more prevalent in journalism and scientific literature, the ephemeral nature of the World Wide Web is becoming an increasingly serious issue for their verifiability, replicability, and reproducibility. The architecture of Webchain, a new system enabling source and reference verifiability on the Web, is combining distributed ledger technologies with secure timestamping to ensure the history of creation, ownership, and referential integrity of online resources. We present the architecture and system extensions, conduct a security analysis, and evaluate the Webchain system based on a comprehensive prototype implementation. The results confirm the feasibility and robustness of our approach.
Dimitris Vyzovitis, Yusef Napora, Dirk McCormick, David Dias · 5 authors
Permissionless blockchain environments necessitate the use of a fast and\nattack-resilient message propagation protocol for Block and Transaction\nmessages to keep nodes synchronised and avoid forks. We present GossipSub, a\ngossip-based pubsub protocol, which, in contrast to past pubsub protocols,\nincorporates resilience against a wide spectrum of attacks.\n Firstly, GossipSub's mesh construction implements an eager push model keeps\nthe fan-out of the pubsub delivery low and balances excessive bandwidth\nconsumption and fast message propagation throughout the mesh. Secondly, through\ngossip dissemination, GossipSub realises a lazy-pull model to reach nodes\nfar-away or outside the mesh. Thirdly, through constant observation, nodes\nmaintain a score profile for the peers they are connected to, allowing them to\nchoose the most well-behaved nodes to include in the mesh. Finally, and most\nimportantly, a number of tailor-made mitigation strategies designed\nspecifically for these three components make GossipSub resilient against the\nmost challenging Sybil-based attacks. We test GossipSub in a testbed\nenvironment involving more than 5000 VM nodes deployed on AWS and show that it\nstays immune to all considered attacks. GossipSub is currently being integrated\nas the main messaging layer protocol in the Filecoin and the Ethereum 2.0\n(ETH2.0) blockchains.\n
This project aims to create a blockchain-based model that addresses key challenges in digital voting. The goal is to develop a secure and transparent system that eliminates common issues such as delays in result announcements, voter identity verification concerns, and security risks [1]. Voting is the backbone of any democracy, and ensuring its integrity is crucial. Traditional digital voting systems often face problems like fraud, manipulation, and lack of transparency. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and tamper-proof nature, offers a promising solution. It functions as a distributed ledger that records transactions securely in a peer-to-peer network, making it nearly impossible to alter past data [2]. This technology brings several benefits to voting, including decentralization, security, transparency, immutability, and voter anonymity [3]. A major highlight of this project is the integration of blockchain with smart contracts, which adds an extra layer of security and automation to the voting process [4]. The system is designed to work on the Ethereum blockchain, using smart contracts written in Solidity and accessed through blockchain wallets [5]. By eliminating the need for a central authority to oversee elections, this approach ensures a fair and transparent voting process where every vote is securely recorded and cannot be tampered with [6]. In essence, this project reimagines digital voting by leveraging blockchain’s strengths, making elections more secure, efficient, and trustworthy.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ji‐Young Kwak, Jong-choul Yim, Namseok Ko, Sun-Me Kim
The byzantine agreement protocol has a disadvantage that there are many limitations on node scalability, because the performance degradation may occur due to a large amount of traffic. Hence, this classical byzantine agreement algorithm seems to be infeasible to achieve scale-out performance with the same level of security as a Bitcoin. In order to improve the performance degradation due to a large amount of traffic, we propose the hierarchical consensus mechanism based on service-zone sharding rather than how all nodes participate in the consensus process. In the proposed consensus mechanism (SZHBFT), a disjoint set of transactions is locally processed by a secure consensus subgroup or globally processed between consensus subgroups. Thus, the transactions that occur related to multiple Service-Zone Consensus Groups are updated and maintained in the Inter-Service Zone Public Ledger, whereas service transactions occurring locally are processed in parallel by each Service-Zone Consensus Group and then distributed into a local Service-Zone Private Ledger. The scheme of the proposed SZHBFT mechanism provides the hierarchical agreement solution along with distributed multiledger structure for the scalable byzantine resilient agreement by forming secure consensus subgroups in order to minimize the overhead of overall communication messages.
High levels of scalability and reliability are needed to support the massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. In particular, blockchains can be effectively used to safely manage data from large-scale IoT networks. However, current blockchain systems have low transactions per second (TPS) rates and scalability limitations that make them unsuitable. To solve the above issues, this article proposes a deep Q network shard-based blockchain (DQNSB) scheme that dynamically finds the optimal throughput configuration. In this article, a novel analysis of sharded blockchain latency and security-level characterization is provided. Using the analysis equations, the DQNSB scheme estimates the level of maliciousness and adapts the blockchain parameters to enhance the security level considering the amount of malicious attacks on the consensus process. To achieve this purpose, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are trained to find the optimal system parameters in response to the network status, and adaptively optimizes the system throughput and security level. The simulation results show that the proposed DQNSB scheme provides a much higher TPS than the existing DRL-enabled blockchain technology while maintaining a high security level.
Jiabin Bao, Debiao He, Min Luo, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
As our fossil fuel reserves are rapidly depleting, there has been an increased focus to explore the utility of renewable energy (e.g., solar energy and wind energy) in replacing fossil fuel. One resulting trend is the energy market gradually shifting toward a distributed market, where renewable energy can be traded, partly evidenced by the number of blockchain-based solutions designed for the (distributed) energy sector. The interest in blockchain is also due to blockchain's underpinning characteristics such as anonymity, decentralized, and transparency. Therefore, in this article, we perform a comprehensive review of how blockchain technology has been, and can be, deployed in energy applications, ranging from energy management to peer-to-peer trading to electric vehicle-related applications to carbon emissions trading, and others. We also study the existing architectures and solutions, and existing and emerging security and privacy challenges, as well as exploring other potential applications of blockchain in the energy sector.
Wenfeng Liu, Yu Zhang, Lu Liu, Shuyan Liu · 6 authors
The domain name system (DNS) is the infrastructure of many services and applications, thus the availability and consistency of the domain name resolution process are crucial but have long troubled DNS. The availability problem is caused by a denial-of-service (DoS) attack or a single point of failure (SPOF). The consistency problem originates from the lack of a forced data synchronization mechanism between authoritative server replicas or between parent/child authoritative servers. We proposed a novel blockchain-based domain name resolution and management architecture named FI-DNS to solve the above problems fundamentally. FI-DNS solves availability and consistency problems in the name resolution process from the mechanism level and guarantees the authenticity and integrity of name resolution results by using public-key cryptography. FIDNS also supports root zone collaborative management based on smart contracts, which is compatible with the current governance model led by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). We implemented the prototype system to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the FI-DNS architecture. We built an experimental environment with real domain name data, evaluated the name resolution performance and stability of the FI-DNS prototype system, and compared the prototype system with DNS.
Software defined networking (SDN) is the promising technology for the future network with the advantage of isolating the control plane form the data plane. Through SDN, physical network resources can be softwarized and virtualized easily. In future network scenarios, end users usually have customized resource demands, modeled as virtual network requests (VNRs). Hence, these VNRs need to be allocated and implemented efficiently, called as virtual network embedding (VNE). As one of the key issues in SDN, secure softwarized and virtualized resource allocation, especially in certain network scenarios with high security requirements, calls for significant attention in the literature. In this paper, we research the virtual network embedding for secure SDN, using the blockchain technology. VNE problem model for secure SDN is firstly presented. Then, it is the security model for SDN. Next, we propose our blockchain-based VNE algorithm for secure SDN. Aiming at validating our blockchain-based algorithm efficiency, we execute the experiment evaluation. Experiment results show that our blockchain-based algorithm performs better than its counterpart without blockchain technology, in terms of fault tolerant performance.