The full-replication data storage mechanism, as commonly utilized in existing blockchain systems, is lack of sufficient storage scalability, since it reserves a copy of the whole block data in each node so that the overall storage consumption per block is O(n) with n nodes. 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, thereby it is critical to devise a new storage mechanism. This paper proposes a novel storage engine, called BFT-Store, to enhance storage scalability by integrating erasure coding with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol. First, the storage consumption per block can be reduced to O(1), which enlarges overall storage capability when more nodes join blockchain. Second, an efficient online re-encoding protocol is designed for storage scale-out and a hybrid replication scheme is employed to improve reading performance. Last, extensive experimental results illustrate the scalability, availability and efficiency of BFT-Store, which is implemented on an open-source permissioned blockchain Tendermint.
Amir Abbaszadeh Sori, Mehdi Golsorkhtabaramiri, Amir Masoud Rahmani
Over the last decade, cryptocurrencies have made a significant progress as Bitcoin. Nowadays, one of the challenges in the cryptocurrencies community is the high energy consumption of Bitcoin. Not only Bitcoin but also some other cryptocurrencies deal with this problem. This work-in-progress paper defines macro standardization for energy consumption of each transaction based on VISA and MasterCard energy consumption, IOTA energy consumption modeling, and measuring of IOTA current rate control mechanism (Proof-of-Work).
M.E in Computer Engineering from SVBIT, GTU, Gandhinagar, India., Pratik Patel, Pinkal Chauhan, M.E in Computer Engineering from LDRP, Gandhinagar, India.
In our everyday lives, IoT plays a vital role. It is crucial to sense, capture and share data from connected devices via internet. Existing system proposed centralized client/server approach where central authority keeps a record of all the activities. Failure of such centralized authority makes the whole system fail. A decentralized / distributed approach is therefore needed if a single failure point is avoided. In this paper contains information to integrating Blockchain in IoT ecosystem in order to achieve access control. We proposed smart contract based architecture which consist multiple permission contract, one decision contract and one entry contract, to achieve distributed and secure IoT device access control. To conclude system framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with two laptops and one Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the PCs, DC and EC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.
D.M. Sheeba, S. Jayalakshmi, Dept of Computer Applications, VISTAS, Chennai, India.
Internet of Things (IoT) growing at a rate of exponential numbers in recent years has received extensive attention with BlockChain (BC) technology which provide trust to IoT with its immutable nature, decentralization in computing, resource constraints, security and privacy. The distributed ledger of transactions in BC is path leading technology for addressing Cyber Threats in the form of data theft; it provides secure application architecture which has proven track of record for securing data. IoT devices using BC enabled to communicate between objects, share data, decide based on business criteria and act as a medium to securely transmit information. This work provides lightweight BlockChain with two prominent consensus mechanism PoW – Proof of Work and PoS – Proof of Stake for smart IoT devices. Next, Smart Home Device (SMD) is ensures providing best-in-class Security and Privacy for smart home Appliances. Further provides future advances in the Approach.
Areej Alsaafin, Ilham Qasse, Manar Abu Talib, Qassim Nasir
Nowadays, smart cities deploy several smart computing technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and interconnected network architecture for the purpose of providing innovative solutions and better collaboration between residents and local governments while maintaining an optimal utilization of the available resources. However, these technologies suffer from some security and privacy issues which are very critical for many applications. Blockchain technology is a valuable infrastructure solution that addresses these issues. The decentralized approach of the blockchain technology facilitates building a resilient ecosystem where IoT devices can function effectively and securely. Moreover, the architecture of the blockchain provides reliable communication by eliminating single point of failure and enabling users to maintain anonymity by employing privacy-preserving cryptographic algorithms. However, employing the blockchain technology in an IoT-based system is challenging due to the centralized nature of IoT-based systems and the resource constraints of its interconnected devices, which lead to several serious security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a blockchain infrastructure design that provides security and privacy to IoT-based systems of critical governmental and industrial applications. The proposed design includes a blockchain connected gateway, which adaptively and securely maintains user privacy preferences. Moreover, it handles the blockchain computation instead of overwhelming the IoT devices with heavy computation.
The last decade has experienced a vast interest in Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies with a specific focus on the applications of this technology. However, slow confirmation times of transactions and unforeseeable high fees hamper their wide adoption for micro-payments. The idea of establishing payment channel networks is one of the many proposed solutions to address this scalability issue where nodes, by utilizing smart contracting, establish payment channels between each other and perform off-chain transactions. However, due to the way these channels are created, both sides have a certain one-way capacity for making transactions. Consequently, if one sides exceeds this one-way capacity, the channel becomes useless in that particular direction, which causes failures of payments and eventually creates an imbalance in the overall network. To keep the payment channel network sustainable, in this paper, we aim to increase the overall success rate of payments by effectively exploiting the fact that end-users are usually connected to the network at multiple points (i.e., gateways) any of which can be used to initiate the payment. We propose an efficient method for selection of the gateway for a user by considering the gateway's inbound and outbound payment traffic ratio. We then augment this proposed method with split payment capability to further increase success rate especially for large transactions. The evaluation of the proposed method shows that compared to greedy and maxflow-based approaches, we can achieve much higher success rates, which are further improved with split payments.
This article presents a novel way to reduce blockchain nodes’ memory requirements using error correcting codes. In particular, LDPC codes are taken as examples to explicitly demonstrate the scheme. The proposed coding scheme encodes data across multiple blocks, respectively, block headers, in the blockchain. This leads to a significant reduction in required memory at each node. We then apply the proposed coding technique to blockchains organized in two different ways. Our first scheme has the same protocol for mining, broadcasting, and verification of blocks, as Bitcoin-type blockchains. Our scheme is different in thatfull nodesdo not have to store all blocks. Instead they will need to store only one block of a group of$t$blocks. In the second scheme, we consider a new block verification protocol and an account-based model under the assumption that transmission between any two nodes can be established, as well as the broadcast transmission. Our block verification protocol uses the Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm and requires sending a newly mined block to only a small number of verification nodes, instead of broadcasting it to the entire network, which leads to a reduction of the network load.
Recent advancement of Bitcoin revolution has propelled unlimited opportunities for futuristic digital ecosystem design. Transactions belonging to Bitcoin are being fully supported, realized, and disseminated by a set of innovative hot and cold wallet technologies within the blockchain framework. While deploying smart applications under the niche of Internet of Things (IoT) plethora, such Bitcoin transactions aroused the issue of unsupported resource-constrained tool sets and demanded for a novel architecture. To cater this challenge, this article proposes a novel Bitcoin lightweight IoT node-based system model while incorporating the improved simplified payment verification (SPV) process for e-healthcare application. This article, first formulates necessary models of background arts utilized in the work that include inhomogeneous Poisson point process, block header structure formulation, depth and height relationship, bloom filter mechanism, pay-to-public key hash (P2PKH) base stack process, and transaction management. Second, developed models are deployed through several key algorithms and associated procedures. Finally, analysis and discussions are made that encompass the block confirmation time, appropriateness of the byzantine fault tolerance, smart contract policy, and SPV response in the proposed scenario.
Kejiao Li, Hui Li, Han Wang, Huiyao An · 7 authors
The blockchain has a great vogue in recent years, and its core consensus algorithms also become the focus of research. At present, most of the research on consensus mechanisms are oriented to the public blockchain and based on existing consensus mechanisms or sophisticated distributed algorithms. Various application scenarios have been developed based on the consortium blockchain, while few researchers pay attention to customize consistency algorithms. Moreover, there is a trade-off between security and performance in designing consensus mechanisms. We propose a novel consensus algorithm called Proof of Vote (PoV), where the distributed nodes controlled by consortium members could reach consensus and come to a decentralized arbitration by voting. PoV separates the voting rights and bookkeeping rights with the essential idea of establishing different security identities for network nodes. Contrary to the third-party intermediary or uncontrollable public awareness, the production and verification of PoV blocks are decided by the voting results among the core consortium members. We theoretically prove that PoV blocks can reach transaction finality by only one confirmation. Compared with the total traffic complexity of BFT-based consensus, PoV has just that of O( ), which is a great improvement when the number of nodes is over 100.
Lanfranco Zanzi, Antonio Albanese, Vincenzo Sciancalepore, Xavier Costa‐Pérez
With the advent of revolutionary technologies, such as virtualization and softwarization, a novel concept for 5G networks and beyond has been unveiled: Network Slicing. Initially driven by the research community, standardization bodies as 3GPP have embraced it as a promising solution to revolutionize the traditional mobile telecommunication market by enabling new business models opportunities. Network Slicing is envisioned to open up the telecom market to new players such as Industry Verticals, e.g., automotive, smart factories, e-health, etc. Given the large number of potential new business players, dubbed as network tenants, novel solutions are required to accommodate their needs in a cost-efficient and secure manner. In this paper, we propose NSBchain, a novel network slicing brokering (NSB) solution, which leverages on the widely adopted Blockchain technology to address the new business models needs beyond traditional network sharing agreements. NSBchain defines a new entity, the Intermediate Broker (IB), which enables Infrastructure Providers (InPs) to allocate network resources to IBs through smart contracts and IBs to assign and re-distribute their resources among tenants in a secure, automated and scalable manner. We conducted an extensive performance evaluation by means of an open-source blockchain platform that proves the feasibility of our proposed framework considering a large number of tenants and two different consensus algorithms.
Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology is a disruptive technology that provides the infrastructure for developing decentralized applications enabling the implementation of novel business models even in traditionally centralized domains. In the last years it has drawn high interest from the academic community, technology developers and startups thus lots of solutions have been developed to address blockchain technology limitations and the requirements of applications software engineering. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of DLT solutions analyzing the addressed challenges, provided solutions and their usage for developing decentralized applications. Our study reviews over 100 blockchain papers and startup initiatives from which we construct a 3-tier based architecture for decentralized applications and we use it to systematically classify the technology solutions. Protocol and Network Tier solutions address the digital assets registration, transactions, data structure, and privacy and business rules implementation and the creation of peer-to-peer networks, ledger replication, and consensus-based state validation. Scaling Tier solutions address the scalability problems in terms of storage size, transaction throughput, and computational capability. Finally, Federated Tier aggregates integrative solutions across multiple blockchain applications deployments. The paper closes with a discussion on challenges and opportunities for developing decentralized applications by providing a multi-step guideline for decentralizing the design of traditional systems and implementing decentralized applications.
In this paper we propose a blockchain-based automatic indemnification mechanism. Clients and service providers (SPs) exchange signed messages according to a predefined protocol that enables clients to utilize service-provider services with simultaneous cryptographic proof of service. When a client has discovered an SP to have violated a service level agreement based on cryptographic proof, then they can obtain cryptocurrency as a compensation by raising objections to a smart contract on a public blockchain. When an objection has been judged successful by programs located in the smart contract, a portion of the deposit (cryptocurrency in the smart contract) will be transferred to the account of the objection-raiser. In this way, the need to establish and run a customer service center with employees for processing such claims and refunds is obviated. Moreover, the traditional third-party trust is no longer needed. Focusing on services for cloud-storage service, we propose protocols and implementation of an indemnification system in the Ethereum. The feasibility of the proposed application has been demonstrated through pilot implementation and testing.
As one of the key technologies of distributed ledgers, blockchain solves the trust problem in open network without relying on any trusted third party. Its decentralized feature has a broad application prospect, but still faces scalability problem. Currently, blockchain scalability bottleneck is mainly in three aspects: performance inefficiency, high confirmation delay, and function extension. For example, Bitcoin can only deal with 7 transactions per second averagely. Obviously, it cannot meet the requirement of current digital payment scenarios, nor can it be carried in other applications such as distributed storage and credit service. What's more, different blockchain systems carry different business and requirements, so scalability is the core issue of the current development of blockchain. This paper introduces the blockchain scalability related technologies from the aspects of improving efficiency and extending functionality of blockchain system, respectively. We summarize four mainstream solutions to improve the performance of blockchain system, including Sharding mechanism, directed acyclic graph based (DAG-based), off-chain payment network and cross-chain technology. In the end, we give some suggestions for further research in blockchain scalability.
Subhi Alrubei, Edward A. Ball, Jonathan Rigelsford, Callum. A Willis
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly being utilized, by both businesses and individuals, for many applications. This utilization means increases in the smart devices that are connected to the Internet of Things, which will significantly increase the challenges related to devices' interconnectivity and management, data and user privacy, and network, data, and device security. At the same time, blockchain approaches provide a decentralized, immutable, and peer-to-peer ledger technology that could be the right answer to these challenges. Significant challenges, however, accompany the integration of blockchain into the Internet of Things, since IoT smart devices may suffer from resource and power constraints and blockchain is associated with scalability and delay issues. In this paper, a practical incorporation of blockchain into the Internet of Things is demonstrated using Ethereum Proof of Authority (PoA). This provides performance analyses, which include measurement of the transaction arrival time, the system end-to-end latency for different network implementations over cellular and Wi-Fi, and the average power consumption. This includes the study of the effect of network bandwidth on the stability and synchronization of all nodes on the blockchain network.
Gamze Gürsoy, Charlotte M. Brannon, Eric Ni, Sarah Wagner · 6 authors
Abstract The genomic characterization of individuals promises to be immensely useful for biomedical research and healthcare. However, a critical barrier to expanding personal genome sequencing is achieving secure, high-integrity storage of raw data. While cloud storage offers solutions to access such data from any place and device, the vulnerabilities of centralized storage in relation to security, data integrity, and robustness, such as single points of failure, have not yet been addressed. Blockchain is a potential alternative to these storage modes. However, storing large-scale data on blockchain can be challenging due to slow transaction speeds, the potential for chains to reach large sizes, and limitations on querying data stored on-chain. Currently, several genomic storage applications incorporate blockchain, but likely because of these challenges, many use blockchain only to facilitate and log data-access transactions, rather than to store raw genomic data on-chain. While this secures the process of data access, it does not secure the data itself, which is often stored off-chain (i.e. in a cloud or file-hosting services). Here, we developed a novel method of storing reference-aligned reads on-chain in a private blockchain network. We also developed tools for accessing and analyzing the on-chain data. We addressed the challenges of on-chain data storage by minimizing the data inserted to the chain using reference-based data compression techniques and by binning the on-chain data by genomic location to reduce retrieval times. Our tools provide open-source blockchain-based storage and access for advanced genomic analyses such as variant calling.
Danda B. Rawat, Ronald Doku, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Chandra Bajracharya · 5 authors
A huge amount of information is expected to be exchanged in vehicular networks through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications for enhancing overall traffic efficiency and road safety. However, there are several critical challenges to be addressed before completely realizing the full potential of V2X networking. Privacy-aware security is one of the central components to be addressed for V2X communications. This paper presents a novel framework by leveraging the best features of two emerging technologies: blockchain technology and named data networking (NDN) for privacy-aware secure V2X communications. The proposed framework does not use the private information of users (owners, drivers, pedestrians, passengers, cyclists, etc.) in vehicular networks while providing verifiable secure V2X communications by using non-private information such as number plate of the vehicle (like in ParkMobile App or E-ZPass systems use) for integrity and accountability of the communications. Specifically, integrity and accountability in the proposed framework for its users are achieved by amalgamating the best features of blockchain technology and NDN. Furthermore, the proposed approach aims to increase the trust and transparency and reduce the business friction in smart transplantation systems.
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and stable price of consumption, i.e., the minimum transaction fee required to have a transaction processed. As Bitcoin matures, the influx of transactions increases and the block rewards become insignificant. We show that under these conditions, it becomes hard to maintain the health of the blockchain. In Bitcoin, under these mature operating conditions (MOC), the miners would find it challenging to cover their mining costs as there would be no more revenue from merely mining a block. It may cause miners not to continue mining, threatening the blockchain's security. Further, as we show in this paper using simulations, the cost of acting in favor of the health of the blockchain, under MOC, is very high in Bitcoin, causing all miners to process transactions greedily. It leads to stranded transactions, i.e., transactions offering low transaction fees, experiencing unreasonably high processing latency. To make matters worse, a compounding effect of these stranded transactions is the rising price of consumption. Such phenomena not only induce unfairness as experienced by the miners and the users but also deteriorate the health of the blockchain. We propose BitcoinF transaction processing protocol, a simple, yet highly effective modification to the existing Bitcoin protocol to fix these issues of unfairness. BitcoinF resolves these issues of unfairness while preserving the ability of the users to express urgency and have their transactions prioritized.
Internet of Things (IoT) growth is expected to reach phenomenal levels of diverse adoption and deployment amongst multiple industries. This ranges from financial, communication, transport, health and general consumer sectors. The expected burst of IoT deployment will introduce significant cyber security challenges, specifically in the area of configuration management. Blockchain technology is continuously evolving beyond the use as financial currency, and is proving to be a feasible solution for distributed record keeping and validation. The special characteristics of Blockchain technology introduces a new domain of IoT secure configuration and decentralized management, while taking into consideration the challenging constraints imposed by IoT devices efficient and low-power design. In this paper we try to identify an effective approach to manage and control security IoT device configurations by adopting a Blockchain technology.
Blockchain technologies have been increasingly adopted by enterprises to increase operational efficiency and enable new business models. These enterprise blockchain applications generally run on dedicated blockchain networks due to regulations and security requirements. The design process of these networks involves many decisions and trade-offs that impact security, governance, and performance of applications that run on them. The challenge is further exacerbated by the lack of a common architecture and concept map to communicate about blockchain networks, as blockchain technologies tend to use different concepts and architecture. This paper presents a concept map, an anatomy and the principal dimensions of the design space of blockchain networks. We applied the proposed design space in a case study about designing and deploying a blockchain network for an ad-hoc IoT infrastructure. We found that the design space brought structure to the design process and the analysis of design alternatives. The presented concept map, anatomy and design space are intended to help improve the blockchain network design practice and lay a foundation for future research on the design process and deployment automation of blockchain networks.
Andrêssa S. Fernandes, Vladimir Rocha, Arlindo Flávio da Conceição, Flávio Horita
Blockchain technology has been applied in several areas, ranging from financial to health. Although this technology offers benefits, for instance the immutability, anonymity, and decentralization of information, its use presents some problems, been the scalability in terms of storage size one of them. This paper presents a scalable architecture for sharing electronic health records using a multi-channel hyperledger blockchain. The architecture uses one blockchain to record patient visits and one blockchain for each health institution to record links that point to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) stored in external systems. Among the main conclusions, the final results highlight the scalability of the proposed architecture, when compared to the related work models in the heterogeneous network.
Yongfeng Qian, Yingying Jiang, Long Hu, M. Shamim Hossain · 6 authors
The Cognitive Internet of Vehicles (CIoV) introduces a cognitive engine in the traditional Internet of Vehicles, which can realize more intelligent functions such as vehicle deployment and resource allocation. Especially in terms of content caching, the cognitive engine can perceive the content requirements of users and match the content providers and content requesters to improve the caching hit rate. However, during this process, users may worry that their privacy data may be leaked. Content requesters need to submit data about points of interest in contents, which is part of their sensitive information. In addition, in terms of rapid speed of vehicles, the connection time is limited, such as vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside unit (RSU), which leads to limited transaction time during obtaining contents. In order to solve these problems, in this article, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-aware content caching architecture in CIoV. In general, when vehicles need contents, in order to protect the privacy of vehicles, it is no longer necessary to submit a request to an RSU, but through broadcasting contents from an RSU or surrounding vehicles, where vehicles can selectively obtain contents. To improve the cache hit rate, the cognitive engine will perceive content requirements and recommend relevant content requirements to an RSU or content-providing vehicles based on machine learning or deep learning methods. However, this method of content acquisition will connect different vehicles, which brings the untrusted problem. Both content requesters and providers may worry about untrusted users connected with them. To this end, we adopt the blockchain technology to record the completed content transactions, which are written into the block after the consensus mechanism is completed, thus solving the problem of distrust between vehicles. Experiments demonstrate the privacy-aware content caching architecture based on blockchains effectiveness.
Abstract The charity organizations in China lack transparency and the supervision to them is difficult to achieve, which has a negative impact on the willingness of the people to donate. Blockchain as a underlying technology of Bitcoin system provides a new solution for the charity system in terms of technology. This paper proposed a charity system based on blockchain technology and expounds the design pattern, architecture and operational process of the platform. Some core functions of the charity platform have been realized and verified on Ethereum in this article. We hope to increase the transparency of charities to enhance the public’s trust in charities and promote the development of philanthropy by blockchain-based charity system.