Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
As an alternative to the energy greedy proof-of-work, new blockchains constrain the set of participants whose selection is debatable. These blockchains typically allow a fixed consortium of machines to decide upon new transaction blocks. In this paper, we introduce the community blockchain that bridges the gap between these public blockchains and constrained blockchains. The idea is to allow potentially all participants to decide upon “some” block while restricting the set of participants deciding upon “one” block. We also propose an implementation called ComChain that builds upon the Red Belly Blockchain, the fastest blockchain we are aware of. It runs a consensus among the existing community to elect a new community. This reconfiguration speeds up as the number of removed nodes increases.
K Navaneeth Krishnan, Roopesh Jenu, Tintu Joseph, M L Silpa
The buss words blockchain and internet of things has been floating around the tech world for quite a while. IoT has already proved that it can have a significant impact on our daily life. A significant amount of data is collected and transmitted through the internet from various devices across the globe. IoT consists of heterogeneous devices communicating over a wide range of networks transmitting lots of critical and non-critical data, which raises concern about the security of such collected data from the users and the ownership of the data. This paper introduces a security framework for the internet of things implementation in a confined environment, such as smart city, power grid or metro rail systems, etc. The framework ensures the secure communication and authentication of the data across such diversified networks and devices. The framework is built upon the underlying mechanism of blockchain technology combined with the use of secure hashing algorithm.
BITCONCH chain proposed an innovative POR (Proof Of Reputation) reputation consensus algorithm, which solved the pain point that the blockchain is difficult to maintain both high throughput and decentralization. Based on social graphs, BITCONCH Chain mathematically models social, time, and contribution activities to build a decentralized reputation system. Each user has the opportunity to establish a high reputation value. The higher the user's reputation, the lower the transaction cost (or even free). The more opportunities that are selected as trust nodes to participate in the consensus, the greater the benefits. High-reputation users are defined as “mutual trust nodes”, and small micro-transactions will start “payment channels” for high-speed offline transactions. The reputation system and system incentive system will effectively promote the continued enthusiasm of business developers and ordinary users, and contribute to the construction of the business ecosystem. Business developers with traffic are more likely to get high reputation values, and the chances of being elected to a trusted full node are higher. Ordinary users can increase reputation by actively engaging in social interactions and actively using business applications in the ecosystem, increasing the chances of being selected as trusted light nodes. The Bitconch chain uses a DAG directed acyclic graph data structure to maintain the system's positive scalability. Support smartphone light node client to resist the decentralization of the system and maintain dispersion. Zero-knowledge verification, latticed data storage, quantum-level encryption algorithms, and improved BVM virtual machines make Bitconch chain more reliable and provide a friendly DApp and sidechain development environment to meet certain applications. Technical requirements for large file storage, low transaction costs, user information protection, sidechain and smart contract iterations, and bug fixes. BITCONCH chain is a decentralized distributed network with no block and no chain, which solves two difficulties in the application of blockchain: scalability and decentralization. Bitconch chain, which can be applied to the commercial application needs of users above 10 million, is the most feasible blockchain ecosystem for high-frequency small micro-transactions and social applications.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Giovanni Di Stasi, Stefano Avallone, Roberto Canonico, Giorgio Ventre
Bitcoin is a new digital currency created with the aim of being decentralized, peer-to-peer, censorship-resistant, borderless, scarce, fast and cheap to use. Since Bitcoin main way of operating is based on broadcast communications, e.g. all transactions of the currency reach all network peers, how to achieve scalability is one of the most important concerns for it to achieve wide usage. One of the proposals to improve its scalability takes the form of the Lightning Network (LN) which consists of an overlay network on top of the base Bitcoin layer. Such an overlay allows to perform a new kind of off-blockchain transactions, i.e. transactions not broadcast to the entire network, that, differently from previous off-blockchain solutions, do not require to put trust in any third entity. Important open problems of the LN are i) defining how payments should be routed and ii) establishing which fee policies intermediate nodes should apply for forwarding payments. The contributions of this work are twofold: we first propose a new, more general, way for nodes to apply fees for forwarding payments which allows to keep the network balanced and improve its performance in the long term. Secondly, we propose a new multipath routing payment scheme, based on the atomic multipath payment method, which is able to significantly reduce the fees paid by users, while being fast and also able to keep the network balanced.
Blockchain is one of the most hyped technologies of recent years. It promises to restructure the way applications are developed and to replace the widely client-server model used today. While the technology is promising the ecosystem of tools and development methodologies are still in their early stages. In this paper a proof of concept blockchain application is developed, regarding the exchange of data between different universities in different countries, with respect to the Erasmus program. A decentralized application has been designed from ground up and is proposed to be installed in multiple nodes located in all participating universities. Ethereum platform has been chosen and the required smart contracts have been implemented. Additionally an easy to use web interface have been developed in order to be usable for end users. We have evaluated both the development process and the efficiency of the resulting implementation.
Rawia Bdiwi, Cyril de Runz, Sami Faïz, Arab Ali Chérif
Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain (BC) is an innovative paradigm that is gaining ground in smart environments. In intelligent classrooms, IoT makes our exchange easier with the prominent advent of smart devices, connected objects and sensors. However, the important research direction in this kind of IoT-Based Ubiquitous Learning Environment (ULE) is security and privacy that remaining essential challenges. Previously, we exposed the initial architecture of ULE based on BC technology and the educational services that can be delivered via this platform. In this paper, we investigate deeper and we highlight the main component of our ULE known as integrated IoT-ubiquitous platform using BC. The collection of data exchanged across devices is determined by the miner that preserves security using transactions that trace communications. Finally, in this study we demonstrate our preliminary experimental results that show the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized platform which is more secure by analyzing confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Internet of Things (IoTs) offers a plethora of opportunities for remote monitoring and communication of everyday objects known as things with applications in numerous domains. The advent of blockchains can be a significant enabler for IoTs towards conducting and verifying transactions in a secure manner. However, applying blockchains to IoTs is challenging due to the resource constrained nature of the embedded devices coupled with significant delay incurred in processing and verifying transactions in the blockchain. Thus there exists a need for profiling the energy consumption of blockchains for securing IoTs and analyzing energy-performance trade-offs. Towards this goal, we profile the impact of workloads based on Smart Contracts and further quantify the power consumed by different operations performed by the devices on the Ethereum platform. In contrast to existing approaches that are focused on performance, we characterize performance and energy consumption for real workloads and analyse energy-performance trade-offs. Our proposed methodology is generic in that it can be applied to other platforms. The insights obtained from the study can be used to develop secure protocols for IoTs using blockchains.
Yiming Jiang, Chenxu Wang, Ye Huang, Siyu Long · 5 authors
At present, the Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly setting off a huge wave of digitalization in traditional industries. In the era of the Internet of Everything, massive data is generated by IoT devices. Recently, Blockchain has attracted more and more attentions in the field of IoT due to its decentralization, traceability, security and so on. Many IoT-oriented data services are built based on distributed ledger technology like blockchains. However, due to the lack of scalability and high transaction costs of the public blockchain, it is hard to directly apply the blockchain technology to IoT scenarios. The recent transaction directed acyclic graph (TDAG) technology, especially Tangle, is suitable for low-latency M2M (Machine to Machine) micropayment transactions in the ever-growing scale of the edge-centric IoT. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate Tangle into IoT blockchains and build a cross-chain interactive decentralized access model in the context of data management. We employ a consortium blockchain as the control station, and Tangle runs as the backbone of all IoT devices. It is equivalent to opening the off-chain channel of the DAG Tangle structure on the consortium blockchain. Transactions in these channels form the sub-Tangle and then merge sub-Tangle into the main Tangle for confirmation through the notary mechanism. Finally, we implement a prototype of the proposed model and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance. The results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.
Although cryptocurrencies have witnessed explosive growth in the past year, they have also raised many concerns, among which a crucial one is the scalability issue of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Suffering from the large overhead of global consensus and security assurance, even leading cryptocurrencies can only handle up to tens of transactions per second, which largely limits their applications in real- world scenarios. Among many proposals to improve cryptocurrency scalability, one of the most promising and mature solutions is the payment channel network (PCN), which offers off-chain settlement of transactions with minimal involvement of expensive blockchain operations. In this paper, we investigate the problem of payment routing in PCN. We suggest crucial design goals in PCN routing, and propose a novel distributed dynamic routing mechanism called CoinExpress. Through extensive simulations, we have shown that our proposed mechanism is able to achieve outstanding payment acceptance ratio with low routing overhead.
Damiano Di Francesco Maesa, Matteo Franceschi, Barbara Guidi, Laura Ricci
Bitcoin has emerged as a disruptive technology able to revolutionize the way financial transactions are performed. The static analysis of the Bitcoin's blockchain conducted jointly with a real time analysis of the Bitcoin's Peer-to-Peer network can reveal interesting properties of the Bitcoin's ecosystem. In this paper we propose BitKer, a Bitcoin kernel client able to interact with the Peer-to-Peer network to retrieve information useful to support higher level analyses. BitKer offers an API to applications requiring an interaction with the underlying network, for instance to implement deanonymization strategies. In this work, we present a first set of experimental results obtained by three different logs, the last one of them obtained just after the August 2017 Bitcoin Cash hard fork. Results show that BitKer is effective in retrieving useful information and can be easily used as a basis for more complex analysis tools.
This work presents ChainFS, a middleware system that secures cloud storage services using a minimally trusted Blockchain. ChainFS hardens the cloud-storage security against forking attacks. The ChainFS middleware exposes a file-system interface to end users. Internally, ChainFS stores data files in the cloud and exports minimal and necessary functionalities to the Blockchain for key distribution and file operation logging. We implement the ChainFS system on Ethereum and S3FS and closely integrate it with FUSE clients and Amazon S3 cloud storage. We measure the system performance and demonstrate low overhead.
Kolbeinn Karlsson, Weitao Jiang -, Stephen B. Wicker, Danny Adams · 7 authors
While the intersection of blockchains and the Internet of Things (IoT) have received considerable research interest lately, Nakamoto-style blockchains possess a number of qualities that make them poorly suited for many IoT scenarios. Specifically, they require high network connectivity and are power-intensive. This is a drawback in IoT environments where battery-constrained nodes form an unreliable ad hoc network such as in digital agriculture. In this paper we present Vegvisir, a partition-tolerant blockchain for use in power-constrained IoT environments with limited network connectivity. It is a permissioned, directed acyclic graph (DAG)-structured blockchain that can be used to create a shared, tamperproof data repository that keeps track of data provenance. We discuss the use cases, architecture, and challenges of such a blockchain.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Hoang Tam Vo, Ziyuan Wang, Dileban Karunamoorthy, John Wagner · 6 authors
Recently, we have witnessed a trend that many industries are forming consortiums and attempting to accelerate efficiency and reduce cost by using blockchain technology. Nevertheless, there is a clear missing capability of cross-industry and cross-blockchain interoperability. Currently, most blockchain business networks operate in isolation without external data transfer or multi-blockchain interactions. For blockchain technology to ultimately deliver on its promise, blockchain networks must be able to scale from networks addressing individual business processes to very large scale networks of interconnected decentralized autonomous organizations addressing much larger business problems at the level of entire industries and across industries. In this paper, we envision the inception of Internet of Blockchains (IoB), where homogeneous and heterogeneous decentralized networks communicate to facilitate cross-chain transactions of value, data and state transition. In addition, we also discuss interledger techniques that are essential for enabling industry-scale blockchain networks as well as achieving scalable interconnectivity between disparate, distributed ledgers.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a name coined to the digital ecosystem of numerous internet connected devices. It brings the physical world closer to the digital one and as a result, allows for new applications and services. The emergence of Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology, presents a possible solution to ensure trust in decentralized systems. Blockchain brings trust, immutability, and verifiability of a distributed ledger in a decentralized network which could be useful to build trust in IoT. However, the integration of IoT with Blockchain involves a number of challenges. The use of Blockchain within the IoT is a recent and a fast paced topic. Therefore, conducting a systematic literature review is essential to understand what has been proposed on the topic. Recent work has provided a systematic review with a focus on Bitcoin. In this paper, we present a systematic review of more recent work on Blockchain and IoT, with a broader focus on Blockchain platforms beyond Bitcoin. Our work provides an overview of what has been done so far on the use of Blockchain and IoT.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
A review system is a valuable component in E-commerce applications. Existing centralized review systems are prone to review frauds and manipulations. A decentralized, immutable and auditable blockchain system is a natural fit to prevent fraudulent and manipulated reviews. We develop and implement ReviewChain, a decentralized review system using Ethereum smart contract. ReviewChain validates new reviews by querying the identity of purchasers from a supply chain system. We assume that the supply chain system is based on blockchain technology. We develop and implement a mechanism to tie two disparate Ethereum based blockchain networks. Ethereum smart contract code is limited and cannot make external procedure calls. Therefore, we introduce multi-blockchain gateway nodes called notaries. Our proposed smart contracts and notaries allow us to interface two blockchains effectively. We run ReviewChain and discuss how various design parameters impact the system performance.
Sambit Nayak, Nanjangud C. Narendra, Anshu Shukla, James Kempf
While blockchains and smart contracts are primarily known for their use as the technologies underlying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, these technologies also have applicability in other areas. In this paper, we present an application of smart contracts running on a permissioned distributed ledger (essentially a private blockchain where only credentialed participants are allowed to read and write) to managing tenant and service accounts in a cloud computing data center. The system is called Saranyu and it supports four services: identity management, authentication, authorization, and charging. Identity management and authentication are handled using client-generated public/private key pairs in the usual fashion. Authorization is handled as a contract from a grantee of service access rights to a recipient which is a tenant or other service. Charging is supported by Saranyu integration with payment gateways for payments related to service resource usage. We describe an implementation of Saranyu on top of the Quorum blockchain system. We believe the security, non-repudiation, tamper-resistance, and easy transaction history access brought by blockchain technology will increase transparency and trust in cloud tenant and service management and that the fundamentally distributed nature of the blockchain will make Saranyu an excellent match with developing distributed cloud architectures.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Robert Norvill, Beltrán Borja Fiz Pontiveros, Radu State, Andréa Cullen
In this paper we propose a system that moves the bytecode of an Ethereum contract creation transaction off-chain. As blockchains are append-only we present a way to help reduce the chain size and growth for Ethereum. Contract creation transaction data is replaced with hashes which identify a file in InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Doing so reduces the size of data stored in such transactions by 93.86% in our dataset. The proposed system retains the assurance provided by blockchain and reduces network traffic under certain conditions.
This review focuses on the evolution of cloud computing and distributed ledger technologies (blockchains) over the last decade. Cloud computing relies mainly on a conceptually centralized service provisioning model, while blockchain technologies originate from a peer-to-peer and a completely distributed approach. Still, noteworthy commonalities between both approaches are often overlooked by researchers. Therefore, to the best of the authors knowledge, this paper reviews both domains in parallel for the first time. We conclude that both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of centralized service provisioning approaches are often the disadvantages of distributed ledger approaches and vice versa. It is obviously an interesting question whether both approaches could be combined in a way that the advantages can be added while the disadvantages could be avoided. We derive a software stack that could build the foundation unifying the best of these two worlds and that would avoid existing shortcomings like vendor lock-in, some security problems, and inherent platform dependencies.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Mathis Steichen, Beltran Fiz, Robert Norvill, Wazen M. Shbair · 5 authors
Large files cannot be efficiently stored on blockchains. On one hand side, the blockchain becomes bloated with data that has to be propagated within the blockchain network. On the other hand, since the blockchain is replicated on many nodes, a lot of storage space is required without serving an immediate purpose, especially if the node operator does not need to view every file that is stored on the blockchain. It furthermore leads to an increase in the price of operating blockchain nodes because more data needs to be processed, transferred and stored. IPFS is a file sharing system that can be leveraged to more efficiently store and share large files. It relies on cryptographic hashes that can easily be stored on a blockchain. Nonetheless, IPFS does not permit users to share files with selected parties. This is necessary, if sensitive or personal data needs to be shared. Therefore, this paper presents a modified version of the InterPlanetary Filesystem (IPFS) that leverages Ethereum smart contracts to provide access controlled file sharing. The smart contract is used to maintain the access control list, while the modified IPFS software enforces it. For this, it interacts with the smart contract whenever a file is uploaded, downloaded or transferred. Using an experimental setup, the impact of the access controlled IPFS is analyzed and discussed.
Luo Kan, Wei Yu, Amjad Hafiz Muhammad, Siyuan Wang · 6 authors
Blockchain is a new technology for data sharing between untrusted peers. However, it does not work well with massive transactions. Besides, there are high barriers between heterogeneous blockchain systems. In this paper, we proposed an innovative component-based framework for exchanging information across arbitrary blockchain system called interactive multiple blockchain architecture. In our architecture, a dynamic network of multi-chain is created for inter-blockchain communication. We propose the inter-blockchain connection model for routing management and messages transferring. Additionally, our proposed protocols provide transactions with atomicity and consistency in crossing-chain scene. In the end, our experiment results based on a network of private multiple blockchain systems show that the throughput is increased by a number of chains parallel running.
Jianli Pan, Jianyu Wang, A. MARIA HESTER, Ismail AlQerm · 6 authors
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On the one hand, IoT devices are "weak" and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively "vulnerable" facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we design and prototype an edge-IoT framework named "EdgeChain" based on blockchain and smart contracts. The core idea is to integrate a permissioned blockchain and the internal currency or "coin" system to link the edge cloud resource pool with each IoT device' account and resource usage, and hence behavior of the IoT devices. EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management system to control how much resource IoT devices can obtain from edge servers, based on pre-defined rules on priority, application types and past behaviors. Smart contracts are used to enforce the rules and policies to regulate the IoT device behavior in a non-deniable and automated manner. All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into blockchain for secure data logging and auditing. We implement an EdgeChain prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ideas. The results show that while gaining the security benefits of blockchain and smart contracts, the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is within a reasonable and acceptable range.
Message digest algorithms are one of the underlying building blocks of\nblockchain platforms such as Ethereum. This paper analyses situations in which\nthe message digest collision resistance property can be exploited by attackers.\nTwo mitigations for possible attacks are described: longer message digest sizes\nmake attacks more difficult; and, including timeliness properties limits the\namount of time an attacker has to determine a hash collision.\n
Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Supply Chain monitoring applications rely on messaging protocols for exchanging data. Contemporary IoT deployments widely use the publish-subscribe messaging model because of its resource-efficiency. However, the systems with publish-subscribe messaging model employ a centralized architecture, wherein the data from all the devices in the application network flows via a central broker to the subscribers. Such a centralized architecture make publish-subscribe messaging model susceptible to a central point of failure. Besides, it provides an opportunity for the organization that owns the broker to tamper with the data. In this work, we contribute Trinity, a novel distributed publish-subscribe broker with blockchain-based immutability. Trinity distributes the data published to one of the brokers in the network to all the brokers in the network. The distributed data is stored in an immutable ledger through the use of the blockchain technology. Furthermore, Trinity executes smart contracts to validate the data before saving the data on the blockchain. Through the use of a blockchain network, Trinity can guarantee persistence, ordering, and immutability across trust boundaries. Our evaluation results show that Trinity consumes minimal resources, and the use of smart contracts enable the stakeholders to automate the data management processes. To the best of our knowledge, Trinity is the first framework that combines the components of the blockchain technology with the publish-subscribe messaging model.
Hany F. Atlam, Ahmed Alenezi, Madini O. Alassafi, Gary Wills
The Internet of Things (IoT) has extended the internet connectivity to reach not just computers and humans, but most of our environment things. The IoT has the potential to connect billions of objects simultaneously which has the impact of improving information sharing needs that result in improving our life. Although the IoT benefits are unlimited, there are many challenges facing adopting the IoT in the real world due to its centralized server/client model. For instance, scalability and security issues that arise due to the excessive numbers of IoT objects in the network. The server/client model requires all devices to be connected and authenticated through the server, which creates a single point of failure. Therefore, moving the IoT system into the decentralized path may be the right decision. One of the popular decentralization systems is blockchain. The Blockchain is a powerful technology that decentralizes computation and management processes which can solve many of IoT issues, especially security. This paper provides an overview of the integration of the blockchain with the IoT with highlighting the integration benefits and challenges. The future research directions of blockchain with IoT are also discussed. We conclude that the combination of blockchain and IoT can provide a powerful approach which can significantly pave the way for new business models and distributed applications.