Blockchain (BC) in the Internet of Things (IoT) is a novel technology that acts with decentralized, distributed, public and real-time ledger to store transactions among IoT nodes. A blockchain is a series of blocks, each block is linked to its previous blocks. Every block has the cryptographic hash code, previous block hash, and its data. The transactions in BC are the basic units that are used to transfer data between IoT nodes. The IoT nodes are different kind of physical but smart devices with embedded sensors, actuators, programs and able to communicate with other IoT nodes. The role of BC in IoT is to provide a procedure to process secured records of data through IoT nodes. BC is a secured technology that can be used publicly and openly. IoT requires this kind of technology to allow secure communication among IoT nodes in heterogeneous environment. The transactions in BC could be traced and explored through anyone who are authenticated to communicate within the IoT. The BC in IoT may help to improve the communication security. In this paper, I explored this approach, its opportunities and challenges.
In big cloud structures or large data structures, fog computing could be interpreted, referring critically to the growing issues and problems in accessing the information among the Internet of things (IoT) devices. Fog computing can be used to compute, store, control and connect smart devices to each other. IoT is an architecture of uniquely identified interrelated physical things, these physical things are able to communicate with each other and can transmit and receive information. This research presents a framework of the combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Fog computing. The bl…
In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), massive computing devices surrounding us operate and interact with each other to provide several significant services in industries, medical as well as in daily life activities at home, office, education sectors, and so on. The participating devices in an IoT network usually have resource constraints and the devices are prone to different cyber attacks, leading to the loopholes in the security and authentication. As a revolutionized and innovated technology, blockchain, that is applied in cryptocurrency, market prediction, etc., uses a distributed le…
With the explosive growth of smart IoT devices at the edge of the Internet, embedding sensors on mobile devices for massive data collection and collective environment sensing has been envisioned as a cost-effective solution for IoT applications. However, existing IoT platforms and framework rely on dedicated middleware for (semi-) centralized task dispatching, data storage and incentive provision. Consequently, they are usually expensive to deploy, have limited adaptability to diverse requirements, and face a series of data security and privacy issues. In this paper, we employ permissionless b…
Blockchain, as well as Internet of Things (IoT), is considered as two major disruptive emerging technologies. However, both of them suffer from innate technological limitations to some extent. IoT requires strengthening its security features while Blockchain inherently possesses them due to its extensive use of cryptographic mechanisms and Blockchain, in an inverted manner, needs contributions from the distributed nodes for its P2P (Peer-to-Peer) consensus model while IoT rudimentarily embodies them within its architecture. This chapter, therefore, acutely dissects the viability, along with pr…
IoT emerges as an unprecedented paradigm with great potential for changing how people interact, think and live. It is making existing Internet services feasible in ways that were previously impossible, as well as paving the way for new situation-awareness applications suitable for smart cities, such as realtime video surveillance, traffic control, and emergency management. These applications will typically rely on large numbers of IoT devices to collect and collaboratively process streamed data to enable real-time decision making. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Semantic Virtual Spa…
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in incorporating blockchain for the Internet of Things (IoT) to address the inherent issues of IoT, such as single point of failure and data silos. However, blockchain alone cannot ascertain the authenticity and veracity of the data coming from IoT devices. The append-only nature of blockchain exacerbates this issue, as it would not be possible to alter the data once recorded on-chain. Trust and Reputation Management (TRM) is an effective approach to overcome the aforementioned trust issues. However, designing TRM frameworks for blockchain…
Recently, blockchain has gained momentum as a novel technology that gives rise to a plethora of new decentralized applications (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT)). However, its integration with the IoT is still facing several problems (e.g., scalability, flexibility). Provisioning resources to enable a large number of connected IoT devices implies having a scalable and flexible blockchain. To address these issues, we propose a scalable and trustworthy blockchain (STB) architecture that is suitable for the IoT; which uses blockchain sharding and oracles to establish trust among unreliable IoT devi…
Blockchain is considered the critical backbone technology for secure and trusted Internet of Things (IoT) in the future 6G network. However, deploying a blockchain system in a complex wireless IoT network is challenging due to the limited resources, complex wireless environment, and the property of self-interested IoT devices. The existing incentive mechanism of blockchain is not compatible with the wireless IoT network. In this paper, to incentivize IoT devices to join the construction of the wireless blockchain network, we propose a multi-dimensional contract to optimize the blockchain utili…
Internet of things (IoT) has been proposed to be a new paradigm of connecting devices and providing services to various applications, e.g., transportation, energy, smart city, and healthcare. In this paper, we focus on an important issue, i.e., economics of IoT, that can have a great impact to the success of IoT applications. In particular, we adopt and present the information economics approach with its applications in IoT. We first review existing economic models developed for IoT services. Then, we outline two important topics of information economics which are pertinent to IoT, i.e., the v…
The booming Internet of Things (IoT) market has drawn tremendous interest from cyber attackers. The centralized cloud-based IoT service architecture has serious limitations in terms of security, availability, and scalability, and is subject to single points of failure (SPOF). Recently, accommodating IoT services on blockchains has become a trend for better security, privacy, and reliability. However, blockchain's shortcomings of high cost, low throughput, and long latency make it unsuitable for IoT applications. In this paper, we take a retrospection of existing blockchain-based IoT solutions …
This paper gives a detail analysis of various applications based on Internet of Thing (IoT)s. This explains about how internet of things evolved from mobile computing and ubiquitous computing. It emphasises the fact that objects are connected over the internet rather than people. The properties of Internet of Things (IOT) are product information, electronic tag, standard expressed and uploading information. It utilises the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and wireless sensor networks (WSN). IOT applications are used in domains such as healthcare, supply chain management, defenc…
Internet of things (IoT) changes significantly the requirements for connectivity, mainly with regards to long battery life, low device cost, low deployment cost, extended coverage and support for a massive number of devices. Driven from these requirements, several different cellular and non-cellular low power wide area network (LPWAN) solutions are emerging and competing for IoT business and the overall connectivity market. Motivated by this, in this paper, we review and compare the design specifications of different LPWAN solutions, as well as, we discuss their suitability for different IoT a…
IoT cloud enabled societal applications have dramatically increased in the recent past due to the thrust for innovations, notably through startup initiatives, in various sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, industry, and so forth. The existing IoT cloud solutions have led practitioners or researchers to a haphazard clutter of serious security hazards and performance inefficiencies. This paper proposes a blockchain enabled IoT cloud implementation to tackle the existing issues in smart cities. It particularly highlights the implementation of chaincodes for air quality monitoring systems in …
With the continuous expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, edge computing mode has emerged in recent years to overcome the shortcomings of traditional cloud computing mode, such as high delay, network congestion, and large resource consumption. Thus, edge-thing systems will replace the classic cloud-thing/cloud-edge-thing systems and become mainstream gradually, where IoT devices can offload their tasks to neighboring edge nodes. A common problem is how to utilize edge computing resources. For the sake of fairness, double auction can be used in the edge-thing system to achieve an effec…
Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping the incumbent industry to smart industry featured with data-driven decision-making. However, intrinsic features of IoT result in a number of challenges such as decentralization, poor interoperability, privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology brings the opportunities in addressing the challenges of IoT. In this paper, we investigate the integration of blockchain technology with IoT. We name such synthesis of blockchain and IoT as Blockchain of Things (BCoT). This paper presents an in-depth survey of BCoT and discusses the insights of this…
The blockchain is a distributed technology which allows establishing trust among unreliable users who interact and perform transactions with each other. While blockchain technology has been mainly used for crypto-currency, it has emerged as an enabling technology for establishing trust in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, a naive usage of the blockchain for IoT leads to high delays and extensive computational power. In this paper, we propose a blockchain architecture dedicated to being used in a supply chain which comprises different distributed IoT entities. We propose …
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its inherent security mechanisms and immunity to different attacks. A blockchain relies on a consensus method for agreeing on any new data. Most of the consensus methods which are currently used for the blockchain of different cryptocurrencies require high computational power and thus are not apt for resource-constrained systems. In this article, we discuss and surve…
Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart home applications are rising in popularity. However, this trend attracts malicious activity, which causes cost-efficient security to be in high demand. This paper proposes a low-end design that reinforces the security of a home network. It uses private blockchain technology and localization via RSSI-based trilateration. We investigated the benefits of private blockchains over their public counterpart, and we improve the precision of the localization algorithm by testing it against different wireless technologies. The results conclude that using a private bl…
We present models for utilizing blockchain and smart contract technology with the widely used OAuth 2.0 open authorization framework to provide delegated authorization for constrained IoT devices. The models involve different tradeoffs in terms of privacy, delay, and cost, while exploiting key advantages of blockchains and smart contracts. These include linking payments to authorization grants, immutably recording authorization information and policies in smart contracts, and offering resilience through the execution of smart contract code on all blockchain nodes.
We study the problem of efficiently disseminating authenticated blockchain information from blockchain nodes (servers) to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, through a wireless base station (BS). In existing blockchain protocols, upon generation of a new block, each IoT device receives a copy of the block header, authenticated via digital signature by one or more trusted servers. Since it relies on unicast transmissions, the required communication resources grow linearly with the number of IoT devices. We propose a more efficient scheme, in which a single copy of each block header is multicasted…
As a disruptive technology that originates from cryptocurrency, blockchain provides a trusted platform to facilitate industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. However, implementing a blockchain platform in IIoT scenarios confronts various security challenges due to the rigorous deployment condition. To this end, we present a novel design of secure blockchain based on trusted computing hardware for IIoT applications. Specifically, we employ the trusted execution environment (TEE) module and a customized security chip to safeguard the blockchain against different attacking vectors. Furthermore, we imp…
The emerging blockchain protocols provide a decentralized architecture that is suitable of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) interactions. However, keeping a local copy of the blockchain ledger is infeasible for low-power and memory-constrained devices. For this reason, they are equipped with lightweight software implementations that only download the useful data structures, e.g. state of accounts, from the blockchain network, when they are updated. In this paper, we consider and analyze a novel scheme, implemented by the nodes of the blockchain network, which aggregates the blockchain data …
A new framework for a secure and robust consensus in blockchain-based IoT networks is proposed using machine learning. Hyperledger fabric, which is a blockchain platform developed as part of the Hyperledger project, though looks very apt for IoT applications, has comparatively low tolerance for malicious activities in an untrustworthy environment. To that end, we propose AI-enabled blockchain (AIBC) with a 2-step consensus protocol that uses an outlier detection algorithm for consensus in an IoT network implemented on hyperledger fabric platform. The outlier-aware consensus protocol exploits a…
Deploying mobile edge computing (MEC) server in the mobile blockchain-enabled Internet of things (IoT) system is a promising approach to improve the system performance, however, it imposes a significant challenge on the trust of MEC server. To address this problem, we first propose an untrusted MEC proof of work scheme in mobile blockchain network where plenty of nonce hash computing demands can be offloaded to MEC server. Then, we design a nonce ordering algorithm for this scheme to provide fairer computing resource allocation for all mobile IoT devices/users. Specifically, we formulate the u…
The agricultural sector is still lagging behind from all other sectors in terms of using the newest technologies. For production, the latest machines are being introduced and adopted. However, pre-harvest and post-harvest processing are still done by following traditional methodologies while tracing, storing, and publishing agricultural data. As a result, farmers are not getting deserved payment, consumers are not getting enough information before buying their product, and intermediate person/processors are increasing retail prices. Using blockchain, smart contracts, and IoT devices, we can fu…
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 desi…
Today, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are the powerhouse of data generation with their ever-increasing numbers and widespread penetration. Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions are getting integrated to all kinds of services, making products significantly more "smarter". The centerpiece of these technologies is "data". IoT device vendors should be able keep up with the increased throughput and come up with new business models. On the other hand, AI/ML solutions will produce better results if training data is diverse and plentiful. In this paper, we propo…
Blockchain (BC), a by-product of Bitcoin cryptocurrency, has gained immense and wide scale popularity for its applicability in various diverse domains - especially in multifaceted non-monetary systems. By adopting cryptographic techniques such as hashing and asymmetric encryption - along with distributed consensus approach, a Blockchain based distributed ledger not only becomes highly secure but also immutable and thus eliminates the need for any third-party intermediators. On the contrary, innumerable IoT (Internet of Things) devices are increasingly being added to the network. This phenomeno…
Automated and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasing daily. As the number of IoT devices grows, the volume of data generated by them will also grow. Managing these rapidly expanding IoT devices and enormous data efficiently to be available to all authorized users without compromising its integrity will become essential in the near future. On the other side, many information security incidents have been recorded, increasing the requirement for countermeasures. While safeguards against hostile third parties have been commonplace until now, operators and parties have seen an i…
Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology that can guarantee data consistency and integrity among distributed participants. It has been used in many applications of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, since IoT applications often introduce a massive number of devices into blockchain systems, the efficiency of the blockchain becomes a serious problem. In this article, we analyze the key factors affecting the efficiency of blockchain. Unlike most existing solutions that handle this from the computing perspective, we consider the problem from the communication perspective. Particularly,…
In the Internet-of-Things, the number of connected devices is expected to be extremely huge, i.e., more than a couple of ten billion. It is however well-known that the security for the Internet-of-Things is still open problem. In particular, it is difficult to certify the identification of connected devices and to prevent the illegal spoofing. It is because the conventional security technologies have advanced for mainly protecting logical network and not for physical network like the Internet-of-Things. In order to protect the Internet-of-Things with advanced security technologies, we propose …
There continues to be a recent push to taking the cryptocurrency based ledger system known as Blockchain and applying its techniques to non-financial applications. One of the main areas for application remains Internet of Things (IoT) as we see many areas of improvement as we move into an age of smart cities. In this paper, we examine an initial look at applying the key aspects of Blockchain to a health application network where patients health data can be used to create alerts important to authenticated healthcare providers in a secure and private manner. This paper also presents the benefits…
The prevalence of Internet of Things (IoTs) allows heterogeneous embedded smart devices to collaboratively provide smart services with or without human intervention. While leveraging the large scale IoT based applications like Smart Gird or Smart Cities, IoTs also incur more concerns on privacy and security. Among the top security challenges that IoTs face, access authorization is critical in resource sharing and information protection. One of the weaknesses in today's access control (AC) is the centralized authorization server, which can be the performance bottleneck or the single point of fa…
Blockchain technology has drawn attention fromvarious communities. The underlying consensus mechanism inBlockchain enables a myriad of applications for the integrityassurance of stored data. In this paper, we utilize Blockchaintechnology to verify the authenticity of a video captured by astreaming IoT device for forensic investigation purposes. Theproposed approach computes the hash of video frames beforethey leave the IoT device and are transferred to a remote basestation. To guarantee the transmission, we ensure that this hashis sent through a TCP-based connection. The hash is then storedon …
The use of the term blockchain is documented for disparate projects, from cryptocurrencies to applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), and many more. The concept of blockchain appears therefore blurred, as it is hard to believe that the same technology can empower applications that have extremely different requirements and exhibit dissimilar performance and security. This position paper elaborates on the theory of distributed systems to advance a clear definition of blockchain that allows us to clarify its role in the IoT. This definition inextricably binds together three elements that, …
Blockchain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system, is starting to be adopted for ensuring enhanced security and privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Fervent research is currently being focused in both academia and industry in this domain. Proof of Work (PoW), a cryptographic puzzle, plays a vital role in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which are considered to be incorruptible. Furthermore, BC uses a changeable Public Key (PK) to record the identity of users, thus providing an extra layer of privacy. Not only in cryptocu…
The Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. In this paper, we propose to employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the clustered IoT data collection with blockchain-based security provisioning. In particular, the UAVs generate candidate blocks based on the collected data, which are then audited through a lightweight proof-of-stake consensus mechanism within the UAV-based blockchain network. To motivate efficient blockchain while reducing the operational cos…
The Mirai Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack exploited security vulnerabilities of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and thereby clearly signalled that attackers have IoT on their radar. Securing IoT is therefore imperative, but in order to do so it is crucial to understand the strategies of such attackers. For that purpose, in this paper, a novel IoT honeypot called ThingPot is proposed and deployed. Honeypot technology mimics devices that might be exploited by attackers and logs their behavior to detect and analyze the used attack vectors. ThingPot is the first of its kind, since it …
Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big evolutionary step in the world of internet. The main intention behind the IoT is to enable safer living and risk mitigation on different levels of life. With the advent of IoT botnets, the view towards IoT devices has changed from enabler of enhanced living into Internet of vulnerabilities for cyber criminals. IoT botnets has exposed two different glaring issues, 1) A large number of IoT devices are accessible over public Internet. 2) Security (if considered at all) is often an afterthought in the architecture of many wide spread IoT devices. In this ar…
Internet of Things (IoT) is realized by the idea of free flow of information amongst various low power embedded devices that use Internet to communicate with one another. It is predicted that the IoT will be widely deployed and it will find applicability in various domains of life. Demands of IoT have lately attracted huge attention and organizations are excited about the business value of the data that will be generated by the IoT paradigm. On the other hand, IoT have various security and privacy concerns for the end users that limit its proliferation. In this paper we have identified, catego…
Data is central to the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Most of the current IoT systems are using centralized cloud-based data sharing systems, which will be difficult to scale up to meet the demands of future IoT systems. Involvement of such third-party service provider requires also trust from both sensor owner and sensor data user. Moreover, the fees need to be paid for their services. To tackle both the scalability and trust issues and to automatize the payments, this paper presents a blockchain based proxy re-encryption scheme. The system stores the IoT data in a distributed cloud afte…
We are experiencing an unprecedented healthcare crisis caused by newly-discovered corona-virus disease (COVID-19). The outbreaks of COVID-19 reveal the frailties of existing healthcare systems. Therefore, the digital transformation of healthcare systems becomes an inevitable trend. During this process, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays a crucial role while intrinsic vulnerabilities of security and privacy deter the wide adoption of IoMT. In this article, we present a blockchain-enabled IoMT to address the security and privacy concerns of IoMT systems. We also discuss the solutions br…
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a new cellular technology introduced in 3GPP Release 13 for providing wide-area coverage for the Internet of Things (IoT). This article provides an overview of the air interface of NB-IoT. We describe how NB-IoT addresses key IoT requirements such as deployment flexibility, low device complexity, long battery life time, support of massive number of devices in a cell, and significant coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. We also share the various design rationales during the standardization of NB-IoT in Release 13 and point out sever…
Privacy-preserving Blockchain-enabled Parametric Insurance via Remote Sensing and IoT
School of Computing, Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学计算学院）；Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University（莫纳什大学信息技术学院）；Data61, CSIRO（CSIRO数据61）
University of Calcutta（加尔各答大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）
Standard security protocols like SSL, TLS, IPSec etc. have high memory and processor consumption which makes all these security protocols unsuitable for resource constrained platforms such as Internet of Things (IoT). Blockchain (BC) finds its efficient application in IoT platform to preserve the five basic cryptographic primitives, such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability and non-repudiation. Conventional adoption of BC in IoT platform causes high energy consumption, delay and computational overhead which are not appropriate for various resource constrained IoT devices. …
Mobile devices with embedded sensors for data collection and environmental sensing create a basis for a cost-effective approach for data trading. For example, these data can be related to pollution and gas emissions, which can be used to check the compliance with national and international regulations. The current approach for IoT data trading relies on a centralized third-party entity to negotiate between data consumers and data providers, which is inefficient and insecure on a large scale. In comparison, a decentralized approach based on distributed ledger technologies (DLT) enables data tra…
IoT devices have been adopted widely in the last decade which enabled collection of various data from different environments. The collected data is crucial in certain applications where IoT devices generate data for critical infrastructure or systems whose failure may result in catastrophic results. Specifically, for such critical applications, data storage poses challenges since the data may be compromised during the storage and the integrity might be violated without being noticed. In such cases, integrity and data provenance are required in order to be able to detect the source of any incid…
The continuous strengthening of the security posture of IoT ecosystems is vital due to the increasing number of interconnected devices and the volume of sensitive data shared. The utilisation of Machine Learning (ML) capabilities in the defence against IoT cyber attacks has many potential benefits. However, the currently proposed frameworks do not consider data privacy, secure architectures, and/or scalable deployments of IoT ecosystems. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical blockchain-based federated learning framework to enable secure and privacy-preserved collaborative IoT intrusion dete…
University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Over the years, the popularity and usage of wearable Internet of Things (IoT) devices in several healthcare services are increased. Among the services that benefit from the usage of such devices is predictive analysis, which can improve early diagnosis in e-health. However, due to the limitations of wearable IoT devices, challenges in data privacy, service integrity, and network structure adaptability arose. To address these concerns, we propose a platform using federated learning and private blockchain technology within a fog-IoT network. These technologies have privacy-preserving features se…
Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity has a prominent presence in the 5G wireless communication systems. As these systems are being deployed, there is a surge of research efforts and visions towards 6G wireless systems. In order to position the evolution of IoT within the 6G systems, this paper first takes a critical view on the way IoT connectivity is supported within 5G. Following that, the wireless IoT evolution is discussed through multiple dimensions: time, space, intelligence, and value. We also conjecture that the focus will broaden from IoT devices and their connections towards the eme…
Due to the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), a massive number of devices are connected to the Internet. For these distributed devices in IoT networks, how to ensure their security and privacy becomes a significant challenge. The blockchain technology provides a promising solution to protect the data integrity, provenance, privacy, and consistency for IoT networks. In blockchains, communication is a prerequisite for participants, which are distributed in the system, to reach consensus. However, in IoT networks, most of the devices communicate through wireless links, which are not a…
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are playing a major role in building security and trust in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, IoT deployments with a large number of devices, such as in environment monitoring applications, generate and send massive amounts of data. This would generate vast number of transactions that must be processed within the distributed ledger. In this work, we first demonstrate that the Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain fails to scale in a sizable IoT connectivity infrastructure. To solve this problem, we present a lightweight distributed ledger scheme to integ…
