The blockchain technology is taking the world by storm. Blockchain with its decentralized, transparent and secure nature has emerged as a disruptive technology for the next generation of numerous industrial applications. One of them is Cloud of Things enabled by the combination of cloud computing and Internet of Things. In this context, blockchain provides innovative solutions to address challenges in Cloud of Things in terms of decentralization, data privacy and network security, while Cloud of Things offer elasticity and scalability functionalities to improve the efficiency of blockchain operations. Therefore, a novel paradigm of blockchain and Cloud of Things integration, called BCoT, has been widely regarded as a promising enabler for a wide range of application scenarios. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art review on the BCoT integration to provide general readers with an overview of the BCoT in various aspects, including background knowledge, motivation, and integrated architecture. Particularly, we also provide an in-depth survey of BCoT applications in different use-case domains such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation and smart industry. Then, we review the recent BCoT developments with the emerging blockchain and cloud platforms, services, and research projects. Finally, some important research challenges and future directions are highlighted to spur further research in this promising area.
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has been characterised to be the next big thing and has already gained a broad recognition by experts in diverse fields. In this paper, we consider possible use cases and applications of the blockchain for the consumer electronics (CE) industry and its interplay with the Internet of things. Instead of discussing how the blockchain can revolutionise the supply chain, we focus on how it could be employed for enhancing the security of networked CE devices. This work is motivated by the large number of recent attacks that use easily hackable devices as a …
The integration of multi-access edge computing (MEC) and RAFT consensus makes it feasible to deploy blockchain on trustful base stations and gateways to provide efficient and tamper-proof edge data services for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, reducing the latency of storing data on blockchain remains a challenge, especially when an anomalytriggered data flow in a certain area exceeds the block generation speed. This letter proposes an intelligent transaction migration scheme for RAFT-based private blockchain in IoT applications to migrate transactions in busy areas to idle regi…
This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing blockchain protocols for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. We start by describing the blockchains and summarizing the existing surveys that deal with blockchain technologies. Then, we provide an overview of the application domains of blockchain technologies in IoT, e.g, Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Energy, Internet of Cloud, Fog computing, etc. Moreover, we provide a classification of threat models, which are considered by blockchain protocols in IoT networks, into five main categories, namely, identity-based attacks, manipul…
The Internet of Things is an essential component in the growth of an ecosystem that enables quick and precise judgments to be made for communication on the battleground. The usage of the battlefield of things (BoT) is, however, subject to several restrictions for a variety of reasons. There is a potential for instances of replay, data manipulation, breaches of privacy, and other similar occurrences. As a direct result of this, the implementation of a security mechanism to protect the communication that occurs within BoT has turned into an absolute requirement. To this aim, we propose a blockch…
This paper provides a comprehensive and high level technical overview of BC technology by creating a common language through business and technology about BC. Then an overview of a BC technology, its architectures, classification, challenges, etc. is presented. Finally, some recommendations are provided to re-searchers that will have to be tackled before deploying the next generation of IoT applications based on BC technology.
Stealth address prevents public association of a blockchain transaction's output with a recipient's wallet address and hides the actual destination address of a transaction. While stealth address provides an effective privacy-enhancing technology for a cryptocurrency network, it requires blockchain nodes to actively monitor all the transactions and compute the purported destination addresses, which restricts its application for resource-constrained environments like Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose DKSAP-IoT, a faster dual-key stealth address protocol for blockchain-based Io…
Recently, an infectious disease, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), has been reported in Wuhan, China, and subsequently spread worldwide within a couple of months. On May 16, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected several countries in the world. In this article, we present how the amalgamation of blockchain, cryptography, internet of medical things (IoMT), and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies can address such an issue in the event of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we propose a secure AI-based blockchain-assisted IoMT (SAI-BA-IoMT) model for the healthcare system in the COVID-19 c…
As more and more applications and services depend on data collected and provided by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is of importance that such data can be trusted. Data provenance solutions together with blockchain technology are one way to make data more trustworthy. However, current solutions do not address the heterogeneous nature of IoT applications and their data. In this work, we identify functional and non-functional requirements for a generic IoT data provenance framework, and conceptualise the framework as a layered architecture. Using a proof-of-concept implementation based on E…
One of the key challenges to the IoT's success is how to secure and anonymize billions of IoT transactions and devices per day, an issue that still lingers despite significant research efforts over the last few years. On the other hand, technologies based on blockchain algorithms are disrupting today's cryptocurrency markets and showing tremendous potential, since they provide a distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a single entity. Although the blockchain may present itself as a cure-all for the IoT's security and privacy challenges, significant research…
Despite technological advances, most smart objects in the Internet of Things (IoT) cannot be accessed using technologies designed and developed for interacting with powerful Internet servers. IoT use cases involve devices that not only have limited resources, but also they are not always connected to the Internet and are physically exposed to tampering. In this paper, we describe the design, development, and evaluation of a smart contract-based solution that allows end-users to securely interact with smart devices. Our approach enables access control, Thing authentication, and payments in a fu…
After being legalized as an agricultural commodity by the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, the Industrial Hemp production is moved from limited pilot programs to a regulated agriculture production system, and the market keeps increasing since then. However, Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) faces several critical challenges, including high complexity and variability, data tampering, and lack of immutable information tracking system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain enabled internet-of-things (IoT) platform for IHSC to support process tracking, scalability, interoperability, and risk management. Ba…
Blockchain has recently been able to draw wider attention throughout the research community. Since its emergence, the world has seen the mind-blowing expansion of this new technology, which was initially developed as a pawn of digital currency more than a decade back. A self-administering ledger that ensures extensive data immutability over the peer-to-peer network has made it attractive for cybersecurity applications such as a sensor-enabled system called the Internet of things (IoT). Brand new challenges and questions now demand solutions as huge IoT devices are now online in a distributed f…
Several IoT applications are tightly dependent on the locations of the devices. However, localization algorithms can be easily compromised by injecting false locations. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based secure localization algorithm for the Internet of Things (IoT). The algorithm uses a public ledger (Blockchain) that contains nodes position and the list of their neighbor nodes. This ledger is shared among the IoT devices. Once an IoT device is localized its new position and the list of neighbor nodes are added to the Blockchain. This shared localization data will be used later by o…
The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining process in blockchain requires miners to solve a proof-of-work puzzle, which requires high computational power. However, the lightweight IIoT devices cannot directly participate in the mining process due to the limitation of power and computational resources. The edge computing service makes it possible for IIoT applications to build a blockchain network, in…
An authorisation has been recognised as an important security measure for preventing unauthorised access to critical resources, such as devices and data, within the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Existing authorisation methods for the IoT network are based on traditional access control models, which have several drawbacks, including architecture centralisation, policy tampering, access rights validation, malicious third-party policy assignment and control, and network-related overheads. The increasing trend of integrating Blockchain technology with IoT networks demonstrates its importance …
As an important technology to ensure data security, consistency, traceability, etc., blockchain has been increasingly used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The integration of blockchain and edge computing can further improve the resource utilization in terms of network, computing, storage, and security. This paper aims to present a survey on the integration of blockchain and edge computing. In particular, we first give an overview of blockchain and edge computing. We then present a general architecture of an integration of blockchain and edge computing system. We next study how to uti…
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 …
In general, a botnet is a collection of compromised internet computers, controlled by attackers for malicious purposes. To increase attacks' success chance and resilience against defence mechanisms, modern botnets have often a decentralized P2P structure. Here, IoT devices are playing a critical role, becoming one of the major tools for malicious parties to perform attacks. Notable examples are DDoS attacks on Krebs on Security and DYN, which have been performed by IoT devices part of botnets. We take a first step towards detecting P2P botnets in IoT, by proposing AutoBotCatcher, whose design …
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…
Blockchain is gaining momentum as a promising technology for many application domains, one of them being the Edge-of- Things (EoT) that is enabled by the integration of edge computing and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Particularly, the amalgamation of blockchain and EoT leads to a new paradigm, called blockchain enabled EoT (BEoT) that is crucial for enabling future low-latency and high-security services and applications. This article envisions a novel BEoT architecture for supporting industrial applications under the management of blockchain at the network edge in a wide range of IoT use case…
Bilinear pairing is a fundamental operation that is widely used in cryptographic algorithms (e.g., identity-based cryptographic algorithms) to secure IoT applications. Nonetheless, the time complexity of bilinear pairing is $O(n^3)$, making it a very time-consuming operation, especially for resource-constrained IoT devices. Secure outsourcing of bilinear pairing has been studied in recent years to enable computationally weak devices to securely outsource the bilinear pairing to untrustworthy cloud servers. However, the state-of-art algorithms often require to pre-compute and store some values,…
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…
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy, energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle…
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, …
Differential private (DP) query and response mechanisms have been widely adopted in various applications based on Internet of Things (IoT) to leverage variety of benefits through data analysis. The protection of sensitive information is achieved through the addition of noise into the query response which hides the individual records in a dataset. However, the noise addition negatively impacts the accuracy which gives rise to privacy-utility trade-off. Moreover, the DP budget or cost $ε$ is often fixed and it accumulates due to the sequential composition which limits the number of queries. Ther…
We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the percep…
Blockchain is one of the emerging technologies with the potential to disrupt many application domains. Cloud is an on-demand service paradigm facilitating the availability of shared resources for data storage and computation. In recent years, the integration of blockchain and cloud has received significant attention for ensuring efficiency, transparency, security and even for offering better cloud services in the form of novel service models. In order to exploit the full potential of blockchain-cloud integration, it is essential to have a clear understanding on the existing works within this d…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing human life with the idea of interconnecting everyday used devices (Things) and making them smart. By establishing a communication network between devices, the IoT system aids in automating tasks and making them efficient and powerful. The sensors and the physical world, connected over a network, involve a massive amount of data. The data collection and sharing possess a critical threat of being stolen and manipulated over the network. These inadequate data security and privacy issues in IoT systems raise concerns about maintaining authentication …
In recent years, blockchain networks have attracted significant attention in many research areas beyond cryptocurrency, one of them being the Edge of Things (EoT) that is enabled by the combination of edge computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, blockchain networks enabled with unique features such as decentralization, immutability, and traceability, have the potential to reshape and transform the conventional EoT systems with higher security levels. Particularly, the convergence of blockchain and EoT leads to a new paradigm, called BEoT that has been regarded as a promisi…
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 was mainly introduced for secure transactions in connection with the mining of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. This article discusses the fundamental concepts of blockchain technology and its components, such as block header, transaction, smart contracts, etc. Blockchain uses the distributed databases, so this article also explains the advantages of distributed Blockchain over a centrally located database. Depending on the application, Blockchain is broadly categorized into two categories; Permissionless and Permissioned. This article elaborates on these two categories as well. Further, it …
In view of the security issues of the Internet of Things (IoT), considered better combining edge computing and blockchain with the IoT, integrating attribute-based encryption (ABE) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) models with attributes as the entry point, an attribute-based encryption and access control scheme (ABE-ACS) has been proposed. Facing Edge-Iot, which is a heterogeneous network composed of most resource-limited IoT devices and some nodes with higher computing power. For the problems of high resource consumption and difficult deployment of existing blockchain platforms, we d…
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of bl…
A large number of IoT devices are connected via the Internet. However, most of these IoT devices are generally not perfect-by-design even have security weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Thus, it is essential to update these IoT devices securely, patching their vulnerabilities and protecting the safety of the involved users. Existing studies deliver secure and reliable updates based on blockchain network which serves as the transmission network. However, these approaches could compromise users privacy when updating the IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain based privacy-preservin…
The world is becoming more interconnected every day. With the high technological evolution and the increasing deployment of it in our society, scenarios based on the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered a reality nowadays. However, and before some predictions become true (around 75 billion devices are expected to be interconnected in the next few years), many efforts must be carried out in terms of scalability and security. In this study we propose and evaluate a new approach based on the incorporation of Blockchain into current IoT scenarios. The main contributions of this study are as …
In recent years blockchain technology has received tremendous attention. Blockchain users are known by a changeable Public Key (PK) that introduces a level of anonymity, however, studies have shown that anonymized transactions can be linked to deanonymize the users. Most of the existing studies on user de-anonymization focus on monetary applications, however, blockchain has received extensive attention in non-monetary applications like IoT. In this paper we study the impact of de-anonymization on IoT-based blockchain. We populate a blockchain with data of smart home devices and then apply mach…
The world has been experiencing a mind-blowing expansion of blockchain technology since it was first introduced as an emerging means of cryptocurrency called bitcoin. Currently, it has been regarded as a pervasive frame of reference across almost all research domains, ranging from virtual cash to agriculture or even supply-chain to the Internet of Things. The ability to have a self-administering register with legitimate immutability makes blockchain appealing for the Internet of Things (IoT). As billions of IoT devices are now online in distributed fashion, the huge challenges and questions re…
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers an infrastructure made of smart medical equipment and software applications for health services. Through the internet, the IoMT is capable of providing remote medical diagnosis and timely health services. The patients can use their smart devices to create, store and share their electronic health records (EHR) with a variety of medical personnel including medical doctors and nurses. However, unless the underlying combination within IoMT is secured, malicious users can intercept, modify and even delete the sensitive EHR data of patients. Patients also…
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…
Blockchain, the backbone of Bitcoin, has recently gained a lot of attention. Blockchain functions as an immutable record that enables decentralized transactions. Blockchain-based applications are sprouting up in a variety of industries, including financial services, reputation systems, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others. However, many hurdles of blockchain technology, including scalability and security issues, have to be overcome. Many industries, including finance, medicine, manufacturing, and education, use blockchain applications to capitalize on this technology's unique set of …
The exponential growth of wireless-based solutions, such as those related to the mobile smart devices (e.g., smart-phones and tablets) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, has lead to countless advantages in every area of our society. Such a scenario has transformed the world a few decades back, dominated by latency, into a new world based on an efficient real-time interaction paradigm.Recently, cryptocurrency have contributed to this technological revolution, the fulcrum of which are a decentralization model and a certification function offered by the so-called blockchain infrastructure, whi…
The Internet of Things IoT is experiencing exponential growth in research and industry, but it still suffers from privacy and security vulnerabilities. Conventional security and privacy approaches tend to be inapplicable for IoT, mainly due to its decentralized topology and the resource-constraints of the majority of its devices. BlockChain BC that underpin the crypto-currency Bitcoin have been recently used to provide security and privacy in peer-to-peer networks with similar topologies to IoT. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which ar…
We leverage blockchain technology for drone node authentication in internet of drone things (IoDT). During the authentication procedure, the credentials of drone nodes are examined to remove malicious nodes from the system. In IoDT, drones are responsible for gathering data and transmitting it to cluster heads (CHs) for further processing. The CH collects and organizes data. Due to computational load, their energy levels rapidly deplete. To overcome this problem, we present a low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (R2D) protocol based on distance, degree, and residual energy. R2D is used to …
We document an ongoing research process towards the implementation and integration of a digital artefact, executing the lifecycle of a leveraged trade with permissionless blockchain technology. By employing core functions of the 'Dai Stablecoin system' deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, we produce the equivalent exposure of a leveraged position while deterministically automating the monitoring and liquidation processes. We demonstrate the implementation and early integration of the artefact into a hardened exchange environment through a microservice utilizing standardized API calls. The earl…
College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东）计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology（Thapar工程技术学院计算机科学与工程系）；King Abdul Aziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；School of Computing, Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学计算学院）；Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学江苏省无线通信重点实验室）
With the advent of the Internet of things (IoT) era, more and more devices are connected to the IoT. Under the traditional cloud-thing centralized management mode, the transmission of massive data is facing many difficulties, and the reliability of data is difficult to be guaranteed. As emerging technologies, blockchain technology and edge computing (EC) technology have attracted the attention of academia in improving the reliability, privacy and invariability of IoT technology. In this paper, we combine the characteristics of the EC and blockchain to ensure the reliability of data transmissio…
Networks are composed of logical nodes and edges for communications. The atomistic component of things connected to the network is a memory chip. Accordingly, the unique linkage of a memory chip and a logical node can be promising to resolve the root-of-trust problem on the Internet-of-Things. For this aim, we propose a protocol of challenge-response using a memory chip. For the central management, a central node controls the entry of electronic appliances with a memory chip into the network, and excludes a fake node (e.g., the spoofing entity) from the network that the central node manages. F…
