In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time distributed networks popularly known as the Internet of Things (IoT), fog computing and edge computing. The blockchain is gaining a lot of interest in these domains to secure the system by ignoring centralized dependencies, where proof-of-work (PoW) plays a vital role to make the whole security solution decentralized. Due to the resource limitations of the devices, PoW is not suitable for blockchain-based security solutions. This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm called Proof-of-Authentication (PoAh), which introduces a cryptographic authentication mechanism to replace PoW for resource constrained devices, and to make the blockchain application-specific. PoAh is thus suitable for private as well as permissioned blockchains. Further, PoAh not only secures the systems, but also maintains system sustainability and scalability. The proposed consensus algorithm is evaluated theoretically in simulation scenarios, and in real-time hardware testbeds to validate its performance. Finally, PoAh and its integration with the blockchain in the IoT and edge computing scenarios is discussed. The proposed PoAh, while running in limited computer resources (e.g. single-board computing devices like the Raspberry Pi) has a latency in the order of 3 secs.
This article presents the first-ever blockchain which can simultaneously handle device and data security, which is important for the emerging Internet-of-Everything (IoE). This article presents a unique concept of blockchain that integrates hardware security primitives called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to solve scalability, latency, and energy requirement challenges and is called PUFchain. Data management and security (and privacy) of data, devices, and individuals, are some of the issues in the IoE architectures that need to be resolved. Integrating the blockchain into the IoE envir…
Blockchain technology has gained increasing popularity in the research of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the past decade. As a distributed and immutable ledger secured by strong cryptography algorithms, the blockchain brings a new perspective to secure IoT systems. Many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy. In comparison, the blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is much less studied. Nonetheless, we see the potential of blockchain in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. This pap…
The pervasiveness of the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled the administration of a large number of intelligent devices. However, IoT is based on centralised models, which introduce a number of problems, such as a single point of failure and security risks. Blockchain may offer a viable option for addressing these concerns. Practically, both blockchain and IoT are complex technologies posing further challenges in assessing application performance. The availability of a reliable simulation environment for Blockchain based IoT applications would be a major aid in the development and evaluation…
With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks, smart devices, and traditional information and communication technologies, there is tremendous growth in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services in our everyday life. IoT systems deal with high volumes of data. This data can be particularly sensitive, as it may include health, financial, location, and other highly personal information. Fine-grained security management in IoT demands effective access control. Several proposals discuss access control for the IoT, however, a limited focus is given to the emerging blockc…
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…
Blockchain is a promising technology for establishing trust in IoT networks, where network nodes do not necessarily trust each other. Cryptographic hash links and distributed consensus mechanisms ensure that the data stored on an immutable blockchain can not be altered or deleted. However, blockchain mechanisms do not guarantee the trustworthiness of data at the origin. We propose a layered architecture for improving the end-to-end trust that can be applied to a diverse range of blockchain-based IoT applications. Our architecture evaluates the trustworthiness of sensor observations at the data…
The Internet of Things (IoT) bears unprecedented security and scalability challenges due to the magnitude of data produced and exchanged by IoT devices and platforms. Some of those challenges are currently being addressed by coupling IoT applications with blockchains. However, current blockchain-backed IoT systems simply use the blockchain to store access control policies, thereby underutilizing the power of blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a new framework named Sash that couples IoT platforms with blockchain that provides a number of advantages compared to state of the art. In…
The data collected from Internet of Things (IoT) devices on various emissions or pollution, can have a significant economic value for the stakeholders. This makes it prone to abuse or tampering and brings forward the need to integrate IoT with a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to collect, store, and protect the IoT data. However, DLT brings an additional overhead to the frugal IoT connectivity and symmetrizes the IoT traffic, thus changing the usual assumption that IoT is uplink-oriented. We have implemented a platform that integrates DLTs with a monitoring system based on narrowband IoT (…
Blockchains are appealing technologies with various applications ranging from banking to networking. IOTA blockchain is one of the most prominent blockchain specifically designed for IoT environments. In this paper we investigate the convergence of IOTA consensus algorithms: Fast Probabilistic Consensus and Cellular Consensus, when run on top of various topologies. Furthermore, we investigate their resilience to various types of adversaries. Our extensive simulations show that both Cellular Consensus and Fast Probabilistic Consensus have poor convergence rates even under low power adversaries …
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 …
IoT provides services by connecting smart devices to the Internet, and exploiting data generated by said devices to enable value-added services to individuals and businesses. In such cases, if data is exposed, tampered or lost, the service would not behave correctly. In this article, we discuss data security in IoT applications across five dimensions: confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, non-repudiation and availability. We discuss how distributed ledger technology could be used to overcome these issues and propose to use a fog computing architecture as decentralized computational support…
In this era of explosive growth in technology, the internet of things (IoT) has become the game changer when we consider technologies like smart homes and cities, smart energy, security and surveillance, and healthcare. The numerous benefits provided by IoT have become attractive technologies for users and cybercriminals. Cybercriminals of today have the tools and the technology to deploy millions of sophisticated attacks. These attacks need to be investigated; this is where digital forensics comes into play. However, it is not easy to conduct a forensic investigation in IoT systems because of…
Blockchain technology has been transforming the financial industry and has created a new crypto-economy in the last decade. The foundational concepts such as decentralized trust and distributed ledger are promising for distributed, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the applications of Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies in this domain are few and far between because of the lack of understanding and inherent architectural challenges. In this paper, we describe the opportunities for applications of blockchain for the IoT and examine the challenges involved in archite…
The advent of Bitcoin, and consequently Blockchain, has ushered in a new era of decentralization. Blockchain enables mutually distrusting entities to work collaboratively to attain a common objective. However, current Blockchain technologies lack scalability, which limits their use in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Many devices on the Internet have the computational and communication capabilities to facilitate decision-making. These devices will soon be a 50 billion node network. Furthermore, new IoT business models such as Sensor-as-a-Service (SaaS) require a robust Trust and Reputati…
Blockchain technology provides a private, secure, transparent decentralized exchange of data. Also, blockchain is not limited to a particular area, but it has a wide range of applications and can be integrated into a variety of Internet interactive systems. For example, the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain tracking, Electronic Health Records (EHR), digital forensics, identity management, trustless payments, and other key business elements will all benefit from its implementation. Next layer solutions such as Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Cardano, and other Web 3.0 technologies provide develope…
The fast developing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies provide a promising opportunity to build large-scale systems to connect numerous heterogeneous devices into the Internet. Most existing IIoT infrastructures are based on a centralized architecture, which is easier for management but cannot effectively support immutable and verifiable services among multiple parties. Blockchain technology provides many desired features for large-scale IIoT infrastructures, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, trackability, and immutability. This paper presents a blockchain-based IIoT ar…
We investigate the tamper-resistant property of Blockchain and its effectiveness for IoT systems. In particular, we implemented an IoT testbed, and built a Blockchain into the testbed. A number of tamper-resistance experiments were conducted and analyzed to corroborate the process of block validation in Blockchain. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate the tamper-resistant capability of Blockchain in securing trust in IoT systems. The demonstration video is provided at [1].
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…
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 …
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 …
Prior to provisioning sensor data to smart contracts, a pre-processing of the data on intermediate off-chain nodes is often necessary. When doing so, originally constructed cryptographic signatures cannot be verified on-chain anymore. This exposes an opportunity for undetected manipulation and presents a problem for applications in the Internet of Things where trustworthy sensor data is required on-chain. In this paper, we propose trustworthy pre-processing as enabler for end-to-end sensor data integrity in data on-chaining workflows. We define requirements for trustworthy pre-processing, pres…
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…
This paper proposes an architecture and a protocol suite for a permissioned blockchain for a local IoT network. The architecture is based on a sealed Sequencer and a Fog Server running (post-quantum) Guy Fawkes protocols. The blocks of the blockchain are stored in networked Content Addressable Storage alongside any user data and validity proofs. We maintain that a typical IoT device can, despite its resource limitations, use our blockchain protocols directly, without a trusted intermediary. This includes posting and monitoring transactions as well as off-chain (post-quantum) emergency communic…
Nowadays, open standards for self-sovereign identity and access management enable portable solutions that are following the requirements of IoT systems. This paper proposes a blockchain-based identity and access management system for IoT -- specifically smart vehicles -- as an example of use-case, showing two interoperable blockchains, Ethereum and Hyperledger Indy, and a self-sovereign identity model.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a guiding technology behind automation and smart computing. One of the major concerns with the IoT systems is the lack of privacy and security preserving schemes for controlling access and ensuring the security of the data. A majority of security issues arise because of the centralized architecture of IoT systems. Another concern is the lack of proper authentication and access control schemes to moderate access to information generated by the IoT devices. So the question that arises is how to ensure the identity of the equipment or the communicating node…
The Internet of Things (IoT) has already changed our daily lives by integrating smart devices together towards delivering high quality services to its clients. These devices when integrated together form a network through which massive amount of data can be produced, transferred, and shared. A critical concern is the security and integrity of such a complex platform to ensure the sustainability and reliability of these IoT-based systems. Blockchain is an emerging technology that has demonstrated its unique features and capabilities for different problems and application domains including IoT-b…
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…
Security is one of the fundamental challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) due to the heterogeneity and resource constraints of the IoT devices. Device classification methods are employed to enhance the security of IoT by detecting unregistered devices or traffic patterns. In recent years, blockchain has received tremendous attention as a distributed trustless platform to enhance the security of IoT. Conventional device identification methods are not directly applicable in blockchain-based IoT as network layer packets are not stored in the blockchain. Moreover, the transactions are broadcas…
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have received significant interest in various areas beyond the financial sector, with profound applications in the Internet of Things (IoT), providing the means for creating truly trustless and secure solutions for IoT applications. Taking into account the weak security defences that the majority of IoT devices have, it is critical that a blockchain-based solution targeting the IoT is not only capable of addressing the many challenges IoT is facing, but also does not introduce other defects, in terms of performance, making its adoption hard to ach…
In the next-generation computing, the role of cloud, internet, and smart devices will be capacious. Nowadays we all are familiar with the word smart. This word is used a number of times in our daily life. The Internet of Things (IoT) will produce remarkable different kinds of information from different resources. It can store and process big data in the cloud. The fogging acts as an interface between cloud and IoT. The IoT nodes are also known as fog nodes, these nodes are able to access anywhere within the range of the network. The blockchain is a novel approach to record the transactions in …
The blockchain has found numerous applications in many areas with the expectation to significantly enhance their security. The Internet of things (IoT) constitutes a prominent application domain of blockchain, with a number of architectures having been proposed for improving not only security but also properties like transparency and auditability. However, many blockchain solutions suffer from inherent constraints associated with the consensus protocol used. These constraints are mostly inherited by the permissionless setting, e.g. computational power in proof-of-work, and become serious obsta…
Blockchains and smart contracts are an emerging, promising technology, that has received considerable attention. We use the blockchain technology, and in particular Ethereum, to implement a large-scale event-based Internet of Things (IoT) control system. We argue that the distributed nature of the "ledger," as well as, Ethereum's capability of parallel execution of replicated "smart contracts", provide the sought after automation, generality, flexibility, resilience, and high availability. We design a realistic blockchain-based IoT architecture, using existing technologies while by taking into…
Blockchain has come to provide transparency, reliability as well as to increase the security in computer systems, especially in distributed ones like the Internet of Things (IoT). A few integrations have been proposed in this context so far; however, most of these solutions do not pay special attention to the interoperability of the IoT, one of the biggest challenges in this field. In this paper, a Blockchain solution has been integrated into the OMA Lightweight M2M (LwM2M), a promising industry IoT protocol for global interoperability. This integration provides reliability and auditability to…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Ben-Gurion University（本-古里安大学）
Due to their rapid growth and deployment, the Internet of things (IoT) have become a central aspect of our daily lives. Unfortunately, IoT devices tend to have many vulnerabilities which can be exploited by an attacker. Unsupervised techniques, such as anomaly detection, can be used to secure these devices in a plug-and-protect manner. However, anomaly detection models must be trained for a long time in order to capture all benign behaviors. Furthermore, the anomaly detection model is vulnerable to adversarial attacks since, during the training phase, all observations are assumed to be benign.…
The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks emerge as a areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utili…
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…
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…
In this work, we leverage advances in decentralized identifiers and permissioned blockchains to build a flexible user authentication and authorization mechanism that offers enhanced privacy, achieves fast revocation, and supports distributed "policy decision points" executed in mutually untrusted entities. The proposed solution can be applied in multi-tenant "IoT hubs" that interconnect diverse IoT silos and enable authorization of "guest" users, i.e., opportunistic users that have no trust relationship with the system, which has not encountered or known them before.
With the recent advances of IoT (Internet of Things) new and more robust security frameworks are needed to detect and mitigate new forms of cyber-attacks, which exploit complex and heterogeneity IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. With the rise of blockchain technologies service providers pay considerable attention to better understand and adopt blockchain technologies in order to have better secure and trusted systems for own organisations and their customers. The present paper introduces a high level guide for the senior officials and decision make…
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…
The advancement in cloud networks has enabled connectivity of both traditional networked elements and new devices from all walks of life, thereby forming the Internet of Things (IoT). In an IoT setting, improving and scaling network components as well as reducing cost is essential to sustain exponential growth. In this domain, software-defined networking (SDN) is revolutionizing the network infrastructure with a new paradigm. SDN splits the control/routing logic from the data transfer/forwarding. This splitting causes many issues in SDN, such as vulnerabilities of DDoS attacks. Many solutions …
The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing explosive growth and has gained extensive attention from academia and industry in recent years. Most of the existing IoT infrastructures are centralized, in which the presence of a cloud server is mandatory. However, centralized frameworks suffer from the issues of unscalability and single-point-of-failure. Consequently, decentralized IoT has been proposed by taking advantage of the emerging technology of Blockchain. Voting systems are widely adopted in IoT, such as a leader election in wireless sensor networks. Self-tallying voting systems are alte…
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…
Today, the number of IoT devices in all aspects of life is exponentially increasing. The cities we are living in are getting smarter and informing us about our surroundings in a contextual manner. However, there lay significant challenges of deploying, managing and collecting data from these devices, in addition to the problem of storing and mining that data for higher-quality IoT services. Blockchain technology, even in today's nascent form, contains the pillars to create a common, distributed, trustless and autonomous infrastructure system. This paper describes a standardized IoT infrastruct…
With the rapid development of the Internet of things (IoT), more and more IoT devices are connected and communicate frequently. In this background, the traditional centralized security architecture of IoT will be limited in terms of data storage space, data reliability, scalability, operating costs and liability judgment. In this paper, we propose an new key information storage framework based on a small distributed database generated by blockchain technology and cloud storage. Specifically, all encrypted key communication data will be upload to public could server for enough storage, but the …
Blockchain has proven a very developed and secured technology. It ensures data integrity with authentic connected nodes. Now-a-days, blockchain with IoT is a great combination for secured and smart end to end product delivery. This observation has motivated the research to develop a conceptual model to provide a secure pharmaceutical product delivery by developing a IoT integrated with lightweight blockchain. The undeveloped and most of the developing countries are facing problems such as drug counterfeits, shortages, opiates and tracking them became difficult because of less transparency. Als…
