Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as wireless sensors need to be certain of the authenticity of the server. As contemporary blockchain techniques that address post-quantum concerns have not been designed, in this study, we investigate a blockchain in the post-quantum setting and seek to discover how it can resist attacks from quantum computing. In addition, traditional proof of work (PoW)-based consensus protocols such as Bitcoin cannot supply memory mining, and the transaction capacity of each block in a blockchain is limited and needs to be expanded. Thus, a new post-quantum proof of work (post-quantum PoW) consensus algorithm for security and privacy of smart city applications is proposed. It can be used to not only protect a blockchain under a quantum computing attack compared to existing classical hash-based PoW algorithms but also to supply memory mining. Meanwhile, an identity-based post-quantum signature is embedded into a transaction process to construct lightweight transactions. Subsequently, we provide a detailed description on the execution of the post-quantum lightweight transaction in a blockchain. Overall, this work can help enrich the research on future post-quantum blockchain and support the construction or architecture of emerging blockchain-based smart cities.
Cybersecurity is an inherent characteristic that should be addressed before the large deployment of smart city applications. Recently, Blockchain appears as a promising technology to provide several cybersecurity aspects of smart city applications. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing blockchain-based solutions for the cybersecurity of the main smart city applications, namely smart healthcare, smart transportation, smart agriculture, supply chain management, smart grid, and smart homes. We describe the existing solutions and we discuss their merits and limits. Moreover, w…
Blockchain is one of the most popular topics for discussion now. However, most experts still see this technology as only part of Bitcoin, other crypto-currencies or money transfer systems. Often, new solutions, proposed by young researchers, are blocked by reviewers, only because these solutions can not be used for Bitcoins. However, Blockchain technology is more universal and can be used also in other areas, for example, in IoT, WSN and mobile devices. This paper considers the implementation of Blockchain technology in sensor networks as an element of IoT. The concept of "Rolling Blockchain" …
Cross-Blockchain communication has gained traction due to the increasing fragmentation of blockchain networks and scalability solutions such as side-chaining and sharding. With SmartSync, we propose a novel concept for cross-blockchain smart contract interactions that creates client contracts on arbitrary blockchain networks supporting the same execution environment. Client contracts mirror the logic and state of the original instance and enable seamless on-chain function executions providing recent states. Synchronized contracts supply instant read-only function calls to other applications ho…
Blockchain-based smart contract has become a growing field in the blockchain technology. What was once a technology used to solve digital transaction issues turns out to have some wider usage, including smart contract. The development of smart contract can be traced from the numerous platforms facilitating it, however the issue on how well each platform works as oppose to each other has yet been fully explored. The usage of smart contract can be seen from the applications that are built on top of the smart contract platform, such as the tokenization of real world to virtual world assets. Howev…
The emerging blockchain technology supports decentralized computing paradigm shift and is a rapidly approaching phenomenon. While blockchain is thought primarily as the basis of Bitcoin, its application has grown far beyond cryptocurrencies due to the introduction of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-enforcing pieces of software, which reside and run over a hosting blockchain. Using blockchain-based smart contracts for secure and transparent management to govern interactions (authentication, connection, and transaction) in Internet-enabled environments, mostly IoT, is a niche area of r…
Currently, blockchain proposals are being adopted to solve security issues, such as data integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation. To improve certain aspects, e.g., energy consumption and latency, of traditional blockchains, different architectures, algorithms, and data management methods have been recently proposed. For example, appendable-block blockchain uses a different data structure designed to reduce latency in block and transaction insertion. It is especially applicable in domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), where both latency and energy are key concerns. However, the lack of s…
This research critically analyses blockchain scaling solutions based on their ability to realistically balance the properties of the blockchain trilemma. We have concluded this research by outlining a gap in the current body of literature and implementation of scalability solutions. An extended UTXO transaction model is proposed to overcome challenges associated with implementing both layer one and layer two scaling solutions in a blockchain system. The examination of industry approaches is used to justify this direction and puts forth a basis for future work.
There is an ongoing competition among blockchain technologies and the existence of one ultimate blockchain is impossible for many reasons. On the other hand, such variety can create difficulties in adoption, especially for the governments and corporations. The proposed technology ensures a blockchain agnostic approach and aimed to create a unified ecosystem of multiple networks. The cross-blockchain protocol can be used to develop services where end-users decide for themselves their most preferred blockchain. The invention solves problems of duplication of tokens in the result of hardforks, is…
An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results …
This chapter contributes to evolving the versatility and complexity of blockchain-enabled services through extending the functionality of blockchain-enforced smart contracts. The contributions include: (i) a method for automated management of contracts with hierarchical conditionality structures through an hierarchy of intelligent agents and the use of hierarchical cryptographic key-pairs; (ii) a method for efficient and secure matching and transfer of smart- contract underlyings (entities) among disparate smart contracts/subcontracts; (iii) a method for producing an hierarchy of common secret…
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive the environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records. In this work, we leverage blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and…
Raziel combines secure multi-party computation and proof-carrying code to provide privacy, correctness and verifiability guarantees for smart contracts on blockchains. Effectively solving DAO and Gyges attacks, this paper describes an implementation and presents examples to demonstrate its practical viability (e.g., private and verifiable crowdfundings and investment funds). Additionally, we show how to use Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Proofs (i.e., Proof-Carrying Code certificates) to prove the validity of smart contracts to third parties before their execution without revealing anything else. Fi…
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…
In this paper, we discuss the integration of blockchain in smart energy systems. We present various blockchain technology solutions, review important blockchain platforms, and several blockchain based smart energy projects in different smart energy domains. The majority of blockchain platforms with embedded combination of blockchain technology solutions are computing- and resource- intensive, and hence not entirely suitable for smart energy applications. We consider the requirements of smart energy systems and accordingly identify appropriate blockchain technology solutions for smart energy ap…
The proliferation of sensor technologies in Industrial Control Systems (ICS) helped to transform the environment towards better automation, process control and monitoring. However, sensor technologies expose the smart cities of the future to complex security challenges. Luckily, the sensing capabilities also create opportunities to capture various data types, which apart from operational use can add substantial value to developing mechanisms to protect ICS and critical infrastructure. We discuss Blockchain (BC), a disruptive technology with applications ranging from cryptocurrency to smart con…
Traditional smart grid energy auctions cannot directly be integrated in blockchain due to its decentralized nature. Therefore, research works are being carried out to propose efficient decentralized auctions for energy trading. Since, blockchain is a novel paradigm which ensures trust, but it also comes up with a curse of high computation and communication complexity which eventually causes resource scarcity. Therefore, there is a need to develop and encourage development of greener and computational-friendly auctions to carry out decentralized energy trading. In this paper, we first provide a…
The main problem faced by smart contract platforms is the amount of time and computational power required to reach consensus. In a classical blockchain model, each operation is in fact performed by each node, both to update the status and to validate the results of the calculations performed by others. In this short survey we sketch some state-of-the-art approaches to obtain an efficient and scalable computation of smart contracts. Particular emphasis is given to sharding, a promising method that allows parallelization and therefore a more efficient management of the computational resources of…
A city is a large human settlement that serves the people who live there, and a smart city is a concept of how cities might better serve their residents through new forms of technology. In this paper, we focus on four major smart city domains according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs: smart utility, smart transportation, smart homes, and smart healthcare. Numerous IoT applications have been developed to achieve the intelligence that we desire in our smart domains, ranging from personal gadgets such as health trackers and smart watches to large-scale industrial IoT systems such as nuclear and en…
Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of blockchains, however, they are impeded by blockchains' lack of confidentiality and poor performance. We present Ekiden, a system that addresses these critical gaps by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Ekiden leverages a novel architecture that separates consensus from execution, enabling efficient TEE-backed con…
A smart grid is an important application in Industry 4.0 with a lot of new technologies and equipment working together. Hence, sensitive data stored in the smart grid is vulnerable to malicious modification and theft. This paper proposes a framework to build a smart grid based on a highly effective private Ethereum network. Our framework provides a real smart grid that includes modern hardware and a smart contract to secure data in the blockchain network. To obtain high throughput but a low uncle rate, the difficulty calculation method used in the mining process of the Ethereum consensus mecha…
In recent years, manifold blockchain protocols have been proposed by researchers and industrial companies alike. This has led to a very heterogeneous blockchain landscape. Accordingly, it would be desirable if blockchains could interact with each other. However, current blockchain technologies offer only limited support for interoperability, thus preventing tokens or smart contracts from leaving the scope of a particular blockchain. As a first step towards a solution for cross-chain smart contract interactions, we introduce a framework which allows to invoke a smart contract from another block…
Searching for available parking spaces is a major problem for drivers especially in big crowded cities, causing traffic congestion and air pollution, and wasting drivers' time. Smart parking systems are a novel solution to enable drivers to have real-time parking information for pre-booking. However, current smart parking requires drivers to disclose their private information, such as desired destinations. Moreover, the existing schemes are centralized and vulnerable to the bottleneck of the single point of failure and data breaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed privacy-preserving s…
Technological advances have enabled multiple countries to consider implementing Smart City Infrastructure to provide in-depth insights into different data points and enhance the lives of citizens. Unfortunately, these new technological implementations also entice adversaries and cybercriminals to execute cyber-attacks and commit criminal acts on these modern infrastructures. Given the borderless nature of cyber attacks, varying levels of understanding of smart city infrastructure and ongoing investigation workloads, law enforcement agencies and investigators would be hard-pressed to respond to…
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…
The traditional oil supply chain suffers from various shortcomings regarding crude oil extraction, processing, distribution, environmental pollution, and traceability. It offers an only a forward flow of products with almost no security and tracking process. In time, the system will lag behind due to the limitations in quality inspection, fraudulent information, and monopolistic behavior of supply chain entities. Inclusion of counterfeiting products and opaqueness of the system urge renovation in this sector. The recent evolution of Industry 4.0 leads to the alternation in the supply chain int…
The proposed smart contract can prevent seven cyber attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in the Middle Attack (MITM), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), 51\%, Injection attacks, Routing Attack, and Eclipse attack. The Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm used in this model reduces the number of validators for each transaction which makes it suitable for lightweight applications. The timing complexity of key/certificate validation and signature/certificate revocation processes do not depend on the number of transactions. The comparisons of various timing parameters wi…
Increased collaborative production and dynamic selection of production partners within industry 4.0 manufacturing leads to ever-increasing automatic data exchange between companies. Automatic and unsupervised data exchange creates new attack vectors, which could be used by a malicious insider to leak secrets via an otherwise considered secure channel without anyone noticing. In this paper we reflect upon approaches to prevent the exposure of secret data via blockchain technology, while also providing auditable proof of data exchange. We show that previous blockchain based privacy protection ap…
We reveal six zero-day social engineering attacks in Ethereum, and subdivide them into two classes: Address Manipulation and Homograph. We demonstrate the attacks by embedding them in source codes of five popular smart contracts with combined market capitalization of over \$29 billion, and show that the attacks have the ability to remain dormant during the testing phase and activate only after production deployment. We analyze 85,656 open source smart contracts and find 1,027 contracts that can be directly used for performing social engineering attacks. For responsible disclosure, we contact s…
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the blockchain technology, and many blockchain-based applications have been developed to take advantage of its decentralization, transparency, fault tolerance, and strong security. In the field of smart grids, a plethora of proposals have emerged to utilize blockchain for augmenting intelligent energy management, energy trading, security and privacy protection, microgrid management, and energy vehicles. Compared with traditional centralized approaches, blockchain-based solutions are able to exploit the advantages of blockchain to realize be…
Intelligence is one of the most important aspects in the development of our future communities. Ranging from smart home, smart building, to smart city, all these smart infrastructures must be supported by intelligent power supply. Smart grid is proposed to solve all challenges of future electricity supply. In smart grid, in order to realize optimal scheduling, a Smart Meter (SM) is installed at each home to collect the near real-time electricity consumption data, which can be used by the utilities to offer better smart home services. However, the near real-time data may disclose user's privacy…
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…
Blockchain is a core technology to manage the value of cryptocurrencies, or to record trails of important business trades. The Smart Contract on blockchain is expected to improve security on blockchain system with automated operation, but it cannot be the solution when the application service required to operate tightly related blockchain ledgers as service business logic. This paper proposed the method to extend the functionality of traditional Smart Contract on blockchain, and introduced the prototype system, named 'ConnectionChain'.
In this article we present hygiea, an end-to-end blockchain-based solution for the Covid-19 pandemic. hygiea has two main objectives. The first is to allow governments to issue Covid-19 related certificates to citizens that can be verified by designated verifiers to ensure safer workplaces. The second is to provide the necessary tools to experts and decision makers to better understand the impact of the pandemic through statistical models built on top of the data collected by the platform. This work covers all steps of the certificate issuance, verification and revocation cycles with well-defi…
Blockchain technology is a crypto-based secure ledger for data storage and transfer through decentralized, trustless peer-to-peer systems. Despite its advantages, previous studies have shown that the technology is not completely secure against cyber attacks. Thus, it is crucial to perform domain specific risk analysis to measure how viable the attacks are on the system, their impact and consequently the risk exposure. Specifically, in this paper, we carry out an analysis in terms of quantifying the risk associated to an operational multi-layered Blockchain framework for Smart Mobility Data-mar…
In the given technology-driven era, smart cities are the next frontier of technology, aiming at improving the quality of people's lives. Many research works focus on future smart cities with a holistic approach towards smart city development. In this paper, we introduce such future smart cities that leverage blockchain technology in areas like data security, energy and waste management, governance, transport, supply chain, including emergency events, and environmental monitoring. Blockchain, being a decentralized immutable ledger, has the potential to promote the development of smart cities by…
Smart Grid, an intelligent connected grid consisting of millions of smart devices, used to collect data from the grid to improve the efficiency of its operation. These smart devices communicating wirelessly are susceptible to attacks and hence the security and privacy of the smart devices along with the smart grid is a major challenge. Blockchain-based systems provide improved security and privacy and hence gained a lot of attention in the recent past. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture for Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) and Home Area networks (HANs) in Smart Grid. The pape…
Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are current hot topics in research and practice. However, the potentials of their combination have been studied just recently to a larger extend. While different use cases for combining AI and blockchain have been discussed, the idea of enabling blockchain-based smart contracts to perform "smarter" decisions by using AI or machine learning (ML) models has only been considered on the conceptual level so far. It remained open, how such AI-enabled smart contracts could be implemented in a robust way for real-world applications. Therefore, in …
A smart contract is a digital program of transaction protocol (rules of contract) based on the consensus architecture of blockchain. Smart contracts with Blockchain are modern technologies that have gained enormous attention in scientific and practical applications. A smart contract is the central aspect of a blockchain that facilitates blockchain as a platform outside the cryptocurrency spectrum. The development of blockchain technology, with a focus on smart contracts, has advanced significantly in recent years. However research on the smart contract idea has weaknesses in the implementation…
To build a robust secure solution for smart city IOT network from any Cyber attacks using Artificial Intelligence. In Smart City IOT network, data collected from different log collectors or direct sources from cloud or edge should harness the potential of AI. The smart city command and control center team will leverage these models and deploy it in different city IOT network to help on intrusion prediction, network packet surge, potential botnet attacks from external network. Some of the vital use cases considered based on the users of command-and-control center
Smartness in smart cities is achieved by sensing phenomena of interest and using them to make smart decisions. Since the decision makers may not own all the necessary sensing infrastructures, crowdsourced sensing, can help collect important information of the city in near real-time. However, involving people brings of the risk of exposing their private information.This chapter explores crowdsensing in smart city applications and its privacy implications.
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…
Central China Normal University（华中师范大学）；CCNU Wollongong Joint Institute（华中师范大学伍伦贡联合研究院）；Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学）
With the development of blockchain technology, more and more attention has been paid to the intersection of blockchain and education, and various educational evaluation systems and E-learning systems are developed based on blockchain technology. Among them, Ethereum smart contract is favored by developers for its ``event-triggered" mechanism for building education intelligent trading systems and intelligent learning platforms. However, due to the immutability of blockchain, published smart contracts cannot be modified, so problematic contracts cannot be fixed by modifying the code in the educa…
Blockchain was always associated with Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and digital asset trading. However, its benefits are far beyond that. It supports technologies like the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to pave the way for futuristic smart environments, like smart homes, smart transportation, smart energy trading, smart industries, smart supply chains, and more. To enable these environments, IoT devices, machines, appliances, and vehicles, need to intercommunicate without the need for centralized trusted parties. Blockchain replaces these trusted parties in such trustless environments. It provides secu…
In this chapter we provide an overview of the concept of blockchain technology and its potential to disrupt the world of banking through facilitating global money remittance, smart contracts, automated banking ledgers and digital assets. In this regard, we first provide a brief overview of the core aspects of this technology, as well as the second-generation contract-based developments. From there we discuss key issues that must be considered in developing such ledger based technologies in a banking context.
