Biblio

Blockchain is a decentralized technology that provides untampered and anonymous security service to users. Without relying on trusted third party, it can establish the value transfer between nodes and reduce the transaction costs. Mature public key cryptosystem and signature scheme are important basis of blockchain security. Currently, most of the public key cryptosystems are based on classic difficult problems such as RSA and ECC. However, the above asymmetric cryptosystems are no longer secure with the development of quantum computing technology. To resist quantum attacks, researchers have proposed encryption schemes based on lattice recently. Although existing schemes have theoretical significance in blockchain, they are not suitable for the practical application due to the large size of key and signature. To tackle the above issues, this paper proposes an anti-quantum signature scheme over ideal lattice in blockchain. First, we transfer the signature scheme from the standard lattice to the ideal lattice, which reduces the size of public key. Afterwards, a novel signature scheme is proposed to reduce both the size of the private and public key significantly. Finally, we theoretically prove the security of our ideal lattice-based signature scheme with a reduction to the hardness assumption of Ideal Small Integer Sulotion problem which can resist quantum attacks. The efficiency analysis demonstrates that our signature scheme can be practically used in blockchain.

In order to realize the sharing of data by multiple users on the blockchain, this paper proposes an attribute-based searchable encryption with verifiable ciphertext scheme via blockchain. The scheme uses the public key algorithm to encrypt the keyword, the attribute-based encryption algorithm to encrypt the symmetric key, and the symmetric key to encrypt the file. The keyword index is stored on the blockchain, and the ciphertext of the symmetric key and file are stored on the cloud server. The scheme uses searchable encryption technology to achieve secure search on the blockchain, uses the immutability of the blockchain to ensure the security of the keyword ciphertext, uses verify algorithm guarantees the integrity of the data on the cloud. When the user's attributes need to be changed or the ciphertext access structure is changed, the scheme uses proxy re-encryption technology to implement the user's attribute revocation, and the authority center is responsible for the whole attribute revocation process. The security proof shows that the scheme can achieve ciphertext security, keyword security and anti-collusion. In addition, the numerical results show that the proposed scheme is effective.

Security-related data collection is an essential part for attack detection and security measurement in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Due to no fixed infrastructure of MANETs, a detection node playing as a collector should discover available routes to a collection node for data collection. Notably, route discovery suffers from many attacks (e.g., wormhole attack), thus the detection node should also collect securityrelated data during route discovery and analyze these data for determining reliable routes. However, few literatures provide incentives for security-related data collection in MANETs, and thus the detection node might not collect sufficient data, which greatly impacts the accuracy of attack detection and security measurement. In this paper, we propose B4SDC, a blockchain system for security-related data collection in MANETs. Through controlling the scale of RREQ forwarding in route discovery, the collector can constrain its payment and simultaneously make each forwarder of control information (namely RREQs and RREPs) obtain rewards as much as possible to ensure fairness. At the same time, B4SDC avoids collusion attacks with cooperative receipt reporting, and spoofing attacks by adopting a secure digital signature. Based on a novel Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism by accumulating stakes through message forwarding, B4SDC not only provides incentives for all participating nodes, but also avoids forking and ensures high efficiency and real decentralization at the same time. We analyze B4SDC in terms of incentives and security, and evaluate its performance through simulations. The thorough analysis and experimental results show the efficacy and effectiveness of B4SDC.

The blockchain is a storage technology and transmission of information, transparent, secure, and operating without central control. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized trust management and cooperation model where data is shared via blockchain and we explore the revenue distribution under different consensus schemes. To reduce the power calculation with respect to the control mechanism, our proposal adopts the possibility of Proof on Trust (PoT) and Proof of proof-of-stake based trust to replace the proof of work (PoW) scheme, to carry out the mining and storage of new data blocks. To detect nodes with malicious behavior to provide false system information, the trust updating algorithm is proposed..

IoT devices provide a rich data source that is not available in the past, which is valuable for a wide range of intelligence applications, especially deep neural network (DNN) applications that are data-thirsty. An established DNN model provides useful analysis results that can improve the operation of IoT systems in turn. The progress in distributed/federated DNN training further unleashes the potential of integration of IoT and intelligence applications. When a large number of IoT devices are deployed in different physical locations, distributed training allows training modules to be deployed to multiple edge data centers that are close to the IoT devices to reduce the latency and movement of large amounts of data. In practice, these IoT devices and edge data centers are usually owned and managed by different parties, who do not fully trust each other or have conflicting interests. It is hard to coordinate them to provide end-to-end integrity protection of the DNN construction and application with classical security enhancement tools. For example, one party may share an incomplete data set with others, or contribute a modified sub DNN model to manipulate the aggregated model and affect the decision-making process. To mitigate this risk, we propose a novel blockchain based end-to-end integrity protection scheme for DNN applications integrated with an IoT system in the edge computing environment. The protection system leverages a set of cryptography primitives to build a blockchain adapted for edge computing that is scalable to handle a large number of IoT devices. The customized blockchain is integrated with a distributed/federated DNN to offer integrity and authenticity protection services.

The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) together with its spread in industrial environments have changed pro-duction lines, by dramatically fostering the dynamicity of data sharing and the openness of machines. However, the increased flexibility and openness of the industrial environment (also pushed by the adoption of Edge devices) must not negatively affect the security and safety of production lines and its opera-tional processes. In fact, opening industrial environments towards the Internet and increasing interactions among machines may represent a security threat, if not properly managed. The paper originally proposes the adoption of the Blockchain to securely store in distributed ledgers topology information and access rules, with the primary goal of maximizing the cyber-resiliency of industrial networks. In this manner, it is possible to store and query topology information and security access rules in a completely distributed manner, ensuring data availability even in case a centralized control point is temporarily down or the network partitioned. Moreover, Blockchain consensus algorithms can be used to foster a participative validation of topology information, to reciprocally ensure the identity of interacting machines/nodes, to securely distribute topology information and commands in a privacy-preserving manner, and to trace any past modification in a non-repudiable manner.

Providing an acceptable level of security for Internet of Things (IoT)-based critical infrastructures, such as the connected vehicles, considers as an open research issue. Nowadays, blockchain overcomes a wide range of network limitations. In the context of IoT and blockchain, Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)-based consensus protocol, that elects a set of authenticated devices/nodes within the network, considers as a solution for achieving the desired energy efficiency over the other consensus protocols. In BFT, the elected devices are responsible for ensuring the data blocks' integrity and preventing the concurrently appended blocks that might contain some malicious data. In this paper, we evaluate the fault-tolerance with different network settings, i.e., the number of connected vehicles. We verify and validate the proposed model with MATLAB/Simulink package simulations. The results show that our proposed hybrid scenario performed over the non-hybrid scenario taking throughput and latency in the consideration as the evaluated metrics.

In today's technological climate, users require fast automation and digitization of results for large amounts of data at record speeds. Especially in the field of medicine, where each patient is often asked to undergo many different examinations within one diagnosis or treatment. Each examination can help in the diagnosis or prediction of further disease progression. Furthermore, all produced data from these examinations must be stored somewhere and available to various medical practitioners for analysis who may be in geographically diverse locations. The current medical climate leans towards remote patient monitoring and AI-assisted diagnosis. To make this possible, medical data should ideally be secured and made accessible to many medical practitioners, which makes them prone to malicious entities. Medical information has inherent value to malicious entities due to its privacy-sensitive nature in a variety of ways. Furthermore, if access to data is distributively made available to AI algorithms (particularly neural networks) for further analysis/diagnosis, the danger to the data may increase (e.g., model poisoning with fake data introduction). In this paper, we propose a federated learning approach that uses decentralized learning with blockchain-based security and a proposition that accompanies that training intelligent systems using distributed and locally-stored data for the use of all patients. Our work in progress hopes to contribute to the latest trend of the Internet of Medical Things security and privacy.

This research is dedicated to the development of a prototype of open infrastructure for users’ internet traffic filtering on a browser level. We described the advantages of a distributed approach in comparison with current centralized solutions. Besides, we suggested a solution to define the optimum size for a URL storage block in Ethereum network. This solution may be used for the development of infrastructure of DApps applications on Ethereum network in future. The efficiency of the suggested approach is supported by several experiments.

Authentication and access control techniques are fundamental security elements to restrict access to critical resources in IoT environment. In the current state-of-the-art approaches in the literature, the architectures do not address the security features of authentication and access control together. Besides, they don't completely fulfill the key Internet-of-Things (IoT) features such as usability, scalability, interoperability and security. In this paper, we introduce a novel blockchain-based architecture for authentication and capability-based access control for IoT environment. A capability is a token which contains the access rights authorized to the device holding it. The architecture uses blockchain technology to carry out all the operations in the scheme. It does not embed blockchain technology into the resource-constrained IoT devices for the purpose of authentication and access control of the devices. However, the IoT devices and blockchain are connected by means of interfaces through which the essential communications are established. The authenticity of such interfaces are verified before any communication is made. Consequently, the architecture satisfies usability, scalability, interoperability and security features. We carried out security evaluation for the scheme. It exhibits strong resistance to threats like spoofing, tampering, repudiation, information disclosure, and Denial-of-Service (DoS). We also developed a proof of concept implementation where cost and storage overhead of blockchain transactions are studied.

Cloud architecture has become a valuable solution for different applications, such as big data analytics, due to its high degree of availability, scalability and strategic value. However, there still remain challenges in managing cloud architecture, in areas such as cloud security. In this paper, we exploit software-defined networking (SDN) and blockchain technologies to secure cloud management platforms from a networking perspective. We develop a blockchain-powered SDN-enabled networking infrastructure in which the integration between blockchain-based security and autonomy management layer and multi-controller SDN networking layer is defined to enhance the integrity of the control and management messages. Furthermore, our proposed networking infrastructure also enables the autonomous bandwidth provisioning to enhance the availability of cloud architecture. In the simulation section, we evaluate the performance of our proposed blockchain-powered SDN-enabled networking infrastructure by considering different scenarios.

In isolated network domains, global trustworthiness (e.g., consistent network view) is critical to the multiple-domain business partners who aim to perform the trusted corporations depending on each isolated network view. However, to achieve such global trustworthiness across distributed network domains is a challenge. This is because when multiple-domain partners are required to exchange their local domain views with each other, it is difficult to ensure the data trustworthiness among them. In addition, the isolated domain view in each partner is prone to be destroyed by malicious falsification attacks. To this end, we propose a blockchain-based approach that can ensure the trustworthiness among multiple-party domains. In this paper, we mainly present the design and implementation of the proposed trustworthiness-protection system. A cloud-based prototype and a local testbed are developed based on Ethereum. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed prototype and testbed.

In general, Cloud storage is considered as a distributed model. Here, the data is usually stored on remote servers to properly maintain, back up and make it accessible to clients over a network, whenever required. Cloud storage providers keep the data and processes to oversee it on capacity servers based on secure virtualization methods. A security framework is proposed for auditing the cloud data, which makes use of the proposed blockchain technology. This ensures to efficiently maintain the data integrity. The blockchain structure inspects the mutation of operational information and thereby ensures the data security. Usually, the data auditing scheme is widely used in a Third Party Auditor (TPA), which is a centralized entity that the client is forced to trust, even if the credibility is not guaranteed. To avoid the participation of TPA, a decentralised scheme is suggested, where it uses a smart contract for auditing the cloud data. The working of smart contracts is based on blockchain. Ethereum is used to deploy a smart contract thereby eliminating the need of a foreign source in the data auditing process.

Blockchain is becoming more popular because of its decentralized, secured, and transparent nature. Supply chain and its management is indispensable to improve customer services, reduce operating costs and improve financial position of a firm. Integration of blockchain and supply chain is substantial, but it alone is not enough for the sustainability of supply chain systems. The proposed mechanism speaks about the method of rewarding the supply chain parties with incentives so as to improve the security and make the integration of supply chain with blockchain sustainable. The proposed incentive mechanism employs the co-operative approach of game theory where all the supply chain parties show a cooperative behavior of following the blockchain-based supply chain protocols and also this mechanism makes a fair attempt in rewarding the supply chain parties with incentives.

In many organizations, permissioned blockchain networks are currently transitioning from a proof-of-concept stage to production use. A crucial part of this transition is ensuring awareness of potential threats to network operations. Due to the plethora of software components involved in distributed ledgers, threats may be difficult or impossible to detect without a structured monitoring approach. To this end, we conduct a survey of attacks on permissioned blockchains and develop a set of threat indicators. To gather these indicators, a data processing pipeline is proposed to aggregate log information from relevant blockchain components, enriched with data from external sources. To evaluate the feasibility of monitoring current blockchain frameworks, we determine relevant data sources in Hyperledger Fabric. Our results show that the required data is mostly available, but also highlight significant improvement potential with regard to threat intelligence, chaincode scanners and built-in metrics.

Intrusion Detection System is a well-known term in the domain of Network and Information Security. It's one of the important components of the Network and Information Security infrastructure. Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) helps to detect unauthorized use, abnormal and malicious activities on the host, whereas Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) helps to detect attacks and intrusion on networks. Various researchers are actively working on different approaches to improving the IDS performance and many improvements have been achieved. However, development in many other technologies and newly emerging techniques always opens the doors of opportunity to add a sharp edge to IDS and to make it more robust and reliable. This paper proposes the development of Distributed Intrusion Detection System (DIDS) using emerging and promising technologies like Blockchain upon a stable platform like cloud infrastructure.

Consensus protocols are currently the bottlenecks that prevent blockchain systems from scaling. However, we argue that transaction execution is also important to the performance and security of blockchains. In other words, there are ample opportunities to speed up and further secure blockchains by reducing the cost of transaction execution. Our goal is to understand how much we can speed up blockchains by exploiting transaction concurrency available in blockchain workloads. To this end, we first analyze historical data of seven major public blockchains, namely Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Zilliqa. We consider two metrics for concurrency, namely the single-transaction conflict rate per block, and the group conflict rate per block. We find that there is more concurrency in UTXO-based blockchains than in account-based ones, although the amount of concurrency in the former is lower than expected. Another interesting finding is that some blockchains with larger blocks have more concurrency than blockchains with smaller blocks. Next, we propose an analytical model for estimating the transaction execution speed-up given an amount of concurrency. Using results from our empirical analysis, the model estimates that 6× speed-ups in Ethereum can be achieved if all available concurrency is exploited.

Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides insights for difficulty adjustment rules for PoW based blockchains. The proposed algorithm consists a two-layer neural network. It has low memory cost, meanwhile satisfying the fast-updating and low volatility requirements for difficulty adjustment. Real data from Ethereum are used in the simulations to prove that the proposed algorithm has better performance for the control of the block difficulty.

Recently, with the increase of smart factories, smart cities, and the 4th industrial revolution, internal user authentication is emerging as an important issue. The existing user authentication and Access Control architecture can use the centralized system to forge access history by the service manager, which can cause problems such as evasion of responsibility and internal corruption. In addition, the user must independently manage the ID or physical authentication medium for authentication of each service, it is difficult to manage the subscribed services. This paper proposes a Hybrid blockchain-based integrated ID model to solve the above problems. The user creates authentication information based on the electronic signature of the Ethereum Account, a public blockchain, and provides authentication to a service provider composed of a Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain. The service provider ensures the integrity of the information by recording the Access History and authentication information in the Internal-Ledger. Through the proposed architecture, we can integrate the physical pass or application for user authentication and authorization into one Unification ID. Service providers can prevent non-Repudiation of responsibility by recording their authority and access history in ledger.

In recent years, there is fast growth in the high throughput DNA sequencing technology, and also there is a reduction in the cost of genome-sequencing, that has led to a advances in the genetic industries. However, the reduction in cost and time required for DNA sequencing there is still an issue of managing such large amount of data. Also, the security and transmission of such huge amount of DNA sequence data is still an issue. The idea is to provide a secure storage platform for future generation bioinformatics systems for both researchers and healthcare user. Secure data sharing strategies, that can permit the healthcare providers along with their secured substances for verifying the accuracy of data, are crucial for ensuring proper medical services. In this paper, it has been surveyed about the applications of blockchain technology for securing healthcare data, where the recorded information is encrypted so that it becomes difficult to penetrate or being removed, as the primary goals of block-chaining technology is to make data immutable.

Data tracing is an important topic in the era of digital economy when data are considered as one of the core factors in economic activities. However, the current data traceability systems often fail to obtain public trust due to their centralization and opaqueness. Blockchain possesses natural technical features such as data tampering resistance, anonymity, encryption security, etc., and shows great potential of improving the data tracing credibility. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-PROV-based multi-center data provenance solution in where the PROV model standardizes the data record storage and provenance on the blockchain automatically and intelligently. The solution improves the transparency and credibility of the provenance data, such as to help the efficient control and open sharing of data assets.

As a typical representative of a new generation military information technology, the value and significance of Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) has been widely recognized by the world's military forces. At the same time, Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is facing serious scalability and security challenges. This paper presents the basic concept and six-domain model of IoBT, explains the integration security framework of IoBT and blockchain. Furthermore, we design and build a novel IoT framework called IoBTChain based on blockchain and smart contracts, which adopts a credit-based resource management system to control the amount of resources that an IoBT device can obtain from a cloud server based on pre-defined priority rules, application types, and behavior history. We illustrate the deployment procedure of blockchain and smart contracts, the device registration procedure on blockchain, the IoBT behavior regulation workflow and the pricing-based resource allocation algorithm.

As the scale of integrated circuits continues to expand, electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) reuse play an increasingly important role in the integrated circuit design process. Although many Web-EDA platforms have begun to provide online EDA software to reduce the threshold for the use of EDA tools, IP protection on the Web- EDA platform is an issue. This article uses blockchain technology to design an IP trading system for the Web-EDA platform to achieve mutual trust and transactions between IP owners and users. The structure of the IP trading system is described in detail, and a blockchain wallet for the Web-EDA platform is developed.

The industrial Internet has built a new industrial manufacturing and service system with all elements, all industrial chains and all value chains connected through the interconnection of people, machines and things. It breaks the relatively closed and credible production environment of traditional industry. But at the same time, the full interconnection of cross-device, cross-system, and cross-region in the industrial Internet also brings a certain network trust crisis. The method proposed in this paper breaking the relatively closed manufacturing environment of traditional industries, extends the network connection object from human to machine equipment, industrial products and industrial services. It provides a safe and credible environment for the development of industrial Internet, and a trust guarantee for the across enterprises entities and data sharing.

Microservices architecture has become one of the most prominent software architectures in the software development processes due to its features such as scalability, maintainability, resilience, and composability. It allows developing business applications in a decentralized manner by dividing the important business logic into separate independent services. Digital certificates are used to verify the identity of microservices in most cases. However, the certificate authorities (CA) who issue the certificates to microservices cannot be trusted always since they can issue certificates without the consent of the relevant microservice. Nevertheless, existing implementations of certificate transparency are mostly centralized and has the vulnerability of the single point of failure. The distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain can be used to achieve decentralized nature in certificate transparency implementations. A blockchain-based decentralized certificate transparency system specified for microservices architecture is proposed in this paper to ensure secure communication among services. After the implementation and deployment in a cloud service, the system expressed average certificate querying time of 643 milliseconds along with the highly secured service provided.