Biblio

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is emerging to advance the modern defense and warfare applications because the battlefield things, such as combat equipment, warfighters, and vehicles, can sense and disseminate information from the battlefield to enable real-time decision making on military operations and enhance autonomy in the battlefield. Since this Internet-of-Battlefield Things (IoBT) environment is highly heterogeneous in terms of devices, network standards, platforms, connectivity, and so on, it introduces trust, security, and privacy challenges when battlefield entities exchange information with each other. To address these issues, we propose a Blockchain-empowered auditable platform for IoBT and describe its architectural components, such as battlefield-sensing layer, network layer, and consensus and service layer, in depth. In addition to the proposed layered architecture, this paper also presents several open research challenges involved in each layer to realize the Blockchain-enabled IoBT platform.

The blockchain technology has emerged as an attractive solution to address performance and security issues in distributed systems. Blockchain's public and distributed peer-to-peer ledger capability benefits cloud computing services which require functions such as, assured data provenance, auditing, management of digital assets, and distributed consensus. Blockchain's underlying consensus mechanism allows to build a tamper-proof environment, where transactions on any digital assets are verified by set of authentic participants or miners. With use of strong cryptographic methods, blocks of transactions are chained together to enable immutability on the records. However, achieving consensus demands computational power from the miners in exchange of handsome reward. Therefore, greedy miners always try to exploit the system by augmenting their mining power. In this paper, we first discuss blockchain's capability in providing assured data provenance in cloud and present vulnerabilities in blockchain cloud. We model the block withholding (BWH) attack in a blockchain cloud considering distinct pool reward mechanisms. BWH attack provides rogue miner ample resources in the blockchain cloud for disrupting honest miners' mining efforts, which was verified through simulations.

With the growing number of cyberattack incidents, organizations are required to have proactive knowledge on the cybersecurity landscape for efficiently defending their resources. To achieve this, organizations must develop the culture of sharing their threat information with others for effectively assessing the associated risks. However, sharing cybersecurity information is costly for the organizations due to the fact that the information conveys sensitive and private data. Hence, making the decision for sharing information is a challenging task and requires to resolve the trade-off between sharing advantages and privacy exposure. On the other hand, cybersecurity information exchange (CYBEX) management is crucial in stabilizing the system through setting the correct values for participation fees and sharing incentives. In this work, we model the interaction of organizations, CYBEX, and attackers involved in a sharing system using dynamic game. With devising appropriate payoff models for each player, we analyze the best strategies of the entities by incorporating the organizations' privacy component in the sharing model. Using the best response analysis, the simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed framework.