Biblio

The traditional data storage method often adopts centralized architecture, which is prone to trust and security problems. This paper proposes a trusted data storage and access control scheme combining blockchain and attribute-based encryption, which allow cyber-physical system (CPS) nodes to realize the fine-grained access control strategy. At the same time, this paper combines the blockchain technology with distributed storage, and only store the access control policy and the data access address on the blockchain, which solves the storage bottleneck of blockchain system. Furthermore, this paper proposes a novel multi-authority attributed-based identification method, which realizes distributed attribute key generation and simplifies the pairwise authentication process of multi-authority. It can not only address the key escrow problem of one single authority, but also reduce the problem of high communication overhead and heavy burden of multi-authority. The analyzed results show that the proposed scheme has better comprehensive performance in trusted data storage and access control for power cyber-physical system.

Blockchain transactions are signed by private keys. Secure key storage and tamper resistant computing, are critical requirements for deployments of trusted infrastructure. In this paper we identify some threats against blockchain wallets, and we introduce a set of physical and logical countermeasures in order to defeat them. We introduce open software and hardware architectures based on secure elements, which enable detection of cloned device and corrupted software. These technologies are based on resistant computing (javacard), smartcard anti cloning, smartcard self content attestation, applicative firewall, bare metal architecture, remote attestation, dynamic PUF (Physical Unclonable Function), and programming token as root of trust.

Our identity as a human being is determined by the documents, not by appearance or physicality. The most important thing to prove the identity of humans is to show a government-issued document. Generally, from birth to death humans are recognized by documents because they are born with a birth certificate and they die with a death certificate. The main problem with these documents is that, they can be falsified or manipulated by others. Moreover in this digital era, they are stored in a centralized manner, which is prone to a cyber threat. This study aims to develop a blockchain environment to create, verify, and securely share documents in a decentralized manner. With the help of bigchainDB, interplanetary file system (IPFS), and asymmetric encryption, this research work will prototype the proposed solution called blockchain-based digital locker, which is similar to the DigiLocker released by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), Govt. of India. BigchainDB will help in treating each document as an asset by making it immutable with the help of IPFS and asymmetric encryption, where documents can not only be shared but also verified.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) generates explanations which are used by regulators to audit the responsibility in case of any catastrophic failure. These explanations are currently stored in centralized systems. However, due to lack of security and traceability in centralized systems, the respective owner may temper the explanations for his convenience in order to avoid any penalty. Nowadays, Blockchain has emerged as one of the promising technologies that might overcome the security limitations. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel Blockchain based framework for proof-of-authenticity pertaining to XAI decisions. The framework stores the explanations in InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) due to storage limitations of Ethereum Blockchain. Further, a Smart Contract is designed and deployed in order to supervise the storage and retrieval of explanations from Ethereum Blockchain. Furthermore, to induce cryptographic security in the network, an explanation's hash is calculated and stored in Blockchain too. Lastly, we perform the cost and security analysis of our proposed system.

As the traditional inverters are transforming toward more intelligent inverters with advanced information and communication technologies, the cyber-attack surface has been remarkably expanded. Specifically, securing firmware of smart inverters from cyber-attacks is crucial. This paper provides expanded firmware attack surface targeting smart inverters. Moreover, this paper proposes a security module for transforming a conventional inverter to a firmware security built-in smart inverter by preventing potential malware and unauthorized firmware update attacks as well as fast automated inverter recovery from zero-day attacks. Furthermore, the proposed security module as a client of blockchain is connected to blockchain severs to fully utilize blockchain technologies such as membership service, ledgers, and smart contracts to detect and mitigate the firmware attacks. The proposed security module framework is implemented in an Internet-of-Thing (IoT) device and validated by experiments.

This paper presents a decentralized messaging system based on blockchain technology. This system allows their users to securely send and receive digital messages in the network. Since the messages stored in a conventional blockchain could be easily read by everyone in the network, under the proposed approach these messages are previously encrypted using public-key cryptography, while the sender and recipient remain anonymous. The proposed system incorporates a browser-based user interface that enable their users to interact seamlessly in a peer-to-peer fashion.

The research proposal discloses a novel drone-based ad-hoc network that leverages acoustic information for power plant surveillance and utilizes a secure blockchain model for protecting the integrity of drone communication over the network. The paper presents a vision for the drone-based networks, wherein drones are employed for monitoring the complex power plant machinery. The drones record acoustic information generated by the power plants and detect anomalies or deviations in machine behavior based on collected acoustic data. The drones are linked to distributed network of computing devices in possession with the plant stakeholders, wherein each computing device maintains a chain of data blocks. The chain of data blocks represents one or more transactions associated with power plants, wherein transactions are related to high risk auditory data set accessed by the drones in an event of anomaly or machine failure. The computing devices add at least one data block to the chain of data blocks in response to valid transaction data, wherein the transaction data is validated by the computing devices owned by power plant personnel.

Smart grids are being continually adopted as a replacement of the traditional power grid systems to ensure safe, efficient, and cost-effective power distribution. The smart grid is a heterogeneous communication network made up of various devices such as smart meters, automation, and emerging technologies interacting with each other. As a result, the smart grid inherits most of the security vulnerabilities of cyber systems, putting the smart grid at risk of cyber-attacks. To secure the communication between smart grid entities, namely the smart meters and the utility, we propose in this paper a communication infrastructure built on top of a blockchain network, specifically Ethereum. All two-way communication between the smart meters and the utility is assumed to be transactions governed by smart contracts. Smart contracts are designed in such a way to ensure that each smart meter is authentic and each smart meter reading is reported securely and privately. We present a simulation of a sample smart grid and report all the costs incurred from building such a grid. The simulations illustrate the feasibility and security of the proposed architecture. They also point to weaknesses that must be addressed, such as scalability and cost.

Development of large-scale and complex software systems requires multiple teams, including software development teams, domain experts, user representatives, and other project stakeholders, to work collaboratively to achieve software development goals. These teams rely on the use of agreed software development processes, knowledge management tools, and communication channels collaboratively in the software development project. Software testing is an important and complicated process due to reasons such as difficulties in achieving testing goals with the given time constraint, absence of efficient data sharing policies, vague testing acceptance criteria at various levels of testing, and lack of trusted coordination among the teams involved in software testing. The efficiency of the software testing relies on efficient, reliable, and trusted information sharing among these teams. Existing approaches to software testing for collaborative software development use centralized or decentralize tools for software testing, knowledge management, and communication channels. Existing approaches have the limitations of centralized authority, a single point of failure/compromise, lack of automatic requirement compliance checking and transparency in information sharing, and lack of unified data sharing policy, and reliable knowledge management repositories for sharing and storing past software testing artifacts and data. In this paper, a software testing approach for collaborative software development using private blockchain is presented, and the desirable properties of private blockchain, such as distributed data management, tamper-resistance, auditability and automatic requirement compliance checking, are incorporated to greatly improve the quality of software testing for collaborative software development.

Mining, the process where multiple miners compete to add blocks to Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, is of great importance to maintain the tamper-resistance feature of blockchains. In current blockchain networks, miners usually form groups, called mining pools, to improve their revenues. When multiple pools exist, a fundamental mining pool selection problem arises: which pool should each miner join to maximize its revenue? In addition, the existence of mining pools also leads to another critical issue, i.e., Block WithHolding (BWH) attack, where a pool sends some of its miners as spies to another pool to gain extra revenues without contributing to the mining of the infiltrated pool. This paper therefore aims to investigate the mining pool selection issue (i.e., the stable population distribution of miners in the pools) in the presence of BWH attack from the perspective of evolutionary game theory. We first derive the expected revenue density of each pool to determine the expected payoff of miners in that pool. Based on the expected payoffs, we formulate replicator dynamics to represent the growth rates of the populations in all pools. Using the replicator dynamics, we obtain the rest points of the growth rates and discuss their stability to identify the Evolutionarily Stable States (ESSs) (i.e., stable population distributions) of the game. Simulation and numerical results are also provided to corroborate our analysis and to illustrate the theoretical findings.

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.

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.

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) is playing an important role in our life. This inevitably generates mass data and requires a more secure transmission. As blockchain technology can build trust in a distributed environment and ensure the data traceability and tamper resistance, it is a promising way to support IoT data transmission and sharing. In this paper, edge computing is considered to provide adequate resources for end users to offload computing tasks in the blockchain enabled IoT system, and the node pairing problem between end users and edge computing servers is researched with the consideration of wireless channel quality and the service quality. From the perspective of the end users, the objective optimization is designed to maximize the profits and minimize the payments for completing the tasks and ensuring the resource limits of the edge servers at the same time. The deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method is utilized to train an intelligent strategy, and the policy gradient based node pairing (PG-NP) algorithm is proposed. Through a deep neural network, the well-trained policy matched the system states to the optimal actions. The REINFORCE algorithm with baseline is applied to train the policy network. According to the training results, as the comparison strategies are max-credit, max-SINR, random and max-resource, the PG-NP algorithm performs about 57% better than the second-best method. And testing results show that PGNP also has a good generalization ability which is negatively correlated with the training performance to a certain extend.

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.

We study the problem of generation of cycles, chains and graphs of pairing-friendly elliptic curves using in succinct non-interactive arguments for knowledge protocols in blockchain. The task to build a “stick” for existing MNT753 cycle is reduced to the factorization problem for big numbers. Together with graphs of pairing friendly elliptic curves we consider auxiliary graphs of their orders (primes or irreducible polynomials) associated to vertices and embedding degrees to edges. Numerical experiments allow us to conjecture that (except of MNT case): 1) for any fixed embedding degrees there exist only finite number of such cycles and, hence, there are no families of such cycles; 2) chains of prime order are very rare; we suppose that there are no polynomial families of such chains. It is hard to find a family of pairing friendly elliptic curves with the base field order q(x) such that ζk ∈ Q[x]/(q(x)) for k \textbackslashtextgreater 6. From other hand our examples show that we can apply Brezing-Weng construction with k=6 and D=3 iteratively to obtain chains of length 3-4. We build 1) a family of 1-chains with embedding degrees 8 and 7, where all orders are given by cyclotomic polynomials; 2) a combination of MNT cycle and near-MNT curve.

Today, the online review system cannot fully support the business since there are fraudulent activities inside. The companies that get low score reviews are induced to raise their score for the market competition capability by paying to the platform for deleting or editing the posted reviews. Moreover, the automatic filtration system of a platform removes some reviews without the awareness of the users. The low transparency platform causes low credibility toward the reviews. Blockchain technology provides exceptionally high transparency since every action can be traced publicly. However, there are some tradeoffs that need to be considered, such as cost and response time. This work tends to find the potential of using Blockchain technology in the online review system by testing four implementation approaches of the Ethereum Smart Contract. The result illustrates that using IPFS to store the data is a practical way of reducing transaction costs. Besides, preventing using Smart Contract states can significantly reduce costs too. The response time for using the Blockchain and IPFS system is slower than the centralized system. However, posting a review does not need a fast response. Thus, it is worthy of trading response time with transparency and cost. In the business view, the review posting with cost causes more difficulty to generate fake reviews. Moreover, there are other advantages over the centralized system, such as the reward system, bogus review voting, and global database. Thus, credibility improvement for a consumer online review system is a potential application of Blockchain technology.

Quality Critical Decentralised Applications (QC-DApp) have high requirements for system performance and service quality, involve heterogeneous infrastructures (Clouds, Fogs, Edges and IoT), and rely on the trustworthy collaborations among participants of data sources and infrastructure providers to deliver their business value. The development of the QCDApp has to tackle the low-performance challenge of the current blockchain technologies due to the low collaboration efficiency among distributed peers for consensus. On the other hand, the resilience of the Cloud has enabled significant advances in software-defined storage, networking, infrastructure, and every technology; however, those rich programmabilities of infrastructure (in particular, the advances of new hardware accelerators in the infrastructures) can still not be effectively utilised for QCDApp due to lack of suitable architecture and programming model.

Medical institutions are increasingly adopting IoT platforms to share data, communicate rapidly and improve healthcare treatment abilities. However, this trend is also raising the risk of potential data manipulation attacks. In decentralized networks, defense mechanisms against external entities have been widely enabled while protection against insider attackers is still the weakest link of the chain. Most of the platforms are based on the assumption that all the insider nodes are trustworthy. However, these nodes are exploiting of this assumption to lead manipulation attacks and violate data integrity and reliability without being detected. To address this problem, we propose a secure decentralized management system able to detect insider malicious nodes. Our proposal is based on a three layer architecture: storage layer, blockchain based network layer and IoT devices layer. In this paper, we mainly focus on the network layer where we propose to integrate a decentralized trust based authorization module. This latter allows updating dynamically the nodes access rights by observing and evaluating their behavior. To this aim, we combine probabilistic modelling and stochastic modelling to classify and predict the nodes behavior. Conducted performance evaluation and security analysis show that our proposition provides efficient detection of malicious nodes compared to other trust based management approaches.

Cyber-security is indispensable as malicious incidents are ubiquitous on the Internet. Intrusion Detection Systems have an important role in detecting and thwarting cyber-attacks. However, it is more effective in a centralized system but not in peer-to-peer networks which makes it subject to central point failure, especially in collaborated intrusion detection systems. The novel blockchain technology assures a fully distributed security system through its powerful features of transparency, immutability, decentralization, and provenance. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate and demonstrate several methods of collaborative intrusion detection with blockchain to analyze the suitability and security of blockchain for collaborative intrusion detection systems. We also studied the difference between the existing means of the integration of intrusion detection systems with blockchain and categorized the major vulnerabilities of blockchain with their potential losses and current enhancements for mitigation.

The recent spurt of incidents related to copyrights and security breaches has led to the monetary loss of several digital content creators and publishers. These incidents conclude that the existing system lacks the ability to uphold the integrity of their published content. Moreover, some of the digital content owners rely on third parties, results in lack of ability to provide provenance of digital media. The question that needs to be addressed today is whether modern technologies can be leveraged to suppress such incidents and regain the confidence of creators and the audience. Fortunately, this paper presents a unique framework that empowers digital content creators to have complete control over the place of its origin, accessibility and impose restrictions on unauthorized alteration of their content. This framework harnesses the power of the Ethereum platform, a part of Blockchain technology, and uses S mart Contracts as a key component empowering the creators with enhanced control of their content and the corresponding audience.

In smart cities, data privacy and security issues of Electronic Health Record(EHR) are grabbing importance day by day as cyber attackers have identified the weaknesses of EHR platforms. Besides, health insurance companies interacting with the EHRs play a vital role in covering the whole or a part of the financial risks of a patient. Insurance companies have specific policies for which patients have to pay them. Sometimes the insurance policies can be altered by fraudulent entities. Another problem that patients face in smart cities is when they interact with a health organization, insurance company, or others, they have to prove their identity to each of the organizations/companies separately. Health organizations or insurance companies have to ensure they know with whom they are interacting. To build a platform where a patient's personal information and insurance policy are handled securely, we introduce an application of blockchain to solve the above-mentioned issues. In this paper, we present a solution for the healthcare system that will provide patient privacy and transparency towards the insurance policies incorporating blockchain. Privacy of the patient information will be provided using cryptographic tools.

The paper discusses a prototype of a database, which can be used for operation in a decentralized mode for an information system. In this project, the focus is on creation of a data structure model that provides flexibility of business processes. The research is based on the development of a model for decentralized access rights distribution by including users in groups where they are assigned similar roles using consensus of other group members. This paper summarizes the main technologies that were used to ensure information security of the decentralized storage, the mechanisms for fixing access rights to an object access (the minimum entity of the system), describes a process of the data access control at the role level and an algorithm for managing the consensus for applying changes.

IoT adds more flexibility in many areas of applications to makes it easy to monitor and manage data instantaneously. However, IoT has many challenges regarding its security and storage issues. Moreover, the third-party trusting agents of IoT devices do not support sufficient security level between the network peers. This paper proposes improving the trust, processing power, and storage capability of IoT in distributed system topology by adopting the blockchain approach. An application, IoT Trust Management (ITM), is proposed to manage the trust of the shared content through the blockchain network, e.g., supply chain. The essential key in ITM is the trust management of IoT devices data are done using peer to peer (P2P), i.e., no third-party. ITM is running on individual python nodes and interact with frontend applications creating decentralized applications (DApps). The IoT data shared and stored in a ledger, which has the IoT device published details and data. ITM provides a higher security level to the IoT data shared on the network, such as unparalleled security, speed, transparency, cost reduction, check data, and Adaptability.

Blockchain is developing rapidly in various domains for its security. Nowadays, one of the most crucial fundamental concerns is internet security. Blockchain is a novel solution to enhance the security of network applications. However, there are no precise frameworks to secure the Internet of Vehicle (IoV) using Blockchain technology. In this paper, a blockchain-based smart internet of vehicle (BSIoV) framework has been proposed due to the cooperative, collaborative, transparent, and secure characteristics of Blockchain. The main contribution of the proposed work is to connect vehicle-related authorities together to fix a secure and transparent vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication through the peer-to-peer network connection and provide secure services to the intelligent transport systems. A key management strategy has been included to identify a vehicle in this proposed system. The proposed framework can also provide a significant solution for the data security and safety of the connected vehicles in blockchain network.

The privacy protection and information security are two crucial issues for future advanced artificial intelligence devices, especially for cooperative system with rich core data exchange which may offer opportunities for attackers to fake interaction messages. To combat such threat, great efforts have been made by introducing trust mechanism in initiative or passive way. Furthermore, blockchain and distributed ledger technology provide a decentralized and peer-to-peer network, which has great potential application for multi-agent system, such as IoTs and robots. It eliminates third-party interference and data in the blockchain are stored in an encrypted way permanently and anti-destroys. In this paper, a methodology of blockchain is proposed and designed for advanced cooperative system with artificial intelligence to protect privacy and sensitive data exchange between multi-agents. The validation procedure is performed in laboratory by a three-level computing networks of Raspberry Pi 3B+, NVIDIA Jetson Tx2 and local computing server for a robot system with four manipulators and four binocular cameras in peer computing nodes by Go language.