Biblio

To decrease the IoT attack surface and provide protection against security threats such as introduction of fake IoT nodes and identity theft, IoT requires scalable device identity and authentication management. This work proposes a blockchain-based identity management approach with consensus authentication as a scalable solution for IoT device authentication management. The proposed approach relies on having a blockchain secure tamper proof ledger and a novel lightweight consensus-based identity authentication. The results show that the proposed decentralised authentication system is scalable as we increase number of nodes.

The latest, modern security camera systems record numerous data at once. With the utilization of artificial intelligence, these systems can even compose an online attendance register of students present during the lectures. Data is primarily recorded on the hard disk of the NVR (Network Video Recorder), and in the long term, it is recommended to save the data in the blockchain. The purpose of the research is to demonstrate how university security cameras can be securely connected to the blockchain. This would be important for universities as this is sensitive student data that needs to be protected from unauthorized access. In my research, as part of the practical implementation, I therefore also use encryption methods and data fragmentation, which are saved at the nodes of the blockchain. Thus, even a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) type attack may be easily repelled, as data is not concentrated on a single, central server. To further increase security, it is useful to constitute a blockchain capable of its own data storage at the faculty itself, rather than renting data storage space, so we, ourselves may regulate the conditions of operation, and the policy of data protection. As a practical part of my research, therefore, I created a blockchain called UEDSC (Universities Data Storage Chain) where I saved the student's data.

Blockchain has emerged as a leading technological innovation because of its indisputable safety and services in a distributed setup. Applications of blockchain are rising covering varied fields such as financial transactions, supply chains, maintenance of land records, etc. Supply chain management is a potential area that can immensely benefit from blockchain technology (BCT) along with smart contracts, making supply chain operations more reliable, safer, and trustworthy for all its stakeholders. However, there are numerous challenges such as scalability, coordination, and safety-related issues which are yet to be resolved. Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a completely new dimension for scalability, cooperation, and coordination in distributed culture. MAS consists of a collection of automated agents who can perform a specific task intelligently in a distributed environment. In this work, an attempt has been made to develop a framework for implementing a multi-agent system for a large-scale product manufacturing supply chain with blockchain technology wherein the agents communicate with each other to monitor and organize supply chain operations. This framework eliminates many of the weaknesses of supply chain management systems. The overall goal is to enhance the performance of SCM in terms of transparency, traceability, trustworthiness, and resilience by using MAS and BCT.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the principal signalling protocol in Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, responsible for initialising, terminating, and maintaining sessions amongst call parties. However, the problem with the SIP protocol is that it was not designed to be secure by nature as the HTTP digest authentication used in SIP is insecure, making it vulnerable to a variety of attacks. The current solutions rely on several standardised encryption protocols, such as TLS and IPsec, to protect SIP registration messages. However, the current centralised solutions do not scale well and cause algorithm overload when encoding and decoding SIP messages. In trying to rectify this issue, we propose in this paper a blockchain-based lightweight authentication mechanism, which involves a decentralised identity model to authenticate the SIP client to the SIP server. Our mechanism uses a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain to ensure trust, accountability and preserves user privacy. We provided a proof-of-concept implementation to demonstrate our work. Further analysis of this approach's usability, mainly CPU and memory usage, was conducted comparing to IPsec and TLS. Then we discussed our system's security and presented a security analysis. Our analysis proves that our approach satisfies the SIP protocol security requirements.

In today's digital era, data is most important in every phase of work. The storage and processing on data with security is the need of each and every application field. Data need to be tamper resistant due to possibility of alteration. Data can be represented and stored in heterogeneous format. There are chances of attack on information which is vital for particular organization. With rapid increase in cyber crime, attackers behave maliciously to alter those data. But it is having great impact on forensic evidences which is required for provenance. Therefore, it is required to maintain the reliability and provenance of digital evidences as it travels through various stages during forensic investigation. In this approach, there is a forensic chain in which generated report passes through various levels or intermediaries such as pathology laboratory, doctor, police department etc. To build the transparent system with immutability of forensic evidences, blockchain technology is more suitable. Blockchain technology provides the transfer of assets or evidence reports in transparent environment without central authority. In this paper blockchain based secure system for forensic evidences is proposed. The proposed system is implemented on Ethereum platform. The tampering of forensic evidence can be easily traced at any stage by anyone in the forensic chain. The security enhancement of forensic evidences is achieved through implementation on Ethereum platform with high integrity, traceability and immutability.

Blockchain technology (BCT) has paved a way for new potentials of handling serious data privacy, integrity and security issues in healthcare. To curb the increasing challenges in healthcare industry, healthcare organizations need to apply blockchain technology to better improve patient safety and protect patients records from counterfeiting and fraud. The purpose of this research paper was to define BCT can assist in improving pharmaceutical industries in Saudi Arabia upon utilization of its application. This study adopted quantitative methods to gather the study data. Based on healthcare leaders perception and Internet connection, lack of cooperation, and economic inequality were found to be leading factors hindering the application of blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical industries, Saudi Arabia. Factors facilitating the application of blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical industries, Saudi Arabia were found as system robustness of BCT, increased data safety and decentralization, need for enhanced supply chain management and interoperability, and government laws and policies. Adopting interventions that are targeted to specific patient population medications, effective delivery systems, transit provider reimbursement far from intensity and volume of services towards value and quality was found to compromise the pre-existent challenges and real capacity in healthcare system. Although the relationship between implementation of blockchain technology and cost spending is negative in the short-term, in the long run, the relationship is positive Blockchain helps in managing multiple levels in a more secure way, reduces paper work and amplifies verification inefficiency.

The COVID-19 pandemic has recently emerged as a worldwide health emergency that necessitates coordinated international measures. To contain the virus's spread, governments and health organisations raced to develop vaccines that would lower Covid-19 morbidity, relieve pressure on healthcare systems, and allow economies to open. Following the COVID-19 vaccine, the vaccination certificate has been adopted to help the authorities formulate policies by controlling cross-border travelling. To address serious privacy concerns and eliminate the need for third parties to retain the trust and govern user data, in this paper, we leverage blockchain technologies in developing a secure and verifiable vaccination certificate. Our approach has the advantage of utilising a hybrid approach that implements different advanced technologies, such as the self-sovereignty concept, smart contracts and interPlanetary File System (IPFS). We rely on verifiable credentials paired with smart contracts to make decisions about who can access the system and provide on-chain verification and validation of the user and issuer DIDs. The approach was further analysed, with a focus on performance and security. Our analysis shows that our solution satisfies the security requirements for immunisation certificates.

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 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.

As it was difficult for the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) to manage a large amount of safety equipment efficiently, resulting in the frequent occurrence of safety accidents caused by the quality of equipment. Therefore, this paper presents a design of a self-powered wireless communication radio frequency identification tag system based on the Si24R1. The system uses blockchain technology to provide a full-length, chain-like path for RFID big data to achieve data security management. Using low-power Si24R1 chips to make tags can extend the use time of tags and achieve full life cycle management of equipment. In addition, a transmission scheme was designed to reduce the packet loss rate, in this paper. Finally, the result showed that the device terminal received and processed information from the six tags simultaneously. According to calculations, this electronic tag could be used for up to three years. This system can be widely used for safe operation management, which can effectively reduce the investment of manpower and material resources.

Using the blockchain technology to store the privatedocuments of individuals will help make data more reliable and secure, preventing the loss of data and unauthorized access. The Consensus algorithm along with the hash algorithms maintains the integrity of data simultaneously providing authentication and authorization. The paper incorporates the block chain and the Identity Based Encryption management concept. The Identity based Management system allows the encryption of the user's data as well as their identity and thus preventing them from Identity theft and fraud. These two technologies combined will result in a more secure way of storing the data and protecting the privacy of the user.

Authenticating a person's identity has always been a challenge. While attempts are being made by government agencies to address this challenge, the citizens are being exposed to a new age problem of Identity management. The sharing of photocopies of identity cards in order to prove our identity is a common sight. From score-card to Aadhar-card, the details of our identity has reached many unauthorized hands during the years. In India the identity thefts accounts for 77% [1] of the fraud cases, and the threats are trending. Programs like e-Residency by Estonia[2], Bitnation using Ethereum[3] are being devised for an efficient Identity Management. Even the US Home Land Security is funding a research with an objective of “Design information security and privacy concepts on the Blockchain to support identity management capabilities that increase security and productivity while decreasing costs and security risks for the Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE).” [4] This paper will discuss the challenges specific to India around Identity Management, and the possible solution that the Distributed ledger, hashing algorithms and smart contracts can offer. The logic of hashing the personal data, and controlling the distribution of identity using public-private keys with Blockchain technology will be discussed in this paper.

The legacy security defense mechanisms cannot resist where emerging sophisticated threats such as zero-day and malware campaigns have profoundly changed the dimensions of cyber-attacks. Recent studies indicate that cyber threat intelligence plays a crucial role in implementing proactive defense operations. It provides a knowledge-sharing platform that not only increases security awareness and readiness but also enables the collaborative defense to diminish the effectiveness of potential attacks. In this paper, we propose a secure distributed model to facilitate cyber threat intelligence sharing among diverse participants. The proposed model uses blockchain technology to assure tamper-proof record-keeping and smart contracts to guarantee immutable logic. We use an open-source permissioned blockchain platform, Hyperledger Fabric, to implement the blockchain application. We also utilize the flexibility and management capabilities of Software-Defined Networking to be integrated with the proposed sharing platform to enhance defense perspectives against threats in the system. In the end, collaborative DDoS attack mitigation is taken as a case study to demonstrate our approach.

Software Defined Vehicular Networking (SDVN) could be the future of the vehicular networks, enabling interoperability between heterogeneous networks and mobility management. Thus, the deployment of large SDVN is considered. However, SDVN is facing major security issues, in particular, authentication and access control issues. Indeed, an unauthorized SDN controller could modify the behavior of switches (packet redirection, packet drops) and an unauthorized switch could disrupt the operation of the network (reconnaissance attack, malicious feedback). Due to the SDVN features (decentralization, mobility) and the SDVN requirements (flexibility, scalability), the Blockchain technology appears to be an efficient way to solve these authentication and access control issues. Therefore, many Blockchain-based approaches have already been proposed. However, two key challenges have not been addressed: authentication and access control for SDN controllers and high scalability for the underlying Blockchain network. That is why in this paper we propose an innovative and scalable architecture, based on a set of interconnected Blockchain sub-networks. Moreover, an efficient access control mechanism and a cross-sub-networks authentication/revocation mechanism are proposed for all SDVN devices (vehicles, roadside equipment, SDN controllers). To demonstrate the benefits of our approach, its performances are compared with existing solutions in terms of throughput, latency, CPU usage and read/write access to the Blockchain ledger. In addition, we determine an optimal number of Blockchain sub-networks according to different parameters such as the number of certificates to store and the number of requests to process.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the use of blockchain technology for self-organization of network communities. Network communities are characterized by the key role of trust in personal interactions, the need for repeated interactions, strong and weak ties within the network, social learning as the mechanism of self-organization. Therefore, in network communities reputation is the central component of social action, assessment of the situation, and formation of the expectations. The current proliferation of virtual network communities requires the development of appropriate technical infrastructure in the form of reputation systems - programs that provide calculation of network members reputation and organization of their cooperation and interaction. Traditional reputation systems have vulnerabilities in the field of information security and prevention of abusive behavior of agents. Overcoming these restrictions is possible through integration of reputation systems and blockchain technology that allows to increase transparency of reputation assessment system and prevent attempts of manipulation the system and social engineering. At the same time, the most promising is the use of blockchain-oracles to ensure communication between the algorithms of blockchain-based reputation system and the external information environment. The popularization of blockchain technology and its implementation in various spheres of social management, production control, economic exchange actualizes the problems of using digital technologies in political processes and their impact on the formation of digital authoritarianism, digital democracy and digital anarchism. The paper emphasizes that blockchain technology and reputation systems can equally benefit both the resources of government control and tools of democratization and public accountability to civil society or even practices of avoiding government. Therefore, it is important to take into account the problems of political institutionalization, path dependence and the creation of differentiated incentives as well as the technological aspects.

Most of the authentication protocols assume the existence of a Trusted Third Party (TTP) in the form of a Certificate Authority or as an authentication server. The main objective of this research is to present an autonomous solution where users could store their credentials, without depending on TTPs. For this, the use of an autonomous network is imperative, where users could use their uniqueness in order to identify themselves. We propose the framework “Three Blockchains Identity Management with Elliptic Curve Cryptography (3BI-ECC)”. Our proposed framework is a decentralize identity management system where users' identities are self-generated.

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.

Blockchain technology is the cornerstone of digital trust and systems' decentralization. The necessity of eliminating trust in computing systems has triggered researchers to investigate the applicability of Blockchain to decentralize the conventional security models. Specifically, researchers continuously aim at minimizing trust in the well-known Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) model which currently requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to sign digital certificates. Recently, the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) was standardized as a certificate issuance automation protocol. It minimizes the human interaction by enabling certificates to be automatically requested, verified, and installed on servers. ACME only solved the automation issue, but the trust concerns remain as a trusted CA is required. In this paper we propose decentralizing the ACME protocol by using the Blockchain technology to enhance the current trust issues of the existing PKI model and to eliminate the need for a trusted CA. The system was implemented and tested on Ethereum Blockchain, and the results showed that the system is feasible in terms of cost, speed, and applicability on a wide range of devices including Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Blockchain technology is attracting attention as an innovative system for decentralized payments in fields such as financial area. On the other hand, in a decentralized environment, management of a secret key used for user authentication and digital signature becomes a big issue because if a user loses his/her secret key, he/she will also lose assets on the blockchain. This paper describes the secret key management issues in blockchain systems and proposes a solution using a biometrics-based digital signature scheme. In our proposed system, a secret key to be used for digital signature is generated from the user's biometric information each time and immediately deleted from the memory after using it. Therefore, our blockchain system has the advantage that there is no need for storage for storing secret keys throughout the system. As a result, the user does not have a risk of losing the key management devices and can prevent attacks from malware that steals the secret key.

Due to malicious eavesdropping, forgery as well as other risks, it is challenging to dispose and store collected power data from smart grid in secure manners. Blockchain technology has become a novel method to solve the above problems because of its de-centralization and tamper-proof characteristics. It is especially well known that data stored in blockchain cannot be changed, so it is vital to seek out perfect mechanisms to ensure that data are compliant with high quality (namely, accuracy of the power data) before being stored in blockchain. This will help avoid losses due to low-quality data modification or deletion as needed in smart grid. Thus, we apply the parallel vision theory on the identification of meter readings to realize accurate power data. A cloud-blockchain fusion model (CBFM) is proposed for the storage of accurate power data, allowing for secure conducting of flexible transactions. Only power data calculated by parallel visual system instead of image data collected originally via robot would be stored in blockchain. Hence, we define the quality assurance before data uploaded to blockchain and security guarantee after data stored in blockchain as a successive framework, which is a brand new solution to manage efficiency and security as a whole for power data and data alike in other scenes. Security analysis and performance evaluations are performed, which prove that CBFM is highly secure and efficient impressively.

In this paper, we propose an architecture that utilizes blockchain technology for enabling verifiable trust in collaborative health research environments. The architecture supports the human-in-the-loop paradigm for health research by establishing trust between participants, including human researchers and AI systems, by making all data transformations transparent and verifiable by all participants. We define the trustworthiness of the system and provide an analysis of the architecture in terms of trust requirements. We then evaluate our architecture by analyzing its resiliency to common security threats and through an experimental realization.

Blockchain technology has attracted much attention due to the great success of the cryptocurrencies. Owing to its immutability property and consensus protocol, blockchain offers a new solution for trusted storage and computation services. To scale up the services, prior research has suggested a hybrid storage architecture, where only small meta-data are stored onchain and the raw data are outsourced to off-chain storage. To protect data integrity, a cryptographic proof can be constructed online for queries over the data stored in the system. However, the previous schemes only support simple key-value queries. In this paper, we take the first step toward studying authenticated range queries in the hybrid-storage blockchain. The key challenge lies in how to design an authenticated data structure (ADS) that can be efficiently maintained by the blockchain, in which a unique gas cost model is employed. By analyzing the performance of the existing techniques, we propose a novel ADS, called GEM2-tree, which is not only gas-efficient but also effective in supporting authenticated queries. To further reduce the ADS maintenance cost without sacrificing much the query performance, we also propose an optimized structure, GEM2*-tree, by designing a two-level index structure. Theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation validate the performance of the proposed ADSs.

Blockchain technology has brought a huge paradigm shift in multiple industries, by integrating distributed ledger, smart contracts and consensus protocol under the same roof. Notable applications of blockchain include cryptocurrencies and large-scale multi-party transaction management systems. The latter fits very well into the domain of manufacturing and supply chain management for Integrated Circuits (IC), which, despite several advanced technologies, is vulnerable to malicious practices, such as overproduction, IP piracy and deleterious design modification to gain unfair advantages. To combat these threats, researchers have proposed several ideas like hardware metering, design obfuscation, split manufacturing and watermarking. In this paper, we show, how these issues can be complementarily dealt with using blockchain technology coupled with identity-based encryption and physical unclonable functions, for improved resilience against certain adversarial motives. As part of our proposed blockchain protocol, titled `BLIC', we propose an authentication mechanism to secure both active and passive IC transactions, and a composite consensus protocol designed for IC supply chains. We also present studies on the security, scalability, privacy and anonymity of the BLIC protocol.

With the advent of blockchain technology, multiple avenues of use are being explored. The immutability and security afforded by blockchain are the key aspects of exploitation. Extending this to legal contracts involving digital intellectual properties provides a way to overcome the use of antiquated paperwork to handle digital assets.

With the transformation of connected vehicles into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the time is now ripe for paving the way for the next generation of connected vehicles with novel applications and innovative security measures. The connected vehicles are experiencing prenominal growth in the auto industry, but are still studded with many security and privacy vulnerabilities. Today's IoV applications are part of cyber physical communication systems that collect useful information from thousands of smart sensors associated with the connected vehicles. The technology advancement has paved the way for connected vehicles to share significant information among drivers, auto manufacturers, auto insurance companies and operational and maintenance service providers for various applications. The critical issues in engineering the IoV applications are effective to use of the available spectrum and effective allocation of good channels an opportunistic manner to establish connectivity among vehicles, and the effective utilization of the infrastructure under various traffic conditions. Security and privacy in information sharing are the main concerns in a connected vehicle communication network. Blockchain technology facilitates secured communication among users in a connected vehicles network. Originally, blockchain technology was developed and employed with the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, to provide increased trust, reliability, and security among users based on peer-to-peer networks for transaction sharing. In this paper, we propose to integrate blockchain technology into ad hoc vehicular networking so that the vehicles can share network resources with increased trust, reliability, and security using distributed access control system and can benefit a wider scope of scalable IoV applications scenarios for decision making. The proposed architecture is the faithful environment for information sharing among connected vehicles. Blockchain technology allows multiple copies of data storage at the distribution cloud. Distributed access control system is significantly more secure than a traditional centralized system. This paper also describes how important of ad hoc vehicular networking in human life, possibilities in real-world implementation and its future trends. The ad hoc vehicular networking may become one of the most trendy networking concepts in the future that has the perspective to bring out much ease human beneficial and secured applications.