Challenges in Blockchain as a Solution for IoT Ecosystem Threats and Access Control: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly influencing and transforming various aspects of our daily lives. Contrary to popular belief, it raises security and privacy issues as it is used to collect data from consumers or automated systems. Numerous articles are published that discuss issues like centralised control systems and potential alternatives like integration with blockchain. Although a few recent surveys focused on the challenges and solutions facing the IoT ecosystem, most of them did not concentrate on the threats, difficulties, or blockchain-based solutions. Additionally, none of them focused on blockchain and IoT integration challenges and attacks. In the context of the IoT ecosystem, overall security measures are very important to understand the overall challenges. This article summarises difficulties that have been outlined in numerous recent articles and articulates various attacks and security challenges in a variety of approaches, including blockchain-based solutions and so on. More clearly, this contribution consolidates threats, access control issues, and remedies in brief. In addition, this research has listed some attacks on public blockchain protocols with some real-life examples that can guide researchers in taking preventive measures for IoT use cases. Finally, a future research direction concludes the research gaps by analysing contemporary research contributions

Cloud-Edge Orchestration for the Internet-of-Things: Architecture and AI-Powered Data Processing

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordThe Internet-of-Things (IoT) has been deeply penetrated into a wide range of important and critical sectors, including smart city, water, transportation, manufacturing and smart factory. Massive data are being acquired from a fast growing number of IoT devices. Efficient data processing is a necessity to meet diversified and stringent requirements of many emerging IoT applications. Due to the constrained computation and storage resources, IoT devices have resorted to the powerful cloud computing to process their data. However, centralised and remote cloud computing may introduce unacceptable communication delay since its physical location is far away from IoT devices. Edge cloud has been introduced to overcome this issue by moving the cloud in closer proximity to IoT devices. The orchestration and cooperation between the cloud and the edge provides a crucial computing architecture for IoT applications. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool to enable the intelligent orchestration in this architecture. This paper first introduces such a kind of computing architecture from the perspective of IoT applications. It then investigates the state-of-the-art proposals on AI-powered cloud-edge orchestration for the IoT. Finally, a list of potential research challenges and open issues is provided and discussed, which can provide useful resources for carrying out future research in this area.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC