Blockchain for the Internet of Things: Present and Future

One of the key challenges to the IoT's success is how to secure and anonymize billions of IoT transactions and devices per day, an issue that still lingers despite significant research efforts over the last few years. On the other hand, technologies based on blockchain algorithms are disrupting today's cryptocurrency markets and showing tremendous potential, since they provide a distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a single entity. Although the blockchain may present itself as a cure-all for the IoT's security and privacy challenges, significant research efforts still need to be put forth to adapt the computation-intensive blockchain algorithms to the stringent energy and processing constraints of today's IoT devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing literature on the topic of blockchain for IoT, and present a roadmap of research challenges that will need to be addressed to enable the usage of blockchain technologies in the IoT

Blockchain for Future Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

The concept of smart grid has been introduced as a new vision of the conventional power grid to figure out an efficient way of integrating green and renewable energy technologies. In this way, Internet-connected smart grid, also called energy Internet, is also emerging as an innovative approach to ensure the energy from anywhere at any time. The ultimate goal of these developments is to build a sustainable society. However, integrating and coordinating a large number of growing connections can be a challenging issue for the traditional centralized grid system. Consequently, the smart grid is undergoing a transformation to the decentralized topology from its centralized form. On the other hand, blockchain has some excellent features which make it a promising application for smart grid paradigm. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey on application of blockchain in smart grid. As such, we identify the significant security challenges of smart grid scenarios that can be addressed by blockchain. Then, we present a number of blockchain-based recent research works presented in different literatures addressing security issues in the area of smart grid. We also summarize several related practical projects, trials, and products that have been emerged recently. Finally, we discuss essential research challenges and future directions of applying blockchain to smart grid security issues.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, 5 table

The Effect of IoT New Features on Security and Privacy: New Threats, Existing Solutions, and Challenges Yet to Be Solved

The future of Internet of Things (IoT) is already upon us. IoT applications have been widely used in many field of social production and social living such as healthcare, energy and industrial automation. While enjoying the convenience and efficiency that IoT brings to us, new threats from IoT also have emerged. There are increasing research works to ease these threats, but many problems remain open. To better understand the essential reasons of new threats and the challenges in current research, this survey first proposes the concept of "IoT features". Then, the security and privacy effects of eight IoT new features were discussed including the threats they cause, existing solutions and challenges yet to be solved. To help researchers follow the up-to-date works in this field, this paper finally illustrates the developing trend of IoT security research and reveals how IoT features affect existing security research by investigating most existing research works related to IoT security from 2013 to 2017

Blockchain And The Future of the Internet: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization, transparency, and trusted auditability. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentralized database, blockchain finds its applications in fields as varied as the energy sector, forestry, fisheries, mining, material recycling, air pollution monitoring, supply chain management, and their associated operations. In this paper, we present a survey of blockchain-based network applications. Our goal is to cover the evolution of blockchain-based systems that are trying to bring in a renaissance in the existing, mostly centralized, space of network applications. While re-imagining the space with blockchain, we highlight various common challenges, pitfalls, and shortcomings that can occur. Our aim is to make this work as a guiding reference manual for someone interested in shifting towards a blockchain-based solution for one's existing use case or automating one from the ground up.Comment: Under Review in IEEE COMS

Sensor function virtualization to support distributed intelligence in the internet of things

It is estimated that-by 2020-billion devices will be connected to the Internet. This number not only includes TVs, PCs, tablets and smartphones, but also billions of embedded sensors that will make up the "Internet of Things" and enable a whole new range of intelligent services in domains such as manufacturing, health, smart homes, logistics, etc. To some extent, intelligence such as data processing or access control can be placed on the devices themselves. Alternatively, functionalities can be outsourced to the cloud. In reality, there is no single solution that fits all needs. Cooperation between devices, intermediate infrastructures (local networks, access networks, global networks) and/or cloud systems is needed in order to optimally support IoT communication and IoT applications. Through distributed intelligence the right communication and processing functionality will be available at the right place. The first part of this paper motivates the need for such distributed intelligence based on shortcomings in typical IoT systems. The second part focuses on the concept of sensor function virtualization, a potential enabler for distributed intelligence, and presents solutions on how to realize it

Software Defined Security Service Provisioning Framework for Internet of Things

Programmable management framework have paved the way for managing devices in the network. Lately, emerging paradigm of Software Defined Networking (SDN) have revolutionized programmable networks. Designers of networking applications i.e. Internet of things (IoT) have started investigating potentials of SDN paradigm in improving network management. IoT envision interconnecting various embedded devices surrounding our environment with IP to enable internet connectivity. Unlike traditional network architectures, IoT are characterized by constraint in resources and heterogeneous inter connectivity of wireless and wired medium. Therefore, unique challenges for managing IoT are raised which are discussed in this paper. Ubiquity of IoT have raised unique security challenges in IoT which is one of the aspect of management framework for IoT. In this paper, security threats and requirements are summarized in IoT extracted from the state of the art efforts in investigating security challenges of IoT. Also, SDN based security service provisioning framework for IoT is proposed.Comment: 15 pages, 18 figure

The Potential of Critical E-Applications for Engaging SMEs in E Business: A Provider Perspective

YesAgainst a background of the low engagement of SMEs in e-business this paper investigates the emergence of, and potential for, critical e-applications defined as `an e-business application, promoted by a trusted third party, which engages a significant number of SMEs by addressing an important shared business concern within an aggregation.¿ By a review of secondary data and empirical investigation with service providers and other intermediaries the research shows that such applications can facilitate the e-business engagement of SMEs. There are three key findings, namely: the emergence of aggregation specific e-business applications; the emergence of collaboratively based `one to many¿ business models; and the importance of trusted third parties in the adoption of higher complexity e-business applications by SMEs. Significantly this work takes a deliberately provider perspective and complements the already considerable literature on SME IT adoption from a user and network perspective. In terms of future research the importance of a better conceptual understanding of the impact of complexity on the adoption of IT by SMEs is highlighted

Permissioned Blockchain Technologies for Academic Publishing

Academic publishing is continuously evolving with the gradual adoption of new technologies. Blockchain is a new technology that promises to change how individuals and organizations interact across various boundaries. The adoption of blockchains is beginning to transform diverse industries such as finance, supply chain, international trade, as well as energy and resource management and many others. Through trust, data immutability, decentralized distribution of data, and facilitation of collaboration without the need for centralized management and authority, blockchains have the potential to transform the academic publishing domain and to address some of the current problems such as productivity and reputation management, predatory publishing, transparent peer-review processes and many others. In this paper, we outline the technologies available in the domain of permissioned blockchains with focus on Hyperledger Fabric and discuss how they can be leveraged in the domain of academic publishing

Analysis of roles and position of mobile network operators in mobile payment infrastructure

A number of different mobile payment solutions have been presented the last decade. The phone subscription with its security mechanisms are used for user identification and payments. This is the case for SMS based payment and ticketing systems that are getting more and more popular. However, there are other ways to implement a Trusted Element (TE) , where a SIM card architecture is only one. It can be in the mobile phone, as a separate integrated circuit, as an optional customer deployed plug-in device (e.g., microSD) or be running as an application on a server existing entirely as software. In this paper we analyze what roles and responsibilities different actors have in different types of mobile payments solutions. The main focus is on the implications for the mobile operator business. It turns out that new types of intermediary actors in most cases play an important role. Sometimes mobile operators are not even involved. The emergence of new payment together with other non-SIM card based TE solutions opens up for many different market scenarios for mobile payment services. --

The ISTI Rapid Response on Exploring Cloud Computing 2018

This report describes eighteen projects that explored how commercial cloud computing services can be utilized for scientific computation at national laboratories. These demonstrations ranged from deploying proprietary software in a cloud environment to leveraging established cloud-based analytics workflows for processing scientific datasets. By and large, the projects were successful and collectively they suggest that cloud computing can be a valuable computational resource for scientific computation at national laboratories