5,069 research outputs found
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
Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: A comparative framework of the main Architectural Drivers
Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management solution, the
technological weapon-of-choice behind the success of Bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies. As the number and variety of existing blockchain
implementations continues to increase, adopters should focus on selecting the
best one to support their decentralized applications (dApps), rather than
developing new ones from scratch. In this paper we present a framework to aid
software architects, developers, tool selectors and decision makers to adopt
the right blockchain technology for their problem at hand. The framework
exposes the correlation between technological decisions and architectural
features, capturing the knowledge from existing industrial products, technical
forums/blogs, experts' feedback and academic literature; plus our own
experience using and developing blockchain-based applications. We validate our
framework by applying it to dissect the most outstanding blockchain platforms,
i.e., the ones behind the top 10 cryptocurrencies apart from Bitcoin. Then, we
show how we applied it to a real-world case study in the insurtech domain
A Reference Architecture for Blockchain-based Peer-to-Peer IoT Applications
The advent of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies enable IoT and
smart city application developers to conceive new types of applications and
solutions for identity management, trust, and data monetization. However,
architecting blockchain-based IoT applications remain challenging due to the
heterogeneous nature of blockchain platforms and lack of guidelines on how to
interface existing components in the IoT ecosystem with the emerging Blockchain
technology. This article explains the characteristics of blockchain and IoT
technologies and presents a general reference architecture that can be used to
develop many blockchain-based peer-to-peer IoT applications
On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies
The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of
our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and
objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical
world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there
are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be
addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy,
energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and
its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of
these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without
considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth
overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the
main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies
and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the
shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.Comment: Includes 11 Pages, 3 Figures, To publish in Journal of Strategic
Innovation and Sustainability for issue JSIS 14(1
Internet of Things: Survey on Security and Privacy
The Internet of Things (IoT) is intended for ubiquitous connectivity among
different entities or "things". While its purpose is to provide effective and
efficient solutions, security of the devices and network is a challenging
issue. The number of devices connected along with the ad-hoc nature of the
system further exacerbates the situation. Therefore, security and privacy has
emerged as a significant challenge for the IoT. In this paper,we aim to provide
a thorough survey related to the privacy and security challenges of the IoT.
This document addresses these challenges from the perspective of technologies
and architecture used. This work focuses also in IoT intrinsic vulnerabilities
as well as the security challenges of various layers based on the security
principles of data confidentiality, integrity and availability. This survey
analyzes articles published for the IoT at the time and relates it to the
security conjuncture of the field and its projection to the future.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure
A Review on the Application of Blockchain for the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories
Industry 4.0 is a concept devised for improving the way modern factories
operate through the use of some of the latest technologies, like the ones used
for creating Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robotics or Big Data
applications. One of such technologies is blockchain, which is able to add
trust, security and decentralization to different industrial fields. This
article focuses on analyzing the benefits and challenges that arise when using
blockchain and smart contracts to develop Industry 4.0 applications. In
addition, this paper presents a thorough review on the most relevant
blockchain-based applications for Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, its aim is
to provide a detailed guide for future Industry 4.0 developers that allows for
determining how blockchain can enhance the next generation of cybersecure
industrial applications
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 Role of Big Data Analytics in Industrial Internet of Things
Big data production in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is evident due to
the massive deployment of sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
However, big data processing is challenging due to limited computational,
networking and storage resources at IoT device-end. Big data analytics (BDA) is
expected to provide operational- and customer-level intelligence in IIoT
systems. Although numerous studies on IIoT and BDA exist, only a few studies
have explored the convergence of the two paradigms. In this study, we
investigate the recent BDA technologies, algorithms and techniques that can
lead to the development of intelligent IIoT systems. We devise a taxonomy by
classifying and categorising the literature on the basis of important
parameters (e.g. data sources, analytics tools, analytics techniques,
requirements, industrial analytics applications and analytics types). We
present the frameworks and case studies of the various enterprises that have
benefited from BDA. We also enumerate the considerable opportunities introduced
by BDA in IIoT.We identify and discuss the indispensable challenges that remain
to be addressed as future research directions as well
PlaTIBART: a Platform for Transactive IoT Blockchain Applications with Repeatable Testing
With the advent of blockchain-enabled IoT applications, there is an increased
need for related software patterns, middleware concepts, and testing practices
to ensure adequate quality and productivity. IoT and blockchain each provide
different design goals, concepts, and practices that must be integrated,
including the distributed actor model and fault tolerance from IoT and
transactive information integrity over untrustworthy sources from blockchain.
Both IoT and blockchain are emerging technologies and both lack codified
patterns and practices for development of applications when combined. This
paper describes PlaTIBART, which is a platform for transactive IoT blockchain
applications with repeatable testing that combines the Actor pattern (which is
a commonly used model of computation in IoT) together with a custom Domain
Specific Language (DSL) and test network management tools. We show how
PlaTIBART has been applied to develop, test, and analyze fault-tolerant IoT
blockchain applications.Comment: Workshop on Middleware and Applications for the Internet of Things
(M4IoT) 201
Blockchain access control Ecosystem for Big Data security
In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has experienced an
explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields,
but also given rise to concerns the security and protection of data storage,
transmission, processing, and access to data. The blockchain is a distributed
ledger that records transactions in a secure, flexible, verifiable and
permanent way. Transactions in a blockchain can be an exchange of an asset, the
execution of the terms of a smart contract, or an update to a record. In this
paper, we have developed a blockchain access control ecosystem that gives asset
owners the sovereign right to effectively manage access control of large data
sets and protect against data breaches. The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger
Fabric blockchain is used to run the business network while the Hyperledger
composer tool is used to implement the smart contracts or transaction
processing functions that run on the blockchain network
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