Blockchain Applicability for the Internet of Things: Performance and Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Blockchain has recently been able to draw wider attention throughout the research community. Since its emergence, the world has seen the mind-blowing expansion of this new technology, which was initially developed as a pawn of digital currency more than a decade back. A self-administering ledger that ensures extensive data immutability over the peer-to-peer network has made it attractive for cybersecurity applications such as a sensor-enabled system called the Internet of things (IoT). Brand new challenges and questions now demand solutions as huge IoT devices are now online in a distributed fashion to ease our everyday lives. After being motivated by those challenges, the work here has figured out the issues and perspectives an IoT infrastructure can suffer because of the wrong choice of blockchain technology. Though it may look like a typical review, however, unlike that, this paper targets sorting out the specific security challenges of the blockchain-IoT eco-system through critical findings and applicable use-cases. Therefore, the contribution includes directing Blockchain architects, designers, and researchers in the broad domain to select the unblemished combinations of Blockchain-powered IoT applications. In addition, the paper promises to bring a deep insight into the state-of-the-art Blockchain platforms, namely Ethereum, Hyperledger, and IOTA, to exhibit the respective challenges, constraints, and prospects in terms of performance and scalability

Certificateless cryptography with KGC trust level 3

A normal certificateless cryptosystem can only achieve KGC trust level 2 according to the trust hierarchy defined by Girault. Although in the seminal paper introducing certificateless cryptography, Al-Riyami and Paterson introduced a binding technique to lift the KGC trust level of their certificateless schemes to level 3, many subsequent work on certificateless cryptography just focused on the constructions of normal certificateless schemes, and a formal study on the general applicability of the binding technique to these existing schemes is still missing. In this paper, to address the KGC trust level issue, we introduce the notion of Key Dependent Certificateless Cryptography (KD-CLC). Compared with conventional certificateless cryptography, KD-CLC can achieve stronger security, and more importantly, KGC trust level 3. We then study generic techniques for transforming conventional CLC to KD-CLC. We start with the binding technique by Al-Riyami and Paterson, and show that there are some technical difficulties in proving that the binding technique is generally applicable. However, we show that a slightly modified version of the binding technique indeed can be proved to work under the random oracle assumption. Finally, we show how to perform the transformation using a standard cryptographic primitive instead of a random oracle