Energy consideration when integrating Blockchain with IoT for anti-counterfeit

Blockchain technology has been growing in popularity after Bitcoin, the first protocol has demonstrated a strong use case of the technology in Finance. Over the years, as the technology develops more and more, other use cases for the technology which basically relies on a distributed ledger database system have been explored in areas like supply chain and Internet of Things, to help in some of the bottleneck which IoT faces, some of the challenges are security, privacy, scalability, etc. This thesis work will consider energy consumption when integrating IoT with the Blockchain for anti-counterfeit purposes. Because there is little public academic information about the integration of Blockchain with IoT, it is very difficult to ascertain quantitatively, the energy requirement in application areas like anti-counterfeit. This thesis work has to qualitatively, rely on projects whitepapers and application documentation when comparing the energy requirement in the integration of Blockchain and IoT used for counterfeit solutions by different projects. Both private and public (open-sourced) projects were considered and resulted in two broad classifications ‘integration by brands using a unique identifier (RFID and NFC)’ and ‘integration throughout a product lifecycle’. Energy need for each project(s) in a class is considered based on the IoT hardware used and the Blockchain generation and consensus which also seems to have an impact on the implementation cost and complexity of the project

SLEC: A Novel Serverless RFID Authentication Protocol Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the leading technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) to create an efficient and reliable system to securely identify objects in many environments such as business, health, and manufacturing areas. Since the RFID server, reader, and tag communicate via insecure channels, mutual authentication between the reader and the tag is necessary for secure communication. The central database server supports the authentication of the reader and the tag by storing and managing the network data. Recent lightweight RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to satisfy the security features of RFID communication. A serverless RFID system is a new promising solution to alternate the central database for mobile RFID models. In this model, the reader and the tag perform the mutual authentication without the support of the central database server. However, many security challenges arise from implementing the lightweight RFID authentication protocols in the serverless RFID network. We propose a new robust serverless RFID authentication protocol based on the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) to prevent the security attacks on the network and maintain the confidentiality and the privacy of the authentication messages and tag information and location. While most of the current protocols assume a secure channel in the setup phase to transmit the communication data, we consider in our protocol an insecure setup phase between the server, reader, and tag to ensure that the data can be renewed from any checkpoint server along with the route of the mobile RFID network. Thus, we implemented the elliptic curve cryptography in the setup phase (renewal phase) to transmit and store the data and the public key of the server to any reader or tag so that the latter can perform the mutual authentication successfully. The proposed model is compared under the classification of the serverless model in term of computation cost and security resistance

Animal Identification and Traceability Under the US National Animal Identification System

The identification of animals has a long history in the United States. Since the late nineteenth century, livestock producers have used brands to mark their animals. Ear tags and other marks now identify individual animals or animals from a specific producer, but not all livestock are identified to facilitate traceability