Blockchain in maritime cybersecurity

Blockchain technologies can be used for many different purposes from handling large amounts of data to creating better solutions for privacy protection, user authentication and a tamper proof ledger which lead to growing interest among industries. Smart contracts, fog nodes and different consensus methods create a scalable environment to secure multi-party connections with equal trust of participanting nodes’ identity. Different blockchains have multiple options for methodologies to use in different environments. This thesis has focused on Ethereum based open-source solutions that fit the remote pilotage environment the best. Autonomous vehicular networks and remote operatable devices have been a popular research topic in the last few years. Remote pilotage in maritime environment is persumed to reach its full potential with fully autonomous vessels in ten years which makes the topic interesting for all researchers. However cybersecurity in these environments is especially important because incidents can lead to financial loss, reputational damage, loss of customer and industry trust and environmental damage. These complex environments also have multiple attack vectors because of the systems wireless nature. Denial-of-service (DoS), man-in-the-middle (MITM), message or executable code injection, authentication tampering and GPS spoofing are one of the most usual attacks against large IoT systems. This is why blockchain can be used for creating a tamper proof environment with no single point-of-failure. After extensive research about best performing blockchain technologies Ethereum seemed the most preferable for decentralised maritime environment. In comparison to most of 2021 blockchain technologies that have focused on financial industries and cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has focused on decentralizing applications within many different industries. This thesis provides three Ethereum based blockchain protocol solutions and one operating system for these protocols. All have different features that add to the base blockchain technology but after extensive comparison two of these protocols perform better in means of concurrency and privacy. Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum provide many ways of tackling privacy, concurrency and parallel execution issues with consistent high throughput levels. However Hyperledger Fabric has far better throughput and concurrency management. This makes the solution of Firefly operating system with Hyperledger Fabric blockchain protocol the most preferable solution in complex remote pilotage fairway environment

Secure Decentralized IoT Service Platform using Consortium Blockchain

Blockchain technology has gained increasing popularity in the research of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the past decade. As a distributed and immutable ledger secured by strong cryptography algorithms, the blockchain brings a new perspective to secure IoT systems. Many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy. In comparison, the blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is much less studied. Nonetheless, we see the potential of blockchain in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. This paper proposes an innovative IoT service platform powered by consortium blockchain technology. The presented solution abstracts machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) communications into services provided by IoT devices. Then, it materializes data exchange of the IoT network through smart contracts and blockchain transactions. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary storage layer to the proposed platform to address various data storage requirements. Our proof-of-concept implementation is tested against various workloads and connection sizes under different block configurations to evaluate the platform's transaction throughput, latency, and hardware utilization. The experiment results demonstrate that our solution can maintain high performance under most testing scenarios and provide valuable insights on optimizing the blockchain configuration to achieve the best performance

Rational Cybersecurity for Business

Use the guidance in this comprehensive field guide to gain the support of your top executives for aligning a rational cybersecurity plan with your business. You will learn how to improve working relationships with stakeholders in complex digital businesses, IT, and development environments. You will know how to prioritize your security program, and motivate and retain your team. Misalignment between security and your business can start at the top at the C-suite or happen at the line of business, IT, development, or user level. It has a corrosive effect on any security project it touches. But it does not have to be like this. Author Dan Blum presents valuable lessons learned from interviews with over 70 security and business leaders. You will discover how to successfully solve issues related to: risk management, operational security, privacy protection, hybrid cloud management, security culture and user awareness, and communication challenges. This open access book presents six priority areas to focus on to maximize the effectiveness of your cybersecurity program: risk management, control baseline, security culture, IT rationalization, access control, and cyber-resilience. Common challenges and good practices are provided for businesses of different types and sizes. And more than 50 specific keys to alignment are included. What You Will Learn Improve your security culture: clarify security-related roles, communicate effectively to businesspeople, and hire, motivate, or retain outstanding security staff by creating a sense of efficacy Develop a consistent accountability model, information risk taxonomy, and risk management framework Adopt a security and risk governance model consistent with your business structure or culture, manage policy, and optimize security budgeting within the larger business unit and CIO organization IT spend Tailor a control baseline to your organization’s maturity level, regulatory requirements, scale, circumstances, and critical assets Help CIOs, Chief Digital Officers, and other executives to develop an IT strategy for curating cloud solutions and reducing shadow IT, building up DevSecOps and Disciplined Agile, and more Balance access control and accountability approaches, leverage modern digital identity standards to improve digital relationships, and provide data governance and privacy-enhancing capabilities Plan for cyber-resilience: work with the SOC, IT, business groups, and external sources to coordinate incident response and to recover from outages and come back stronger Integrate your learnings from this book into a quick-hitting rational cybersecurity success plan Who This Book Is For Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and other heads of security, security directors and managers, security architects and project leads, and other team members providing security leadership to your busines

Blockchains for use in construction and engineering projects

This chapter describes blockchains and illustrates this explanation using the results of a prototype project for an industrial application for a construction project. The chapter describes the application and how modular software components can be used to assemble a blockchain solution. The chapter concludes with a design of the system architecture. The background to blockchain technology includes a description of the evolving nature due to communal, open software consortia and an accelerated prototyping of systems. Four recommendations are made in the chapter. These include the need to form consortia for prototyping applications, encouraging government involvement, the need for engagement with the open software development community, and the suggestion that systems should be designed to support Lean production. A final section offers a range of discussion topics on the current state of the technology and where to expect area of increased interest. These are summarized in three areas: Lean management, Industry 4.0 and smart cities, and topics around privacy and security

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches

Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) Method and Its Applications in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud

The integration of cyber-physical systems and cloud manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize existing manufacturing systems by enabling better accessibility, agility, and efficiency. To achieve this, it is necessary to establish a communication method of manufacturing services over the Internet to access and manage physical machines from cloud applications. Most of the existing industrial automation protocols utilize Ethernet based Local Area Network (LAN) and are not designed specifically for Internet enabled data transmission. Recently MTConnect has been gaining popularity as a standard for monitoring status of machine tools through RESTful web services and an XML based messaging structure, but it is only designed for data collection and interpretation and lacks remote operation capability. This dissertation presents the design, development, optimization, and applications of a service-oriented Internet-scale communication method named Machine Tool Communication (MTComm) for exchanging manufacturing services in a Cyber-Physical Manufacturing Cloud (CPMC) to enable manufacturing with heterogeneous physically connected machine tools from geographically distributed locations over the Internet. MTComm uses an agent-adapter based architecture and a semantic ontology to provide both remote monitoring and operation capabilities through RESTful services and XML messages. MTComm was successfully used to develop and implement multi-purpose applications in in a CPMC including remote and collaborative manufacturing, active testing-based and edge-based fault diagnosis and maintenance of machine tools, cross-domain interoperability between Internet-of-things (IoT) devices and supply chain robots etc. To improve MTComm’s overall performance, efficiency, and acceptability in cyber manufacturing, the concept of MTComm’s edge-based middleware was introduced and three optimization strategies for data catching, transmission, and operation execution were developed and adopted at the edge. Finally, a hardware prototype of the middleware was implemented on a System-On-Chip based FPGA device to reduce computational and transmission latency. At every stage of its development, MTComm’s performance and feasibility were evaluated with experiments in a CPMC testbed with three different types of manufacturing machine tools. Experimental results demonstrated MTComm’s excellent feasibility for scalable cyber-physical manufacturing and superior performance over other existing approaches

Edge computing platforms for Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to transform many domains of human activity, enabled by the collection of data from the physical world at a massive scale. As the projected growth of IoT data exceeds that of available network capacity, transferring it to centralized cloud data centers is infeasible. Edge computing aims to solve this problem by processing data at the edge of the network, enabling applications with specialized requirements that cloud computing cannot meet. The current market of platforms that support building IoT applications is very fragmented, with offerings available from hundreds of companies with no common architecture. This threatens the realization of IoT's potential: with more interoperability, a new class of applications that combine the collected data and use it in new ways could emerge. In this thesis, promising IoT platforms for edge computing are surveyed. First, an understanding of current challenges in the field is gained through studying the available literature on the topic. Second, IoT edge platforms having the most potential to meet these challenges are chosen and reviewed for their capabilities. Finally, the platforms are compared against each other, with a focus on their potential to meet the challenges learned in the first part. The work shows that AWS IoT for the edge and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge have mature feature sets. However, these platforms are tied to their respective cloud platforms, limiting interoperability and the possibility of switching providers. On the other hand, open source EdgeX Foundry and KubeEdge have the potential for more standardization and interoperability in IoT but are limited in functionality for building practical IoT applications

Intelligent Personal Assistants Solutions in Ubiquitous Environments in the Context of Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) will create the opportunity to develop new types of businesses. Every tangible object, biologic or not, will be identified by a unique address, creating a common network composed by billions of devices. Those devices will have different requirements, creating the necessity of finding new mechanisms to satisfy the needs of all the entities within the network. This is one of the main problems that all the scientific community should address in order to make Internet of Things the Future Internet. Currently, IoT is used in a lot of projects involving Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Sensors are generally cheap and small devices able to generate useful information from physical indicators. They can be used on smart home scenarios, or even on healthcare environments, turning sensors into useful devices to accomplish the goals of many use case scenarios. Sensors and other devices with some reasoning capabilities, like smart objects, can be used to create smart environments. The interaction between the objects in those scenarios and humans can be eased by the inclusion of Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs). Currently, IPAs have good reasoning capabilities, improving the assistance they give to their owners. Artificial intelligence (AI), new learning mechanisms, and the evolution assisted in speech technology also contributed to this improvement. The integration of IPAs in IoT scenarios can become a case of great success. IPAs will comprehend the behavior of their owners not only through direct interactions, but also by the interactions they have with other objects in the environment. This may create ubiquitous communication scenarios where humans act as passive elements, being adequately informed of all the aspects of interest that surrounds them. The communication between IPAs and other objects in their surrounding environment may use gateways for traffic forwarding. On ubiquitous environments devices can be mobile or static. For example, in smart home scenarios, objects are generally static, being always on the same position. In mobile health scenarios, objects can move from one place to another. To turn IPAs useful on all types of environments, static and mobile gateways should be developed. On this dissertation, a novel mobile gateway solution for an IPA platform inserted on an IoT context is proposed. A mobile health scenario was chosen. Then, a Body Sensor Network (BSN) is always monitoring a person, giving the real time feedback of his/her health status to another person responsible by him (designated caretaker). On this scenario, a mobile gateway is needed to forward the traffic between the BSN and the IPA of the caretaker. Therefore, the IPA is able to give warnings about the health status of the person under monitoring, in real time. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype, where the more important aspects for IPAs and IoT networks are considered

Data trust framework using blockchain and smart contracts

Lack of trust is the main barrier preventing more widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent and reliable infrastructure for data sharing prevents many data owners from sharing their data. Data trust is a paradigm that facilitates data sharing by forcing data controllers to be transparent about the process of sharing and reusing data. Blockchain technology has the potential to present the essential properties for creating a practical and secure data trust framework by transforming current auditing practices and automatic enforcement of smart contracts logic without relying on intermediaries to establish trust. Blockchain holds an enormous potential to remove the barriers of traditional centralized applications and propose a distributed and transparent administration by employing the involved parties to maintain consensus on the ledger. Furthermore, smart contracts are a programmable component that provides blockchain with more flexible and powerful capabilities. Recent advances in blockchain platforms toward smart contracts' development have revealed the possibility of implementing blockchain-based applications in various domains, such as health care, supply chain and digital identity. This dissertation investigates the blockchain's potential to present a framework for data trust. It starts with a comprehensive study of smart contracts as the main component of blockchain for developing decentralized data trust. Interrelated, three decentralized applications that address data sharing and access control problems in various fields, including healthcare data sharing, business process, and physical access control system, have been developed and examined. In addition, a general-purpose application based on an attribute-based access control model is proposed that can provide trusted auditability required for data sharing and access control systems and, ultimately, a data trust framework. Besides auditing, the system presents a transparency level that both access requesters (data users) and resource owners (data controllers) can benefit from. The proposed solutions have been validated through a use case of independent digital libraries. It also provides a detailed performance analysis of the system implementation. The performance results have been compared based on different consensus mechanisms and databases, indicating the system's high throughput and low latency. Finally, this dissertation presents an end-to-end data trust framework based on blockchain technology. The proposed framework promotes data trustworthiness by assessing input datasets, effectively managing access control, and presenting data provenance and activity monitoring. A trust assessment model that examines the trustworthiness of input data sets and calculates the trust value is presented. The number of transaction validators is defined adaptively with the trust value. This research provides solutions for both data owners and data users’ by ensuring the trustworthiness and quality of the data at origin and transparent and secure usage of the data at the end. A comprehensive experimental study indicates the presented system effectively handles a large number of transactions with low latency