An assessment of blockchain consensus protocols for the Internet of Things

In a few short years the Internet of Things has become an intrinsic part of everyday life, with connected devices included in products created for homes, cars and even medical equipment. But its rapid growth has created several security problems, with respect to the transmission and storage of vast amounts of customers data, across an insecure heterogeneous collection of networks. The Internet of Things is therefore creating a unique set of risk and problems that will affect most households. From breaches in confidentiality, which could allow users to be snooped on, through to failures in integrity, which could lead to consumer data being compromised; devices are presenting many security challenges to which consumers are ill equipped to protect themselves from. Moreover, when this is coupled with the heterogeneous nature of the industry, and the interoperable and scalability problems it becomes apparent that the Internet of Things has created an increased attack surface from which security vulnerabilities may be easily exploited. However, it has been conjectured that blockchain may provide a solution to the Internet of Things security and scalability problems. Because of blockchain’s immutability, integrity and scalability, it is possible that its architecture could be used for the storage and transfer of Internet of Things data. Within this paper a cross section of blockchain consensus protocols have been assessed against a requirement framework, to establish each consensus protocols strengths and weaknesses with respect to their potential implementation in an Internet of Things blockchain environment

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Rethinking blockchains in the Internet of Things era from a wireless communication perspective

Due to the rapid development of the internet of Things (ioT), a massive number of devices are connected to the internet. For these distributed devices in ioT networks, how to ensure their security and privacy becomes a significant challenge. Blockchain technology provides a promising solution to protect the data integrity, provenance, privacy, and consistency for ioT networks. in blockchains, communication is a prerequisite for participants, which are distributed in the system, to reach consensus. However, in ioT networks, most of the devices communicate through wireless links, which are not always reliable. Hence, the communication reliability of ioT devices influences the system security. in this article, we rethink the roles of communication and computing in blockchains by accounting for communication reliability. We analyze the trade-off between communication reliability and computing power in blockchain security, and present a lower bound to the computing power that is needed to conduct an attack with a given communication reliability. Simulation results show that adversarial nodes can succeed in tampering with a block with less computing power by hindering the propagation of blocks from other nodes

Internet of Things From Hype to Reality

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant mindshare, let alone attention, in academia and the industry especially over the past few years. The reasons behind this interest are the potential capabilities that IoT promises to offer. On the personal level, it paints a picture of a future world where all the things in our ambient environment are connected to the Internet and seamlessly communicate with each other to operate intelligently. The ultimate goal is to enable objects around us to efficiently sense our surroundings, inexpensively communicate, and ultimately create a better environment for us: one where everyday objects act based on what we need and like without explicit instructions

Privacy-by-Design Framework for Assessing Internet of Things Applications and Platforms

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are designed and developed either as standalone applications from the ground-up or with the help of IoT middleware platforms. They are designed to support different kinds of scenarios, such as smart homes and smart cities. Thus far, privacy concerns have not been explicitly considered by IoT ap- plications and middleware platforms. This is partly due to the lack of systematic methods for designing privacy that can guide the software development process in IoT. In this paper, we propose a set of guidelines, a privacy- by-design framework, that can be used to assess privacy capabilities and gaps of existing IoT applications as well as middleware platforms. We have evaluated two open source IoT middleware platforms, namely OpenIoT and Eclipse SmartHome, to demonstrate how our framework can be used in this way

Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

Mobile Technologies Internet of Things Concept Support

Import 26/06/2013Cílem této bakalářské práce je vytvoření mobilní aplikace, která bude schopna načíst čárové kódy a RFID tagy. Tato označení by měla sdělovat informace o pacientovi, které bude možné ukládat do databáze i sledovat v databázi. Tato práce byla řešená v prostředí Eclipse s pluginem ADT, která užívá jazyk Java. Dále byla aplikace testována na mobilním zařízení LG Optimus One P500, Samsung Google Nexus S i9023 a emulátoru.In this Bachelor thesis aims to create a mobile application that will be able to read barcodes and RFID tags. These labels should disclose patient information that can be stored in the database and monitor the database. This work has been addressed in Eclipse with ADT plugin, which uses a Java language. Furthermore, the application was tested on a mobile device, LG Optimus One P500, Samsung and Google emulator.450 - Katedra kybernetiky a biomedicínského inženýrstvívelmi dobř

Designing and implementing a GPS-based vehicle navigation application for Eclipse Kuksa

Abstract. With the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), connected cars are rapidly becoming an essential milestone in the design of intelligent transportation systems and a key element in smart city design. Connected cars use a three-layer client-connection-cloud architecture, and car sensors are located at the client layer. This architecture provides the driver with a large amount of data about the external environment, which reduces the number of traffic accidents and helps the car drive safely. Driving safety is the most critical design factor for next-generation vehicles. The future vision of the automotive industry is self-driving cars. However, it faces some challenges. Eclipse Kuksa provides solutions to challenges in the field of connected cars. A comprehensive ecosystem includes a complete tool stack for connected vehicles, including a vehicle platform, a cloud platform, and an application development Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Its essential function is to collect, store, and analyze vehicle data and transmit various information in the cloud. This master’s thesis aims to investigate a Global Positioning System (GPS) -based vehicle navigation application on the vehicle and cloud platforms of Eclipse Kuksa, understand how to develop a GPS-based vehicle navigation application using the Eclipse Kuksa software platform, and discuss the advantages and challenges of using Eclipse Kuksa to develop vehicle applications. The research methods are Design Science Research (DSR) and literature review. System development is carried out following the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) Process, developed and evaluated on the vehicle navigation application. The application artifact consists of the Eclipse Kuksa vehicle platform and cloud platform. The steps described in this paper can be used to build vehicle applications in Eclipse Kuksa. This paper also explains the benefits and challenges of using Eclipse Kuksa to develop vehicle applications. The main benefit is that open source solutions break the long-term closed development model of the automotive industry and establish a vehicle-to-cloud solution standard to meet the IoT challenges to the automotive industry. Simultaneously the challenge of using Eclipse Kuksa is the complexity of environment construction and the software and hardware compatibility