A Novel IoT Trust Model Leveraging Fully Distributed Behavioral Fingerprinting and Secure Delegation

With the number of connected smart devices expected to constantly grow in the next years, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are experimenting a booming demand to make data collection and processing easier. The ability of IoT appliances to provide pervasive and better support to everyday tasks, in most cases transparently to humans, is also achieved through the high degree of autonomy of such devices. However, the higher the number of new capabilities and services provided in an autonomous way, the wider the attack surface that exposes users to data hacking and lost. In this scenario, many critical challenges arise also because IoT devices have heterogeneous computational capabilities (i.e., in the same network there might be simple sensors/actuators as well as more complex and smart nodes). In this paper, we try to provide a contribution in this setting, tackling the non-trivial issues of equipping smart things with a strategy to evaluate, also through their neighbors, the trustworthiness of an object in the network before interacting with it. To do so, we design a novel and fully distributed trust model exploiting devices' behavioral fingerprints, a distributed consensus mechanism and the Blockchain technology. Beyond the detailed description of our framework, we also illustrate the security model associated with it and the tests carried out to evaluate its correctness and performance

Blockchain Driven Access Control Mechanisms, Models and Frameworks: A Systematic Literature Review

Access control or authorization is referred to as the confinement of specific actions of an entity, thereby allowing them to be performed as per certain rules. Blockchain-driven access control mechanisms gained considerable attention directly after applications beyond the premise of cryptocurrency were found. However, there are no systematic efforts to analyze existing empirical evidence. To this end, we aim to synthesize litera- ture to understand the state-of-the-art blockchain driven access control mechanisms with respect to underlying platforms, utilized blockchain properties, nature of the mod- els and associated testbeds and tools. We conducted the review in a systematic way. Meta analysis and thematic synthesis were performed on the findings from relevant primary studies, in order to answer the framed research questions in perspective. We identified 76 relevant primary studies that passed the quality assessment.  The problems targeted by relevant studies were single point of failure, security, and privacy, etc. The meta-analysis of the primary studies suggests the use of different blockchain platforms along with several application domains where different blockchain proprieties were utilized. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of blockchain driven access control systems. In hindsight, we present a taxonomy of blockchain-driven access control systems to better understand the immense implications of this field spanning various application domain

Blockchain Technology and its Applications Across Multiple Domains: A Survey

Blockchain technology has become an active area of research and a technological option for many businesses and industrial communities. With its distributed, decentralized, and trustless nature, blockchain can provide businesses with new opportunities and benefits through increased efficiency, reduced costs, enhanced integrity and transparency, better security, and improved traceability. Although blockchain’s largest applications have been in the finance and banking sector, we now see experiments and proposed applications in different fields. This paper provides an overview of blockchain technology; it brings together all the key design features, characteristics, and benefits of blockchain that make it a superior and unique technology, and it presents the popular consensus protocols and taxonomy of blockchain systems. Additionally, the paper surveys blockchain-based applications across multiple domains such as in finance, insurance, supply chain management, energy, advertising and media, real estate and healthcare. It aims at examining the industries’ key issues, blockchain solutions and use cases. The paper highlights three broad limitations that blockchain technology presents: scalability, security, and regulation, and shows how these challenges could impact blockchain application and adoption

Investigating the Skills and Knowledge Requirements for IOT implementation in Construction

In line with the exponential rate of advancement in information technologies within industries globally, the construction industry has stepped out of the conventional technologies to embrace smart technologies. Internet of Things (IoT) is one such technological advancement in construction although the improvement is taking place at a glacial pace. Internet of Things (IoT) allows stakeholders in construction to collect real-time data from a construction site and transform them into useful information for better insights. It enables construction industry to become smarter, safer and more efficient. Moreover, for a construction industry increasingly looking at boosting productivity, maximizing efficiencies and making the most whole-life value through added intelligence, it's not too difficult to see the demanding potential of IoT technologies to offer the latter expectations. However, lack of skills and knowledge to match this digital demand has been a prominent issue in construction. Although this skill gap is often dominated by the diminishing supply of manual labour, the lack of digital and non-digital skills is an equally pressing concern. Upskilling existing workforce is a simple yet effective way to combat this skills gap. This paper therefore investigates the Skills and Knowledge Requirements to implement IOT in Construction. An empirical investigation conducted in construction industry, United Kingdom enabled the envisaging of the skill-knowledge requirement not only present but also for future

Distributed Ledger Technology: State-of-the-Art and Current Challenges

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is making the first steps toward becoming a solution for the growing number of various decentralized systems world wide. Unlike pure Blockchain, DLT finds many uses across different industries, including eHealth, finance, supply chain monitoring, and the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the vital DLT features is the ability to provide an immutable and commonly verifiable ledger for larger-scale and highly complex systems. Today’s centralized systems can no longer guarantee the required level of availability and reliability due to the growing number of the involved nodes, complicated heterogeneous architectures, and task load, while the publicly available distributed systems are still in their infancy. This paper aims to provide an exhaustive topical review of the state-of-the art of Distributed Ledger Technology applicability in various sectors. It outlines the importance of the practical integration of technology-related challenges, as well as potential solutions

Advanced technologies and international business : A multidisciplinary analysis of the literature

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The AuthorsAdvanced digital technologies, such as the Internet of Things, blockchain, big data analytics and augmented reality, are gradually transforming the way multinational firms do business. Due to the extent of this transformation many scholars argue that the integration of these technologies marks the commencement of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). However, the question how these advanced technologies impact international business activities needs further attention. To this end, we adopt a multidisciplinary approach to review the related literature in international business (IB), general management, information systems, and operations research. We include the two latter fields, because advanced technologies have received more attention in these bodies of literature. Based on our analysis, we discuss the implications of these technologies for international business. Further, we highlight the drivers of technology utilisation by multinational firms and likely outcomes. We also provide future research avenues.Peer reviewe

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

AWESOME: an auction and witness enhanced SLA model for decentralized cloud marketplaces

In recent decades, the world has witnessed cloud computing as an essential technology that changes the traditional application Development and Operation (DevOps) lifecycle. However, current cloud software DevOps and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management often face challenges of 1) selecting the best fitting service providers, customizing services and planning capacities for large-scale distributed applications; 2) guaranteeing high-quality and trustworthy SLAs among multiple service providers; 3) enhancing the interoperability of cloud services across different providers; and 4) designing effective incentive models among stakeholders. This paper proposes a novel framework called Auction and Witness Enhanced trustworthy SLA for Open, decentralized service MarkEtplaces (AWESOME) to build a trustworthy cloud marketplace and address the above challenges. The proposed framework contains four subsystems: a customizable graphical user interface, an auction-based service selection model, a witness committee management mechanism, and a smart contract factory orchestration. We developed a prototype AWESOME decentralized application (DApp) based on the Ethereum blockchain. Extensive experiments are designed to evaluate the latency and cost of our model. The experimental results demonstrate that our model is economical and feasible.publishedVersio