On the Convergence of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) Technologies

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy, energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.Comment: Includes 11 Pages, 3 Figures, To publish in Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability for issue JSIS 14(1

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 1 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 9 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 11 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 12 Advertisements IEEE

The conditions for implementing a circular economy in the Czech Republic

In July 2018, measures of the European Commission regarding the Circular Economy Package (CEP) came into force. All EU Member States have two years since to implement these measures into their national legislations. The aim of the authors is, using available resources, to evaluate current conditions in the Czech Republic in the areas affected by this legislation. It is primarily the area of waste management, which has set values within the CEP that must be achieved within those two years. The article offers an analysis of the circular economy penetration into the Czech legislation. The procedure for introducing changes in legislation is presented through the Waste Management Plan (WMP) for the period 2015-2024. The aim of the article is to verify whether whether the Czech Republic is able to meet the EU and WMP's requirements in the current development of waste management. The authors are first to use the analysis of secondary data from national and transnational sources, from which they created unique and original outcomes for the given issue. After the analysis, they introduced the measures that could be used for the greater motivation of the target groups in order to meet the goals of the Czech Republic. The authors address the concrete impacts of CEP implementation within the Czech Republic and also present Czech examples of good practice.Web of Science24437536

Recent Advances in Internet of Things and Emerging Social Internet of Things: Vision, Challenges and Trends

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT), together with its related emerging technologies, has been driving a revolution in the way people perceive and interact with the surrounding environment [...

Malware in the Future? Forecasting of Analyst Detection of Cyber Events

There have been extensive efforts in government, academia, and industry to anticipate, forecast, and mitigate cyber attacks. A common approach is time-series forecasting of cyber attacks based on data from network telescopes, honeypots, and automated intrusion detection/prevention systems. This research has uncovered key insights such as systematicity in cyber attacks. Here, we propose an alternate perspective of this problem by performing forecasting of attacks that are analyst-detected and -verified occurrences of malware. We call these instances of malware cyber event data. Specifically, our dataset was analyst-detected incidents from a large operational Computer Security Service Provider (CSSP) for the U.S. Department of Defense, which rarely relies only on automated systems. Our data set consists of weekly counts of cyber events over approximately seven years. Since all cyber events were validated by analysts, our dataset is unlikely to have false positives which are often endemic in other sources of data. Further, the higher-quality data could be used for a number for resource allocation, estimation of security resources, and the development of effective risk-management strategies. We used a Bayesian State Space Model for forecasting and found that events one week ahead could be predicted. To quantify bursts, we used a Markov model. Our findings of systematicity in analyst-detected cyber attacks are consistent with previous work using other sources. The advanced information provided by a forecast may help with threat awareness by providing a probable value and range for future cyber events one week ahead. Other potential applications for cyber event forecasting include proactive allocation of resources and capabilities for cyber defense (e.g., analyst staffing and sensor configuration) in CSSPs. Enhanced threat awareness may improve cybersecurity.Comment: Revised version resubmitted to journa