A Review on the Application of Blockchain for the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories

Industry 4.0 is a concept devised for improving the way modern factories operate through the use of some of the latest technologies, like the ones used for creating Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robotics or Big Data applications. One of such technologies is blockchain, which is able to add trust, security and decentralization to different industrial fields. This article focuses on analyzing the benefits and challenges that arise when using blockchain and smart contracts to develop Industry 4.0 applications. In addition, this paper presents a thorough review on the most relevant blockchain-based applications for Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, its aim is to provide a detailed guide for future Industry 4.0 developers that allows for determining how blockchain can enhance the next generation of cybersecure industrial applications

Blockchain-based Smart Contracts - Applications and Challenges

A blockchain-based smart contract or a "smart contract" for short, is a computer program intended to digitally facilitate the negotiation or contractual terms directly between users when certain conditions are met. With the advance in blockchain technology, smart contracts are being used to serve a wide range of purposes ranging from self-managed identities on public blockchains to automating business collaboration on permissioned blockchains. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of smart contracts with a focus on existing applications and challenges they face

Permissioned Blockchain Technologies for Academic Publishing

Academic publishing is continuously evolving with the gradual adoption of new technologies. Blockchain is a new technology that promises to change how individuals and organizations interact across various boundaries. The adoption of blockchains is beginning to transform diverse industries such as finance, supply chain, international trade, as well as energy and resource management and many others. Through trust, data immutability, decentralized distribution of data, and facilitation of collaboration without the need for centralized management and authority, blockchains have the potential to transform the academic publishing domain and to address some of the current problems such as productivity and reputation management, predatory publishing, transparent peer-review processes and many others. In this paper, we outline the technologies available in the domain of permissioned blockchains with focus on Hyperledger Fabric and discuss how they can be leveraged in the domain of academic publishing

Co-simulation Framework for Blockchain Based Market Designs and Grid Simulations

The increased penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) on the distribution network creates local challenges in balancing consumption and generation. To coordinate the roll-out and the operation of DERs, distribution-level energy markets have been proposed, but there are currently few tools for simulating the operation of DERs in these proposed markets. We present a framework which utilizes a grid co- simulation platform (Mosaik) to simulation DER operation, while simulating market clearing operations with a blockchain network (Ethereum). The use of blockchains, an emerging technology for decentralized computing and data storage, allows us to model secure decentralized execution of market clearing functions and payment processes. By unifying simulation of market clearing rules and the physical grid, we are able to ensure that economic incentives are aligned with physical constraints, helping facilitate the development of more effective distributed energy markets. We demonstrate the use of this new simulation platform on a small feeder, for which a market mechanism to incentivize DER integration is explored

A Survey on Consensus Protocols in Blockchain for IoT Networks

The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its inherent security mechanisms and immunity to different attacks. A blockchain relies on a consensus method for agreeing on any new data. Most of the consensus methods which are currently used for the blockchain of different cryptocurrencies require high computational power and thus are not apt for resource-constrained systems. In this article, we discuss and survey the various blockchain based consensus methods that are applicable to resource constrained IoT devices and networks. A typical IoT network consists of several devices which have limited computational and communications capabilities. Most often, these devices cannot perform intensive computations and are starved for bandwidth. Therefore, we discuss the possible measures that can be taken to reduce the computational power and convergence time for the underlying consensus methods. We also talk about some of the alternatives to the public blockchain like private blockchain and tangle, along with their potential adoption for IoT networks. Furthermore, we review the existing consensus methods that have been implemented and explore the possibility of utilizing them to realize a blockchain based IoT network. Some of the open research challenges are also put forward.Comment: This paper is submitted to IEEE Internet of Things Journal. It is under revie

Blockchain And The Future of the Internet: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain is challenging the status quo of the central trust infrastructure currently prevalent in the Internet towards a design principle that is underscored by decentralization, transparency, and trusted auditability. In ideal terms, blockchain advocates a decentralized, transparent, and more democratic version of the Internet. Essentially being a trusted and decentralized database, blockchain finds its applications in fields as varied as the energy sector, forestry, fisheries, mining, material recycling, air pollution monitoring, supply chain management, and their associated operations. In this paper, we present a survey of blockchain-based network applications. Our goal is to cover the evolution of blockchain-based systems that are trying to bring in a renaissance in the existing, mostly centralized, space of network applications. While re-imagining the space with blockchain, we highlight various common challenges, pitfalls, and shortcomings that can occur. Our aim is to make this work as a guiding reference manual for someone interested in shifting towards a blockchain-based solution for one's existing use case or automating one from the ground up.Comment: Under Review in IEEE COMS

Blockchain for the Internet of Things: Present and Future

One of the key challenges to the IoT's success is how to secure and anonymize billions of IoT transactions and devices per day, an issue that still lingers despite significant research efforts over the last few years. On the other hand, technologies based on blockchain algorithms are disrupting today's cryptocurrency markets and showing tremendous potential, since they provide a distributed transaction ledger that cannot be tampered with or controlled by a single entity. Although the blockchain may present itself as a cure-all for the IoT's security and privacy challenges, significant research efforts still need to be put forth to adapt the computation-intensive blockchain algorithms to the stringent energy and processing constraints of today's IoT devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing literature on the topic of blockchain for IoT, and present a roadmap of research challenges that will need to be addressed to enable the usage of blockchain technologies in the IoT

A Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains

Due to their interesting features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. They are full-stack systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security and privacy issues of blockchains. To this end, we propose a security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats (similar to the ISO/OSI hierarchy) as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408. In contrast to the previous surveys, we focus on the categorization of security incidents based on their origins and using the proposed architecture we present existing prevention and mitigation techniques. The scope of our work mainly covers aspects related to the decentralized nature of blockchains, while we mention common operational security issues and countermeasures only tangentially

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

Applications of Blockchain in Healthcare: Current Landscape & Challenges

Several problems in healthcare stem from the complex network of intermediaries and the lack of traceability of transactions. To mention a few: healthcare data is fragmented across several silos negatively affecting research and services, about half of the clinical trials are never reported, the cost of drug discovery is ever increasing, and substandard and fake medicines are still a huge problem. Blockchain has the potential to solve these problems as it provides trust without any intermediaries, has traceability as a default feature, and promises new business models by enabling novel incentive structures. Due to its potential, blockchain has gathered significant interest in the healthcare industry. In this paper, we review major use cases of blockchain in healthcare: patient data management, pharmaceutical research, supply chain management of medical goods, prescription management, billing claims management, analytics, and telemedicine alongside the related projects. We found that most of the blockchain projects are limited as white-papers, proof of concepts, and products with a limited user base. However, we observed that the quantity, quality, and maturity of the projects are increasing. We also discuss technical, regulatory, and business challenges to the adoption of blockchain in the healthcare industryComment: 17 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables, white pape