Blockchain-based Digital Twins:Research Trends, Issues, and Future Challenges

Industrial processes rely on sensory data for decision-making processes, risk assessment, and performance evaluation. Extracting actionable insights from the collected data calls for an infrastructure that can ensure the dissemination of trustworthy data. For the physical data to be trustworthy, it needs to be cross validated through multiple sensor sources with overlapping fields of view. Cross-validated data can then be stored on the blockchain, to maintain its integrity and trustworthiness. Once trustworthy data is recorded on the blockchain, product lifecycle events can be fed into data-driven systems for process monitoring, diagnostics, and optimized control. In this regard, digital twins (DTs) can be leveraged to draw intelligent conclusions from data by identifying the faults and recommending precautionary measures ahead of critical events. Empowering DTs with blockchain in industrial use cases targets key challenges of disparate data repositories, untrustworthy data dissemination, and the need for predictive maintenance. In this survey, while highlighting the key benefits of using blockchain-based DTs, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research results for blockchain-based DTs. Based on the current research trends, we discuss a trustworthy blockchain-based DTs framework. We also highlight the role of artificial intelligence in blockchain-based DTs. Furthermore, we discuss the current and future research and deployment challenges of blockchain-supported DTs that require further investigation.</p

Context-Aware Security in the Internet of Things:What We Know and Where We are Going

Context awareness has been on the grow for the last couple of years and part of the reason for the emergence of this technology is the nature and dynamic of the Internet of Things (IoT) itself. Context awareness provides an additional layer of security for the ever-changing IoT entourage by providing an aware approach to security decisions. Traditional security mechanisms might not be always suitable for the context of IoT, thus context-aware security mechanism comes out as a suitable solution. Context awareness is a technique for identifying contextual circumstances using a particular context framework model of awareness, followed by identifying an appropriate solution that is centred on the findings. This paper presents a holistic view of context awareness for IoT security. Specifically, we intend to analyze how context awareness contributes to IoT security, we focus on investigating the context-aware security solutions proposed in the literature and exploring the techniques and approaches used to enhance IoT security based on contextual information, their effectiveness and benefits together with impediments of these solutions. In addition, we discuss the challenges associated with using context-aware security in the IoT and future research directions that need to be addressed in order to make contextual information more effective for security solutions in IoT