Exploring the intellectual cores of the blockchain–Internet of Things (BIoT)

Leveraging Blockchain Technology for Ensuring Security and Privacy Aspects in Internet of Things: A Systematic Literature Review

As the Internet of Things (IoT) concept materialized worldwide in complex ecosystems, the related data security and privacy issues became apparent. While the system elements and their communication paths could be protected individually, generic, ecosystem-wide approaches were sought after as well. On a parallel timeline to IoT, the concept of distributed ledgers and blockchains came into the technological limelight. Blockchains offer many advantageous features in relation to enhanced security, anonymity, increased capacity, and peer-to-peer capabilities. Although blockchain technology can provide IoT with effective and efficient solutions, there are many challenges related to various aspects of integrating these technologies. While security, anonymity/data privacy, and smart contract-related features are apparently advantageous for blockchain technologies (BCT), there are challenges in relation to storage capacity/scalability, resource utilization, transaction rate scalability, predictability, and legal issues. This paper provides a systematic review on state-of-the-art approaches of BCT and IoT integration, specifically in order to solve certain security- and privacy-related issues. The paper first provides a brief overview of BCT and IoT's basic principles, including their architecture, protocols and consensus algorithms, characteristics, and the challenges of integrating them. Afterwards, it describes the survey methodology, including the search strategy, eligibility criteria, selection results, and characteristics of the included articles. Later, we highlight the findings of this study which illustrates different works that addressed the integration of blockchain technology and IoT to tackle various aspects of privacy and security, which are followed by a categorization of applications that have been investigated with different characteristics, such as their primary information, objective, development level, target application, type of blockchain and platform, consensus algorithm, evaluation environment and metrics, future works or open issues (if any), and further notes for consideration. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of all articles is included from an architectural and operational perspective. Finally, we cover major gaps and future considerations that can be taken into account when integrating blockchain technology with IoT.

Internet of Things and Blockchain Integration: Security, Privacy, Technical, and Design Challenges

The Internet of things model enables a world in which all of our everyday devices can be integrated and communicate with each other and their surroundings to gather and share data and simplify task implementation. Such an Internet of things environment would require seamless authentication, data protection, stability, attack resistance, ease of deployment, and self-maintenance, among other things. Blockchain, a technology that was born with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, may fulfill Internet of things requirements. However, due to the characteristics of both Internet of things devices and Blockchain technology, integrating Blockchain and the Internet of things can cause several challenges. Despite a large number of papers that have been published in the field of Blockchain and the Internet of things, the problems of this combination remain unclear and scattered. Accordingly, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the challenges related to Blockchain–Internet of things integration by evaluating the related peer-reviewed literature. The paper also discusses some of the recommendations for reducing the effects of these challenges. Moreover, the paper discusses some of the unsolved concerns that must be addressed before the next generation of integrated Blockchain–Internet of things applications can be deployed. Lastly, future trends in the context of Blockchain–Internet of things integration are discussed.

A Two-Echelon Responsive Health Analytic Model for Triggering Care Plan Revision in Geriatric Care Management

Due to the increasing ageing population, how can caregivers effectively provide long-term care services to meet the older adults’ needs with finite resources is emerging. In addressing this issue, nursing homes are striving to adopt smart health with the internet of things and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency and sustainability of healthcare. This study proposed a two-echelon responsive health analytic model (EHAM) to deliver appropriate healthcare services in nursing homes under the Internet of Medical Things environment. A novel care plan revision index is developed using a dual fuzzy logic approach for multidimensional health assessments, followed by care plan modification using case-based reasoning. The findings reveal that EHAM can generate patient-centred long-term care solutions of high quality to maximise the satisfaction of nursing home residents and their families. Ultimately, sustainable healthcare services can be within the communities.

Schloss: Blockchain-Based System Architecture for Secure Industrial IoT

Industrial companies can use blockchain to assist them in resolving their trust and security issues. In this research, we provide a fully distributed blockchain-based architecture for industrial IoT, relying on trust management and reputation to enhance nodes’ trustworthiness. The purpose of this contribution is to introduce our system architecture to show how to secure network access for users with dynamic authorization management. All decisions in the system are made by trustful nodes’ consensus and are fully distributed. The remarkable feature of this system architecture is that the influence of the nodes’ power is lowered depending on their Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), and the nodes’ significance and authority is determined by their behavior in the network. This impact is based on game theory and an incentive mechanism for reputation between nodes. This system design can be used on legacy machines, which means that security and distributed systems can be put in place at a low cost on industrial systems. While there are no numerical results yet, this work, based on the open questions regarding the majority problem and the proposed solutions based on a game-theoretic mechanism and a trust management system, points to what and how industrial IoT and existing blockchain frameworks that are focusing only on the power of PoW and PoS can be secured more effectively.

A Lightweight Certificateless Group Key Agreement Method without Pairing Based on Blockchain for Smart Grid

In smart grids, the access verification of a large number of intelligent gateways and terminal devices has become one of the main concerns to ensure system security. This means that smart grids need a new key management method that is safe and efficient and has a low computational cost. Although a large number of scholars have conducted relevant research, most of these schemes cannot balance the computational overhead and security. Therefore, we propose a lightweight and secure key management method, having a low computational overhead, based on blockchain for smart grids. Firstly, we redesigned the architecture of the smart grid based on blockchain and completed the division of various entities. Furthermore, we designed a pairing-free certification authenticated group key agreement method based on blockchain under the architecture. Finally, we achieved higher security attributes, and lower authentication delay and computational overhead, compared to the traditional schemes, as shown in performance analysis and comparison.

Cuproof: Range Proof with Constant Size

Zero-Knowledge Proof is widely used in blockchains. For example, zk-SNARK is used in Zcash as its core technology to identifying transactions without the exposure of the actual transaction values. Up to now, various range proofs have been proposed, and their efficiency and range-flexibility have also been improved. Bootle et al. used the inner product method and recursion to construct an efficient Zero-Knowledge Proof in 2016. Later, Benediky Bünz et al. proposed an efficient range proof scheme called Bulletproofs, which can convince the verifier that a secret number lies in [0,2κ−1] with κ being a positive integer. By combining the inner-product and Lagrange’s four-square theorem, we propose a range proof scheme called Cuproof. Our Cuproof can make a range proof to show that a secret number v lies in an interval [a,b] with no exposure of the real value v or other extra information leakage about v. It is a good and practical method to protect privacy and information security. In Bulletproofs, the communication cost is 6+2logκ, while in our Cuproof, all the communication cost, the proving time and the verification time are of constant sizes.

SDN-IoT empowered intelligent framework for industry 4.0 applications during COVID-19 pandemic

The industrial ecosystem has been unprecedentedly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic because of its immense contact restrictions. Therefore, the manufacturing and socio-economic operations that require human involvement have significantly intervened since the beginning of the outbreak. As experienced, the social-distancing lesson in the potential new-normal world seems to force stakeholders to encourage the deployment of contactless Industry 4.0 architecture. Thus, human-less or less-human operations to keep these IoT-enabled ecosystems running without interruptions have motivated us to design and demonstrate an intelligent automated framework. In this research, we have proposed "EdgeSDN-I4COVID" architecture for intelligent and efficient management during COVID-19 of the smart industry considering the IoT networks. Moreover, the article presents the SDN-enabled layer, such as data, control, and application, to effectively and automatically monitor the IoT data from a remote location. In addition, the proposed convergence between SDN and NFV provides an efficient control mechanism for managing the IoT sensor data. Besides, it offers robust data integration on the surface and the devices required for Industry 4.0 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the article justified the above contributions through particular performance evaluations upon appropriate simulation setup and environment.

Blockchain-IoT-Driven Nursing Workforce Planning for Effective Long-Term Care Management in Nursing Homes

Due to the global ageing population, the increasing demand for long-term care services for the elderly has directed considerable attention towards the renovation of nursing homes. Although nursing homes play an essential role within residential elderly care, professional shortages have created serious pressure on the elderly service sector. Effective workforce planning is vital for improving the efficacy and workload balance of existing nursing staff in today's complex and volatile long-term care service market. Currently, there is lack of an integrated solution to monitor care services and determine the optimal nursing staffing strategy in nursing homes. This study addresses the above challenge through the formulation of nursing staffing optimisation under the blockchain-internet of things (BIoT) environment. Embedding a blockchain into IoT establishes the long-term care platform for the elderly and care workers, thereby decentralising long-term care information in the nursing home network to achieve effective care service monitoring. Moreover, such information is further utilised to optimise nursing staffing by using a genetic algorithm. A case study of a Hong Kong nursing home was conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. We found that the total monthly staffing cost after using the proposed model was significantly lower than the existing practice with a change of −13.48%, which considers the use of heterogeneous workforce and temporary staff. Besides, the care monitoring and staffing flexibility are further enhanced, in which the concept of skill substitution is integrated in nursing staffing optimisation.

An End-to-End Bidirectional Authentication System for Pallet Pooling Management Through Blockchain Internet of Things (BIoT)

Pallet pooling is regarded as a sustainable and cost-effective measure for the industry, but challenging to advocate due to weak data and pallet authentication.In order to establish trust between end-users and pallet pooling services, we propose an end-to-end, bidirectional authentication system for transmitted data and pallets based on blockchain and Internet-of-things (IoT) technologies. In addition, secure data authentication fosters the pallet authenticity in the whole supply chain network, which is achieved by considering the tag, location, and object-specific features. To evaluate the object-specific features, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) approach is adopted to match key-points and descriptors between two pallet images. According to the case study, it is found that the proposed system provides a low bandwidth blocking rate and a high probability of restoring complete data payloads. Consequently, positive influences on end-user satisfaction, quality of service, operational errors, and pallet traceability are achieved through the deployment of the proposed system.

Improving Ponzi Scheme Contract Detection Using Multi-Channel TextCNN and Transformer

With the development of blockchain technologies, many Ponzi schemes disguise themselves under the veil of smart contracts. The Ponzi scheme contracts cause serious financial losses, which has a bad effect on the blockchain. Existing Ponzi scheme contract detection studies have mainly focused on extracting hand-crafted features and training a machine learning classifier to detect Ponzi scheme contracts. However, the hand-crafted features cannot capture the structural and semantic feature of the source code. Therefore, in this study, we propose a Ponzi scheme contract detection method called MTCformer (Multi-channel Text Convolutional Neural Networks and Transofrmer). In order to reserve the structural information of the source code, the MTCformer first converts the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the smart contract code to the specially formatted code token sequence via the Structure-Based Traversal (SBT) method. Then, the MTCformer uses multi-channel TextCNN (Text Convolutional Neural Networks) to learn local structural and semantic features from the code token sequence. Next, the MTCformer employs the Transformer to capture the long-range dependencies of code tokens. Finally, a fully connected neural network with a cost-sensitive loss function in the MTCformer is used for classification. The experimental results show that the MTCformer is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and its variants in Ponzi scheme contract detection.

A Blockchain-IoT Platform for the Smart Pallet Pooling Management

Pallet management as a backbone of logistics and supply chain activities is essential to supply chain parties, while a number of regulations, standards and operational constraints are considered in daily operations. In recent years, pallet pooling has been unconventionally advocated to manage pallets in a closed-loop system to enhance the sustainability and operational effectiveness, but pitfalls in terms of service reliability, quality compliance and pallet limitation when using a single service provider may occur. Therefore, this study incorporates a decentralisation mechanism into the pallet management to formulate a technological eco-system for pallet pooling, namely Pallet as a Service (PalletaaS), raised by the foundation of consortium blockchain and Internet of things (IoT). Consortium blockchain is regarded as the blockchain 3.0 to facilitate more industrial applications, except cryptocurrency, and the synergy of integrating a consortium blockchain and IoT is thus investigated. The corresponding layered architecture is proposed to structure the system deployment in the industry, in which the location-inventory-routing problem for pallet pooling is formulated. To demonstrate the values of this study, a case analysis to illustrate the human-computer interaction and pallet pooling operations is conducted. Overall, this study standardises the decentralised pallet management in the closed-loop mechanism, resulting in a constructive impact to sustainable development in the logistics industry.