A systematic literature review of blockchain-based applications: Current status, classification and open issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next era of communication. Using the IoT, physical objects can be empowered to create, receive, and exchange data in a seamless manner. Various IoT applications focus on automating different tasks and are trying to empower the inanimate physical objects to act without any human intervention. The existing and upcoming IoT applications are highly promising to increase the level of comfort, efficiency, and automation for the users. To be able to implement such a world in an ever-growing fashion requires high security, privacy, authentication, and recovery from attacks. In this regard, it is imperative to make the required changes in the architecture of the IoT applications for achieving end-to-end secure IoT environments. In this paper, a detailed review of the security-related challenges and sources of threat in the IoT applications is presented. After discussing the security issues, various emerging and existing technologies focused on achieving a high degree of trust in the IoT applications are discussed. Four different technologies, blockchain, fog computing, edge computing, and machine learning, to increase the level of security in IoT are discussed.

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A Survey on IoT Security: Application Areas, Security Threats, and Solution Architectures

The paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for a world, where many of our daily objects will be interconnected and will interact with their environment in order to collect information and automate certain tasks. Such a vision requires, among other things, seamless authentication, data privacy, security, robustness against attacks, easy deployment, and self-maintenance. Such features can be brought by blockchain, a technology born with a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. In this paper, a thorough review on how to adapt blockchain to the specific needs of IoT in order to develop Blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) applications is presented. After describing the basics of blockchain, the most relevant BIoT applications are described with the objective of emphasizing how blockchain can impact traditional cloud-centered IoT applications. Then, the current challenges and possible optimizations are detailed regarding many aspects that affect the design, development, and deployment of a BIoT application. Finally, some recommendations are enumerated with the aim of guiding future BIoT researchers and developers on some of the issues that will have to be tackled before deploying the next generation of BIoT applications.

A Review on the Use of Blockchain for the Internet of Things

Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records all transactions in a distributed append-only public ledger called blockchain . The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus protocol, which is run by the network nodes called miners . In exchange for the incentive, the miners are expected to maintain the blockchain honestly. Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin economy has grown at an enormous rate, and it is now worth about 150 billions of dollars. This exponential growth in the market value of bitcoins motivate adversaries to exploit weaknesses for profit, and researchers to discover new vulnerabilities in the system, propose countermeasures, and predict upcoming trends. In this paper, we present a systematic survey that covers the security and privacy aspects of Bitcoin. We start by giving an overview of the Bitcoin system and its major components along with their functionality and interactions within the system. We review the existing vulnerabilities in Bitcoin and its major underlying technologies such as blockchain and PoW-based consensus protocol. These vulnerabilities lead to the execution of various security threats to the standard functionality of Bitcoin. We then investigate the feasibility and robustness of the state-of-the-art security solutions. Additionally, we discuss the current anonymity considerations in Bitcoin and the privacy-related threats to Bitcoin users along with the analysis of the existing privacy-preserving solutions. Finally, we summarize the critical open challenges, and we suggest directions for future research towards provisioning stringent security and privacy solutions for Bitcoin.

A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues of Bitcoin

The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technologies, which has attracted tremendous interests from both the research communities and industries. The blockchain network was originated from the Internet financial sector as a decentralized, immutable ledger system for transactional data ordering. Nowadays, it is envisioned as a powerful backbone/framework for decentralized data processing and data-driven self-organization in flat, open-access networks. In particular, the plausible characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and self-organization are primarily owing to the unique decentralized consensus mechanisms introduced by blockchain networks. This survey is motivated by the lack of a comprehensive literature review on the development of decentralized consensus mechanisms in blockchain networks. In this paper, we provide a systematic vision of the organization of blockchain networks. By emphasizing the unique characteristics of decentralized consensus in blockchain networks, our in-depth review of the state-of-the-art consensus protocols is focused on both the perspective of distributed consensus system design and the perspective of incentive mechanism design. From a game-theoretic point of view, we also provide a thorough review of the strategy adopted for self-organization by the individual nodes in the blockchain backbone networks. Consequently, we provide a comprehensive survey of the emerging applications of blockchain networks in a broad area of telecommunication. We highlight our special interest in how the consensus mechanisms impact these applications. Finally, we discuss several open issues in the protocol design for blockchain consensus and the related potential research directions.

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A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks

As modern vehicle and communication technologies advanced apace, people begin to believe that the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) would be achievable in one decade. ITS introduces information technology to the transportation infrastructures and aims to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. However, security is still a main concern in vehicular communication systems (VCSs). This can be addressed through secured group broadcast. Therefore, secure key management schemes are considered as a critical technique for network security. In this paper, we propose a framework for providing secure key management within the heterogeneous network. The security managers (SMs) play a key role in the framework by capturing the vehicle departure information, encapsulating block to transport keys and then executing rekeying to vehicles within the same security domain. The first part of this framework is a novel network topology based on a decentralized blockchain structure. The blockchain concept is proposed to simplify the distributed key management in heterogeneous VCS domains. The second part of the framework uses the dynamic transaction collection period to further reduce the key transfer time during vehicles handover. Extensive simulations and analysis show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework, in which the blockchain structure performs better in term of key transfer time than the structure with a central manager, while the dynamic scheme allows SMs to flexibly fit various traffic levels.

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Blockchain-Based Dynamic Key Management for Heterogeneous Intelligent Transportation Systems

Location-based services (LBSs) have gained popularity as a result of the advances in mobile and communication technologies LBS provide users with relevant information based on their location In spite of the desirable features provided by LBS, the geographic locations of users are not adequately protected Location privacy is one of the major challenges in vehicular and mobile networks In this paper, we analyze the security and privacy requirements for LBS in vehicular and mobile networks Specifically, this paper covers privacy enhancing technologies and cryptographic approaches that provide location privacy in vehicular and mobile networks The different approaches proposed in literature are compared and open research areas are identified

Security and Privacy in Location-Based Services for Vehicular and Mobile Communications: An Overview, Challenges, and Countermeasures

Satellite communications can be used when other communication systems are either destroyed or overloaded. Observation satellites and delay/disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are technologies that can be interconnected to provide emergency communication for disaster recovery operations. DTNs use a store-carry-forward mechanism to forward messages through intermediary nodes to the destination node. The reliability of relaying messages through multi-hop nodes poses a significant problem in DTNs due to lack of consistent connectivity. These network characteristics make DTNs to heavily rely on the cooperation of neighboring nodes for the successful delivery of packets. However, the presence of malicious or selfish nodes will have a great impact on the network performance. In this paper, we design a decentralized trust management scheme (DTMS) to filter out malicious nodes in DTNs. First, the number of forwarding evidence is combined with the energy consumption rate of the nodes to formulate direct trust. Then, a recommendation trust is computed from the indirect trust, recommendation credibility, and recommendation familiarity. Recommendation credibility and familiarity improve the overall recommendation trust by filtering out dishonest recommendations. A comparative analysis of DTMS is performed against a cooperative watchdog scheme, recommendation based trust model, and spray and wait protocol. The results show that DTMS can effectively deal with malicious behaviors in DTNs including trust related attacks.

A Distributed Trust Management Scheme for Data Forwarding in Satellite DTN Emergency Communications

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) is proposed as the most effective way to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. However, the future of ITS for large scale transportation infrastructures deployment highly depends on the security level of vehicular communication systems (VCS). Therefore, security key management schemes are considered as a critical research topic for network security. In this paper, we propose a framework for providing secure key management within heterogeneous network. The security managers (SMs ) Play a key role in the framework by retrieving the vehicle departure information, encapsulating block to transport keys and then executing rekeying to vehicles within the same security domain. The first part of this framework is a novel Group Key Management (GKM) scheme basing on (LP) of vehicles to depart current VCS region. Vehicle's LP factor is introduced into GKM scheme to achieve a more efficient rekeying scheme and less rekeying costs. The second component of the framework using the blockchain concept to simplify the distributed key management in Heterogeneous VCS domains. Extensive simulations and analysis are provided to show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework: Our GKM results demonstrate that probability-based BR reduces rekeying cost compared to the benchmark scheme, while the blockchain decreases the time cost of key transmission over heterogeneous networks.

A Secure Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Secure Vehicular Communication Systems

Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networking (VDTN) is a special instance of Vehicular Ad hoc Networking (VANET) and in particular Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) that utilizes infrastructure to enhance connectivity in challenged environments. While VANETs assume end-to-end connectivity, DTNs and VDTNs do not. Such networks are characterized by dynamic topology, partitioning due to lack of end-to-end connectivity, and opportunistic encounters between nodes. Notably, VDTNs enhances the capabilities DTNs to provide support for delay and intermittent connectivity. Hence, they can easily find applicability in the early stages of the deployment of vehicular networks characterized by low infrastructure deployment as is obtainable in rural areas and in military communications. Privacy implementation and evaluation is a major challenge in VDTNs. Group communication has become one of the well discussed means for achieving effective privacy and packet routing in ad hoc networks including VDTNs. However, most existing privacy schemes lack flexibility in terms of the dynamics of group formation and the level of privacy achievable. Again, it is difficult to evaluate privacy for sparse VDTNs for rural area and early stages of deployment. This paper reports on an improved privacy scheme based on group communication scheme in VDTNs. We analyze the performance of our model in terms of trade-off between privacy and performance based on delivery overhead and message delivery ratio using simulations. While this is a work in progress, we report that our scheme has considerable improvement compared to other similar schemes described in literature.

Chibueze P. Anyigor Ogah

Papers

Blockchain-Based Dynamic Key Management for Heterogeneous Intelligent Transportation Systems

Security and Privacy in Location-Based Services for Vehicular and Mobile Communications: An Overview, Challenges, and Countermeasures

A Distributed Trust Management Scheme for Data Forwarding in Satellite DTN Emergency Communications

A Secure Key Management Scheme for Heterogeneous Secure Vehicular Communication Systems

Privacy-Enhanced Group Communication for Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks