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Journal ArticleDOI

Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things

10 May 2016-IEEE Access (IEEE)-Vol. 4, pp 2292-2303
TL;DR: The conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
Abstract: Motivated by the recent explosion of interest around blockchains, we examine whether they make a good fit for the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Blockchains allow us to have a distributed peer-to-peer network where non-trusting members can interact with each other without a trusted intermediary, in a verifiable manner. We review how this mechanism works and also look into smart contracts—scripts that reside on the blockchain that allow for the automation of multi-step processes. We then move into the IoT domain, and describe how a blockchain-IoT combination: 1) facilitates the sharing of services and resources leading to the creation of a marketplace of services between devices and 2) allows us to automate in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing, time-consuming workflows. We also point out certain issues that should be considered before the deployment of a blockchain network in an IoT setting: from transactional privacy to the expected value of the digitized assets traded on the network. Wherever applicable, we identify solutions and workarounds. Our conclusion is that the blockchain-IoT combination is powerful and can cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel, distributed applications.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper aims to present the Blockchain and smart contract for a specific domain which is real estate, a detailed design of smart contract is presented and a use case for renting residential and business buildings is examined.
Abstract: Blockchain is a fast-disruptive technology becoming a key instrument in share economy. In recent years, Blockchain has received considerable attention from many researchers and government institutions. This paper aims to present the Blockchain and smart contract for a specific domain which is real estate. A detailed design of smart contract is presented and then a use case for renting residential and business buildings is examined.

155 citations


Cites background or methods from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."

  • ...A number of authors have promoted the vision of a trust-free economy with truly virtual organizations and automatic business transactions of IoT devices [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]....

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  • ...For the design and deployment of Blockchain implementations [8] [9] there are different parameters that are required to be considered while designing and deploying the implemented blockchain....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Key aspects related to architectural design, entity relations, interactions among participants, information flow, implementation and testing of the overall system functionality with a potential business case applied to vaccine supply chain are presented.

154 citations


Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."

  • ...Christidis and Devetsikiotis (2016) present potential application of blockchain and smart contracts for IoT....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A novel adaptive blockchain-based electric vehicle participation (AdBEV) scheme that uses the Iceberg order execution algorithm to obtain an improved EV charging and discharging schedule is proposed and simulation results show the proposed scheme outperforms the scheme that applying genetic algorithm approach in terms of lowering the power fluctuation level and overall charging costs.
Abstract: The electric vehicle (EV) charging scheme can reduce the power generation costs and improve the smart grid resilience. However, the huge penetrations of EVs can impact the voltage stability and operating costs. In this paper, a novel EV participation charging scheme is proposed for a decentralized blockchain-enabled smart grid system. Our objectives are to minimize the power fluctuation level in the grid network and the overall charging cost for EV users. We first formulate the power fluctuation level problem of the smart grid system that take into accounts of EV battery capacities, charging rates, and EV users charging behavior. And then, we propose a novel adaptive blockchain-based electric vehicle participation (AdBEV) scheme that uses the Iceberg order execution algorithm to obtain an improved EV charging and discharging schedule. The simulation results show the proposed scheme outperforms the scheme that applying genetic algorithm approach in term of lowering the power fluctuation level and overall charging costs.

153 citations


Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."

  • ...Furthermore, the smart contract that resides on the blockchain that allows the automation of multi-step processes to self-execute the distributed and heavy workflows is envisaged in the energy industry and the Internet of things [17]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The proposed model sufficiently exploits advantages of edge computing and blockchain to establish a privacy-preserving mechanism while considering other constraints, such as energy cost, and improves privacy protections without lowering down the performance in an energy-efficient manner.
Abstract: Contemporarily, two emerging techniques, blockchain and edge computing, are driving a dramatical rapid growth in the field of Internet-of-Things (IoT). Benefits of applying edge computing is an adoptable complementarity for cloud computing; blockchain is an alternative for constructing transparent secure environment for data storage/governance. Instead of using these two techniques independently, in this article, we propose a novel approach that integrates IoT with edge computing and blockchain, which is called blockchain-based Internet of Edge model. The proposed model, designed for a scalable and controllable IoT system, sufficiently exploits advantages of edge computing and blockchain to establish a privacy-preserving mechanism while considering other constraints, such as energy cost. We implement experiment evaluations running on Ethereum. According to our data collections, the proposed model improves privacy protections without lowering down the performance in an energy-efficient manner.

151 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Dec 2017
TL;DR: This work presents an Blockchain-based architecture for IoT access authorizations that is user transparent, user friendly, fully decentralized, scalable, fault tolerant and compatible with a wide range of today's access control models used in the IoT.
Abstract: The IoT is pervading our daily activities and lives with devices scattered all over our cities, transport systems, buildings, homes and bodies. This invasion of devices with sensors and communication capabilities brings big concerns, mainly about the privacy and confidentiality of the collected information. These concerns hinder the wide adoption of the IoT. To overcome them, in this work, we present an Blockchain-based architecture for IoT access authorizations. Following the IoT tendency requirements, our architecture is user transparent, user friendly, fully decentralized, scalable, fault tolerant and compatible with a wide range of today's access control models used in the IoT. Finally, our architecture also has a secure way to establish relationships between users, devices and group of both, allowing the assignment of attributes for these relationships and their use in the access control authorization.

151 citations


Cites methods from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."

  • ...The work done in [85] mentions the benefits that could be achieved in IoT with the use of Blockchain through use cases examples....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Albanian Generals Problem as mentioned in this paper is a generalization of Dijkstra's dining philosophers problem, where two generals have to come to a common agreement on whether to attack or retreat, but can communicate only by sending messengers who might never arrive.
Abstract: I have long felt that, because it was posed as a cute problem about philosophers seated around a table, Dijkstra’s dining philosopher’s problem received much more attention than it deserves. (For example, it has probably received more attention in the theory community than the readers/writers problem, which illustrates the same principles and has much more practical importance.) I believed that the problem introduced in [41] was very important and deserved the attention of computer scientists. The popularity of the dining philosophers problem taught me that the best way to attract attention to a problem is to present it in terms of a story. There is a problem in distributed computing that is sometimes called the Chinese Generals Problem, in which two generals have to come to a common agreement on whether to attack or retreat, but can communicate only by sending messengers who might never arrive. I stole the idea of the generals and posed the problem in terms of a group of generals, some of whom may be traitors, who have to reach a common decision. I wanted to assign the generals a nationality that would not offend any readers. At the time, Albania was a completely closed society, and I felt it unlikely that there would be any Albanians around to object, so the original title of this paper was The Albanian Generals Problem. Jack Goldberg was smart enough to realize that there were Albanians in the world outside Albania, and Albania might not always be a black hole, so he suggested that I find another name. The obviously more appropriate Byzantine generals then occurred to me. The main reason for writing this paper was to assign the new name to the problem. But a new paper needed new results as well. I came up with a simpler way to describe the general 3n+1-processor algorithm. (Shostak’s 4-processor algorithm was subtle but easy to understand; Pease’s generalization was a remarkable tour de force.) We also added a generalization to networks that were not completely connected. (I don’t remember whose work that was.) I also added some discussion of practical implementation details.

5,208 citations

Book ChapterDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a group of generals of the Byzantine army camped with their troops around an enemy city are shown to agree upon a common battle plan using only oral messages, if and only if more than two-thirds of the generals are loyal; so a single traitor can confound two loyal generals.
Abstract: Reliable computer systems must handle malfunctioning components that give conflicting information to different parts of the system. This situation can be expressed abstractly in terms of a group of generals of the Byzantine army camped with their troops around an enemy city. Communicating only by messenger, the generals must agree upon a common battle plan. However, one or more of them may be traitors who will try to confuse the others. The problem is to find an algorithm to ensure that the loyal generals will reach agreement. It is shown that, using only oral messages, this problem is solvable if and only if more than two-thirds of the generals are loyal; so a single traitor can confound two loyal generals. With unforgeable written messages, the problem is solvable for any number of generals and possible traitors. Applications of the solutions to reliable computer systems are then discussed.

4,901 citations

Book ChapterDOI
John R. Douceur1
07 Mar 2002
TL;DR: It is shown that, without a logically centralized authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of resource parity and coordination among entities.
Abstract: Large-scale peer-to-peer systems face security threats from faulty or hostile remote computing elements. To resist these threats, many such systems employ redundancy. However, if a single faulty entity can present multiple identities, it can control a substantial fraction of the system, thereby undermining this redundancy. One approach to preventing these "Sybil attacks" is to have a trusted agency certify identities. This paper shows that, without a logically centralized authority, Sybil attacks are always possible except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions of resource parity and coordination among entities.

4,816 citations


"Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Because of the Sybil attack [15], consensus in public networks is costly...

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  • ...anyone can join though, this would be catastrophic because of the Sybil attack [15]: a single entity could join with multiple identities, get multiple votes, and thus influence the network to favor this entity’s interests....

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Proceedings ArticleDOI
22 Feb 1999
TL;DR: A new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults that works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude.
Abstract: This paper describes a new replication algorithm that is able to tolerate Byzantine faults. We believe that Byzantinefault-tolerant algorithms will be increasingly important in the future because malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common and can cause faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior. Whereas previous algorithms assumed a synchronous system or were too slow to be used in practice, the algorithm described in this paper is practical: it works in asynchronous environments like the Internet and incorporates several important optimizations that improve the response time of previous algorithms by more than an order of magnitude. We implemented a Byzantine-fault-tolerant NFS service using our algorithm and measured its performance. The results show that our service is only 3% slower than a standard unreplicated NFS.

3,562 citations


"Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...5If more than 3f + 1 nodes are used, then the quorum thresholds listed in [26] may lead to forks....

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  • ...Tendermint vs PBFT—Tendermint....

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  • ...Sieve [38], a mechanism used in the HyperLedger Fabric project, augments the PBFT algorithm [26] by adding speculative execution and verification phases, inspired by the execute-verify architecture presented in [39]....

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  • ...Tendermint [32] provides BFT tolerance and is similar to the PBFT algorithm; however it provides a tighter guarantee with regards to the results returned to the client when more than one third of the nodes are faulty, and allows for a dynamically changing set of set of validators, and leaders that can be rotated in a round-robin manner, among other optimizations [33]....

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  • ...PBFT works on the assumption that less than one third of the nodes are faulty (f ), which is why say that it requires at least5 3f + 1 nodes....

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Proceedings Article
19 Jun 2014
TL;DR: Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log that separates the key elements of consensus, such as leader election, log replication, and safety, and it enforces a stronger degree of coherency to reduce the number of states that must be considered.
Abstract: Raft is a consensus algorithm for managing a replicated log. It produces a result equivalent to (multi-)Paxos, and it is as efficient as Paxos, but its structure is different from Paxos; this makes Raft more understandable than Paxos and also provides a better foundation for building practical systems. In order to enhance understandability, Raft separates the key elements of consensus, such as leader election, log replication, and safety, and it enforces a stronger degree of coherency to reduce the number of states that must be considered. Results from a user study demonstrate that Raft is easier for students to learn than Paxos. Raft also includes a new mechanism for changing the cluster membership, which uses overlapping majorities to guarantee safety.

1,811 citations


"Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..." refers methods in this paper

  • ...popular Raft algorithm [30], is used as a consensus mechanism in Juno [31]....

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