Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things
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.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors conceptualized the relationship between blockchain technology, product deletion and the circular economy and presented a business scenario as an illustrative business scenario for blockchain's application in a circular economy research context.
Abstract: The circular economy (CE) is an emergent concept to rethink and redesign how our economy works. The concept recognizes effective and efficient economic functioning at multiple scales—governments and individuals, globally and locally; for businesses, large and small. CE represents a systemic shift that builds long-term resilience at multiple levels (macro, meso and micro); generating new business and economic opportunities while providing environmental and societal benefits. Blockchain, an emergent and critical technology, is introduced to the circular economy environment as a potential enabler for many circular economic principles. Blockchain technology supported information systems can improve circular economy performance at multiple levels. Product deletion, a neglected but critical effort in product management and product portfolio management, is utilized as an illustrative business scenario as to blockchain’s application in a circular economy research context. Product deletion, unlike product proliferation, has received minimal attention from both academics and practitioners. Product deletion decisions need to be evaluated and analyzed in the circular economy context. CE helps address risk aversion issues in product deletions such as inventory, waste and information management. This paper is the first to conceptualize the relationships amongst blockchain technology, product deletion and the circular economy. Many nuances of relationships are introduced in this study. Future evaluation and critical reflections are also presented with a need for a rigorous and robust research agenda to evaluate the multiple and complex relationships and interplay amongst technology, policy, commerce and the natural environment.
122 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...A blockchain application that is connected with radio frequency identification (RFID) [22], Internet of Things (IoT) [23,24], and global position sensors (GPS) [25] can collect accurate data and address traceability issues in supply chains....
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TL;DR: This work focuses on IoT intrinsic vulnerabilities and their implications to the fundamental information security challenges in confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) is intended for ubiquitous connectivity among different entities or "things". While its purpose is to provide effective and efficient solutions, security of the devices and network is a challenging issue. The number of devices connected along with the ad-hoc nature of the system further exacerbates the situation. Therefore, security and privacy has emerged as a significant challenge for the IoT. In this paper,we aim to provide a thorough survey related to the privacy and security challenges of the IoT. This document addresses these challenges from the perspective of technologies and architecture used. This work focuses also in IoT intrinsic vulnerabilities as well as the security challenges of various layers based on the security principles of data confidentiality, integrity and availability. This survey analyzes articles published for the IoT at the time and relates it to the security conjuncture of the field and its projection to the future.
121 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...3) Blockchain: Blockchain [80] was originally proposed in Bitcoin to solve the double spending problem in a cryptocurrency system....
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01 Feb 2018
TL;DR: A distributed platform with blockchain as a system service for supporting transaction execution in insurance processes based on a blockchain-enabled platform and encode various insurance processes as smart contracts is designed.
Abstract: We design a distributed platform with blockchain as a system service for supporting transaction execution in insurance processes. The insurance industry is heavily dependent on multiple processes between transacting parties for initiating, maintaining and closing diverse kind of policies. Transaction processing time, payment settlement time and security protection of the process execution are major concerns. Blockchain technology, originally conceived as an immutable distributed ledger for detecting double spending of cryptocurrencies, is now increasingly used in different FinTech systems to address productivity and security requirements. The application of blockchain in FinTech processing requires a deep understanding of the underlying business processes. It supports automated interactions between the blockchain and existing transaction systems through the notion of smart contracts. In this paper, we focus on the design of an efficient approach for processing insurance related transactions based on a blockchain-enabled platform. An experimental prototype is developed on Hyperledger fabric, an open source permissioned blockchain design framework. We discuss the main design requirements, corresponding design propositions, and encode various insurance processes as smart contracts. Extensive experiments were conducted to analyze performance of our framework and security of the proposed design.
121 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...In common practical settings, business rules are encoded as smart contracts [2], [3] that require access to the blockchain....
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01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: A comparison of mobile mobility identity vs. location addresses, 164 seamless mobility, 163 application protocols AMQP, 139 blocking vs. non-blocking, 133 communication paradigms publish/subscribe, 133 request/response, 132 data serialization formats, 132 DDS RTPS, 140 IEEE 1888, 140 MQTT, 139 QoS, 134, 136 REST, 137 SIP, 140 XMPP, 138 Application services layer data encoding, interpretation, and modeling.
Abstract: In this book, we choose to introduce the Internet of Things (IoT) concepts and framework in the earlier chapters and avoid painting examples that tie the concepts to a specific industry or to a certain system. In later chapters, we provide examples and use cases that tie the IoT concepts and framework presented in the earlier chap- ters to industry verticals.
120 citations
TL;DR: The emergence of Industry 4.0 has brought in its wake an important number of challenges and opportunities for organizations across the globe as mentioned in this paper, and to cope with such a fast-changing environment, organisa...
Abstract: The emergence of Industry 4.0 has brought in its wake an important number of challenges and opportunities for organisations across the globe. To cope with such a fast-changing environment, organisa...
120 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...Also, with smart contracts (triggered itself after meeting conditions) (Hou, Wang, and Liu 2018; Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016), there is increased efficiency and minimisation of costs (Shermin 2017)....
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...Blockchain operates in a peer-to-peer model (Y. Chen 2018; Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016), without any intermediaries, that is, in a decentralised network (Transport Systems Catapult 2018; Kshetri 2017)....
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References
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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
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
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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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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 2014TL;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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