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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 will also consider aspects related to energy consumption of blockchain architectures, and risks and opportunities of emerging business models while ensuring a reliable distribution network and security of supply.

75 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper has proposed a secure wireless mechanism using Blockchain technology that stores extorted proceedings of each record into number of blocks and simulation results of proposed blockchain mechanism are executed against various security transmission processes to appraise the authenticity of IoT devices.
Abstract: Industrial IoT in the advancement of organizations consigns to the next level in order to trace and manage every single activity of their entities. However, the interdependence, implementation and communication among such wireless devices also known as IoT devices that lead to various secrecy and personnel concerns. Even though the use of smart sensors in industries assists and reduces human efforts with the increased quality besides of enhanced production cost. Several attacks may further encountered by various attackers by hacking several sensors/objects/devices activities. In this paper, in order to preserve transparency and secure each and every activity of smart sensors, we have proposed a secure wireless mechanism using Blockchain technology that stores extorted proceedings of each record into number of blocks. Further, the simulation results of proposed blockchain mechanism are executed against various security transmission processes. In addition, the simulated results are scrutinized besides traditional mechanism and verified over certain metrics such as Probability of attack success, ease of attack detection by the system, falsification attack, authentication delay and probabilistic scenarios to appraise the authenticity of IoT devices.

75 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper investigates a real-world use case from the energy domain, where customers trade portions of their photovoltaic power plant via a blockchain, and introduces the core concepts of blockchain technology and implements a fully custom, private, and permissioned blockchain from scratch.
Abstract: Blockchains are proposed for many application domains apart from financial transactions. While there are generic blockchains that can be molded for specific use cases, they often lack a lightweight and easy-to-customize implementation. In this paper, we introduce the core concepts of blockchain technology and investigate a real-world use case from the energy domain, where customers trade portions of their photovoltaic power plant via a blockchain. This does not only involve blockchain technology, but also requires user interaction. Therefore, a fully custom, private, and permissioned blockchain is implemented from scratch. We evaluate and motivate the need for blockchain technology within this use case, as well as the desired properties of the system. We then describe the implementation and the insights from our implementation in detail, serving as a guide for others and to show potential opportunities and pitfalls when implementing a blockchain from scratch.

75 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
24 Aug 2018-Sensors
TL;DR: A blockchain model based on hypergraphs that uses the hyperedge as the organization of storage nodes and converts the entire networked data storage into part network storage to reduce the storage consumption and to solve the additional security issues.
Abstract: With the fast development and expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of smart devices are being continuously connected, and smart homes, as a typical IoT application, are providing people with various convenient applications, but face security and privacy issues. The idea of Blockchain (BC) theory has brought about a potential solution to the IoT security problem. The emergence of blockchain technology has brought about a change of decentralized management, providing an effective solution for the protection of network security and privacy. On the other hand, the smart devices in IoT are always lightweight and have less energy and memory. This makes the application of blockchain difficult. Against this background, this paper proposes a blockchain model based on hypergraphs. The aims of this model are to reduce the storage consumption and to solve the additional security issues. In the model, we use the hyperedge as the organization of storage nodes and convert the entire networked data storage into part network storage. We discuss the design of the model and security strategy in detail, introducing some use cases in a smart home network and evaluating the storage performance of the model through simulation experiments and an evaluation of the network.

74 citations


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

  • ...[28] applied a smart contract to the IoT, facilitating the sharing of services and resources and allowing automation in a cryptographically verifiable manner several existing time-consuming workflows....

    [...]

Proceedings ArticleDOI
Lei Xu1, Nolan Shah1, Lin Chen1, Nour Diallo1, Zhimin Gao1, Yang Lu1, Weidong Shi1 
02 Apr 2017
TL;DR: This work proposes a privacy respecting approach for blockchain-based sharing economy applications, which leverages a zero-knowledge scheme, and analyzes the security features and performance of the proposed approach to demonstrate its effectiveness in these applications.
Abstract: Blockchain is a novel way to construct fully distributed systems and has the potential to disrupt many businesses including Uber and Airbnb within the sharing economy. Specifically, blockchain provides a method to enforce the agreement between a user and the physical property owner without using any trusted party, e.g., if a user pays the agreed money, the blockchain guarantees that he/she has access to the property. While a blockchain based system has many desirable features, it may leak privacy information of involved parties due to its openness to the public. To mitigate the privacy concern, we propose a privacy respecting approach for blockchain-based sharing economy applications, which leverages a zero-knowledge scheme. We also analyze the security features and performance of the proposed approach to demonstrate its effectiveness in these applications.

74 citations

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...

    [...]

  • ...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....

    [...]

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....

    [...]

  • ...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]....

    [...]

  • ...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]....

    [...]

  • ...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]....

    [...]