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: A blockchain oriented platform to guarantee the origin and provenance of food items in a Smart Tourism Region context and a real case study applied to local products from Sardinia, Italy, is proposed at the end of the article.
Abstract: This article proposes a blockchain oriented platform to guarantee the origin and provenance of food items in a Smart Tourism Region context. Local food and beverage, in fact, can become a good combination to attract tourist and to promote the area provided that their provenance is clearly certified. We designed and developed a blockchain‐based system to manage an agri‐food supply chain for tracking food items. By using smart contracts the platform guarantees transparency, efficiency and trustworthiness. Our system is particularly suitable to manage cold chain since the system interfaces with IoT network devices providing detailed information about data monitoring food such as storage temperature, environment humidity, and GPS data. All involved actors can share data and information in a more efficient, transparent, and tamper proof way than traditional systems. The final consumer can access with transparency to all the agri‐food chain of the purchased product and verify provenance by retrieving all detailed information registered in the blockchain public ledger. The proposed system has been designed according to the ABCDE method, an agile development process recently conceived, to obtain a higher software quality to design a general blockchain system by means software engineering practices. A real case study applied to local products from Sardinia, Italy, is proposed at the end of the article.
66 citations
TL;DR: The first attempt is presented to use BC aided BIM for sustainable building design coordination and collaboration in multiple building stages and a conceptual architecture of BIM + BC for Sustainable Building Design Information Management Framework in building project management is proposed, validated, and refined.
Abstract: At present, sustainable design is experiencing energy consumption and cost-effectiveness challenges in the building industry. A recent body of literature argues that the development of emerging smart digital technologies, such as Building Information Management (BIM) and blockchain (BC), offer immediate benefits to the industry. However, the current application of BIM and BC in the sustainable design and construction process focuses on smart energy and construction management, with little attention to addressing challenges for applying BIM to sustainable design and proposing strategies in terms of the usability of these technologies in the management of building construction projects. Therefore, this paper sets out to explore the potential roles of an integrated BIM and BC approach for sustainable building design information management. The first attempt is presented to use BC aided BIM for sustainable building design coordination and collaboration in multiple building stages. BC has the potential to address challenges that hinder the industry from using BIM for sustainable design, which has been unearthed. An innovative BC enhanced transaction process in BIM is required for sustainable building development. Roles of a user level driven smart contract system of BC can be used to enhance BIM system in the sustainable buildings process. The role of BC is primarily at user level driven smart contracts and their record value exchange capabilities. A user level (BIM stakeholders) driven BC technology for transaction in BIM process flow is revealed, and the user level (sustainable building design project stakeholders/BIM clients) driven and the smart contract enabled BIM+ BC architecture to address challenges of BIM for sustainable design has been further circulated according to the literature. Subsequently, a conceptual architecture of BIM + BC for Sustainable Building Design Information Management Framework in building project management has been proposed, validated, and refined. The Framework has two level encompassing structures and flow. The high-level framework is focused on strategy, whilst the low-level framework demonstrates technical components in detail. This architecture supporting project stakeholders in managing information, has the potential to achieve and ensure the realization of sustainable design goals through the interactive realization of smart contracts integrated into the user level driven BIM + BC system and its recording value exchange function through three user-driven levels, namely user, system, and transaction.
66 citations
Cites methods from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...It is a new application mode of computer technology such as distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission, consensus mechanism, and encryption algorithm [17]....
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...Blockchain has the following characteristics [17]:...
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25 Jun 2018
TL;DR: This paper presents a blockchain based POD solution of shipped physical items that uses smart contracts of Ethereum blockchain network, in which tracking, and tracing activities, logs, and events can be done in a decentralized manner, with high integrity, reliability, and immutability.
Abstract: To date, building a highly trustworthy, credible, and decentralized proof of delivery (POD) systems to trace and track physical items is a very challenging task. This paper presents a blockchain based POD solution of shipped physical items that uses smart contracts of Ethereum blockchain network, in which tracking, and tracing activities, logs, and events can be done in a decentralized manner, with high integrity, reliability, and immutability. Our solution incentivizes each participating entity including the seller, transporter, and buyer to act honestly, and it totally eliminates the need for a third party as escrow. Our proposed POD solution ensures accountability, punctuality, integrity and auditability. Moreover, the proposed solution makes use of a Smart Contract Attestation Authority to ensure that the code follows the terms and conditions signed by the participating entities. It also allows the cancellation of the transaction by the seller, buyer and transporter based on the contract state. Furthermore, the buyer can also ask for a refund in certain justifiable cases. The full code, implementation discussion with sequence diagrams, testing and verification details are all included as part of the proposed solution.
66 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...Blockchain is an immutable, distributed ledger that is tamper-proof with ordered logs [3, 4]....
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...Ethereum smart contracts made blockchain programmable, as it allowed the execution of code, making it even more powerful [4]....
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TL;DR: This work attempts to utilize the deep learning-based approach, namely bidirectional long-short term memory with attention mechanism (BLSTM-ATT), aiming to precisely detect reentrancy bugs, and proposes contract snippet representations for smart contracts, which contributes to capturing essential semantic information and control flow dependencies.
Abstract: In the last decade, smart contract security issues lead to tremendous losses, which has attracted increasing public attention both in industry and in academia. Researchers have embarked on efforts with logic rules, symbolic analysis, and formal analysis to achieve encouraging results in smart contract vulnerability detection tasks. However, the existing detection tools are far from satisfactory. In this paper, we attempt to utilize the deep learning-based approach, namely bidirectional long-short term memory with attention mechanism (BLSTM-ATT), aiming to precisely detect reentrancy bugs. Furthermore, we propose contract snippet representations for smart contracts, which contributes to capturing essential semantic information and control flow dependencies. Our extensive experimental studies on over 42,000 real-world smart contracts show that our proposed model and contract snippet representations significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. In addition, this work proves that it is practical to apply deep learning-based technology on smart contract vulnerability detection, which is able to promote future research towards this area.
66 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...With the rapid development in recent times, blockchain technologies have been applied to many other areas, such as the Internet of Things [38], [39] and copyright protection [40]....
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TL;DR: The Secure Authentication Management human-centric Scheme (SAMS) is proposed to authenticate mobile devices using blockchain for trusting resource information in the mobile devices that are participating in the MRM resource pool.
Abstract: The recent advances in information technology for mobile devices have increased the work efficiency of users, the mobility of compact mobile devices, and the convenience of location independence. However, mobile devices have limited computing power and storage capacity, so mobile cloud computing is being researched to overcome these limitations in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing is divided into two methods: the use of external cloud services and the use of mobile resource management without a cloud server (MRM), which integrates the computing and storage resources of nearby mobile devices. Because mobile devices can freely participate in MRM, it is critical to have authentication technology to determine the correctness of information regarding resources. Conventional technologies require strong authentication techniques because they have vulnerabilities that can easily be tampered with via man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. This paper proposes the Secure Authentication Management human-centric Scheme (SAMS) to authenticate mobile devices using blockchain for trusting resource information in the mobile devices that are participating in the MRM resource pool. The SAMS forms a blockchain based on the resource information of the subordinate client nodes around the master node in the MRM. Devices in the MRM that have not been authorized through the SAMS cannot access or falsify data. To verify the SAMS for application with MRM, it was tested for data falsification by a malicious user accessing the SAMS, and the results show that data falsification is impossible.
66 citations
Cites background from "Blockchains and Smart Contracts for..."
...Compared to a conventional centralized system, a blockchain has a number of advantages, including advantages in efficiency, security, resilience, and transparency [13, 14]....
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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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