Blockchain for IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 8281

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Engineering, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), 8400 Winterthur, Switzerland
Interests: future wireless networks; information and network security; IoT/CPS; network softwarization

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Guest Editor

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Guest Editor
School of computer science, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
Interests: 5G; blockchain; network security; virtual networks; security protocols; software-defined networking (SDN); Internet of Things (IoT); multi-access edge computing (MEC)
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Guest Editor
Workz Group Telecoms Ltd. R &D, 0402 County Wicklow, Ireland
Interests: machine learning; computational intelligence; private blockchain; predictive analytics; bio-inspired algorithms; IoT/CPS

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Blockchain has been introduced into a wide variety of industries, such as finance, intellectual properties, energy, logistics, and insurance. In many applications and use-cases of this technology, there is an inherent link with IoT and CPS regarding various functions, e.g., for monitoring assets, sensing certain features, and actuating particular actions.

The exploitation of blockchain in the realm of IoT and CPS—and future ICT infrastructure in general—has the potential to enable various capabilities and use-cases in those systems. From a security perspective, blockchain technology can establish distributed security in contrast to centralized architectures. In the second place, blockchain’s strong protection against data tampering helps to prevent a rogue device from disrupting communications involving home, factory or transportation systems by injecting or relaying pernicious information. Moreover, since blockchain is built for decentralized control, various monitoring and decision schemes based on blockchains should be more scalable than conventional ones. From an applications perspective, it can enable new digital and pervasive services such as connected goods, fully-visible supply chains or secure e-health data sharing. Thus, blockchain technology holds the potential to securely unlock the business and operational value of 5G and Beyond networks to support common tasks, such as sensing, processing, storing, and communicating information. This promise has become more important with the emerging challenges of the post-COVID-19-pandemic era.

This Special Issue will elaborate on and emphasize the key aspects of use of blockchain for IoT and CPS with a perspective of 5G and Beyond networks and will provide an opportunity for researchers across the globe to share their latest research on the focal theme of the issue. Thus, researchers and engineers from academia and industry are invited to submit their recent high-quality results and innovations. The list of topics includes but is not restricted to the following:

  • Novel theoretical concepts and applications of blockchain for IoT, CPS, and future ICT systems like 5G and Beyond
  • Experimental evaluations of blockchain-based 5G-enabled IoT and CPS
  • Lightweight protocols and algorithms for blockchains in IoT and CPS
  • Security, privacy, and trust in and of blockchain enabled/augmented IoT and CPS
  • Formal methods and modeling of blockchain enabled IoT and cyberphysical systems
  • Blockchain based security frameworks for 5G/6G IoT and CPS
  • Service-oriented blockchains in IoT and CPS
  • Testbeds, simulation techniques, frameworks, and debugging tools related to blockchain for IoT and CPS
  • Intelligent blockchain and consensus algorithms
  • Performance analysis and optimization of blockchain for IoT and CPS
  • Smart contracts and chain codes

Dr. Gürkan Gür
Prof. Samia Bouzefrane
Dr. Madhusanka Liyanage
Dr. Soumya Banerjee
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Distributed ledger technology (DLT)
  • IoT
  • Cyberphysical systems (CPS)
  • Information security 5G and Beyond 5G systems
  • Distributed intelligence

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 1159 KiB  
Article
Fine Grained Access Control Based on Smart Contract for Edge Computing
by Yong Zhu, Xiao Wu and Zhihui Hu
Electronics 2022, 11(1), 167; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11010167 - 5 Jan 2022
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3381
Abstract
Traditional centralized access control faces data security and privacy problems. The core server is the main target to attack. Single point of failure risk and load bottleneck are difficult to solve effectively. And the third-party data center cannot protect data owners. Traditional distributed [...] Read more.
Traditional centralized access control faces data security and privacy problems. The core server is the main target to attack. Single point of failure risk and load bottleneck are difficult to solve effectively. And the third-party data center cannot protect data owners. Traditional distributed access control faces the problem of how to effectively solve the scalability and diversified requirements of IoT (Internet of Things) applications. SCAC (Smart Contract-based Access Control) is based on ABAC (Attributes Based Access Control) and RBAC (Role Based Access Control). It can be applied to various types of nodes in different application scenarios that attributes are used as basic decision elements and authorized by role. The research objective is to combine the efficiency of service orchestration in edge computing with the security of consensus mechanism in blockchain, making full use of smart contract programmability to explore fine grained access control mode on the basis of traditional access control paradigm. By designing SSH-based interface for edge computing and blockchain access, SCAC parameters can be found and set to adjust ACLs (Access Control List) and their policies. The blockchain-edge computing combination is powerful in causing significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models and novel decentralized applications. The rationality on typical process behavior of management services and data access control be verified through CPN (Color Petri Net) tools 4.0, and then data statistics on fine grained access control, decentralized scalability, and lightweight deployment can be obtained by instance running in this study. The results show that authorization takes into account both security and efficiency with the “blockchain-edge computing” combination. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems)
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15 pages, 1266 KiB  
Article
Blockchain-Enabled Access Management System for Edge Computing
by Yong Zhu, Chao Huang, Zhihui Hu, Abdullah Al-Dhelaan and Mohammed Al-Dhelaan
Electronics 2021, 10(9), 1000; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10091000 - 22 Apr 2021
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3295
Abstract
In the post-cloud era, edge computing is a new computing paradigm with data processed at the edge of the network, which can process the data close to the end-user in real time and offload the cloud task intelligently. Meanwhile, the decentralization, tamper-proof and [...] Read more.
In the post-cloud era, edge computing is a new computing paradigm with data processed at the edge of the network, which can process the data close to the end-user in real time and offload the cloud task intelligently. Meanwhile, the decentralization, tamper-proof and anonymity of blockchain technology can provide a new trusted computing environment for edge computing. However, it does raise considerable concerns of security, privacy, fault-tolerance and so on. For example, identity authentication and access control rely on third parties, heterogeneous devices and different vendors in IoT, leading to security and privacy risks, etc. How to combine the advantages of the two has become the highlight of academic research, especially the issue of secure resource management. Comprehensive security and privacy involve all aspects of platform, data, application and access control. In. this paper, the architecture and behavior of an Access Management System (AMS) in a proof of concept (PoC) prototype are proposed with a Color Petri Net (CPN) model. The two domains of blockchain and edge computing are organically connected by interfaces and interactions. The simulation of operation, activity and role association proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the AMS. The instances of platform business access control, data access control, database services, IOT hub service are run on Advantech WISE-PaaS through User Account and Authentication (UAA). Finally, fine-grained and distributed access control can be realized with the help of a blockchain attribute. Namely, smart contracts are used to register, broadcast, and revoke access authorization, as well as to create specific transactions to define access control policies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems)
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