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Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Internet of Things".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 90048

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Hong-Ning Dai

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Guest Editor

Department of Computing and Decision Sciences, Lingnan University, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong
Interests: cyberphysical systems; wireless networks; distributed systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Jiajing Wu

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Guest Editor

Associate Professor, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
Interests: Blockchain; Complex Networks; Cyber-physical Systems

Dr. Hao Wang

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Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7034 Trondheim, Norway
Interests: big data; computer technology; Internet of Things; safety systems; software engineering; wireless communication
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping urban informatics due to the proliferation of applications in smart industries, smart grids, smart healthcare, and smart homes, where various sensors and smart meters are deployed. Diverse IoT devices have generated massive data, containing huge value that can be used to identify faults, abnormal behaviors, and performance bottlenecks, consequently allowing proactive actions to enhance system performance and reliability.

However, incumbent IoT systems are also suffering from technical challenges: (i) poor interoperability across diverse IoT systems; (ii) security vulnerabilities; and (iii) privacy exposure of IoT data. The absence of trust across diverse IoT systems is the main root cause of these challenges.

The advent of blockchain brings opportunities to overcome the above IoT challenges. Blockchain possesses key features such as decentralization, immutability, transparency, nonrepudiation, traceability, and has the potential to improve trust in the IoT ecosystem. However, there are still technical issues to be solved before the full adoption of blockchain for IoT systems.

This Special Issue of Sensors invites high-quality original contributions on the integration of blockchain with IoT systems. The potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Blockchain for trust management of IoT systems;
Blockchain for trusted service computing for IoT systems;
Blockchain for trusted edge/cloud computing for IoT systems;
Blockchain for trusted software-defined networks for IoT systems;
Blockchain for trusted network-slicing mechanisms for IoT systems;
Blockchain for big data in trustworthy IoT systems;
Blockchain-based solutions for the security, privacy, and trust of IoT systems;
Trustworthy machine learning/deep learning approaches for blockchain-enabled IoT systems;
Blockchain-based trustworthy IoT applications;
Platform development for blockchain-enabled, trustworthy IoT systems;
Smart contracts for blockchain-enabled trust management in IoT systems;
Scalability and fault tolerance mechanisms for blockchain-enabled IoT systems;
Distributed consensus algorithms for blockchain-enabled trustworthy IoT systems;
Empirical studies, benchmarking, and industrial best practices for blockchain-enabled IoT systems.

Dr. Hong-Ning Dai
Dr. Jiajing Wu
Dr. Hao Wang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

Internet of Things
sensors
blockchain
security
privacy
trust

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Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

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19 pages, 647 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Aurora-Trinity: A Super-Light Client for Distributed Ledger Networks Extending the Ethereum Trinity Client

by Federico Matteo Benčić and Ivana Podnar Žarko

Sensors 2022, 22(5), 1835; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22051835 - 25 Feb 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2237

Abstract

Light clients for distributed ledger networks can verify blockchain integrity by downloading and analyzing blockchain headers. They are designed to circumvent the high resource requirements, i.e., the large bandwidth and memory requirements that full nodes must meet, which are unsuitable for consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices. Light clients rely on full nodes and trust them implicitly. This leaves them vulnerable to various types of attacks, ranging from accepting maliciously forged data to Eclipse attacks. We introduce Aurora-Trinity, a novel version of light clients that addresses the above-mentioned vulnerability by relying on our original Aurora module, which extends the Ethereum Trinity client. The Aurora module efficiently discovers the presence of malicious or Byzantine nodes in distributed ledger networks with a predefined and acceptable error rate and identifies at least one honest node for persistent or ephemeral communication. The identified honest node is used to detect the latest canonical chain head or to infer the state of an entry in the ledger without downloading the header chain, making the Aurora-Trinity client extremely efficient. It can run on consumer-grade hardware and resource-constrained devices, as the Aurora module consumes about 0.31 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage at runtime. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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17 pages, 474 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Offline Scaling of IoT Devices in IOTA Blockchain

by Abhimanyu Rawat, Vanesa Daza and Matteo Signorini

Sensors 2022, 22(4), 1411; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22041411 - 12 Feb 2022

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3646

Abstract

An increased pattern of hidden Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been observed. Due to the increased number of security attacks, a large number of IoT devices are disappearing from the public internet. Operating blockchain operations in such ad hoc connectivity becomes challenging. However, multiple past studies have pointed towards IOTA Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that closely caters to offline blockchain use cases. However, there has been little to no empirical study or introduction to time bounds on transaction confirmation. Therefore, this study explains what provisions the existing IOTA blockchain has to accommodate the increased pattern of hidden IoT devices, and if IOTA is truly sufficient as a solution. In summary, we approach research questions by analyzing the studies that explore the trend of offline IoT devices and evaluating the relevance of offline blockchains, assessing the IOTA specification and codebase around offline transaction-making capabilities and pointing out some bounds that IOTA blockchain nodes must follow towards incoming transactions. Furthermore, we confirm by experimental runs that outside and within the tight time bounds transactions in offline Tangle can become stale and not get confirmed, and the effective time-bound can be even less. Realizing the need for a better offline blockchain scalability solution. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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22 pages, 1192 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Incremental Clustering Algorithm with Pattern Drift Detection for IoT-Enabled Smart Grid System

by Zigui Jiang, Rongheng Lin and Fangchun Yang

Sensors 2021, 21(19), 6466; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21196466 - 28 Sep 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2866

Abstract

The IoT-enabled smart grid system provides smart meter data for electricity consumers to record their energy consumption behaviors, the typical features of which can be represented by the load patterns extracted from load data clustering. The changeability of consumption behaviors requires load pattern update for achieving accurate consumer segmentation and effective demand response. In order to save training time and reduce computation scale, we propose a novel incremental clustering algorithm with probability strategy, ICluster-PS, instead of overall load data clustering to update load patterns. ICluster-PS first conducts new load pattern extraction based on the existing load patterns and new data. Then, it intergrades new load patterns with the existing ones. Finally, it optimizes the intergraded load pattern sets by a further modification. Moreover, ICluster-PS can be performed continuously with new coming data due to parameter updating and generalization. Extensive experiments are implemented on real-world dataset containing diverse consumer types in various districts. The experimental results are evaluated by both clustering validity indices and accuracy measures, which indicate that ICluster-PS outperforms other related incremental clustering algorithm. Additionally, according to the further case studies on pattern evolution analysis, ICluster-PS is able to present any pattern drifts through its incremental clustering results. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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26 pages, 20679 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Entitlement-Based Access Control for Smart Cities Using Blockchain

by Fariza Sabrina and Julian Jang-Jaccard

Sensors 2021, 21(16), 5264; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21165264 - 4 Aug 2021

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3315

Abstract

Smart cities use the Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as connected sensors, lights, and meters to collect and analyze data to improve infrastructure, public utilities, and services. However, the true potential of smart cities cannot be leveraged without addressing many security concerns. In particular, there is a significant challenge for provisioning a reliable access control solution to share IoT data among various users across organizations. We present a novel entitlement-based blockchain-enabled access control architecture that can be used for smart cities (and for any ap-plication domains that require large-scale IoT deployments). Our proposed entitlement-based access control model is flexible as it facilitates a resource owner to safely delegate access rights to any entities beyond the trust boundary of an organization. The detailed design and implementation on Ethereum blockchain along with a qualitative evaluation of the security and access control aspects of the proposed scheme are presented in the paper. The experimental results from private Ethereum test networks demonstrate that our proposal can be easily implemented with low latency. This validates that our proposal is applicable to use in the real world IoT environments. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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27 pages, 3193 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Combining IOTA and Attribute-Based Encryption for Access Control in the Internet of Things

by Yuanyu Zhang, Ruka Nakanishi, Masahiro Sasabe and Shoji Kasahara

Sensors 2021, 21(15), 5053; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21155053 - 26 Jul 2021

Cited by 23 | Viewed by 4513

Abstract

Unauthorized resource access represents a typical security threat in the Internet of Things (IoT), while distributed ledger technologies (e.g., blockchain and IOTA) hold great promise to address this threat. Although blockchain-based IoT access control schemes have been the most popular ones, they suffer from several significant limitations, such as high monetary cost and low throughput of processing access requests. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel IoT access control scheme by combining the fee-less IOTA technology and the Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) technology. To control the access to a resource, a token, which records access permissions to this resource, is encrypted by the CP-ABE technology and uploaded to the IOTA Tangle (i.e., the underlying database of IOTA). Any user can fetch the encrypted token from the Tangle, while only those who can decrypt this token are authorized to access the resource. In this way, the proposed scheme enables not only distributed, fee-less and scalable access control thanks to the IOTA but also fine-grained attribute-based access control thanks to the CP-ABE. We show the feasibility of our scheme by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype system using smart phones (Google Pixel 3XL) and a commercial IoT gateway (NEC EGW001). We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of access request processing throughput. The experimental results show that our scheme enables object owners to authorize access rights to a large number of subjects in a much (about 5 times) shorter time than the existing access control scheme called Decentralized Capability-based Access Control framework using IOTA (DCACI), significantly improving the access request processing throughput. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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27 pages, 863 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rechained: Sybil-Resistant Distributed Identities for the Internet of Things and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

by Arne Bochem and Benjamin Leiding

Sensors 2021, 21(9), 3257; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21093257 - 8 May 2021

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3294

Abstract

Today, increasing Internet of Things devices are deployed, and the field of applications for decentralized, self-organizing networks keeps growing. The growth also makes these systems more attractive to attackers. Sybil attacks are a common issue, especially in decentralized networks and networks that are deployed in scenarios with irregular or unreliable Internet connectivity. The lack of a central authority that can be contacted at any time allows attackers to introduce arbitrary amounts of nodes into the network and manipulate its behavior according to the attacker’s goals, by posing as a majority participant. Depending on the structure of the network, employing Sybil node detection schemes may be difficult, and low powered Internet of Things devices are usually unable to perform impactful amounts of work for proof-of-work based schemes. In this paper, we present Rechained, a scheme that monetarily disincentivizes the creation of Sybil identities for networks that can operate with intermittent or no Internet connectivity. We introduce a new revocation mechanism for identities, tie them into the concepts of self-sovereign identities, and decentralized identifiers. Case-studies are used to discuss upper- and lower-bounds for the costs of Sybil identities and, therefore, the provided security level. Furthermore, we formalize the protocol using Colored Petri Nets to analyze its correctness and suitability. Proof-of-concept implementations are used to evaluate the performance of our scheme on low powered hardware as it might be found in Internet of Things applications. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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17 pages, 3925 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Two-Level Blockchain System for Digital Crime Evidence Management

by Donghyo Kim, Sun-Young Ihm and Yunsik Son

Sensors 2021, 21(9), 3051; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21093051 - 27 Apr 2021

Cited by 22 | Viewed by 7688

Abstract

Digital evidence, such as evidence from CCTV and event data recorders, is highly valuable in criminal investigations, and is used as definitive evidence in trials. However, there are risks when digital evidence obtained during the investigation of a case is managed through a physical hard disk drive until it is submitted to the court. Previous studies have focused on the integrated management of digital evidence in a centralized system, but if a centralized system server is attacked, major operations and investigation information may be leaked. Therefore, there is a need to reliably manage digital evidence and investigation information using blockchain technology in a distributed system environment. However, when large amounts of data—such as evidence videos—are stored in a blockchain, the data that must be processed only within one block before being created increase, causing performance degradation. Therefore, we propose a two-level blockchain system that separates digital evidence into hot and cold blockchains. In the criminal investigation process, information that frequently changes is stored in the hot blockchain, and unchanging data such as videos are stored in the cold blockchain. To evaluate the system, we measured the storage and inquiry processing performance of digital crime evidence videos according to the different capacities in the two-level blockchain system. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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16 pages, 3247 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Blockchain-Based Trusted Edge Platform in Edge Computing Environment

by Jinnan Zhang, Changqi Lu, Gang Cheng, Teng Guo, Jian Kang, Xia Zhang, Xueguang Yuan and Xin Yan

Sensors 2021, 21(6), 2126; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21062126 - 18 Mar 2021

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 4483

Abstract

Edge computing is a product of the evolution of IoT and the development of cloud computing technology, providing computing, storage, network, and other infrastructure close to users. Compared with the centralized deployment model of traditional cloud computing, edge computing solves the problems of extended communication time and high convergence traffic, providing better support for low latency and high bandwidth services. With the increasing amount of data generated by users and devices in IoT, security and privacy issues in the edge computing environment have become concerns. Blockchain, a security technology developed rapidly in recent years, has been adopted by many industries, such as finance and insurance. With the edge computing capability, deploying blockchain platforms/applications on edge computing platforms can provide security services for network edge environments. Although there are already solutions for integrating edge computing with blockchain in many IoT application scenarios, they slightly lack scalability, portability, and heterogeneous data processing. In this paper, we propose a trusted edge platform to integrate the edge computing framework and blockchain network for building an edge security environment. The proposed platform aims to preserve the data privacy of the edge computing client. The design based on the microservice architecture makes the platform lighter. To improve the portability of the platform, we introduce the Edgex Foundry framework and design an edge application module on the platform to improve the business capability of Edgex. Simultaneously, we designed a series of well-defined security authentication microservices. These microservices use the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network to build a reliable security mechanism in the edge environment. Finally, we build an edge computing network using different hardware devices and deploy the trusted edge platform on multiple network nodes. The usability of the proposed platform is demonstrated by testing the round-trip time (RTT) of several important workflows. The experimental results demonstrate that the platform can meet the availability requirements in real-world usage scenarios. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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22 pages, 1058 KiB

Open AccessArticle

FarpScusn: Fully Anonymous Routing Protocol with Self-Healing Capability in Unstable Sensor Networks

by Fengyin Li, Ying Wang, Hongwei Ju, Yanli Wang, Zhaojie Wang and Huiyu Zhou

Sensors 2020, 20(22), 6683; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20226683 - 22 Nov 2020

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2796

Abstract

Anonymous technology is an effective way for protecting users’ privacy. Anonymity in sensor networks is to prevent the unauthorized third party from revealing the identities of the communication parties. While, in unstable wireless sensor networks, frequent topology changes often lead to route-failure in anonymous communication. To deal with the problems of anonymous route-failure in unstable sensor networks, in this paper we propose a fully anonymous routing protocol with self-healing capability in unstable sensor networks by constructing a new key agreement scheme and proposing an anonymous identity scheme. The proposed protocol maintains full anonymity of sensor nodes with the self-healing capability of anonymous routes. The results from the performance analysis show that the proposed self-healing anonymity-focused protocol achieves full anonymity of source nodes, destination nodes, and communication association. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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Review

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22 pages, 1929 KiB

Open AccessReview

Blockchain for Electronic Voting System—Review and Open Research Challenges

by Uzma Jafar, Mohd Juzaiddin Ab Aziz and Zarina Shukur

Sensors 2021, 21(17), 5874; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21175874 - 31 Aug 2021

Cited by 131 | Viewed by 52276

Abstract

Online voting is a trend that is gaining momentum in modern society. It has great potential to decrease organizational costs and increase voter turnout. It eliminates the need to print ballot papers or open polling stations—voters can vote from wherever there is an Internet connection. Despite these benefits, online voting solutions are viewed with a great deal of caution because they introduce new threats. A single vulnerability can lead to large-scale manipulations of votes. Electronic voting systems must be legitimate, accurate, safe, and convenient when used for elections. Nonetheless, adoption may be limited by potential problems associated with electronic voting systems. Blockchain technology came into the ground to overcome these issues and offers decentralized nodes for electronic voting and is used to produce electronic voting systems mainly because of their end-to-end verification advantages. This technology is a beautiful replacement for traditional electronic voting solutions with distributed, non-repudiation, and security protection characteristics. The following article gives an overview of electronic voting systems based on blockchain technology. The main goal of this analysis was to examine the current status of blockchain-based voting research and online voting systems and any related difficulties to predict future developments. This study provides a conceptual description of the intended blockchain-based electronic voting application and an introduction to the fundamental structure and characteristics of the blockchain in connection to electronic voting. As a consequence of this study, it was discovered that blockchain systems may help solve some of the issues that now plague election systems. On the other hand, the most often mentioned issues in blockchain applications are privacy protection and transaction speed. For a sustainable blockchain-based electronic voting system, the security of remote participation must be viable, and for scalability, transaction speed must be addressed. Due to these concerns, it was determined that the existing frameworks need to be improved to be utilized in voting systems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for Trustworthy Internet of Things)

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