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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 October 2023) | Viewed by 50821

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Prof. Dr. Ju Wook Jang

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Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul 04107, Republic of Korea
Interests: blockchain; IoT; mobile networks; mobility; algorithms

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Internet of Things (IoT) is exploding in research and industry, with IoT technologies quickly maturing in smart homes, smart farms, smart factories and smart cities. Diverse IoT devices generate a huge volume of IoT data vulnerable to tampering, hacking and even denial of services. This vulnerability comes from heterogeneity in protocols and operating systems and slow adoption of global standards. However, most IoT devices are too constrained in terms of processing and communication ability to accommodate conventional security and privacy schemes.

The vast data generated from the huge number of interconnected IoT devices can be best analyzed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for problem-solving or decision-making. In return, IoT provides ample data essential for AI such as machine learning. Thus, IoT and AI are inseparable.

Blockchain is a promising technology for providing security and privacy for constrained IoT devices. Unlike conventional security schemes, which focus on the path traversed by data, blockchain focuses on the protection of data themselves, providing immutability and authentication. This makes blockchain an outstanding candidate for IoT security and privacy, since most IoT data traverse diverse and vulnerable paths interconnecting distributed IoT devices.

This Special Issue addresses the innovative developments, technologies and challenges related to blockchain, security, privacy and intelligence for the IoT. The Special Issue is seeking the latest findings from research and ongoing projects. Additionally, review articles that provide readers with current research trends and solutions are also welcome. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Blockchain-based security and privacy for IoT

Blockchain technology for IoT

Blockchain and AI for IoT

Mobile blockchain for IoT

Software platforms for security in IoT

Edge/fog computing for security and privacy in IoT

IoT applications based on blockchain technology

Evaluation and experimental analysis of blockchain IoT applications

Blockchain, security and privacy for the Internet of Vehicles

Blockchain, security, privacy and AI for IoT healthcare systems

AI-based technologies for security and privacy of future IoT

AI-based technologies for measurement and management of future IoT

Blockchain and AI for smart cities, smart homes, smart health and industrial IoT

AI for fraud detection and forensics in blockchain

Prof. Dr. Ju Wook Jang
Guest Editor

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Keywords

blockchain
IoT
security
privacy
Artificial Intelligence

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Published Papers (11 papers)

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Research

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19 pages, 444 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Blockchain-Based Data Access Control and Key Agreement System in IoT Environment

by JoonYoung Lee, MyeongHyun Kim, KiSung Park, SungKee Noh, Abhishek Bisht, Ashok Kumar Das and Youngho Park

Sensors 2023, 23(11), 5173; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23115173 - 29 May 2023

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2351

Abstract

Recently, with the increasing application of the Internet of Things (IoT), various IoT environments such as smart factories, smart homes, and smart grids are being generated. In the IoT environment, a lot of data are generated in real time, and the generated IoT data can be used as source data for various services such as artificial intelligence, remote medical care, and finance, and can also be used for purposes such as electricity bill generation. Therefore, data access control is required to grant access rights to various data users in the IoT environment who need such IoT data. In addition, IoT data contain sensitive information such as personal information, so privacy protection is also essential. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) technology has been utilized to address these requirements. Furthermore, system structures applying blockchains with CP-ABE are being studied to prevent bottlenecks and single failures of cloud servers, as well as to support data auditing. However, these systems do not stipulate authentication and key agreement to ensure the security of the data transmission process and data outsourcing. Accordingly, we propose a data access control and key agreement scheme using CP-ABE to ensure data security in a blockchain-based system. In addition, we propose a system that can provide data nonrepudiation, data accountability, and data verification functions by utilizing blockchains. Both formal and informal security verifications are performed to demonstrate the security of the proposed system. We also compare the security, functional aspects, and computational and communication costs of previous systems. Furthermore, we perform cryptographic calculations to analyze the system in practical terms. As a result, our proposed protocol is safer against attacks such as guessing attacks and tracing attacks than other protocols, and can provide mutual authentication and key agreement functions. In addition, the proposed protocol is more efficient than other protocols, so it can be applied to practical IoT environments. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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33 pages, 1202 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Toward Trusted IoT by General Proof-of-Work

by Chih-Wen Hsueh and Chi-Ting Chin

Sensors 2023, 23(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/s23010015 - 20 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1798

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is used to describe devices with sensors that connect and exchange data with other devices or systems on the Internet or other communication networks. Actually, the data not only represent the concrete things connected but also describe the abstract matters related. Therefore, it is expected to support trust on IoT since blockchain was invented so that trusted IoT could be possible or, recently, even metaverse could be imaginable. However, IoT systems are usually composed of a lot of device nodes with limited computing power. The built-in unsolved performance and energy-consumption problems in blockchain become more critical in IoT. The other problems such as finality, privacy, or scalability introduce even more complexity so that trusted IoT is still far from realization, let alone the metaverse. With general Proof of Work (GPoW), the energy consumption of Bitcoin can be reduced to less than 1 billionth and proof of PowerTimestamp (PoPT) can be constructed so that a global even ordering can be reached to conduct synchronization on distributed systems in real-time. Therefore, trusted IoT is possible. We reintroduce GPoW with more mathematic proofs so that PoPT can be optimal and describe how PoPT can be realized with simulation results, mining examples and synchronization scenario toward trusted IoT. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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31 pages, 941 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Secure Decentralized IoT Service Platform Using Consortium Blockchain

by Ruipeng Zhang, Chen Xu and Mengjun Xie

Sensors 2022, 22(21), 8186; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22218186 - 26 Oct 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3357

Abstract

Although many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy, blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is still much less studied. Blockchain has great potential in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. In this paper, we propose an innovative IoT service platform powered by the consortium blockchain technology. The proposed platform abstracts machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) communications into services provided by IoT devices. Then, it materializes the data exchange of the IoT network through smart contracts and blockchain transactions. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary storage layer to the proposed platform to address various off-chain data storage needs. Our proof-of-concept implementation was tested against various workloads and connection sizes under different block configurations to evaluate the platform’s transaction throughput, latency, and hardware utilization. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution can maintain high performance with a throughput of approximately 800 reads per second (RPS), 50–80 transactions per second (TPS), and a latency of 50 ms–2 s under light to moderate workloads. Our extensive evaluation of the performance impact of batch size, batch timeout, and connection size also provides valuable insights into the optimization of blockchain configuration for achieving high performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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20 pages, 7752 KiB

Open AccessArticle

LBSS: A Lightweight Blockchain-Based Security Scheme for IoT-Enabled Healthcare Environment

by Omar Said

Sensors 2022, 22(20), 7948; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22207948 - 18 Oct 2022

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 2063

Abstract

Recently, global healthcare has made great progress with the use of Internet of Things technology. However, for there to be excellent patient care, there must be a high degree of safety for the IoT health system. There has been a massive increase in hacking systems and the theft of sensitive and highly confidential information from large health centers and hospitals. That is why establishing a highly secure and reliable healthcare system has become a top priority. In this paper, a security scheme for the IoT-enabled healthcare environment, LBSS, is proposed. This security scheme comprises three security mechanisms. The first mechanism is based on the blockchain technology and is used for transaction integrity. The second mechanism is used to store the healthcare system data in a secure manner through the distribution of its data records among multiple servers. The third mechanism is used to access the healthcare data after applying a proposed authorization test. To minimize the security overhead, the healthcare data is prioritized in regard to its importance. Therefore, each security mechanism has specific steps for each level of data importance. Finally, the NS3 package is used to construct a simulation environment for IoT-enabled healthcare systems to measure the proposed security scheme performance. The simulation results proved that the proposed healthcare security scheme outperformed the traditional models in regard to the performance metrics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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20 pages, 584 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Improving Ponzi Scheme Contract Detection Using Multi-Channel TextCNN and Transformer

by Yizhou Chen, Heng Dai, Xiao Yu, Wenhua Hu, Zhiwen Xie and Cheng Tan

Sensors 2021, 21(19), 6417; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21196417 - 26 Sep 2021

Cited by 34 | Viewed by 4151

Abstract

With the development of blockchain technologies, many Ponzi schemes disguise themselves under the veil of smart contracts. The Ponzi scheme contracts cause serious financial losses, which has a bad effect on the blockchain. Existing Ponzi scheme contract detection studies have mainly focused on extracting hand-crafted features and training a machine learning classifier to detect Ponzi scheme contracts. However, the hand-crafted features cannot capture the structural and semantic feature of the source code. Therefore, in this study, we propose a Ponzi scheme contract detection method called MTCformer (Multi-channel Text Convolutional Neural Networks and Transofrmer). In order to reserve the structural information of the source code, the MTCformer first converts the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the smart contract code to the specially formatted code token sequence via the Structure-Based Traversal (SBT) method. Then, the MTCformer uses multi-channel TextCNN (Text Convolutional Neural Networks) to learn local structural and semantic features from the code token sequence. Next, the MTCformer employs the Transformer to capture the long-range dependencies of code tokens. Finally, a fully connected neural network with a cost-sensitive loss function in the MTCformer is used for classification. The experimental results show that the MTCformer is superior to the state-of-the-art methods and its variants in Ponzi scheme contract detection. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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22 pages, 757 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Security and Privacy for Mobile IoT Applications Using Blockchain

by Kevin Carvalho and Jorge Granjal

Sensors 2021, 21(17), 5931; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21175931 - 3 Sep 2021

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3651

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are becoming more integrated into our society and daily lives, although many of them can expose the user to threats against their privacy. Therefore, we find that it is crucial to address the privacy requirements of most of such applications and develop solutions that implement, as far as possible, privacy by design in order to mitigate relevant threats. While in the literature we may find innovative proposals to enhance the privacy of IoT applications, many of those only focus on the edge layer. On the other hand, privacy by design approaches are required throughout the whole system (e.g., at the cloud layer), in order to guarantee robust solutions to privacy in IoT. With this in mind, we propose an architecture that leverages the properties of blockchain, integrated with other technologies, to address security and privacy in the context of IoT applications. The main focus of our proposal is to enhance the privacy of the users and their data, using the anonymisation properties of blockchain to implement user-controlled privacy. We consider an IoT application with mobility for smart vehicles as our usage case, which allows us to implement and experimentally evaluate the proposed architecture and mechanisms as a proof of concept. In this application, data related to the user’s identity and location needs to be shared with security and privacy. Our proposal was implemented and experimentally validated in light of fundamental privacy and security requirements, as well as its performance. We found it to be a viable approach to security and privacy in IoT environments. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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29 pages, 1293 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Scheduling Mechanism Based on Optimization Using IoT-Tasks Orchestration for Efficient Patient Health Monitoring

by Naeem Iqbal, Imran, Shabir Ahmad, Rashid Ahmad and Do-Hyeun Kim

Sensors 2021, 21(16), 5430; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21165430 - 11 Aug 2021

Cited by 28 | Viewed by 4313

Abstract

Over the past years, numerous Internet of Things (IoT)-based healthcare systems have been developed to monitor patient health conditions, but these traditional systems do not adapt to constraints imposed by revolutionized IoT technology. IoT-based healthcare systems are considered mission-critical applications whose missing deadlines cause critical situations. For example, in patients with chronic diseases or other fatal diseases, a missed task could lead to fatalities. This study presents a smart patient health monitoring system (PHMS) based on an optimized scheduling mechanism using IoT-tasks orchestration architecture to monitor vital signs data of remote patients. The proposed smart PHMS consists of two core modules: a healthcare task scheduling based on optimization and optimization of healthcare services using a real-time IoT-based task orchestration architecture. First, an optimized time-constraint-aware scheduling mechanism using a real-time IoT-based task orchestration architecture is developed to generate autonomous healthcare tasks and effectively handle the deployment of emergent healthcare tasks. Second, an optimization module is developed to optimize the services of the e-Health industry based on objective functions. Furthermore, our study uses Libelium e-Health toolkit to monitors the physiological data of remote patients continuously. The experimental results reveal that an optimized scheduling mechanism reduces the tasks starvation by 14% and tasks failure by 17% compared to a conventional fair emergency first (FEF) scheduling mechanism. The performance analysis results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, and it suggests that the proposed solution can be an effective and sustainable solution towards monitoring patient’s vital signs data in the IoT-based e-Health domain. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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19 pages, 1994 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Scalable Implementation of Anonymous Voting over Ethereum Blockchain

by Jae-Geun Song, Sung-Jun Moon and Ju-Wook Jang

Sensors 2021, 21(12), 3958; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21123958 - 8 Jun 2021

Cited by 21 | Viewed by 3564

Abstract

We considered scalable anonymous voting on the Ethereum blockchain. We identified three major bottlenecks in implementation: (1) division overflow in encryption of voting values for anonymity; (2) large time complexity in tallying, which limited scalability in the number of candidates and voters; and (3) tallying failure due to “no votes” from registered voters. Previous schemes failed at tallying if one (or more) registered voters did not send encrypted voting values. Algorithmic solutions and implementation details are provided. An experiment using Truffle and Remix running on a desktop PC was performed for evaluation. Our scheme shows great reduction in gas, which measures the computational burden of smart contracts to be executed on Ethereum. For instance, our scheme consumed 1/53 of the gas compared to a state-of-the-art solution for 60 voters. Time complexity analysis shows that our scheme is asymptotically superior to known solutions. In addition, we propose a solution to the tallying failure due to the “no vote” from registered voters. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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27 pages, 15291 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Smart Contract-Based P2P Energy Trading System with Dynamic Pricing on Ethereum Blockchain

by Jae Geun Song, Eung seon Kang, Hyeon Woo Shin and Ju Wook Jang

Sensors 2021, 21(6), 1985; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21061985 - 11 Mar 2021

Cited by 34 | Viewed by 6680

Abstract

We implement a peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading system between prosumers and consumers using a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain. The smart contract resides on a blockchain shared by participants and hence guarantees exact execution of trade and keeps immutable transaction records. It removes high cost and overheads needed against hacking or tampering in traditional server-based P2P energy trade systems. The salient features of our implementation include: 1. Dynamic pricing for automatic balancing of total supply and total demand within a microgrid, 2. prevention of double sale, 3. automatic and autonomous operation, 4. experiment on a testbed (Node.js and web3.js API to access Ethereum Virtual Machine on Raspberry Pis with MATLAB interface), and 5. simulation via personas (virtual consumers and prosumers generated from benchmark). Detailed description of our implementation is provided along with state diagrams and core procedures. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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32 pages, 6071 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Autonomous Log Storage Management Protocol with Blockchain Mechanism and Access Control for the Internet of Things

by Chien-Lung Hsu, Wei-Xin Chen and Tuan-Vinh Le

Sensors 2020, 20(22), 6471; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20226471 - 12 Nov 2020

Cited by 20 | Viewed by 4103

Abstract

As the Internet of Things (IoT) has become prevalent, a massive number of logs produced by IoT devices are transmitted and processed every day. The logs should contain important contents and private information. Moreover, these logs may be used as evidences for forensic investigations when cyber security incidents occur. However, evidence legality and internal security issues in existing works were not properly addressed. This paper proposes an autonomous log storage management protocol with blockchain mechanism and access control for the IoT. Autonomous model allows sensors to encrypt their logs before sending it to gateway and server, so that the logs are not revealed to the public during communication process. Along with blockchain, we introduce the concept “signature chain”. The integration of blockchain and signature chain provides efficient management functions with valuable security properties for the logs, including robust identity verification, data integrity, non-repudiation, data tamper resistance, and the legality. Our work also employs attribute-based encryption to achieve fine-grained access control and data confidentiality. The results of security analysis using AVSIPA toolset, GNY logic and semantic proof indicate that the proposed protocol meets various security requirements. Providing good performance with elliptic curve small key size, short BLS signature, efficient signcryption method, and single sign-on solution, our work is suitable for the IoT. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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Review

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19 pages, 1670 KiB

Open AccessReview

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Data System Security: A Literature Review

by Ricardo Raimundo and Albérico Rosário

Sensors 2021, 21(21), 7029; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21217029 - 23 Oct 2021

Cited by 24 | Viewed by 10438

Abstract

Diverse forms of artificial intelligence (AI) are at the forefront of triggering digital security innovations based on the threats that are arising in this post-COVID world. On the one hand, companies are experiencing difficulty in dealing with security challenges with regard to a variety of issues ranging from system openness, decision making, quality control, and web domain, to mention a few. On the other hand, in the last decade, research has focused on security capabilities based on tools such as platform complacency, intelligent trees, modeling methods, and outage management systems in an effort to understand the interplay between AI and those issues. the dependence on the emergence of AI in running industries and shaping the education, transports, and health sectors is now well known in the literature. AI is increasingly employed in managing data security across economic sectors. Thus, a literature review of AI and system security within the current digital society is opportune. This paper aims at identifying research trends in the field through a systematic bibliometric literature review (LRSB) of research on AI and system security. the review entails 77 articles published in the Scopus^® database, presenting up-to-date knowledge on the topic. the LRSB results were synthesized across current research subthemes. Findings are presented. the originality of the paper relies on its LRSB method, together with an extant review of articles that have not been categorized so far. Implications for future research are suggested. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain for IoT Security, Privacy and Intelligence)

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