An official website of the United States government
As Blockchain technology become more understood in recent years and its capability to solve enterprise business use cases become evident, technologist have been exploring Blockchain technology to solve use cases that have been daunting industries for years. Unlike existing technologies, one of the key features of blockchain technology is its unparalleled capability to provide, traceability, accountability and immutable records that can be accessed at any point in time. One application area of interest for blockchain is securing heterogenous networks. This paper explores the security challenges in a heterogonous network of IoT devices and whether blockchain can be a viable solution. Using an experimental approach, we explore the possibility of using blockchain technology to secure IoT devices, validate IoT device transactions, and establish a chain of trust to secure an IoT device mesh network, as well as investigate the plausibility of using immutable transactions for forensic analysis.
more »
« less
Blockchain-based Sensor Data Validation for Security in the Future Electric Grid
This paper explores the feasibility of using blockchain technology to validate that measured sensor data approximately follows a known accepted model to enhance sensor data security in electricity grid systems. This provides a more robust information infrastructure that can be secured against not only failures but also malicious attacks. Such robustness is valuable in envisioned electricity grids that are distributed at a global scale including both small and large nodes. While this may be valuable, blockchain’s security benefits come at the cost of computation of cryptographic functions and the cost of reaching distributed consensus. We report experimental results showing that, for the proposed application and assumptions, the time for these computations is small enough to not negatively impact the overall system operation. From this we conclude that it is indeed worthwhile to further study the application of blockchain technology in the electricity grid, removing the assumptions we make and integrating blockchain in a much more extensive manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance where blockchain is used to validate the measured sensor data in the electricity grid thus providing security to other system operations.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1744129
- PAR ID:
- 10148821
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Integrated Smart Grid Technologies
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 271 to 272
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Measuring trust in different Blockchain application contexts is challenging. There is a gap between building an accountable system with Blockchain and measuring the actual trust enhancement. This paper reviews trust factors in different Blockchain application contexts. We propose a trust assessment model for accountable trust factor collection while accounting for both quantitative and qualitative aspects of trust assessment. Our goal is to help users determine the trustworthiness of an entity by analyzing trust factors collected from intermediaries during business transactions. We use security and incentive assumptions to enhance the reliability of trust assessment data on Blockchain.more » « less
-
Blockchain is a decentralized, digital, and distributed ledger which allows transparent and secure information sharing among the peer-to-peer network. It eliminates the need for a centralized trusted party and, though it was introduced as the backbone technology for cryptocurrencies but has proved to be a promising and revolutionary technology for almost all global industries. The application of blockchain technology in the energy sector proposes a paradigm of solutions to problems of different levels of complexity in the traditional energy ecosystem. Extensive research has been proposed to exploit the inherent benefits of blockchain technology for the integration of distributed energy sources and facilitate peer-to-peer energy trading. This paper proposes a blockchain-based architecture to facilitate secure and decentralized energy trading generated from renewable energy sources. The solution utilizes the Ethereum blockchain and Smart Contracts for energy trading among the members of a small community without any trusted third entity and adopts features to achieve data integrity and confidentiality, and user identity privacy.more » « less
-
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although the blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using Blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records. In this work, we leverage Blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and management. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance model (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed framework can securely capture and validate provenance data that prevents any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the majority of the participants are honest.more » « less
-
This article presents a novel hardware-assisted distributed ledger-based solution for simultaneous device and data security in smart healthcare. This article presents a novel architecture that integrates PUF, blockchain, and Tangle for Security-by-Design (SbD) of healthcare cyber–physical systems (H-CPSs). Healthcare systems around the world have undergone massive technological transformation and have seen growing adoption with the advancement of Internet-of-Medical Things (IoMT). The technological transformation of healthcare systems to telemedicine, e-health, connected health, and remote health is being made possible with the sophisticated integration of IoMT with machine learning, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and other technologies. As healthcare systems are becoming more accessible and advanced, security and privacy have become pivotal for the smooth integration and functioning of various systems in H-CPSs. In this work, we present a novel approach that integrates PUF with IOTA Tangle and blockchain and works by storing the PUF keys of a patient’s Body Area Network (BAN) inside blockchain to access, store, and share globally. Each patient has a network of smart wearables and a gateway to obtain the physiological sensor data securely. To facilitate communication among various stakeholders in healthcare systems, IOTA Tangle’s Masked Authentication Messaging (MAM) communication protocol has been used, which securely enables patients to communicate, share, and store data on Tangle. The MAM channel works in the restricted mode in the proposed architecture, which can be accessed using the patient’s gateway PUF key. Furthermore, the successful verification of PUF enables patients to securely send and share physiological sensor data from various wearable and implantable medical devices embedded with PUF. Finally, healthcare system entities like physicians, hospital admin networks, and remote monitoring systems can securely establish communication with patients using MAM and retrieve the patient’s BAN PUF keys from the blockchain securely. Our experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach successfully integrates three security primitives, PUF, blockchain, and Tangle, providing decentralized access control and security in H-CPS with minimal energy requirements, data storage, and response time.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ISOCC47750.2019.9078509
