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1. A Multidimensional Blockchain Framework For Mobile Internet of Things

   Hussein, Zangoti; Hussein; Pissinou Makki, Alex; Pissinou, Niki; Shahid, R. Abdur; Guerra, J. Omar; Rodriguez, Joel (January 2022, TrustCom 2022 : The 21st IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications)

   The adoption of blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been increasing due to the various benefits that blockchain brings, such as security and privacy. Current blockchain models for mobile IoT assume there are fixed, powerful edge devices capable of providing global communication to all the nodes in the network. However, due to the mobile nature of IoT or network partitioning problems (NPP), nodes can move out of a cell area and split into smaller independent peer-to-peer subnetworks. Existing blockchain structures either do not support the network partitioning problem or have limitations. This paper introduces a multidimensional, graph-based blockchain structure, that utilizes k-dimensional spatiotemporal space, to address the challenges of applying blockchain in mobile networks with limited resources. Experimental results show that a multidimensional blockchain structure can improve scalability and efficiency as the blockchain grows in size, similar to logarithmic growth, and reduce the longest chain length by more than 99.99% compared to the traditional chain-based blockchain structure. 

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2. A Multidimensional Blockchain Framework For Mobile Internet of Things

   Hussein Zangoti, Alex P. (December 2022, The 21st IEEE International Conference on IEEE International Conference on Trust Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications)

   The adoption of blockchain in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been increasing due to the various benefits that blockchain brings, such as security and privacy. Current blockchain models for mobile IoT assume there are fixed, powerful edge devices capable of providing global communication to all the nodes in the network. However, due to the mobile nature of IoT or network partitioning problems (NPP), nodes can move out of a cell area and split into smaller independent peer-to-peer subnetworks. Existing blockchain structures either do not support the network partitioning problem or have limitations. This paper introduces a multidimensional, graph-based blockchain structure, that utilizes k-dimensional spatiotemporal space, to address the challenges of applying blockchain in mobile networks with limited resources. Experimental results show that a multidimensional blockchain structure can improve scalability and efficiency as the blockchain grows in size, similar to logarithmic growth, and reduce the longest chain length by more than 99.99% compared to the traditional chain-based blockchain structure. 

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3. Sensor-Chain: A Lightweight Scalable Blockchain Framework for Internet of Things

   https://doi.org/10.1109/iThings/GreenCom/CPSCom/SmartData.2019.00195  

   Shahid, Abdur R.; Pissinou, Niki; Staier, Corey; Kwan, Rain (July 2019, IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings-2019))

   The Internet of Things (IoT), forming the foundation of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), connects a huge number of ubiquitous sensing and mobile computing devices. The mobile IoT systems generate an enormous volume of a variety of dynamic context data and typically count on centralized architectures to process them. However, their inability to ensure security and decline in communication efficiency and response time with the increase in the size of IoT network are some of the many concerning weaknesses that are holding back the fast-paced growth of IoT. Realizing the limitations of centralized systems, recently blockchain-based decentralized architecture is being considered as the key to redesigning the IoT systems in a way that is designed to be secure, transparent, highly resistant to outages, auditable, and efficient. However, before realizing the new promise of blockchain for IoT, there are significant challenges to address. One fundamental challenge is the scale issue around data collection, storage, and analytic as IoT sensor devices possess limited computational power and storage capabilities. In particular, since the chain is always growing, IoT devices require more and more resources. Thus, an oversized chain poses storage and scalability problems. With this in mind, the overall goal of our research is to design a lightweight scalable blockchain framework for IoT of mobile devices. This framework, coined as "Sensor-Chain", promises a new generation of lightweight blockchain management with a superior reduction in resource consumption, and at the same time capable of retaining critical information about the IoT systems of mobile devices. 

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4. Quantifying location privacy in permissioned blockchain-based internet of things (IoT)

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3360774.3360800  

   Shahid, Abdur R.; Pissinou, Niki; Njilla, Laurent; Alemany, Sheila; Imteaj, Ahmed; Makki, Kia; Aguilar, Edwin (November 2019, MobiQuitous '19: Proceedings of the 16th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services)

   Vincent Poor and Zhu Han (Ed.)

   Recently, blockchain has received much attention from the mobility-centric Internet of Things (IoT). It is deemed the key to ensuring the built-in integrity of information and security of immutability by design in the peer-to-peer network (P2P) of mobile devices. In a permissioned blockchain, the authority of the system has control over the identities of its users. Such information can allow an ill-intentioned authority to map identities with their spatiotemporal data, which undermines the location privacy of a mobile user. In this paper, we study the location privacy preservation problem in the context of permissioned blockchain-based IoT systems under three conditions. First, the authority of the blockchain holds the public and private key distribution task in the system. Second, there exists a spatiotemporal correlation between consecutive location-based transactions. Third, users communicate with each other through short-range communication technologies such that it constitutes a proof of location (PoL) on their actual locations. We show that, in a permissioned blockchain with an authority and a presence of a PoL, existing approaches cannot be applied using a plug-and-play approach to protect location privacy. In this context, we propose BlockPriv, an obfuscation technique that quantifies, both theoretically and experimentally, the relationship between privacy and utility in order to dynamically protect the privacy of sensitive locations in the permissioned blockchain. 

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5. Blockchains and Databases: Opportunities and Challenges for the Permissioned and the Permissionless

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54832-2_1  

   Agrawal, D.; El Abbadi, A.; Amiri, M.J.; Maiyya, S.; Zakhary, V. (August 2020, Advances in Databases and Information Systems)

   Darmont, J; Novikov, B.; Wrembel, R. (Ed.)

   Bitcoin [12] is a successful and interesting example of a global scale peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that integrates many techniques and protocols from cryptography, distributed systems, and databases. The main underlying data structure is blockchain, a scalable fully replicated structure that is shared among all participants and guarantees a consistent view of all user transactions by all participants in the system. In a blockchain, nodes agree on their shared states across a large network of untrusted participants. Although originally devised for cryptocurrencies, recent systems exploit its many unique features such as transparency, provenance, fault tolerance, and authenticity to support a wide range of distributed applications. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use permissionless blockchains. In a permissionless blockchain, the network is public, and anyone can participate without a specific identity. Many other distributed applications, such as supply chain management and healthcare, are deployed on permissioned blockchains consisting of a set of known, identified nodes that still might not fully trust each other. This paper illustrates some of the main challenges and opportunities from a database perspective in the many novel and interesting application domains of blockchains. These opportunities are illustrated using various examples from recent research in both permissionless and permissioned blockchains. Two main themes unite the various examples: (1) the important role of distribution and consensus in managing large scale systems and (2) the need to tolerate malicious failures. The advent of cloud computing and large data centers shifted large scale data management infrastructures from centralized databases to distributed systems. One of the main challenges in designing distributed systems is the need for fault-tolerance. Cloud-based systems typically assume trusted infrastructures, since data centers are owned by the enterprises managing the data, and hence the design typically only assumes and tolerates crash failures. The advent of blockchain and the underlying premise that copies of the blockchain are distributed among untrusted entities has shifted the focus of fault-tolerance from tolerating crash failures to tolerating malicious failures. These interesting and challenging settings pose great opportunities for database researchers. 

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