InterTrust: Towards an Efficient Blockchain Interoperability Architecture with Trusted Services

In recent years, with the development and widespread use of blockchain, many projects have introduced blockchain technology to solve the increasingly serious security problems of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, due to the conflict between the operational performance and security of the blockchain system, the conflict between transparency and privacy, and the compatibility issues with a large number of IIoT devices running together, the mainstream blockchain system cannot be applied to IIoT scenarios. In order to solve these problems, in this article, we propose an IIoT distributed data system based on blockchain technology. We provide a novel system architecture for different IIoT devices to deploy high-performance blockchain systems in many scenarios, such as smart factory networks. To improve the performance of the blockchain network, we adopt the sharding hashgraph consensus mechanism and introduce a node evaluation mechanism based on the state of the node, which is applied to divide a large number of nodes into many shards dynamically. We abstract the node sharding problem as a joint optimization problem and use deep reinforcement learning to solve it. Finally, we compared with asynchronous Byzantine consensus algorithms, such as HoneybadgerBFT and BEAT, which validated the performance of this system architecture.

Industry 4.0 / Industrial Internet of Things - Related Technologies and Requirements for a Successful Digital Transformation: An Investigation of Manufacturing Businesses Worldwide

The rapid development of the supply chain of the Internet of Things (IoT) industry may trigger financial risk contagion among IoT manufacturers. This article collects data on listed IoT companies in the Chinese market from 2010 to 2019 and explores the development of the environment for the IoT industry. Two dynamic time wrapping (DTW) networks are created to analyze the topological structures of the IoT industry environment. Both the standard DTW and strongly connected DTW networks are revolutionary in terms of their interconnectedness in the IoT industry. We found that the level of clustering and transitivity of the network continued to decline between 2010 and 2019; i.e., the efficiency of financial risk contagion on IoT networks was significantly reduced. This article contributes to the literature in two aspects. First, it reveals that China's IoT industry is increasingly competitive; financial risks have become more difficult to transfer. The IoT industry has become more robust and exhibits a lower likelihood of financial risk contagion. Second, the article provides empirical evidence for the theory of coevolution, showing that risk contagion ability in an industry setting is decreasing with the development of individual firms.

Intelligent manufacturing is the future development direction of manufacturing industry. There are still some problems lurk in the traditional mode of production, such as “information island” and “network security”, which result in low productivity but high-cost production, and information leakage. With application of the new generation information technology in manufacturing field is expanded, the deep integration of information technology and manufacturing industry promotes the development of production towards intellectualization, networking, and service. Single mode of production is gradually replaced by the way of large-scale collaborative production, so the traditional industrial internet of things (IoT) and manufacturing architecture are not suitable for the needs of actual production any more. For instance, the great challenges of compatibility and coordination of interface protocols, huge data, cost, and safety. In order to solve these problems, a new model of industrial IoT with security mechanism used in intelligent workshop is proposed. Firstly, this article analyzes the current situation of manufacturing industry and information technology, a secure transmission model of industrial IoT was designed based on the new generation information technology. Secondly, combined with the structure of the IoT and the real production demands, a six-tier industrial IoT architecture based on the new generation information technology is proposed. Finally, the three dimensions of the intelligent manufacturing model are expanded according to the architecture of the IoT. Not only a six-tier intelligent manufacturing system framework based on the new generation of information technology is obtained, but also the network security mechanism is introduced. On one hand, it realizes the coordinated operation of industrial chain, supply chain, and value chain of production process, on the other hand, it also improves the networking, intellectualization, and service level of industrial production. What is more the system can also provide the reference model for the various application of IoT.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) could enhance automation and analytics in industrial environments. Despite the promising benefits of IIoT, securely managing software updates is a challenging problem for those critical applications. This is due to at least the intrinsic lack of software protection mechanisms in legacy industrial systems. In this paper, to address the challenges in building a secure software supply chain for industrial environments, we propose a new approach that leverages distributed watchdogs with blockchain systems in protecting software supply chains. For this purpose, we bind every entity with a unique identity in the blockchain and employ the blockchain as a delegated authenticator by mapping every reporting action to a non-fungible token transfer. Moreover, we present a detailed specification to clearly define the behavior of systems and to apply model checking.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) refers to the extension of the Internet of Things and It is used for industrial purposes such as manufacturing, supply chain.IIoT can be connected with billions of industrial devices and machines that supported machine learning and big data technology. Because of its potential to authorize faster and better decision making, the IIoT becomes essential for supply chain processes. The IIoT is set to revolutionize the supply chain with both operational efficiencies and revenue opportunities made possible with just this type of transparency. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing a conceptual framework for predicting the advantage of the IIoT and supply chain performance. This chapter synthesizes existing literature reviews and making bibliometric analysis on the IIoT and supply chain. Additionally, It also outlines avenues and opportunities for future research aiming at the contribution of the IIoT to Supply Chain processes.

With the rapid development of 5G, numerous data is generated in the blockchain-enabled industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Although these peers in the blockchain system have the storage ability, they are far from meeting the storage requirements of the generated data. In addition, all data is stored in the blockchain network, which is unfriendly to applications that require real-time information. To address the above storage problems, this article proposes a block storage optimization method for blockchain-enabled IIoT, whose core idea is to conditionally select some blocks to store in the cloud. This method firstly models the selection conditions of blocks as a many-objective optimization problem, where the selection conditions include using probability, storage cost, space occupation, and transmission cost. Then, a cascading selection-based evolutionary algorithm (CSEA) for many-objective optimization is developed to solve the model and thereby obtain the optimal blocks stored in the cloud, where CSEA adopts the diversity-first principle. Finally, CSEA is first compared with seven state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark test suites for validating its ability to obtain reliable experimental results, and then is used to solve the proposed model. The corresponding results demonstrate that CSEA has high competitiveness, and our method can effectively address the storage problems above. In summary, this article provides a novel method for addressing the storage problem in the blockchain-enabled IIoT.

Smart contract over the blockchain accelerates the deployment of decentralized Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. However, the usability of smart contracts is constrained to the data on the blockchain, and has no direct access to the off-chain environment. Consequently, smart contract cannot directly serve as a carrier for the IIoT applications that rely on intensive data exchange and task computation. To cope with this issue, we first propose an oracle-aided IIoT blockchain (OIB) system to facilitate the deployment of smart contract based IIoT applications. Specifically, a distributed oracle network is employed to not only bridge the off-chain environment and smart contracts, but also extend the computing capability of smart contracts. Then, we study important properties of the OIB system, i.e., liveness, safety, and fairness. In particular, we propose a new challenge of fairness to guarantee that each oracle can reap positive utility (i.e., individual rationality), and a new challenge of liveness to meet delay constraints of oracle services (i.e., delay-sensitivity). To address these two challenges, we develop an auction based incentive mechanism for the data-feeding oracles to achieve individual rationality as well as incentive compatibility, and a delay-sensitive matching based incentive mechanism for the computing oracles under specific delay constraints. Simulation results corroborate that the proposed auction based incentive mechanism guarantees not only truthfulness but also individual rationality, and show that the matching based incentive mechanism achieves smaller delay than the random selection scheme used in the Decentralized Oracle Service (DOS) network.

Блокчейн у системі охорони здоров’я: проблеми правового забезпечення

Supply chain management (SCM) system is an essential requirement for companies and manufacturers to collaborate in doing business. There are many techniques to manage supply chains, such as using Excel sheets and web-based applications. However, these techniques are ineffective, insecure, and prone to human error. In this paper, we propose CLOUTIDY, a cloud-based SCM system using SEMAR (Service Market) and Blockchain system. We modify JUGO architecture to develop SEMAR as a broker between users and cloud service providers. Also, we apply the Blockchain concept to store the activity log of the SCM system in a decentralized database. CLOUTIDY system can solve several common cases: service selection, resource provisioning, authentication and access control. Also, it improves the security of data by storing each activity log of the supply chain management system in the Blockchain system.

Numerous supply-chain combines with internet of things (IoT) applications have been proposed, and many methods and algorithms enhance the convenience of supply chains. However, new businesses still find it challenging to enter a supply chain, because unauthorised IoT devices of different companies illegally access resources. As security is paramount in a supply chain, IoT management has become very difficult. Public resources allocation and waste management also pose a problem. To solve the above problems, we proposed a new IoT management framework that embraces blockchain technology to help companies to form a supply chain effectively. This framework consists of an access control system, a backup peer mechanism and an internal data isolation and transmission approach. The access control system has a registrar module and an inspection module. The registrar module is mainly responsible for information registration with a registration policy, which has to be followed by all the companies in the supply chain. Besides, it provides a revocation and updating function. The inspection module focuses on judging misbehaviour and monitors the actions of the subjects; when any misoperation occurs, the system will correspondingly penalise violators. So that all related actions and information are verified and stored into blockchain, the IoT access control and safety of IoT admission are enhanced. Furthermore, in a blockchain system, if one single peer in the network breaks down, then the whole system may stop, because consensus cannot be reached. The data of the broken peer may be lost if it does not commit yet. The backup peer mechanism allows the primary peer and the backup peer to connect to an inspecting server for acquiring real-time data. The internal data isolation and transmission modules transmit and stores private data without creating a new subchannel. The proposed method is taken full account of the stability of the network and the fault tolerance to guarantee the robust of the system. To obtain unbiases results, experiments are conducted in two different blockchain environment. The results show our proposed method are promising IoT blockchain system for the supply chain.

Intelligent manufacturing is the new, emerging trend in Industry4.0, reflecting the impact of cutting edge technologies like Internet of Things, Big-data, Artificial intelligence(AI), Cloud Networking. In order to increase productivity and to explore new ways to modernise the manufacturing technologies and supply chain logistics, the digital transformation of Industries is the need of the hour. More innovative and competitive applications are in practice to meet the customer expectations and to reduce the complexity in the global supply chain. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a way of digital transformation in manufacturing. The ‘Industrial Internet of Things’ is the new paradigm, which is the application of Internet of Things (IoT) in Industries especially in manufacturing, using sensor data from machine-to machine (M2M) communication with the help of automation technologies. This chapter addresses the various methodologies of IIoT, in industrial sector with proper use cases. The latest application of this IIoT is Digital Twin, which is very useful in simulation of the machines, has been clearly dealt in this chapter.

Blockchain-based technologies have been created across a range of businesses for improving data security and integrity. A network chain is the most remarkable blockchain applications as part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Sensor data in real time aids industrial equipment and infrastructures in making decisions and taking specified actions. Without sufficient security, an IIoT system can cause operational disruption and financial loss and lead to malicious activities and system manipulation. Detecting anomalies in IIoT networks is critical for network security. In this paper we discuss the Proof of Authority consensus algorithm. The Proof of Authority (PoA) depends on the reputation of trusted parties in blockchain network. The PoA consensus mechanism is based on the values of identities on a network, and validators stake their own identities and reputation. So, the validating nodes that are randomly picked as trustworthy safeguard the Proof of Authority Blockchain network. In Proof of Authority model, transactions are reviewed by already approved network users, and it operates with a fixed number of block validators. Since the identities of the nodes are trusted and known, the process can be used in applications like supply chains and trade networks.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged as a new paradigm in the era of smart systems where interactions and transmission of messages among various entities in an industrial ecosystem are done autonomously. This includes manufacturing of products, shipment process, storage of records, and counting the data, to name a few. However, the involvement of multiple cyber threats that accompany the smart devices may lead the organizations on a heavy risk of profits. Even though the number of cybersecurity approaches have been proposed to ensure a secure and efficient communication mechanism in IIoT systems, the identification of cybersecurity issues in IIoT applications while exchanging the data is still at its early stage. The aim of this article is to propose an efficient cybersecurity communication mechanism using the trust evaluation system of each device to make a correct decision during communication. In addition, the evaluated trust of each device is further analyzed and monitored through a blockchain-based mechanism. The proposed approach is validated against an existing scheme in terms of various security metrics, such as sensitivity of devices while communicating, convergence time of transmitting information and percentage, and probability of malicious devices in terms of data delivery rate, false authentication, and trust value computation.

This paper describes the creation of a new role - Energy Prosumer. It considers instances when generated energy is distributed via commercial PV and home usage. The authors explore how a blockchain system can improve the process of electricity exchange and show a prediction of the households' power profiles with the blockchain process. An original multi-agent system was designed and tested with Transactive Energy (TE) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER). The prediction process of blockchain-based LEMs is usually accepted as given, but it needs to be reliable for effective LEMs. Therefore, an LSTM forecasting model is proposed for reliable prediction results, and this model was implemented in the blockchain system. Results show that the proposed LEMs could deliver excellent and stable predictions and efficient blockchain architecture. Generally, this study has demonstrated how blockchain can improve electricity exchange and the advantages of reliable short-term forecasts. The outcomes could provide an effective way to manage electricity exchange and production. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> Some of the material discussed in this paper is the advanced results of work previously described in [2] and [11].