The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected almost all aspects of human life, various sectors of business, and regions of the world. The flow of human activities halted for several months, and are now being carefully redefined to align with guidelines and recommendations to avoid the spread of the novel coronavirus. In contrast to other pandemics the world has witnessed in the past, the technological advancements of the current era are a boon that can play a key role in safeguarding humanity. In this work, we begin by highlighting general challenges that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, to gauge the applicability of blockchain as a key enabling technology, we identify potential use cases to meet current needs. Further, for each use case, we present a high-level view of how blockchain can be leveraged and discuss the expected performance. Finally, we highlight the challenges that must be addressed to harness the full potential of blockchain technology and discuss plausible solutions.

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The paper aims to resolve security issues revolving around the sharing of students' credentials by leveraging the blockchain technology. It proposes a novel blockchain-based architecture followed by its implementation as a decentralized application (DApp). Further, the cost & the performance analysis are carried out based on the experiments conducted.

The roll-out of 5G technology will nurture the realization of broadband, ultra-reliable, and zero latency services. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) are among the key enablers for 5G. The synergy between NFV and MEC allows migration of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) from cloud to the edge of the network thereby adding agility to the softwarized 5G networks. The overall orchestration of VNF includes, but is not limited to, processing VNF requests, selecting appropriate VNF, migrating VNF from cloud to MEC, instantiating migrated VNF at MEC, settling payment according to a VNF's usage, maintaining VNF's reputation, etc. The orchestration is not foolproof and raises doubts about its trustworthiness. To address all the existing issues in a unified manner, we leverage Blockchain technology as yet another enabling technology for MEC-enabled 5G. Thus, we propose a Blockchain-enhanced architecture for secure VNF orchestration such that issues like authenticity, integrity, confidentiality, reputation, payment transfer, and many more are resolved. To furnish a Proof-of-Concept (PoC), we develop a prototypical DApp (Decentralized Application) using Ethereum Blockchain and Suricata as an exemplar VNF. Further, we discuss the strong resiliency of the proposed architecture against numerous well-known attacks.

Internet of Things (IoT) has proved its applicability in numerous domains such as healthcare, agriculture, automobile, industrial production, logistics and supply chain management. Looking at the current trend, we expect massive proliferation of such IoT devices all around us. However, one of the issues with the widespread use of IoT is the increasing complexity of the underlying architecture, which lead to difficulty in ensuring security compliance. One of the critical security processes is key refreshment, which needs to be regularly executed in order to guarantee strong security management. However, in most of the cases, keys are not updated and if they are updated, the update-logs are not available for all the entities to verify and build trust. Furthermore, the rules for key refreshment are also not defined in a transparent way. In this paper, we propose secure, decentralized, and automatic key refreshment mechanism for an IoT system. The proposed mechanism enables users to verify the freshness of the security keys (being used) thereby relying on the data from IoT devices and establishing trust in an IoT system. The proposed mechanism is driven by blockchain technology and smart contract. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed solution we have implemented it using both Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric blockchains.