Security Properties of Light Clients on the Ethereum Blockchain

Zaman²,

et al. 2021

Electronics

Internet of Things (IoT) communication technologies have brought immense revolutions in various domains, especially in health monitoring systems. Machine learning techniques coupled with advanced artificial intelligence techniques detect patterns associated with diseases and health conditions. Presently, the scientific community is focused on enhancing IoT-enabled applications by integrating blockchain technology with machine learning models to benefit medical report management, drug traceability, tracking infectious diseases, etc. To date, contemporary state-of-the-art techniques have presented various efforts on the adaptability of blockchain and machine learning in IoT applications; however, there exist various essential aspects that must also be incorporated to achieve more robust performance. This study presents a comprehensive survey of emerging IoT technologies, machine learning, and blockchain for healthcare applications. The reviewed articles comprise a plethora of research articles published in the web of science. The analysis is focused on research articles related to keywords such as `machine learning’, blockchain, `Internet of Things or IoT’, and keywords conjoined with `healthcare’ and `health application’ in six famous publisher databases, namely IEEEXplore, Nature, ScienceDirect, MDPI, SpringerLink, and Google Scholar. We selected and reviewed 263 articles in total. The topical survey of the contemporary IoT-based models is presented in healthcare domains in three steps. Firstly, a detailed analysis of healthcare applications of IoT, blockchain, and machine learning demonstrates the importance of the discussed fields. Secondly, the adaptation mechanism of machine learning and blockchain in IoT for healthcare applications are discussed to delineate the scope of the mentioned techniques in IoT domains. Finally, the challenges and issues of healthcare applications based on machine learning, blockchain, and IoT are discussed. The presented future directions in this domain can significantly help the scholarly community determine research gaps to address.

“…The method offers a secure and well-organized way to maintain vaccination records. The solution is based on Ethereum and relies on the idea of smart contracts in blockchain [230].…”

Section: Sharing Patient Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehensive Survey of IoT, Machine Learning, and Blockchain for Health Care Applications: A Topical Assessment for Pandemic Preparedness, Challenges, and Solutions

Zaman²,

et al. 2021

Electronics

“…This approach ensured better data security and reliability. However, the GSM connection does not provide enough bandwidth to sustain this approach, so the architecture has been changed to switch to a light node approach when working with a GSM connection [31]. The light nodes do not have the total blockchain saved on their memory, so it was impossible to validate the state of the network in total security.…”

Section: On-site Installationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The light nodes do not have the total blockchain saved on their memory, so it was impossible to validate the state of the network in total security. In addition, the light nodes exchange only the proofs of the transactions in the Merkle tree form [31], which is, at least in principle, less secure. On the other hand, the exchange of the Merkle tree data requires far less bandwidth and local memory.…”

Section: On-site Installationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Energy Blockchain for Public Energy Communities

et al. 2021

This paper suggests an application of blockchain as an energy open data ledger, designed to save and track data regarding the energy footprint of public buildings and public energy communities. The developed platform permits writing energy production and consumption of public buildings using blockchain-enabled smart meters. Once authenticated on the blockchain, this data can be made available to the public domain for techno-economic analyses for either research studies and internal or third parties audits, increasing, in this way, the perceived transparency of the public institutions. A further feature of the platform, starting on the previously disclosed raw data, allows calculating, validating, and sharing sustainability indicators of public buildings and facilities, allowing the tracking of their improvements in sustainability goals. The paper also provides the preliminary results of a field-test experimentation of the proposed platform on a group of public buildings, highlighting the possible benefits of its widespread exploitation.

“…FIGURE 6. max and max vs. the proportion of addresses whose fall at or below, broken for each ∈ (3,6,9,12) separately. Please note that the vertical axis starts at one as, by definition, all modifications of an Ethereum account require access to at least that account's previous state, and at least one transaction to initiate that change.…”

Section: E Server Resourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To circumvent these resource requirements, many blockchains include so-called light protocols to provide sufficient security to constrained devices without directly utilizing trusted intermediaries. However, constrained devices operating a light protocol have been identified previously as vulnerable to state injection attacks [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adventures of a Light Blockchain Protocol in a Forest of Transactions: A Subset of a Story

2021

Self Cite

The Ethereum blockchain is one of the most popular permissionless blockchains. A consequence of its popularity has been the growth of processing and data storage requirements for any node participating in the Ethereum blockchain network. For constrained devices such requirements are often infeasible to meet. To cater for such nodes, a so-called light protocol has been proposed for Ethereum where the responsibility of maintaining a correct state representation is delegated to light protocol servers. Previous research has identified dependence on external state management as a potential security vulnerability that exclusively impacts light nodes. Although a simple mitigation strategy is available, it comes at the expense of increased latency. In this work, we propose a new Ethereum node type, which we call a subset node, as an extension of the light protocol. Our proposal allows subset nodes to gain a lower latency than a pure light node with comparable or even higher security assurances by tracking and evaluating only a subset of all of the transactions issued on the blockchain. We provide a formal proof on the correctness of the blockchain state used by the subset node under the proposed model. To evaluate the practical feasibility of the subset node model, we analyze one year of historical transaction data from Ethereum, and demonstrate that a subset node tracking the state of a single account can achieve a significant reduction in storage and computational requirements when compared to a full node.