Today, there is an increasing need for an efficient threshold signatures that enforce the protection of identities and multi device-based authentication when interacting with a blockchain technology. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of threshold signatures, establishing FROST as the most efficient scheme in terms of performance. We uniquely demonstrate FROST’s adaptability with empirical results, showcasing its feasibility on middle-range IoT devices and smartphones. In addition we propose an implementation, with a primary goal to enable IoT devices interaction with Hyperledger Fabric v3.0 using FROST for transaction signing. An IoT network of 5 devices can perform a signature and commit to the blockchain ledger in 3.2 seconds, when network latency is optimal.

More and more IoT use cases require trustworthy computing from cloud/back-end services, which cannot necessarily provide a fully trusted execution environment, data immutability, and traceability. The integration of IoT with the blockchain technology is one of the most promising solutions to achieve the previously mentioned features in the IoT networks. Researchers are also interested in integration solutions, and several solutions are already present in the scientific literature. However, there are still some uncertainties in establishing a direct and effective interaction between an IoT device and the given blockchain. In this work, we propose the first IoT hardware architecture model designed to accelerate time-consuming operations of IoT-Blockchain. The proposed IoT hardware architecture model is programmed in SystemC-TLM and can provide a significant reduction in execution time, 53% and 18% when running Hyperledger Sawtooth and Ethereum applications, respectively.

Nowadays, Internet of Things applications face serious data and privacy protection vulnerabilities. To address some of the data protection and privacy issues, in this work we propose a new design for the self-encryption method based on a cryptographic-puzzle algorithm, that includes the generation of multiple secret keys, derived from the plaintext. As the ciphertext is constructed from several chunks of encrypted data, the absence of one of the decryption keys or one of the encrypted chunks renders recovery of the original plaintext nearly impossible. As security improvement upon to other related work proposing self-encryption, the plaintext is mixed with random values in order to use a technique known as Privacy Amplification. Privacy Amplification is achieved by applying cryptographic functions from which SHA-2 family is based on. Implementations of our design are also provided, and they are enabled for standalone and back-end execution systems. Furthermore, performance and security results and comparisons with previous related work are also provided. The security analysis confirms the use of the SHA-2 cryptographic hash family for Privacy Amplification.

Private or consortium blockchain networks have fewer verified participants and offer better throughput and transaction efficiency than public networks. However, as more and more blockchain consensuses are designed for private or consortium networks, their performances are often estimated without a practical use case implementation. In our use case, participants do not have to trust each other but still work together to build an ecosystem where users control their data and information. This paper analyzes the performance (transaction throughput, rejections, node participants) of Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus (BFT) using two blockchains: Hyperledger Sawtooth and Ethereum.

Today we find several solutions how to adapt IoT applications on blockchain technology. The most of the IoT devices have limited hardware resources to be able to execute a blockchain applications and take a real part of blockchain as a blockchain node. In this paper we analyzed Ethereum "aleth" blockchain and we identified the most called cryptographic functions that were used during the execution. Our aim is to model a low power consumption IoT architecture that can execute this blockchain application. The given architecture is deployed by a SystemC model and we used dedicated hardware accelerators to increase the performance. In addition we would like to deploy an architecture that meets the requirements of our industrial partner Renault. Renault figured out with a new type of use case with blockchain and especially with Smart Contracts applications where every cars are connected on a blockchain. With our IoT device model we could obtain a high gain of performance.