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abstract

Blockchain, Internet of Things and Digital Twins in Trustless Security of Critical National Infrastructure

Published: 13 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The advent of communication technologies and smart storage gave rise to the concept of smart cities. One of the key enabling technologies of smart living is the Internet of Things (IoT). In recent years, IoT has developed into many areas of application including critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as transport, hospitals and power distribution grid. The proliferation in IoT applications raised many serious security and privacy concerns to citizens, businesses and governments. CNI systems depend heavily on IoT devices and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) to perform autonomous actions or inform human decision makers through the exchange and processing of data.
Recently, blockchain has been advocated as a solution for secure data storage and sharing. Blockchain cryptographically offers a secure platform for maintaining a decentralised, ”append-only”, publicly verifiable and immutable data structure, which is timestamped and sequentially ordered by its reference to previous block hashes. The immutability and security of blockchain can improve the CNI protection. Two specific smart CNI enabling technologies that would highly benefit from blockchain are IoT and CPS.
Digital twins are virtual replica of the network and logic layer of physical system. A digital twin provides a platform to solve major IoT related CNI cybersecurity challenges in tomorrow’s secure infrastructure, energy distribution, smart cities, smart manufacturing (Industrial IoT and Industry4.0) and autonomous transit systems. This key note discussion outlines how to implement blockchain as a fundamental theory for trustless security for connected CNI. It will investigate technologies which can be utilised to achieve a trustless matrix such as blockchain and peer-distributed security systems, for instance onion-routing, with the wider aim of defining trustless security further. The research also considers the feasibility of trustless IoT security systems and their application in CNI. It investigate the present state-of-the-art in cybersecurity as it relates to trustless security technologies and blockchain and what is the present state of the art of cybersecurity in IoT-enabled CNI systems.

References

[1]
Ruth Ande, Bamidele Adebisi, Mohammad Hammoudeh, and Jibran Saleem. 2020. Internet of Things: Evolution and technologies from a security perspective. Sustainable Cities and Society 54 (2020), 101728.
[2]
Steven Walker-Roberts, Mohammad Hammoudeh, Omar Aldabbas, Mehmet Aydin, and Ali Dehghantanha. 2020. Threats on the horizon: Understanding security threats in the era of cyber-physical systems. The Journal of Supercomputing 76, 4 (2020), 2643–2664.

Cited By

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  • (2023)IoT Blockchains for Digital TwinsOpportunities and Challenges of Industrial IoT in 5G and 6G Networks10.4018/978-1-7998-9266-3.ch011(244-260)Online publication date: 31-Mar-2023
  • (2023)IoT Blockchains for Digital TwinsRole of 6G Wireless Networks in AI and Blockchain-Based Applications10.4018/978-1-6684-5376-6.ch003(57-79)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2023

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        ICFNDS '20: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Future Networks and Distributed Systems
        November 2020
        313 pages
        ISBN:9781450388863
        DOI:10.1145/3440749
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 13 May 2021

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        Author Tags

        1. blockchain
        2. digital twin
        3. internet of things
        4. zero trust security

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        • (2023)IoT Blockchains for Digital TwinsOpportunities and Challenges of Industrial IoT in 5G and 6G Networks10.4018/978-1-7998-9266-3.ch011(244-260)Online publication date: 31-Mar-2023
        • (2023)IoT Blockchains for Digital TwinsRole of 6G Wireless Networks in AI and Blockchain-Based Applications10.4018/978-1-6684-5376-6.ch003(57-79)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2023

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