Hyperledger Sawtooth Research Articles

Accelerating Blockchain Applications on IoT Architecture Models—Solutions and Drawbacks

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.

Hyperledger sawtooth based supplychain traceability system for counterfeit drugs

Drug supply chains have been facing severe issues as counterfeit product cases are increasing exponentially. A supply chain management system that ensures transparency, reliability, and provenance of drugs would increase the trustworthiness of the whole industry. One solution to all three needs is utilizing blockchain-based distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Even though DLTs are emerging as an ideal infrastructure for multi-stakeholder supply chain applications, they still need to be more mature to address the specific challenges specific to each use case. In this article, we propose a distributed blockchain-based framework, PHTrack, leveraging hyperledger sawtooth as a drug supply chain traceability system. Hyperledger sawtooth addresses scalability issues by offering a robust foundation to support large-scale drug supply chain operations in a modular way for it’s each participating stakeholder. Furthermore, it simplifies the integration process with existing systems, even those employing different technologies, thereby facilitating a smoother transition to DLTs. The design of PHTrack is oriented towards minimizing resource consumption throughout the process, particularly within hyperledger sawtooth nodes. Additionally, it incorporates quantum secure off-chain communication for peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. A set of experiments was conducted to validate the proposed framework. Experiments have shown that PHTrack provides reliable and comprehensive drug provenance as well as real-time drug supply chain tracking.

Smart Contracts for Mobile Network Operator Bandwidth Sharing

We propose a new way to share licensed spectrum bandwidth capacity in mobile networks between operators, service providers, and end users using blockchain-based smart contracts. We discuss the foundational building blocks in the contract as well as various extensions to support more advanced features such as bulk purchases and future reservations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the system can be implemented with an open source, permissioned enterprise blockchain, Hyperledger Sawtooth. We show that our smart contract implementation can improve blockchain transaction performance, by approximately four orders of magnitude compared to serial transactions and one order of magnitude compared to parallel transactions, by using public key infrastructure driven bulk purchases of mobile access grants, paving the way for fully automated, efficient, and fine-grained roaming agreements. We conclude with a discussion of lessons learned from two end-to-end use cases we implemented to validate our distributed ledger design.

TrackChain: Hyperledger based pharmaceutical supply chain – Resource utilization perspective

A distributed and decentralised ledger system shared by a variety of users in a peer-to-peer network is defined as a blockchain. Through its decentralised approach, it makes pharmaceutical products more accessible and secure for vendors, while they can maintain and access their inventories themselves. Between a company and its suppliers, a supply chain is used to produce and distribute a specific product or service, whose efficiency is increased with its integration in the supply chain. For efficient and transparent tracking of products, blockchain will be the right choice. In view of blockchain being incorporated into the supply chain system, it solves many logistical issues that supply chains face, such as appropriate data access, ensuring data quality, and many more. This can increase the traceability of the material supply chain and improve the maintenance of the list when there are several products to be supplied. Therefore, the concept of supply chain was developed in two platforms namely, Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Sawtooth. Finally, Hyperledger Sawtooth was found to be well suited for creating decentralised apps or platforms with respect to resource utilization It enables developers to separate their application domain from the core system so that business rules for apps can exist without requiring knowledge of the primary platform's underlying architecture. The proposed system shows that Hyperledger Sawtooth framework consumes lower CPU than Fabric which helps in increasing the number of transactions.

LAKA-UAV: Lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for cloud-assisted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using blockchain in flying ad-hoc networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can be employed in various applications, including traffic control, and delivery application. However, these services are susceptible to various security attacks because sensitive data are exchanged through an open channel. Thus, a secure authentication scheme is essential for UAV. UAV has limited storage resources and computing capabilities. To overcome these problems, cloud computing is considered as a promising solution. Cloud computing provides various properties such as storage availability and scalability. Unfortunately, the cloud server’s database can be a major target for an adversary because it is a centralized system. If an adversary intrudes on the cloud server’s database, he/she may attempt to intercept or learn the stored data. To mitigate these issues, we design a secure and lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for cloud-assisted UAV using blockchain in flying ad-hoc networks, called LAKA-UAV. LAKA-UAV utilizes blockchain technology to ensure access control and data integrity using log transactions and the cloud server securely manages collected data from UAV. We prove the security of LAKA-UAV based on informal security analysis and formal security verification implementation. Based on testbed experiments using MIRACL, LAKA-UAV provides about 2.13 times more efficient performance on average compared with related schemes in terms of computation. We present the blockchain implementation using Hyperledger Sawtooth platform.

Blockchain Network Based Hyperledger Fabric Techniques – A Survey

Blockchain is described as a cacheable, immutable that makes tracking transactions and assets in a corporate network easier. Hyperledger is a free software initiative that was designed to aid in the development of distributed ledgers based on blockchain technology. Hyperledger has several frameworks, including Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Burrow, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Sawtooth, and Hyperledger Grid. There are also other Hyperledger-based technologies used in blockchain. This research paper investigates the many applications and strategies employed by the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. There will also be a discussion regarding Hyperledger frameworks, future improvements, and overall applications used.

Integrated Agri-Food Supply Chain Model: An Application of IoT and Blockchain

In agri-food supply chains (ASC), consumers purchase agri-food goods from farmers. During this process, customers emphasize the need for agri-food safety, while producers hope to enhance their revenues. Due to the dynamism and complexity of the Bangladesh ASC, the traceability and control of agri-food goods encounter formidable obstacles. Due to their reliance on intermediaries, legal financial hurdles, Ethereum-based financial solutions, etc., however, most existing solutions cannot adequately meet the traceability and management needs of Bangladesh ASC. To solve these issues, the authors proposed an integrated Agri-food supply chain (IASC) model. In this study, a systematic review of the literature was conducted using a thematic analysis method. In a portion of the model, the authors depicted a linear physical flow to illustrate the relationship and function of intermediaries and to explain Bangladesh ASC’s dependence on intermediaries. The approach incorporates Blockchain technology and IoT to promote transparency, minimize mistake, prevent product delays, remove unethical and illegal actions, improve supply chain (SC) management, track the whereabouts of the goods, and eventually increase consumer and supplier trust. The article also mentions that crypto currency-based financial transactions between stakeholders in the supply chain are now unlawful in Bangladesh. For blockchain API, a mobile banking and digital payment-based solution has been proposed. Finally, the blockchain-based Hyperledger Sawtooth API has been suggested so that clients can trace the entire history of a product by scanning the QR code on the packaging. Since Bangladesh’s economy is primarily based on agriculture, this research can assist in boosting Bangladesh’s economy. The paper would also contribute to the reduction of corruption and the improvement of firmer/grower and consumer satisfaction. The findings also pave the way for future studies to implement blockchain technology in ASC without relying on Ethereum-based financial flow solutions.

Cloud forensics-enabled chain of custody: a novel and secure modular architecture using Blockchain Hyperledger Sawtooth

Cloud forensics-enabled chain of custody: a novel and secure modular architecture using Blockchain Hyperledger Sawtooth

Comparative analysis of permissioned blockchain frameworks for industrial applications

Blockchain is a technology that creates trust among non-trusting parties without relying on any intermediaries. Consequently, it has attracted the interest of companies operating in a multitude of sectors. However, due to the number of different blockchain solutions that have emerged in the last few years and their rapid changes, it is challenging for such companies to orient their technological decisions. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the key dimensions—namely, governance, maturity, support, latency, privacy, interoperability, flexibility, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability—of some of the most-used permissioned blockchain platforms. Moreover, we present the results of a performance evaluation considering the following frameworks: Hyperledger Fabric 2.2, Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.2, and ConsenSys Quorum 21.1 (with both the GoQuorum client and the Hyperledger Besu client). The platforms were tested under similar conditions, and official releases were used, such that our findings provide a reference for companies establishing their technological orientation.

Hybrid intrusion detection system using blockchain framework

Data security and confidentiality are major goals now days due to the extensive use of the internet for data sharing. In modern era, most of the networks are compromised by intruders to grab access to private, confidential, and highly secured data. An intrusion detection system (IDS) is widely used to secure the network from getting compromised by intruders. Most of the IDS share the signatures of the novel attacks detected by anomaly approach for improving the detection rate and processing time. Security of signature shared by nodes is becoming a considerable problem. This paper presents a novel framework blockchain based hybrid intrusion detection system (BC-HyIDS), which uses the blockchain framework for exchanging signatures from one node to the other in distributed IDS. BC-HyIDS works in three phases where it uses both detection methods and blockchain in the third phase to provide security to data transferred through the network. This system makes use of a cryptosystem to encrypt the data stored in blocks to improve security one level higher. Hyperledger fabric v2.0 and Hyperledger sawtooth is used to implement system. Blockchain framework is created as a prototype using distributed ledger technology which helps in securing signature exchange. Performance of BC-HyIDS is evaluated in terms of accuracy, detection rate, and false alarm rate. From results, it is observed that a 2.8% increase in accuracy, 4.3% increase in detection rate, and a reduction of 2.6% in FAR is achieved. Blockchain performance is evaluated using Hyperledger fabric v2.0 and Hyperledger sawtooth on throughput, processing time, and average latency. BC-HyIDS shows improved performance when used with blockchain.

CrowdLBM: A lightweight blockchain-based model for mobile crowdsensing in the Internet of Things

With the commercialization of fifth generation mobile networks (5G) and continuous innovation of the Internet of Things (IoT), crowdsensing, as a new emerging IoT application, has further deepened our knowledge, utilizing various smart objects distributed throughout the whole industrial system for data collection and processing. To avoid a single point of failure and ensure data integrity, blockchain technology was widely applied. However, due to the demand for computing power and resources, IoT devices with limited capabilities and resources are unsuitable for crowdsensing implementation in the blockchain network. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight blockchain-based crowdsensing model named CrowdLBM with a novel consensus mechanism based on global reputation to resolve the issues raised above. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage scheme and two types of smart contracts to support the crowdsensing process automatically without the intervention of any third party. Finally, we implement a blockchain prototype on Hyperledger Sawtooth, extensive experimental results show that the proposed CrowdLBM outperforms other crowdsensing systems in terms of both scalability and security.

Addressing the Challenges of Electronic Health Records Using Blockchain and IPFS.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are the healthcare sector’s core digital strategy meant to improve the quality of care provided to patients. Despite the benefits afforded by this digital transformation initiative, adoption among healthcare organizations has been slower than desired. The sheer volume and sensitive nature of patient records compel these organizations to exercise a healthy amount of caution in implementing EHR. Cyberattacks have also increased the risks associated with non-optimal EHR implementations. An influx of high-profile data breaches has plagued the sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, which put the spotlight on EHR cybersecurity. One objective of this research project is to aid the acceleration of EHR adoption. Another objective is to ensure the robustness of the system to resist malicious attacks. For the former, a systematic review was used to unearth all the possible causes why the adoption of EHR has been anemic. In this paper, sixty-five existing proposed EHR solutions were analyzed and it was found that there are fourteen major challenges that need to be addressed to reduce friction and risk for health organizations. These were privacy, security, confidentiality, interoperability, access control, scalability, authentication, accessibility, availability, data storage, data ownership, data validity, data integrity, and ease of use. We propose EHRChain, a new framework that tackles all the listed challenges simultaneously to address the first objective while also being designed to achieve the second objective. It is enabled by dual-blockchains based on Hyperledger Sawtooth to allow patient data decentralization via a consortium blockchain and IPFS for distributed data storage.

A Blockchain and Metaheuristic-Enabled Distributed Architecture for Smart Agricultural Analysis and Ledger Preservation Solution: A Collaborative Approach

Distributed forecasting of agriculture commodity prices has an attractive research perspective that delivers active breakthrough analysis of the rapid fluctuations in pricing forecasts for participating stakeholders without being manually dispatched lists. The increased use of an efficient forecasting mechanism for the agriculture information management of generated records and processing creates emerging challenges and limitations. These include new government mandates and regulations, the price of land for expansion, forecasting the growing demand for commodities, fluctuations in the global financial market, food security, and bio-based fuels. Building and deploying distributed dynamic scheduling, management, and monitoring systems of agricultural activities for commodity price forecasting and supply chains require a significant secure and efficient approach. Thus, this paper discusses a collaborative approach where two different folds are demonstrated to cover distinct aspects with different objectives. A metaheuristic-enabled genetic algorithm is designed to receive day-to-day agricultural production details and process and analyze forecast pricing from the records by scheduling, managing, and monitoring them in real-time. The blockchain hyperledger sawtooth distributed modular technology provides a secure communication channel between stakeholders, a private network, protects the forecasting ledger, adds and updates commodity prices, and preserves agricultural information and node transactions in the immutable ledger (IPFS). To accomplish this, we design, develop, and deploy two distinct smart contracts to register the system’s actual stakeholders and allow for the addition of node transactions and exchanges. The second smart contract updates the forecasting commodity pricing ledger and distributes it to participating stakeholders while preserving detailed addresses in storage. The simulation results of the proposed collaborative approach deliver an efficient E-agriculture commodity price forecast with an accuracy of 95.3%. It also maintains ledger transparency, integrity, provenance, availability, and secure operational control and access of agricultural activities.

Optimized User-Friendly Transaction Time Management in the Blockchain Distributed Energy Market

The blockchain nexus with energy transactions in the distributed energy-trading arena successfully achieved a decentralized transaction and increased security. With the elimination of a third-party middle man, an electronic app is introduced to achieve decentralization and aid transactive communications. Observing the internet-of-things (IoT) intense protocols in the transactive communications amongst blockchain participants, however, leads to transaction time delay with associated uncertainty. This paper integrates the practical byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT) algorithm with the private Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain network (P) to achieve a P-pBFT algorithm. The P-pBFT achieved a combined two-step transaction latency optimization (minimization) amongst the blockchain participants in the distributed energy generation (DEG) ecosystem. Through their combined feature extraction, further minimization is achieved by simulating the resulting transaction model derived from the integration. Subsequently, an optimization method is proposed to achieve the shortest transaction time given transaction constraints based on participants’ comfort. Thus, the ratio of node population to the transaction size and the choice of constraints can be regulated at the participants’ convenience to achieve minimum transaction time. Hence, the benefit of deciding the transaction time is achieved thereby eliminating the undesired characteristic uncertainty.

Design and implementation of transaction privacy by virtue of ownership and traceability in blockchain based supply chain.

Blockchain was at the top of the 2016 Gartner hype cycle and has been integrated into business profiles by numerous start-ups. Since the emergence of blockchain through Bitcoin, studies have been conducted to increase blockchain applications for nonfinancial uses. A supply chain is a sector where blockchain is anticipated to have crucial applications. In a traditional supply chain, maintaining traceability and ownership remains a serious issue. In the supply chain, blockchain can increase trust, improve traceability, and eliminate the middle man. It makes the supply chain more transparent though, raising the privacy issue. In this paper, a new approach for transaction privacy is proposed by considering ownership and traceability. The proposed system retains the advantages of blockchain and centralised database server. Its novelty lies in achieving privacy by generating symmetric keys, employing product codes and current timestamps, and it uses asymmetric key elliptic curve cryptography for transaction validation and user identification. The proposed system allows product owners to trace the product and enables its transfer. It protects the supply chain from counterfeit products. The Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain was used for experiments. Security and privacy analysis show that the proposed system can afford privacy without impinging on traceability and ownership. The results estimate that privacy incorporation introduces an overhead of 4.4%. In the experiment, the performance of the proposed system bettered the results of the existing techniques such as POMS and b_verify.

EPS-Ledger: Blockchain Hyperledger Sawtooth-Enabled Distributed Power Systems Chain of Operation and Control Node Privacy and Security

A distributed power system operation and control node privacy and security are attractive research questions that deliver electrical energy systems to the participating stakeholders without being physically connected to the grid system. The increased use of renewable energy in the power grid environment creates serious issues, for example, connectivity, transmission, distribution, control, balancing, and monitoring volatility on both sides. This poses extreme challenges to tackle the entire bidirectional power flow throughout the system. To build distributed monitoring and a secure control operation of node transactions in the real-time system that can manage and execute power exchanging and utilizing, balancing, and maintaining energy power failure. This paper proposed a blockchain Hyperledger Sawtooth enabling a novel and secure distributed energy transmission node in the EPS-ledger network architecture with a robust renewable power infiltration. The paper focuses on a cyber-physical power grid control and monitoring system of renewable energy and protects this distributed network transaction on the blockchain and stores a transparent digital ledger of power. The Hyperledger Sawtooth-enabled architecture allows stakeholders to exchange information related to power operations and control monitoring in a private ledger network architecture and investigate the different activities, preserved in the interplanetary file systems. Furthermore, we design, create, and deploy digital contracts of the cyber–physical energy monitoring system, which allows interaction between participating stakeholders and registration and presents the overall working operations of the proposed architecture through a sequence diagram. The proposed solution delivers integrity, confidentiality, transparency, availability, and control access of the distribution of the power system and maintains an immutable operations and control monitoring ledger by secure blockchain technology.

Blockchain-based green big data visualization: BGbV

The progression of Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in generation of huge amount of data. Effective handling and analysis of such big volumes of data proposes a crucial challenge. Existing cloud-based frameworks of Big Data visualization are rising costs for servers, equipment, and energy consumption. There is a need for a green solution targeting lesser cost and energy consumption with tamper-proof record-keeping, storage, and interactive visualization with only demanded data. We have proposed a Blockchain-based Green big data Visualization (BGbV) solution using Hyperledger Sawtooth for optimum utilization of organization resources. BGbV will support current distributed data visualization platforms and guarantee benefits like security and data availability with lesser storage costs. It helps reduce costs by utilizing small resources that are already available and consume less energy, making it an environmentally friendly solution.

Medical Record Aggregation Using Blockchain Technology

Healthcare domain and a reliable method to store every patient’s data record securely by keeping protection of privacy in mind are considered to be one of the major concerns in the field of study and implementation. An efficient decentralized system for control accessed interoperability of transactions or data between the owner (patient) and the healthcare practitioner is required. This would also ensure a complete and accurate medical history of the patient and allow the full use of it by the health organization as well. The rise in blockchain technology has enabled to build the needs to bridge the gap between the patient and practitioner to securely store and utilize personal data digitally. This paper is a study on proposed implementations and a scope of those medical health aggregation methods have been discussed along with an idea to improve the existing system. A two-level access-controlled mechanism of the patient’s private medical record and granting the requested access or transfer of ownership properties to the practitioner in any chain of a hospital is proposed. Hence, a decentralized, automatically verifiable, transparent and immutable smart e-healthcare card medical records aggregation system could be designed using the Hyperledger Sawtooth framework built on the blockchain technology platform. Three algorithms are being proposed to ensure an atomic transaction - Proof of Work (PoW), Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) and Asymmetric Cryptography (like RSA) algorithm. The aim is to implement the proposed model and strive towards the scope of betterment in the field of healthcare. The health data is planned to be stored in a format like Electronic Health Records (EHR).

A Quantum-Based Blockchain Approach to Voting Protocol Using Hyperledger Sawtooth

Protection measures are essential to present day blockchain innovation ever, since they can exist short of empowered outsider, which implies that there may not be a disclosed trustworthy individual or group responsible for frameworks. Security of the present frameworks depends on estimating the firmness assumptions and large numbers of the benchmark cryptographic functions proven to be powerless for crucial monetary and a variety of applications against the approach of undeniable quantum machines. Upgrading blockchain innovation with the future of quantum states in a shared manner will enhance the degree of protection and security by-laws of physical science, which is never feasible from non-quantum data hypothetical perspectives. In this article, we propose a quantum-built way to deal with harness of security for a democratic application with the execution, utilizing Hyperledger Sawtooth.

Fifa Ticketing System using Blockchain Hyperledger Sawtooth Platform

In this paper we present an approach to investigate how Blockchain Hyperledger Sawtooth platform can be used in ticketing system to process a secure transaction over a network environment. A framework for a ticketing industry has been proposed to overcome the transactional issues between distributors, vendors, and the customers. A discrete three-layer architectural model is presented that is suitable for the application design development. The Blockchain architecture allows us to maintain the list of records contained in the distributed data base on the network and the validator validates the transaction allowing the transaction processor to authorizes the nodes. The outline of Docker compose demonstrates on how to start the transaction processor from the console for the ticketing application. The methodology indicates the use of algorithm to generate a unique key by importing the python software development kit in our design implementation Finally, the paper also provides the detail analysis of how the transactions are initiated, retrieved, and exported to view the complete block of encrypted data and achieve safe and secure transaction between two parties over a network.