Browse Topic: Blockchain
Researchers are leveraging informatics approaches to tackle persistent challenges in data management and sharing, enabling real-world healthcare applications to enhance data security and accessibility.
Cybersecurity, particularly in the automotive sector, is of paramount importance in today’s digital age. With the advent of connected commercial vehicles, which leverage telematics for efficient fleet management, the landscape of automotive cybersecurity is rapidly evolving. These vehicles, integral to logistics and transportation businesses, are becoming increasingly connected, thereby escalating the risks associated with cybersecurity threats. These commercial vehicles are becoming prime targets for cyber-attacks due to their connectivity and the valuable data they hold. The potential consequences of these cyber-attacks can range from data breaches to disruptions in fleet operations, and even safety risks. This paper analyses the unique challenges faced by the commercial vehicle sector, such as the need for robust telematics systems, secure communication channels, and stringent data protection measures. Case studies of notable cybersecurity incidents involving commercial vehicles are presented, providing valuable insights into the modus operandi of cybercriminals. Strategies and best practices to mitigate these risks are proposed, emphasizing the need for secure vehicle architecture and design, intrusion detection systems, and regular OTA updates. The role of employee training programs in enhancing cybersecurity awareness is also highlighted. Emerging trends like AI and machine learning in threat detection, blockchain technology for secure data transmission, and collaborations with ethical hackers for vulnerability assessment are discussed. The paper reviews the current regulatory landscape, stressing the need for international standards specifically for connected commercial vehicles. It concludes with an outlook on anticipated developments in automotive cybersecurity, recommendations for industry stakeholders, and the assertion that prioritizing cybersecurity is crucial for the future of the commercial vehicle industry.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) envisions heterogenous airborne entities like crewed and uncrewed passenger and cargo vehicles within, and between urban and rural environment. To achieve this, a paradigm shift to a cooperative operating environment similar to Extensible Traffic Management (xTM) is needed. This requires the blending of traditional Air Traffic Services (ATS) with the new generation UAM vehicles having their unique flight dynamics and handling characteristics. A hybrid environment needs to be established with enhanced shared situational awareness for all stakeholders, enabling equitable airspace access, minimizing risk, optimized airspace use, and providing flexible and adaptable airspace rules. This paper introduces a novel concept of distributed airspace management which would be apt for all kinds of operational scenarios perceived for UAM. The proposal is centered around the efficiency and safety in air space management being achieved by self-discipline. It utilizes Blockchain’s core concepts like Distributed Ledger, Consensus, and Immutable Smart Contracts. The concept blends harmoniously to the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) recently published by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), though the degrees of involvement by various actors of the eco system are primed for the very adaptation soon when fully autonomous aircraft are expected to dominate the urban skies. Strategic deconfliction and cooperative management are effectively realized with distribution of airspace knowledge, participative decision making and mutual trust. The concept is scalable to the foretold autonomy in this area. Trend predictors extrapolate a massive increase in dynamics, interactions and decision making as the flying vehicles count occupying a city's airspace, is set for exponential growth with personally owned flying vehicles. Proposed solution would operate efficiently with current computing technologies and can be scaled to be resident onboard or offboard the vehicle.
Aerospace is an industry where competition is high and the need to ensure safety and security while managing costs is foremost. Stakeholders, who gain the most by working together, do not necessarily trust each other. Changing backbone technologies that drive enterprise systems and secure historical records does not happen quickly (if at all). At best, businesses adapt incrementally, building customized applications on top of legacy systems. The complexity of these legacy systems leads to duplication of efforts and data storage, making them very inefficient. Technology that augments, rather than replaces, is needed to transform these complex systems into efficient, digital processes. Blockchain technology offers collaborative opportunities for solving some of the data problems that have long challenged the aerospace industry. The industry has been slow to adopt the technology even though experts agree that it has real potential to revolutionize the global supply chain—including maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO)—driving tremendous cost, excess inventory, and inefficiencies out of the system. This chapter discusses how the adoption of blockchain technology could have a significant impact on the aerospace industry and addresses some of the unsettled concerns surrounding the implementation of the technology.
ABSTRACT Currently there is no method to ensure that the software loaded on a vehicle has been compromised at the software level. Common practice is to use physical port security to secure all network and data bus connection points with physical devices requiring tool, keys, or damage to tamper evident devices to prevent, inhibit, or discourage unauthorized connection; turn off access to the ports in the BIOS and password protect the BIOS. As well as give non-admin access to user accounts and password protect the operating systems. All these countermeasures help to prevent access but there is no way to tell if the software was compromised if not detected by these methods. Blockchain technology ensures that the software has not been compromised by comparing a hash generated at start up and comparing it to the distributed ledger. This technology helps to bring Warfighter technology into the future.
The global big data market had a revenue of $162.6 billion in 2021.1 Data is becoming more valuable to companies than gold. However, this data has been used, historically, without contributors’ informed consent and without them seeing a penny from the discoveries the data led to. This article discusses how non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can provide a helpful tool for pharmaceutical companies to track contributed data and compensate contributors accordingly. NFTs are unique, untradable cryptographic assets that can be tracked on a blockchain. NFTs provide a unique traceable token that cannot be replicated, providing a perfect tool to store biodata. The term biodata refers to details regarding a patient’s history and behavioral patterns.
Bitcoin and other digital currencies utilize blockchain. Blockchain, in summary, is a collection of blocks. Within each block is a collection of transactions. Each computer (node) has the same list of blocks and transactions, which they can see as the blocks are filled with the transactions. While this is the traditional application experienced, there are other applications relevant to cybersecurity. As part of the blockchain technology, the nodes are responsible for decision-making. The blockchain technology may be used for this function in these systems. In adjusting the data flow, this is an option to increase the cybersecurity for a complete system. This addition to the cybersecurity system provides a clear benefit.
To find out about the impact of 5G mobile broadband service on the IoT/IIoT, I interviewed Jai Suri, Vice President, IoT and Blockchain Applications Development, Oracle, and Mike Anderson, Embedded Systems Architect, and consultant in the aerospace industry. I asked them if we are close to bringing 5G to industry or whether other applications will likely come first. According to them both, it’s complicated.
ABSTRACT Bitcoin and other digital currencies utilize blockchain. Blockchain, in summary, is a collection of blocks. Within each block is a collection of transactions. Each computer (node) has the same list of blocks and transactions, which they can see as the blocks are filled with the transactions. While this is the traditional application experienced, there are other applications relevant to cybersecurity. As part of the blockchain technology, the nodes are responsible for decision-making. The blockchain technology may be used for this function in these systems. In adjusting the data flow, this is an option to increase the cybersecurity for a complete system. This addition to the cybersecurity system provides a clear benefit. Citation: Parker, C., “Blockchain Vehicle Applications and Cybersecurity: An Appropriate Use or Use Appropriately?”, In Proceedings of the Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering and Technology Symposium (GVSETS), NDIA, Novi, MI, August 10, 2021.
The lack of traceability in today’s supply-chain system for auto components makes counterfeiting a significant problem leading to millions of dollars of lost revenue every year and putting the lives of customers at risk. Traditional solutions are usually built upon hardware such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and barcodes, and these solutions cannot stop attacks from supply-chain (insider) parties themselves as they can simply duplicate products in their local database. This industry-academia collaborative work studies the benefits and challenges associated with the use of distributed ledger (or blockchain) technology toward preventing counterfeiting in the presence of malicious supply-chain parties. We illustrate that the provision of a distributed and append-only ledger jointly governed by supply-chain parties themselves makes permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric a promising approach toward mitigating counterfeiting. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the privacy of supply-chain parties can be preserved as competing supply-chain parties strive to protect their businesses from the prying eyes of competitors and counterparties. Besides, we show that the recall process can be achieved efficiently with the help of the blockchain. The proposed solution, Fordchain, overcomes the challenges to achieve the best of both worlds: a solution to the counterfeiting problem using distributed ledger technology while providing accountability and the privacy notions of interest for supply-chain parties. Although our efforts to build a blockchain-based counterfeiting prevention system aim at automotive supply chains, the lessons learned are highly applicable to other supply chains. We end-to-end implement our Fordchain solution in the Hyperledger Fabric framework, analyze it over AWS EC2 clusters, and illustrate that the performance of our solution is good enough to be applied in practice.
Automotive software is increasingly complex and critical to safe vehicle operation, and related embedded systems must remain up to date to ensure long-term system performance. Update mechanisms and data modification tools introduce opportunities for malicious actors to compromise these cyber-physical systems, and for trusted actors to mistakenly install incompatible software versions. A distributed and stratified “black box” audit trail for automotive software and data provenance is proposed to assure users, service providers, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of vehicular software integrity and reliability. The proposed black box architecture is both layered and diffuse, employing distributed hash tables (DHT), a parity system and a public blockchain to provide high resilience, assurance, scalability, and efficiency for automotive and other high-assurance systems.
In this paper we propose a hierarchical distributed database architecture (HDDA) for tracking rotorcraft configuration, usage, and health state down to the component-level. We leverage key blockchain technologies to guarantee data integrity and provide auditable and verifiable data lineage records, enabling a fleet-wide distributed architecture that scales from onboard edge nodes to enterprise server clusters. HDDA's unique design supports key rotorcraft use cases at all organizational levels, including onboard collection of rotorcraft health and usage data by edge nodes, automated record keeping to reduce maintenance burden and error for ground support personnel, fleet-wide data analysis of individual rotorcraft components to achieve longer maintenance free operating periods and improved rotorcraft health state awareness at all organizational levels. We describe the high-level design of HDDA and provide rationale for our design choices.
The automotive industry is set for a rapid transformation in the next few years in terms of communication. The kind of growth the automotive industry is poised for in fields of connected cars is both fascinating and alarming at the same time. The communication devices equipped to the cars and the data exchanges done between vehicles to vehicles are prone to a lot of cyber-related attacks. The signals that are sent using Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) between vehicles can be eavesdropped by the attackers and it may be used for various attacks such as the man in the middle attack, DOS attack, Sybil attack, etc. These attacks can be prevented using the Blockchain technology, where each transaction is logged in a decentralized immutable Blockchain ledger. This provides authenticity and integrity to the signals. But the use of Blockchain Platforms such as Ethereum has various drawbacks like scalability which makes it infeasible for connected car system. Here, we propose a solution to address various drawbacks of VANET such as privacy issues and, security using a more scalable decentralized platform called IOTA incorporated with a Public Key Infrastructure.
This paper proposes a model to implement a blockchain network that can host a system of autonomous vehicles which communicate through generic V2V protocols like DSRC and CV2X. The blockchain will be designed to function like a global database for V2V communication. The purpose behind the proposal of this model was to ensure a transparent and secure network between all autonomous vehicles which indirectly leads to reduced traffic congestion and takes us a step closer to zero crashes. This is made possible by the blockchain ledger’s enhanced encryption systems.
Certain standard parts in the aerospace industry require qualification as a prerequisite to manufacturing, signifying that the manufacturer’s capacity to produce parts consistent with the performance specifications has been audited by a neutral third-party auditor, key customer, and/or group of customers. In at least some cases, a certifying authority provides manufacturers with certificates of qualification which they can then present to prospective customers, and/or lists qualified suppliers in a Qualified Parts List or Qualified Supplier List available from that qualification authority. If this list is in an infrequently updated and/or inconsistently styled format as might be found in a print or PDF document, potential customers wishing to integrate qualification information into their supplier tracking systems must use a potentially error-prone manual process that could lead to later reliance on out-of-date or even forged data. This paper proposes a blockchain-backed database for such applications, facilitating integration with integrators’ electronic systems including near real-time data updates and a reliable audit trail of changes, certificates that provide more reliable signals of data integrity, and a better user interface with enhanced search capabilities. Though piloted with some centralized control related to the centralized issuance of qualifications, the paper describes how blockchain technology in this application could allow a consortium of companies to manage such a database in a decentralized structure like a decentralized autonomous organization. The proposed database also introduces generalizable data structures which can lend powerful dynamism to other data stores in domains with similar data structures or challenges. This paper describes an example implementation converting the TS200 Qualified Manufacturers List to a blockchain-backed database with search and administrative interfaces. The paper further discusses practical challenges associated with implementing such a database and future directions for additional capabilities.
The re-invention of the global aviation industry is well underway. This dramatic change is being achieved through the use of emergent technology to facilitate a progressive disintermediation of traditional aviation business solutions and services. This progressive disintermediation will continue unabated as this technology is adopted and deployed within the aviation industry. The challenge and opportunity is to whom will lead this re-invention and how will it be accomplished. The integrated use of rapidly evolving technology (Blockchain, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, 5G Cellular Technology and Mobile Edge Computing) is facilitating an integrated more industry cooperative approach enabling this progressive disintermediation. The Boeing Company and other industry leaders are challenging themselves and others by embracing this re-inventive opportunity and by cooperatively learning from peer industries, then adapting the knowledge for applicability to the aviation industry to reform or re-define the aviation ecosystem. Boeing has conducted several proof of concepts with these respective technology sets to validate the efficacy of the technology and to establish a baseline understanding of the interoperability opportunity. What if we do nothing? How long can we wait? Three to five years and then the progressive disintermediation of the industry sectors will have formed new ecosystems with transformative business relationships leveraging the integrated capabilities of these five emergent technologies.
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