No Arabic abstract
Bitcoin has emerged as a revolutionary payment system with its decentralized ledger concept however it has significant problems such as high transaction fees and long confirmation times. Lightning Network (LN), which was introduced much later, solves most of these problems with an innovative concept called off-chain payments. With this advancement, Bitcoin has become an attractive venue to perform micro-payments which can also be adopted in many IoT applications (e.g. toll payments). Nevertheless, it is not feasible to host LN and Bitcoin on IoT devices due to the storage, memory, and processing requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient and secure protocol that enables an IoT device to use LN through an untrusted gateway node. The gateway hosts LN and Bitcoin nodes and can open & close LN channels, send LN payments on behalf of the IoT device. This delegation approach is powered by a (2,2)-threshold scheme that requires the IoT device and the LN gateway to jointly perform all LN operations which in turn secures both parties funds. Specifically, we propose to thresholdize LNs Bitcoin public and private keys as well as its commitment points. With these and several other protocol level changes, IoT device is protected against revoked state broadcast, collusion, and ransom attacks. We implemented the proposed protocol by changing LNs source code and thoroughly evaluated its performance using a Raspberry Pi. Our evaluation results show that computational and communication delays associated with the protocol are negligible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that implemented threshold cryptography in LN.
Lightning Network (LN) addresses the scalability problem of Bitcoin by leveraging off-chain transactions. Nevertheless, it is not possible to run LN on resource-constrained IoT devices due to its storage, memory, and processing requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient and secure protocol that enables an IoT device to use LNs functions through a gateway LN node. The idea is to involve the IoT device in LN operations with its digital signature by replacing original 2-of-2 multisignature channels with 3-of-3 multisignature channels. Our protocol enforces the LN gateway to request the IoT devices cryptographic signature for all operations on the channel. We evaluated the proposed protocol by implementing it on a Raspberry Pi for a toll payment scenario and demonstrated its feasibility and security.
The successful amalgamation of cryptocurrency and consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices can pave the way for novel applications in machine-to-machine economy. However, the lack of scalability and heavy resource requirements of initial blockchain designs hinders the integration as they prioritized decentralization and security. Numerous solutions have been proposed since the emergence of Bitcoin to achieve this goal. However, none of them seem to dominate and thus it is unclear how consumer devices will be adopting these approaches. Therefore, in this paper, we critically review the existing integration approaches and cryptocurrency designs that strive to enable micro-payments among consumer devices. We identify and discuss solutions under three main categories; direct integration, payment channel network and new cryptocurrency design. The first approach utilizes a full node to interact with the payment system. Offline channel payment is suggested as a second layer solution to solve the scalability issue and enable instant payment with low fee. New designs converge to semi-centralized scheme and focuson lightweight consensus protocol that does not require highcomputation power which might mean loosening the initial designchoices in favor of scalability. We evaluate the pros and cons ofeach of these approaches and then point out future researchchallenges. Our goal is to help researchers and practitioners tobetter focus their efforts to facilitate micro-payment adoptions.
The paper aims to do a survey along with a comparative analysis of the various cryptography libraries that are applicable in the field of Internet of Things (IoT). The first half of the paper briefly introduces the various cryptography libraries available in the field of cryptography along with a list of all the algorithms contained within the libraries. The second half of the paper deals with cryptography libraries specifically aimed for application in the field of Internet of Things. The various libraries and their performance analysis listed down in this paper are consolidated from various sources with the aim of providing a single comprehensive repository for reference to the various cryptography libraries and the comparative analysis of their features in IoT.
With the emergence of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) has become a center of attraction for almost all industries due to its wide range of applications from various domains. The explosive growth of industrial control processes and the industrial IoT, imposes unprecedented vulnerability to cyber threats in critical infrastructure through the interconnected systems. This new security threats could be minimized by lightweight cryptography, a sub-branch of cryptography, especially derived for resource-constrained devices such as RFID tags, smart cards, wireless sensors, etc. More than four dozens of lightweight cryptography algorithms have been proposed, designed for specific application(s). These algorithms exhibit diverse hardware and software performances in different circumstances. This paper presents the performance comparison along with their reported cryptanalysis, mainly for lightweight block ciphers, and further shows new research directions to develop novel algorithms with right balance of cost, performance and security characteristics.
We consider the problem where a group of n nodes, connected to the same broadcast channel (e.g., a wireless network), want to generate a common secret bitstream, in the presence of an adversary Eve, who tries to obtain information on the bitstream. We assume that the nodes initially share a (small) piece of information, but do not have access to any out-of-band channel. We ask the question: can this problem be solved without relying on Eves computational limitations, i.e., without using any form of public-key cryptography? We propose a secret-agreement protocol, where the n nodes of the group keep exchanging bits until they have all agreed on a bit sequence that Eve cannot reconstruct with very high probability. In this task, the nodes are assisted by a small number of interferers, whose role is to create channel noise in a way that bounds the amount of information Eve can overhear. Our protocol has polynomial-time complexity and requires no changes to the physical or MAC layer of network devices. First, we formally show that, under standard theoretical assumptions, our protocol is information-theoretically secure, achieves optimal secret-generation rate for n = 2 nodes, and scales well to an arbitrary number of nodes. Second, we adapt our protocol to a small wireless 14-square-meter testbed; we experimentally show that, if Eve uses a standard wireless physical layer and is not too close to any of the nodes, 8 nodes can achieve a secret-generation rate of 38 Kbps. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first experimental demonstration of information-theoretic secret exchange on a wireless network at a rate beyond a few tens of bits per second.