Hongtaek Ju

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has revolutionized smart manufacturing by enhancing automation, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision making. However, the interconnected nature of IIoT devices raises significant concerns about security and system integrity. This paper examines the application of blockchain technology to address these challenges, with a focus on data integrity, access control, and traceability. This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework that leverages decentralized security, smart contracts, and edge computing to mitigate vulnerabilities, including unauthorized access and data manipulation. The framework is evaluated for practicality, scalability, and constraints within IIoT environments. Additionally, this paper discusses the integration of complementary security mechanisms, such as Zero Trust architecture and AI-driven anomaly detection, to provide a comprehensive cybersecurity solution for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has revolutionized smart manufacturing by enhancing automation, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision-making. However, the interconnected nature of IIoT devices raises significant concerns about data privacy and security. This paper explores the use of blockchain technology to address these challenges, focusing on data integrity, access control, and traceability. The paper proposes a blockchain-based framework that leverages decentralized security, smart contracts, and edge computing to mitigate vulnerabilities such as unauthorized access and data manipulation. The framework is evaluated for practicality, scalability, and constraints within IIoT environments. Additionally, the paper discusses integrating complementary security mechanisms, such as Zero-Trust architecture and AI-driven anomaly detection, to provide a comprehensive cybersecurity solution for IIoT.

Summary: Bitcoin is a Blockchain‐based network in which thousands of nodes are directly connected and communicate via a gossip‐based flooding protocol. Mined blocks are propagated to all participating nodes in the network through a CBR (compact block relay) protocol developed to reduce the block propagation delay. However, propagation delay persists. The relay time between nodes must be measured and analyzed to determine the cause of the delay and provide solutions for reducing block propagation time. Previously, we measured the relay time and investigated the cause of the delay. According to the findings of the previous study, the delay of the relay time occurs when assembling compact blocks, depending on whether transactions are requested. In this paper, we find the reasons for requesting transactions. The reasons are due to the transaction propagation method and the characteristics of the transaction itself. We propose a solution based on this. It is a method of reducing probability of requesting transactions by using the compact block's “PREFILLEDTXN” to send the transactions expected to be requested with the block. The probability of requesting is reduced by up to 67% when transactions that have just entered the memory pool are propagated by PREFILLEDTXN. The block relay time is reduced by up to 44% as a result. Finally, this research reduces block relay time between nodes.

This research presents a novel method to assess inter-chain message relay time in the Cosmos blockchain network, which employs the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol for blockchain interoperability. While inter-chain transactions in Cosmos lag behind intra-chain transactions, this research conducts a thorough performance evaluation, emphasizing message relay time across diverse Cosmos chains. The results show a strong association between inter-chain transaction frequency and overall transaction processing speed (TPS), underscoring the inherent trade-off between scalability and compatibility in inter-chain communication protocols. A thorough understanding of inter-chain transaction performance is essential for advancing interoperability and improving cross-blockchain network designs. As a result, this research improves our understanding of Cosmos’ functionality and provides insightful recommendations for boosting the effectiveness and scalability of inter-chain communication. The study also sheds light on message delivery patterns in the Cosmos ecosystem, showing that IBC message relay time has an average duration of 55.448 s and is distributed lognormally. Notably, the time between the commitment of the IBC RecvPacket transaction and the commitment of the IBC Acknowledgement transaction (R to A time) considerably impacts the effectiveness of message transmission, which causes delays in the IBC message relay process.

Community detection is essential in P2P network analysis as it helps identify connectivity structure, undesired centralization, and influential nodes. Existing methods primarily utilize topological data and neglect the rich content data. This paper proposes a technique combining topological and content data to detect communities inside the Bitcoin network using a deep feature representation algorithm and Deep Feedforward Autoencoders. Our results show that the Bitcoin network has a higher clustering coefficient, assortativity coefficient, and community structure than expected from a random P2P network. In the Bitcoin network, nodes prefer to connect to other nodes that share the same characteristics.

Summary: Ethereum is arguably the second most popular cryptocurrency‐based network after Bitcoin. Both use the distributed ledger technology known as the blockchain, which is considered secure. However, the provided security level is proportional to the number of connected nodes, the number of influential nodes, and the supported amount of hash power. Thus, the knowledge of the network properties and nodes' behavior is helpful to protect the network from possible attacks such as double‐spending attacks, DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks. This paper proposes a node discovery mechanism, which performs a P2P link discovery on the Ethereum main network. For that, we develop Search‐node, a modified version of Ethereum client that searches for all participating nodes in the blockchain network, stores the node information in the Bucket, and then processes the peer discovery method. Based on the collected data, we first visualize the Ethereum network topology and analyze the attributes of the network such as node degree, path length, diameter, and clustering coefficient. We then analyze the node properties and provide analytical results regarding the relationship between nodes, heavily connected nodes, node geo‐distribution, security issues, and possible attacks over the influential nodes. As a result, we have identified 68,406 nodes with a total of 642,034 edges. By analyzing the collected data, we have found that the diameter in the Ethereum network is equal to 8. The node degree is over 19, which is two times higher than the default configuration.

This article presents a report on APNOMS 2020, which was held on September 22–25, 2020, at EXCO, Daegu, South Korea. The theme of APNOMS 2020 was “Towards Service and Networking Intelligence for Humanity."