Medical care has become one of the most indispensable parts of human lives, leading to a dramatic increase in medical big data. To streamline the diagnosis and treatment process, healthcare professionals are now adopting Internet of Things (IoT)-based wearable technology. Recent years have witnessed billions of sensors, devices, and vehicles being connected through the Internet. One such technology—remote patient monitoring—is common nowadays for the treatment and care of patients. However, these technologies also pose grave privacy risks and security concerns about the data transfer and the logging of data transactions. These security and privacy problems of medical data could result from a delay in treatment progress, even endangering the patient’s life. We propose the use of a blockchain to provide secure management and analysis of healthcare big data. However, blockchains are computationally expensive, demand high bandwidth and extra computational power, and are therefore not completely suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices meant for smart cities. In this work, we try to resolve the above-mentioned issues of using blockchain with IoT devices. We propose a novel framework of modified blockchain models suitable for IoT devices that rely on their distributed nature and other additional privacy and security properties of the network. These additional privacy and security properties in our model are based on advanced cryptographic primitives. The solutions given here make IoT application data and transactions more secure and anonymous over a blockchain-based network.

The top priority of today’s healthcare system is delivering medicine directly from the manufacturer to end-user. The pharmaceutical supply chain involves some level of commingling of a collection of stakeholders such as distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers, and customers. The biggest challenge associated with this supply chain is temperature monitoring as well as counterfeit drug prevention. Many drugs and vaccines remain viable within a specific range of temperatures. If exposed beyond this temperature range, the medicine no longer works as intended. In this paper, an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor-based blockchain framework is proposed that tracks and traces drugs as they pass slowly through the entire supply chain. On the one hand, these new technologies of blockchain and IoT sensors play an essential role in supply chain management. On the other hand, they also pose new challenges of security for resource-constrained IoT devices and blockchain scalability issues to handle this IoT sensor-based information. In this paper, our primary focus is on improving classic blockchain systems to make it suitable for IoT based supply chain management, and as a secondary focus, applying these new promising technologies to enable a viable smart healthcare ecosystem through a drug supply chain.

There continues to be a recent push to taking the cryptocurrency based ledger system known as Blockchain and applying its techniques to non-financial applications. One of the main areas for application remains Internet of Things (IoT) as we see many areas of improvement as we move into an age of smart cities. In this paper, we examine an initial look at applying the key aspects of Blockchain to a health application network where patients health data can be used to create alerts important to authenticated healthcare providers in a secure and private manner. This paper also presents the benefits and also practical obstacles of the blockchain-based security approaches in IoT.

The essence of “blockchain” is a shared database in which information stored is un-falsifiable, traceable, open, and transparent. Therefore, to improve the security of private information in medical systems, this article uses blockchain technology to design a method to protect private information in medical systems and effectively realize anti-theft control of private information. First, the Patient-oriented Privacy Preserving Access Control model is introduced into the access control process of private information in medical systems. Next, a private information storage platform is built by using blockchain technology, and information transmission is realized using standard cryptographic algorithms. In this process, file authorization contracts are also used to guarantee the security of private information and further prevent theft of medical private information. Our simulation results show that the storage response time of this method is kept below 1,000 ms, and the maximum information throughput rate reaches 550 kbit/s, which indicates that this method has strong performance in information storage and transmission efficiency. Moreover, the reliability and bandwidth utilization of data transmission across domains is higher, so the method has higher information security control performance and superior overall performance.

Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the digital world by connecting billions of electronic devices over the internet. IoT devices play an essential role in the modern era when conventional devices become more autonomous and smart. On the one hand, high‐speed data transfer is a major issue where the 5G‐enabled environment plays an important role. On the other hand, these IoT devices transfer the data by using protocols based on centralized architecture and may cause several security issues for the data. Merging artificial intelligence to 5G wireless systems solves several issues such as autonomous robots, self‐driving vehicles, virtual reality, and engender security problems. Building trust among the network users without trusting third party authorities is the system's primary concern. Blockchain emerged as a key technology based on a distributed ledger to maintain the network's event logs. Blockchain provides a secure, decentralized, and trustless environment for IoT devices. However, integrating IoT and blockchain also has several challenges; for example, major challenge is low throughput. Currently, the ethereum blockchain network can process approximately 12 to 15 transactions per second, while IoT devices require relatively higher throughput. Therefore, blockchains are incapable of providing functionality for a 5G‐enabled IoT based network. The limiting factor of throughput in the blockchain is their network. The slow propagation of transactions and blocks in the P2P network does not allow miners and verifiers to fastly mine and verify new blocks, respectively. Therefore, network scalability is the major issue of IoT based blockchains. In this work, we solved the network scalability issue using blockchain distributed network while to increase the throughput of blockchain, this article uses the Raft consensus algorithm. Another most important issue with IoT networks is privacy. Unfortunately, the blockchain distributed ledgers are public and sensitive information is available on the network for everyone are private, but in such cases, third party editing is not possible without revealing the original contents. To solve privacy issues, we used zkLedger as a solution that is based on zero knowledge‐based cryptography.

In this paper, we focus on differential cryptanalysis of a lightweight ARX cipher. These ciphers use three simple arithmetic operations, namely, modular addition, bitwise rotation, and exclusive-OR, and therefore, are designed very well to perform over the Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. We choose a very well-known ARX cipher designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States of America in June 2013, named SPECK. SPECK was subjected to several years of detailed cryptanalytic analysis within NSA and has been subjected to academic analysis by researchers worldwide. SPECK is specially optimized for low-cost processors like those used in the IoT devices. We first find the differential paths for all the variants of SPECK, and based on that differential path, we attack the round-reduced variant of the cipher. Finding differential paths in ARX is one of the most difficult and time-consuming problems due to the huge state space. We use a nested-based heuristic technique to find a differential path which is inspired by the nested Monte Carlo search (NMCS) algorithm. NMCS was successfully applied before for different games: Morpion Solitaire, SameGame, and 16×16 Sudoku, but the use of such heuristic techniques in cryptography is entirely new and time-saving. INDEX TERMS Differential path, ARX ciphers, nested Monte-Carlo search, IoT ciphers, differential cryptanalysis, SPECK.

Nowadays, there is a strong demand for increasing the protection of resource-constrained devices such as Radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems. Current cryptographic algorithms are sufficient for high-resource desktop computers. RFID systems are commonly used in high-security applications such as access control systems, transaction banking systems, and payment systems. The attacker attempts to mislead RFIDs for unauthorized access to services without payment or to circumvent security mechanisms by detecting a secret password. The biggest challenge in RFID systems is how to ensure successful protection against such infringements. Lightweight cryptography can provide security assurance for protecting RFID systems. This paper presents a new ultra-lightweight cryptography algorithm for RFID systems called Agile. Agile is a 32-bit block cipher based on the Feistel structure since block ciphers are the most commonly used cryptographic and provide very tight protection for IoT devices. The key challenge in designing a lightweight block cipher is to cope with performance, cost, and security. Agile, like all symmetric block cipher, uses the same key for encryption and decryption. The proposed algorithm has an excellent performance in both hardware and software environments, with a limited implementation area, an acceptable cost/security for RFID systems, and an energy-efficient behaviour. Agile has demonstrated high immunity against the most effective linear and differential cryptanalysis attacks and has a sufficient margin of defence against these attacks.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency are a hot topic in today's digital world. In this paper, we create a game theoretic model in continuous time. We consider a dynamic game model of the bitcoin market, where miners or players use mining systems to mine bitcoin by investing electricity into the mining system. Although this work is motivated by BTC, the work presented can be applicable to other mining systems similar to BTC. We propose three concepts of dynamic game theoretic solutions to the model: Social optimum, Nash equilibrium and myopic Nash equilibrium. Using the model that a player represents a single ''miner'' or a ''mining pool'', we develop novel and interesting results for the cryptocurrency world. Keywords Blockchain Á Bitcoin mining Á Dynamic game theory Á Differential game Á Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation Á Social optimum Á Nash equilibrium Á Myopic Nash equilibrium Á Pigovian tax