In the past few years, the implementation of blockchain technology for various applications has been widely discussed in the research community and the industry. There are sufficient number of articles that discuss the possibility of applying blockchain technology in various areas, such as, healthcare, IoT, and business. However, in this article, we present a comparative analysis of core blockchain architecture, its fundamental concepts, and its applications in three major areas: the Internet-of-Things (IoT), healthcare, business and vehicular industry. For each area, we discuss in detail, challenges and solutions that have been proposed from the research community and industry. This research studies also presented the complete ecosystem of blockchain of all the papers we reviewed and summarized. Moreover, analysis is performed of various blockchain platforms, their consensus models, and applications. Finally, we discuss key aspects that are required for the widespread future adoption of blockchain technology in these major areas. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, IoT blockchain, healthcare blockchain, permissioned blockchain, business blockchain.

Businesses need trust to confidently perform trade among each other. Centralized business models are the only mature solutions available to perform trades over the Internet. However, they have many problems which includes but are not limited to the fact that these create bottleneck on the server as well as requires trusted third parties. Recently, decentralized solutions have gained significant popularity and acceptance for future businesses. The wide acceptance of such systems is indeed due to the trust management among various untrusted business stakeholders. Many solutions have been proposed in this regard to provide decentralized infrastructure for various business models. A standard solution that is acceptable to the industry is still in demand. Hyperledger umbrella Blockchain projects, that are supported by IBM and many other industry big players are gaining popularity due to its efficient and pluggable design. In this study, the author present the idea of utilizing Blockchain to design a Value-Added Tax (VAT) system for Saudi Arabia's newly introduced tax system. The reason to select this business model for VAT is twofold. First, it provides an untampered distributed ledger, which cannot be deceived by any party. Each transaction in the system cannot go unnoticed by the smart contract. Secondly, it provides a transparent record, and updates all involved parties regarding each activity performed by stakeholders. The newly proposed system will provide a transparent database of VAT transactions according to our smart contract design and at each stage of supply chain, tax will be deducted and stored on peer-to-peer network via consensus process. The author believes that the proposed solution will have significant impact on VAT collection in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Takaful -an Islamic alternative to conventional insurance -is fast becoming one of the most important constituents of modern Islamic financial market. The fundamental difference between the two forms of risk mitigation is entrenched from the type of contract selected. The conventional insurance work on the principle of bilateral contracts between the customer (insured) and insurance provider where the insured pay regular premium in return for payment of compensation, in case of a predefined event occurs. On the other hand, Takaful works on the principle of mutual guarantee, cooperation and indemnity where the participants in the scheme mutually insure each other. The Takaful providers are mainly responsible for managing, administering and investigating the Takaful funds according to Islamic laws. This studies provides a decentralized architecture that securely implements Takaful risk mitigation system according to its principles. Since all major banking sectors are shifting towards Blockchain technology, as it is currently the only viable solution to offers security, transparency, integrity of resources and ensure trustworthiness among customers. The proposed studies offer state-of-the-art Blockchain technology and focus provide a Takaful system that strictly follows the underlying Islamic laws for this risk mitigation system. Moreover, the proposed platform provides all Takaful transactions over Blockchain that brings confidence and transparency to the community involved in the process.

Malware analysis and detection over the Android have been the focus of considerable research, during recent years, as customer adoption of Android attracted a corresponding number of malware writers. Antivirus companies commonly rely on signatures and are error-prone. Traditional machine learning techniques are based on static, dynamic, and hybrid analysis; however, for large scale Android malware analysis, these approaches are not feasible. Deep neural architectures are able to analyze large scale static details of the applications, but static analysis techniques can ignore many malicious behaviors of applications. The study contributes to the documentation of various approaches for detection of malware, traditional and state-of-the-art models, developed for analysis that facilitates the provision of basic insights for researchers working in malware analysis, and the study also provides a dynamic approach that employs deep neural network models for detection of malware. Moreover, the study uses Android permissions as a parameter to measure the dynamic behavior of around 16,900 benign and intruded applications. A dataset is created which encompasses a large set of permissions-based dynamic behavior pertaining applications, with an aim to train deep learning models for prediction of behavior.The proposed architecture extracts representations from input sequence data with no human intervention. The state-of-the-art Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network extracted deep features and accomplished a general validation accuracy of 97.08% with an F1-score of 0.973 in correctly classifying input. Furthermore, the concept of blockchain is utilized to preserve the integrity of the dataset and the results of the analysis.

Transactions related to vehicles include manufacturing, buying, selling, paying insurance(takaful), obtaining regular inspection, leasing a vehicle from banks, getting in an accident, engaging in a traffic violation, calculating price predictions and renting a vehicle. Many people perform transactions related to vehicles in their daily life; transportation authorities also perform vehicle transactions as part of managing vehicle fleets. But tracking these transactions is a challenging task. There are countrywide solutions that uses centralized systems. However, these solutions have problems with trust management, transparency, and access control. Therefore, we believe there is still room for integrated automation of various vehicle-related transactions. In this paper, we present a blockchainbased framework for vehicle tracking that incorporates the mentioned features. Moreover, blockchain is customized to enable usage control for additional transactions, such as inspection, renting and islamic insurance. The usage control model is integrated with IoT devices to continuously monitor the vehicles for certain conditions and remotely revoke access if needed [1]. The complete transaction set is recorded over an immutable ledger that provides trust, transparency and a complete history of record. In this paper, we also presents a prototype implementation of a permissioned blockchain, which will be made available under the GNUv3 General Public License. Performance analysis is performed on the newly proposed framework implementation over the permissioned blockchain to measure its adoption and suitability. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, decentralized applications, smart contracts, vehicle life cycle tracking VOLUME 4, 2016 This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication.

No abstract

The unprecedented growth in Augmented Reality (AR) has captured the focus of researchers and the industrial sector. The development of AR applications and their implementation in various domains is broadening. One of the advancements in the field of AR is Collaborative AR, which provides ample opportunities for the members of a team to work on a particular project remotely. The various activities carried out remotely, in a collaborative fashion, are based on the active interaction and transmission of data and applications across a communication channel that constitutes a mesh of frequently interacting applications, thus providing a real feeling of working together physically in the purportedly same demographic area. However, in the integration of different roles, remotely working in collaborative AR has a great chance of being intruded upon and manipulated. Consequently, the intrusion may explore novel vulnerabilities to various sensitive collaborative projects. One of the security concerns for collaborative and interconnected remote applications is to have pristine environments, where the participants of the collaborative AR can reliably trust each other during the execution of the various processes. This paper presents an integrity-aware CAR-Tourist (Collaborative Augmented reality for Tourism) framework wherein the unauthorized user’s access is denied and the remote participants of the network are provided with a secure environment through the state-of-the-art Blockchain architecture. This study further provides a use-case implementation of a tourism application. Each tourist has the chance to hire a remote guide for collaborative guidance over a blockchain-trusted network. Moreover, the proposed framework is lightweight, as the only necessary communication between the tourist and guide is recorded in the blockchain network. Each user has to register on a permission blockchain to be allowed to perform certain activities on our proposed CAR-Tourist framework. The decentralized Blockchain approach provides a consensus mechanism based on which not every participant is free to intrude on ongoing communication. Thus, through the proposed framework, all the participants in the collaborative Augmented Reality will have the essential trust of working remotely without external intrusion.

No abstract