Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that is making a great impact on modern society due to its transparency, decentralization, and security properties. Blockchain gained considerable attention due to its very first application of Cryptocurrencies e.g., Bitcoin. In the near future, Blockchain technology is determined to transform the way we live, interact, and perform businesses. Recently, academics, industrialists, and researchers are aggressively investigating different aspects of Blockchain as an emerging technology. Unlike other Blockchain surveys focusing on either its applications, challenges, characteristics, or security, we present a comprehensive survey of Blockchain technology's evolution, architecture, development frameworks, and security issues. We also present a comparative analysis of frameworks, classification of consensus algorithms, and analysis of security risks & cryptographic primitives that have been used in the Blockchain so far. Finally, this paper elaborates on key future directions, novel use cases and open research challenges, which could be explored by researchers to make further advances in this field.

Food supply chain process comprises crops collection, processing of food, shipping & delivery to the whole seller in the market. Harvested foods decompose from the moment they are harvested due to attacks from enzymes, oxidation, and microorganisms. These include bacteria, mold, yeast, moisture, temperature, and chemical reaction. The spoilage of fresh food has increased over time due to the multistage slow food supply chain process. The identification, traceability, and real-time tracking of goods in supply chains have always been a challenge. The advent of the Internet of Things and cloud computing has brought a new approach to the food supply chain process for better cooperation among supply chain partners. The supply chain management (SCM) benefit greatly through automation based on key technologies of IoT, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). These technologies collect the data relevant to the food supply chain system, such as identifying tag-possessed objects or individuals and sensing capabilities of the surrounding environment. However, the collected data can be tempered or modified by attackers to provide false information about environmental conditions. They can destroy or damage the product due to false identification of dynamic environmental conditions. Furthermore, the current automation systems in industry-based retail logistics and SCM do not provide efficient solutions for monitoring the quality of perishable products with integrated solutions. This research aims to develop a secure monitoring and reporting system based on IoT to update the quality of the perishables along with the SCM with a focus on transportation without any human intervention.

Recently, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) got much popularity and are now being considered as integral parts of the automobile industry. As a subclass of MANETs, the VANETs are being used in the intelligent transport system (ITS) to support passengers, vehicles, and facilities like road protection, including misadventure warnings and driver succor, along with other infotainment services. The advantages and comforts of VANETs are obvious; however, with the continuous progression in autonomous automobile technologies, VANETs are facing numerous security challenges including DoS, Sybil, impersonation, replay, and related attacks. This paper discusses the characteristics and security issues including attacks and threats at different protocol layers of the VANETs architecture. Moreover, the paper also surveys different countermeasures.

IoT emergence has given rise to a new digital experience of payment transactions where physical objects like refrigerators, cars, and wearables will make payments. These physical objects will be storing the cardholder credentials and will directly make payments with the vendors over insecure public networks. For such payment transactions, government regulations and standards organizations require to implement PCI DSS for adapting similar set of security measures at the global level. The current version of PCI DSS is not suitable for IoT‐based payment systems due to characteristics of IoT such as resource‐constrained nature of devices and updating software/firmware of so many physical devices. Also, there arises an emergent need of implementing PCI DSS requirements and assessments for security of all stakeholders that store or process the user credentials in a payment. This paper is an initial effort to bring the researcher’s attention to make upcoming versions of PCI DSS suitable for IoT and thus securing the new ways of IoT‐based payment systems. The paper has reviewed the traditional payment process along with considerations for IoT‐based payment systems to make recommendations to modify the PCI DSS in a suitable way for IoT.