With the continuous development of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, new use cases apart from cryptocurrencies have come into the spotlight. In this article, we evaluate whether an e-government service could be a suitable candidate for a blockchain transformation. We selected as a reference test system an existing cross-border e-government service that is used for supporting goods exchanges across the European Union. We show how such an indicative paradigm can be transformed into a blockchain system. In order to do so, we deployed it in an emulated architecture for evaluating its performance under various realistic conditions. Our results show that the deployed system is able to meet the requirements, both in terms of throughput and transaction speed. Moreover, it shows clear advantages in terms of usability and synchronization between all entities.

Protocol stacks specifically designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) have become commonplace. At the same time, security and privacy concerns regarding IoT technologies are also attracting significant attention given the risks that are inherently associated with the respective devices and their numerous applications, ranging from healthcare, smart homes, and cities, to intelligent transportation systems and industrial automation. Considering the still heterogeneous nature of the majority of IoT protocols, a major concern is to find common references for investigating and analyzing their security and privacy threats. To this end, and on top of the current literature, this work provides a comprehensive, vis-à-vis comparison of the security aspects of the thus far most widespread IoT Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) protocols, namely BLE, Z-Wave, ZigBee, Thread, and EnOcean. A succinct but exhaustive review of the relevant literature from 2013 up to now is offered as a side contribution.

The heterogeneity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems has so far prevented the definition of adequate standards, hence making it difficult to compare meaningfully the security degree of diverse architectural choices. This task can be nonetheless achieved with formal methodologies. However, the dedicated IoT literature shows no evidence of a universal model allowing the security evaluation of any arbitrary system. Based on these considerations, we propose a new model that aims at being global and all-encompassing. Our model can be used to fairly analyse the security level of different IoT systems and compare them in a significant way. It is designed to be adaptive with realistic definitions of the adversary’s (1) actions of interacting with IoT systems; (2) capabilities of accessing the data generated by and exchanged in IoT systems with established rules; and (3) objectives of attacking IoT systems according to the four recognised security properties of confidentiality, integrity, availability and soundness. Such a design enables the straightforward characterization of new adversaries. It further helps in providing a fine-grained security evaluation of IoT systems by either accurately describing attacks against the analysed systems or formally proving their guaranteed level of security.