Alberto Sonnino, Michał Król, Argyrios G. Tasiopoulos, Ioannis Psaras
Recent developments in blockchains and edge computing allows to deploy decentralized shared economy with utility tokens, where altcoins secure and reward useful work. However, the majority of the systems being developed, does not provide mechanisms to pair workers and clients, or rely on manual and insecure resolution. AStERISK bridges this gap allowing to perform sealed-bid auctions on blockchains, automatically determine the most optimal price for services, and assign clients to the most suitable workers. AStERISK allows workers to specify a minimal price for their work, and hide submitted bids as well the identity of the bidders without relying on any centralized party at any point. We provide a smart contract implementation of AStERISK and show how to deploy it within the Filecoin network, and perform an initial benchmark on Chainspace.
Mahmood A. Rashid, Krishneel Deo, Divnesh Prasad, K. Ranjith Singh · 6 authors
Blockchain is an emerging technology framework for creating and storing\ntransaction in distributed ledgers with a high degree of security and\nreliability. In this paper we present a blockchain-based platform to create and\nstore contracts in between students and their higher education sponsors. The\nsponsorship might be in any form, such as scholarship, donation or loan. The\nfund will be arranged and managed by a group of competitive agents\n(Fundraisers) who will hold the distributed ledgers and act as miners in the\nblockchain network.\n
Mozhdeh Farhadi, Daniele Miorandi, Guillaume Pierre
IoT provides services by connecting smart devices to the Internet, and exploiting data generated by said devices to enable value-added services to individuals and businesses. In such cases, if data is exposed, tampered or lost, the service would not behave correctly. In this article, we discuss data security in IoT applications across five dimensions: confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, non-repudiation and availability. We discuss how distributed ledger technology could be used to overcome these issues and propose to use a fog computing architecture as decentralized computational support to deploy the ledger.
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.
Tsung-Ting Kuo, Hugo Zavaleta Rojas, Lucila Ohno‐Machado
OBJECTIVES: To introduce healthcare or biomedical blockchain applications and their underlying blockchain platforms, compare popular blockchain platforms using a systematic review method, and provide a reference for selection of a suitable blockchain platform given requirements and technical features that are common in healthcare and biomedical research applications. TARGET AUDIENCE: Healthcare or clinical informatics researchers and software engineers who would like to learn about the important technical features of different blockchain platforms to design and implement blockchain-based health informatics applications. SCOPE: Covered topics include (1) a brief introduction to healthcare or biomedical blockchain applications and the benefits to adopt blockchain; (2) a description of key features of underlying blockchain platforms in healthcare applications; (3) development of a method for systematic review of technology, based on the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement, to investigate blockchain platforms for healthcare and medicine applications; (4) a review of 21 healthcare-related technical features of 10 popular blockchain platforms; and (5) a discussion of findings and limitations of the review.
Konstantinos Loizou, Dimka Karastoyanova, Christos N. Schizas
Blockchain is a technology with potential for making ground breaking steps in addressing social, economic and healthcare challenges. The global information technology scene is being overcrowded with blockchain applications with special focus on the vast healthcare market [12]. The value of information related to healthcare creates a clear path for applying blockchain as a solution for some of the challenges in the healthcare sector, in particular with the goal of creating a fair and transparent way for sharing information and patient data. It is however a fact that while blockchain technology introduces additional complexity to the implementation healthcare software, the benefit the technology actually brings still remains unclear and difficult to evaluate. This vision paper demonstrates our research focus on providing a body of knowledge and tools to help evaluate this impact of blockchain on eHealth applications. In particular, we identify that such a research effort has to explicitly consider cost of addressing challenges inherent to the eHealth domain like integration of disparate software systems (hospitals, research institutions, government agencies, health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, etc.), the potential introduction of cryptocurrencies in healthcare systems, degree of patient service improvement, transparency and compliance to laws and regulations, and others. The more traditional influencing factors, like cost of development and running, licenses for using third-party software services, and the ones inherent to blockchain like cost of computation and energy will also have to be taken into consideration in the metrics model.
Asad Ali Siyal, Aisha Zahid Junejo, Muhammad Zawish, Kainat Ahmed · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has gained considerable attention, with an escalating interest in a plethora of numerous applications, ranging from data management, financial services, cyber security, IoT, and food science to healthcare industry and brain research. There has been a remarkable interest witnessed in utilizing applications of blockchain for the delivery of safe and secure healthcare data management. Also, blockchain is reforming the traditional healthcare practices to a more reliable means, in terms of effective diagnosis and treatment through safe and secure data sharing. In the future, blockchain could be a technology that may potentially help in personalized, authentic, and secure healthcare by merging the entire real-time clinical data of a patient’s health and presenting it in an up-to-date secure healthcare setup. In this paper, we review both the existing and latest developments in the field of healthcare by implementing blockchain as a model. We also discuss the applications of blockchain, along with the challenges faced and future perspectives.
The promise of immutable documents to make it easier and less expensive for consumers and producers to collaborate in a verifiable way would represent an enormous progress, especially as companies strive for establish service contracts which are based on the flow of many small transactions using machine-to-machine communication. The blockchain technology logs these data, verifies the authenticity and make them available for service offers. This work deal with an architecture enabling to setup order processing between consumers and producers using blockchain. In this way, the technical feasibility is shown and the special characteristics of blockchain production networks will be discussed.
Sara Nadeem, Muhammad Rizwan, Fahad Ahmad, Jaweria Manzoor
Cognitive radio, ad hoc networks' applications are continuously increasing in wireless communication globally. In vehicles' environment, cognitive radio technology with mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) enables vehicles to monitor the available channels and to effectively function in these frequencies through sharing ongoing information with drivers and different frameworks to enhance traffic safety on roads. To fulfill the computational storage resources’ limitations of a specific vehicle, Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is used by merging VANET with cloud computing. Cloud computing requires high security and protection because authenticate users and attackers have the same rights in VCC. The security is enhanced in CRVANETs, but the distributed nature of cloud unlocks a door for dissimilar attacks, such as trust modal, data security, connection fault and query tracking attacks. This paper proposes an effective and secured blockchain scheme-based distributed cloud architecture in place of conventional cloud architecture to secure the drivers’ privacy with low cost and on-demand sensing procedure in CRVANETs ecosystem.
Kun Hao, Junchang Xin, Zhiqiong Wang, Keyan Cao · 5 authors
Outsourced data, as significant service offered by the cloud service provider (CSP), can effectively facilitate the data owner (DO) overcoming the storage limitations on massive data. To ensure the availability of data, DO usually outsources the data replications to multiple CSPs (multi-CSPs) and utilizes a third party metadata management (TPMM) to dominate the metadata of the corresponding replications. However, during the outsourced procedures, DO can hardly confirm the confidence of the TPMM who may take some malicious behaviors to affect the reliability of data. Thus, DO inevitably faces data security issues caused by the over-reliance on the semi-trusted TPMM to manage the metadata of replications. In this paper, we focus on the problem of reliable outsourced data service among multi-CSPs in untrusted environment, that is, how to reliably store and verify the metadata of the data replications in untrusted multi-CSPs environment. To address the problem, we use the novel blockchain technology as a medium to build a trusted outsourced service platform. Moreover, we fully consider the innovative characteristics of blockchain including decentralized architecture, redundancy storage, collective maintenance, and tamper resistant to ensure the data cannot be changed maliciously. We first design a blockchain-based outsourced service framework for storing data replications in untrusted environment, which contains three key layers, that is, storage layer, verification layer, and blockchain layer. Then, we devise a novel concept of verification peer (VP) for maintaining metadata stored by a form of blockchain, and each of which holds the entire blockchain locally to prevent metadata from being maliciously tampered with. Finally, based on the proposed model, we introduce a collaborative algorithm invoked by VPs to store and verify the metadata of replications. We present a completed analysis and conduct extensive experiments on multi-CSPs scenario. The evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves superior performance.
Blockchain has a broad development potential and application prospects. At present, huge storage volume on each node has become one of the primary bottlenecks that restrict the expansibility of blockchain. Optimization for storage mechanism has become a necessary way to accelerate the improvement of blockchain. There are a variety of solutions to relieve the storage burden by modifying the architecture of blockchain, but most of them weaken the decentralization property of the system, which is the core advantages of the blockchain. In this paper, an optimization scheme based on the redundant residual number system is proposed to dramatically reduce the storage volume of nodes in the blockchain system, and fault tolerance mechanism is designed based on the new storage scheme. The simulation experiments are performed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.
Roberto Saia, Salvatore Carta, Diego Reforgiato Recupero, Gianni Fenu
The exponential growth of wireless-based solutions, such as those related to the mobile smart devices (e.g., smart-phones and tablets) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, has lead to countless advantages in every area of our society. Such a scenario has transformed the world a few decades back, dominated by latency, into a new world based on an efficient real-time interaction paradigm. Recently, cryptocurrency has contributed to this technological revolution, whose fulcrum is a decentralization model and a certification function offered by the so-called blockchain infrastructure, which makes it possible to certify the financial transactions, anonymously. This paper aims to indicate a possible approach able to exploit this challenging scenario synergistically by introducing a novel blockchain-based distributed paradigm for data exchange between wireless-based devices defined Internet of Entities (IoE). It is based on two core elements with interchangeable roles, entities and trackers, which can be implemented by using existing infrastructures and devices, such as those related to smart-phones, tablets, and IoT systems. The employment of the blockchain-based distributed paradigm allows our approach ensuring the anonymization and immutability of the involved data, which is key in many scenarios and domains (e.g. financial applications, health and legal applications dealing with personal and sensitive data), requirements more and more searched in recent innovations. The possibility to exchange data among a huge number of devices gives rise to a novel and widely exploitable data environment, whose applications are possible in different domains, such as, in Security, eHealth, and Smart Cities.
Ananda Maiti, Ali Raza, Byeong Ho Kang, Lachlan Hardy
Internet of Things (IoT) plays a big role in automating information generation and consumption in industrial monitoring applications. Blockchain can allow this information to be stored in a manner that is both accessible and reliable for the IoT devices to work with. Blockchain has the capability to collect data from IoT devices and store it in a distributed manner that prevents tampering with the data. This paper discusses the use of blockchain to calculate the Service Quality (SQ) in an Industrial IoT for monitoring application. The proposed framework looks at the blockchain as a finite number of fragmented pieces of data corresponding to a specific industrial process. The SQ is expressed as penalties which is the difference between the expected IoT sensor values and the actual sensor data in reported events from the IoT devices. It also moderates the penalty between similar industrial processes based on each other. The moderation allows better understanding of the system functions and identification of specific problems rather than simply recording the sensor data for a single process. Furthermore, this paper analyzes private blockchains for suitability in IIoT and summarizes some key challenges for IoT to be used with blockchain in context of the proposed framework. The paper uses supply chain as a use case scenario for describing the proposed framework and presents results on its technical feasibility.
Emergency medical services universally get regarded as the essential part of the health care delivery system [1]. A relationship exists between the emergency patient death rate and factors such as the failure to access a patient's critical data and the time it takes to arrive at hospitals. Nearly thirty million Americans do not live within an hour of trauma care, so this poor access to trauma centers links to higher pre-hospital death rates in more than half of the United States [2]. So, we need to address the problem. In a patient care-cycle, loads of medical data items are born in different healthcare settings using a disparate system of records during patient visits. The ability for medical care providers to access a patient's complete picture of emergency-relevant medical data is critical and can significantly reduce the annual mortality rate. Today, the problem exists with a continuous recording system of the patient data between healthcare providers. In this paper, we've introduced a combination of secure file transfer methods/tools and blockchain technology as a solution to record patient Emergency relevant medical data as patient walk through from one clinic/medical facility to another, creating a continuous footprint of patient as a secure and scalable data source. So, ambulance crews can access and use it to provide high quality pre-hospital care. All concerns of medical record sharing and accessing like authentication, privacy, security, scalability and audibility, confidentiality has been considered in this approach.
The feedback control loop is the atomic unit in a control system. Typically, feedback control loops are rigid objects that involve a dynamical system, or plant, which has a set of its output states measured by dedicated sensors, which in turn feed a processing unit, known as controller, that calculates actions to be applied as inputs to the plant, via elements known as actuators, in order to drive the outputs to a desired value or trajectory. The appearance of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, where a large number of sensors and processing units interact over a communication network, offers an underlying infrastructure to operate and configure control loops using a different logic: an on-demand strategy. This work introduces the concept of on-demand control loop, and proposes the use of blockchain technology as the enabling infrastructure for generating on-demand control loops over large-scale IoT environments. General design guidelines are given and a simple implementation example over the Ethereum blockchain is presented, which shows the feasibility of the proposed technique.
Raed A. Salha, Maher A. El-Hallaq, Abdelkhalek I. Alastal
The ultimate aim of a smart city is to enhance the quality of life for its residents and businesses through modern technologies in order to reduce resource deterioration and maintain overall costs. From this perspective, blockchain is one of these technologies that has received much attention during the recent years as it offers new alternatives for individuals and institutions in the smart city context. This study aims to explore the potential and contribution of blockchain in smart cities by studying and reviewing the literature of scientific research on the concept and fundamentals of blockchain, involving its most practical applications. In addition, it summarizes worldwide examples of success in using blockchain as well as exploring the challenges and opportunities related to this technology in smart cities. Thus, this study provides a useful reference for researchers to review all about the new blockchain technology.
Blockchain technology is one of the most widely acclaimed technologies of recent years. It enables the creation of distributed applications involving multiple actors or organizations in which transactions and data are not under the control of a central authority. Transactions are stored in a distributed public ledger in an immutable format in such a way that they can be verified by participants. This disintermediation promises to remove much of the “friction” (and lower costs) from distributed transactions by cutting out the intermediary party, thus enabling a variety of applications in finance, government, health, etc. This paper provides an overview of recent research in the application of blockchain technology to higher education for those who are interested in working in this area or just understanding how higher education may be positively impacted in the future by blockchain.