Tim K. Mackey, Tsung-Ting Kuo, Basker Gummadi, Kevin A. Clauson · 9 authors
Blockchain is a shared distributed digital ledger technology that can better facilitate data management, provenance and security, and has the potential to transform healthcare. Importantly, blockchain represents a data architecture, whose application goes far beyond Bitcoin - the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain and has popularized the technology. In the health sector, blockchain is being aggressively explored by various stakeholders to optimize business processes, lower costs, improve patient outcomes, enhance compliance, and enable better use of healthcare-related data. However, critical in assessing whether blockchain can fulfill the hype of a technology characterized as 'revolutionary' and 'disruptive', is the need to ensure that blockchain design elements consider actual healthcare needs from the diverse perspectives of consumers, patients, providers, and regulators. In addition, answering the real needs of healthcare stakeholders, blockchain approaches must also be responsive to the unique challenges faced in healthcare compared to other sectors of the economy. In this sense, ensuring that a health blockchain is 'fit-for-purpose' is pivotal. This concept forms the basis for this article, where we share views from a multidisciplinary group of practitioners at the forefront of blockchain conceptualization, development, and deployment.
The technological evolution brought by the Internet of things (IoT) comes with new forms of cyber-attacks exploiting the complexity and heterogeneity of IoT networks, as well as, the existence of many vulnerabilities in IoT devices. The detection of compromised devices, as well as the collection and preservation of evidence regarding alleged malicious behavior in IoT networks emerge as a areas of high priority. This paper presents a blockchain-based solution, which is designed for the smart home domain, dealing with the collection and preservation of digital forensic evidence. The system utilizes a private forensic evidence database, where the captured evidence is stored, along with a permissioned blockchain that allows providing security services like integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation, so that the evidence can be used in a court of law. The blockchain stores evidences' metadata, which are critical for providing the aforementioned services, and interacts via smart contracts with the different entities involved in an investigation process, including Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. A high-level architecture of the blockchain-based solution is presented that allows tackling the unique challenges posed by the need for digitally handling forensic evidence collected from IoT networks.
The behavior of agents to ensure financial security on the basis of game theory was analyzed, the winning strategy taking into account risk and uncertainty was determined. Using Data Mining the useful functions of this technology were identified to ensure financial security: suspicious transactions determination, credit risks analysis, client account reliability analysis, financial indicators predicting and risks control. A comparison was made of the assessment of the effectiveness of various data mining algorithms on the nature of financial transactions and decision-making procedures in the financial security system. It was proved that the development of information technology has created a whole range of vulnerabilities in the financial system, in particular, has transformed the form of money in modern conditions -the emergence of a cryptocurrency. The influence of the formation and development of cryptocurrency on financial security at all levels of the economy: micro and macro was analyzed.
Ilya Afanasyev, Alexander Kolotov, Ruslan Rezin, Konstantin Danilov · 6 authors
The possibilities of decentralization and immutability make blockchain\nprobably one of the most breakthrough and promising technological innovations\nin recent years. This paper presents an overview, analysis, and classification\nof possible blockchain solutions for practical tasks facing multi-agent robotic\nsystems. The paper discusses blockchain-based applications that demonstrate how\ndistributed ledger can be used to extend the existing number of research\nplatforms and libraries for multi-agent robotic systems.\n
Ștefana Maria Moisă, Andrada Pârvu, Beatrice Gabriela Ioan
Background: Palliative care, seen as a fundamental human right, gains increasingly more importance worldwide, but the distribution of this kind of facilities is unequal. Aim: In this paper authors compare the palliative care systems of Romania and Lithuania, post-communist countries, characterized by shifting from a state healthcare system to a decentralized one, based on health insurances. Design: We have performed a desk research in Romanian and English languages, analyzing publications referring to this topic in the two countries. Data sources: Vilnius University Database and Google search engine using as keywords, Lithuania(n) palliative care", respectively "Romania(n) palliative care", published between 1975 and 2019. Eligibility criteria: articles published between the years mentioned above in English or Romanian languages. Results: In Romania, the palliative care network is better structured, including both hospital care and home care, for adults and children. Still, opioid consumption in Lithuania is higher than in Romania because of a more flexible prescribing legislation. In Romania, palliative care is a recognized as a medical sub-speciality, while in Lithuania no preoccupations exist in this regard. Conclusions: In both countries state budget funds allocation lacks transparency, and funds allocated for palliative care are insufficient. During the last 20 years Romania has undertaken bigger steps in palliative care than Lithuania, especially due to the effort of a few dedicated professionals. Still, the sub-financing of the two systems and the limited number of professionals limit the system efficiency.
Summary Blockchains are increasingly studied in the context of new applications. Permissioned blockchains promise to deal with the issue of complete removal of trust, a notion that is currently the hallmark of the developed society. Before the idea is adopted in contexts where resource efficiency and fast operation is a requirement, one could legitimately ask the question: can permissioned blockchains match the performance of traditional large‐scale databases? This paper compares two popular frameworks, Hyperledger Fabric and Apache Cassandra, as representatives of permissioned blockchains and distributed databases, respectively. We compare their latency for varying workloads and network sizes. The results show that, for small systems, blockchains can start to compete with traditional databases, but also that the difference in consistency models and differences in setup can have a large impact on the resulting performance.
Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are two technologies which are pioneer nowadays and in the future. IoT become pioneer because our goverment sets Industrial Revolution 4.0 which signifies the IoT technology. For blockchain, it is a technology which has a significant development. These two technologies have a good future. The innovation in this design is combining these two technologies. IoT has a problem in securitization, but blockchain has an advantage in security. So, by combining these technologies, the problem could be resolved. This design used microcontroller ESP32. It will collect three data sets, i.e. altitude, pressure and temperature. The data will be sent through Internet to Ethereum blockchain network in Ropsten TestNet. The Data will store in state variables. Twenty data have been sent and tested. The data has been verified to be stored in Ethereum Virtual Machine because the data could be verified through etherscan.io. So, the conclusion is this design could prove that blockchain could be used to data securitization in IoT. Internet of Things (IoT) dan blockchain merupakan dua teknologi yang akan menjadi pioneer saat ini dan di masa mendatang. Pioneer saat ini karena pemerintah menetapkan Revolusi Industri 4.0 yang salah satu titik beratnya adalah IoT. Untuk blockchain, saat ini merupakan teknologi yang mengalami perkembangan signifikan. Kedua teknologi ini menjanjikan. Salah satu hal yang dapat menjadi inovasi adalah menggabungkan keduanya. IoT memiliki permasalahan pada sekuriti, sedangkan blockchain memiliki keunggulan dalam hal sekuriti. Dengan demikian, menggunakan teknologi blockchain untuk aplikasi IoT akan menjadi solusi. Alat yang dirancang menggunakan mikrokontroler ESP32. Alat ini akan mengakuisis data dari tiga buah sensor, yaitu sensor ketinggian, tekanan dan suhu. Data-data ini dikirim melalui Internet ke jaringan blockchain Ethereum di TestNet Ropsten. Data tersebut akan disimpan di state variables. Dua puluh data dikirim dan berhasil disimpan di Ethereum Virtual Machine. Ini terbukti dengan setiap data yang dikirim dapat divalidasi dan terekam di etherscan.io. Dengan demikian, perancangan alat ini berhasil membuktikan bahwa IoT dapat menggunakan blockchain untuk sekuritisasi data.
This paper deals with design of the alternative secure Blockchain network framework to prevent damages from an attacker. The concept of the strategic alliance of the management is applied on the top of the recent developed stochastic game framework. This new enhanced hybrid theoretical model has been developed based on the combination of the conventional game theory, the fluctuation theory and the Blockchain Governance Game to find best strategies towards preparation for preventing a network malfunction from an attacker by making the strategic alliance with other genuine miners. Analytically tractable results for decision making parameters are fully obtained which enable to predict the moment for operations and deliver the optimal number of the alliance with other nodes to protect the Blockchain network. This research helps for whom considers the initial coin offering or launching new blockchain based services with enhancing the security features by alliance with the trusted miners within the decentralized network.
The main objective of this study is to examine the mutual interaction between crypto money (coins) types. For this purpose, we investigated the sensitivity existence of any crypto money to changes in other crypto types. Methodology-In this study, to find out whether the interaction (relationship) exists between cryptocurrencies VAR model will be used through daily closing prices of each crypt money. Under the VAR analysis, variance decomposition, impact-response functions analysis will be done and finally, Granger Causality Test will be performed. Findings-According to the results of VAR analysis based on Variance Decomposition, BITCOIN, BT CASH and Tether are largely external variables and their prices are not significantly affected by other crypto currencies. In contrast, the values of Etherum, Lite Coin and QTUM are significantly affected by the changes in the values of other crypto coins. Conclusion-In accordance with findings obtained from analysis, we observed that Tether is moving towards becoming an alternative investment tool for all the crypto moneys. Other crypto coins tend to move in the same direction.
(1) Background: Large eHealth systems should have a mechanism to detect unauthorized changes in patients’ medical documentation, access permissions, and logs. This is due to the fact that modern eHealth systems are connected with many healthcare providers and sites. (2) Methods: Design-science methodology was used to create an integrity-protection service model based on blockchain technology. Based on the problem of transactional transparency, requirements were specified and a model was designed. After that, the model’s security and performance were evaluated. (3) Results: a blockchain-based eHealth integrity model for ensuring information integrity in eHealth systems that uses a permissioned blockchain with off-chain information storage was created. In contrast to existing solutions, the proposed model allows information removal, which in many countries’ eHealth systems is a legal requirement, and is based on a blockchain using the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. (4) Conclusion: A blockchain can be used to store medical data or only security-related data. In the proposed model, a blockchain is mainly used to implement a data-integrity service. This service can be implemented using other mechanisms, but a blockchain provides a solution that does not require trusted third parties, works in a distributed eHealth environment, and supports document removal.
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a blockchain, with different approaches and philosophies. However, many of them share one common feature: they require proof-of-work to support the generation of blocks (mining) and, eventually, the generation of money. This proof-of-work scheme often consists in the resolution of a cryptography problem, most commonly breaking a hash value, which can only be achieved through brute-force. The main drawback of proof-of-work is that it requires ridiculously large amounts of energy which do not have any useful outcome beyond supporting the currency. In this paper, we present a theoretical proposal that introduces a proof-of-useful-work scheme to support a cryptocurrency running over a blockchain, which we named Coin.AI. In this system, the mining scheme requires training deep learning models, and a block is only mined when the performance of such model exceeds a threshold. The distributed system allows for nodes to verify the models delivered by miners in an easy way (certainly much more efficiently than the mining process itself), determining when a block is to be generated. Additionally, this paper presents a proof-of-storage scheme for rewarding users that provide storage for the deep learning models, as well as a theoretical dissertation on how the mechanics of the system could be articulated with the ultimate goal of democratizing access to artificial intelligence.
The paper presents the use of states of explosionproof method for analyzing the behavior of systems that provide smart contract technology. The selected example system is ShadowEth, whose main task is to ensure sufficient confidentiality of information stored in the Ethereum blockchain currency. The Petri network model for the ShadowEth system has been presented. The system
The article identifies the peculiarities of the educational services provision in the region in the conditions of decentralization of power. It has been found out that at the present stage of state development, higher education is the driving force for changing and updating the country's social and economic status. Therefore, investment in higher education is the main factor by which the state influences not only the quality of educational services and the state of universities, but also the development of the economy as a whole. It has been found that the state plays an important role in organizing educational services at the regional level of the country, forming the legal field and financing the educational sector. The regulatory activities of the state can be implemented at the stage of planning, motivating, and organizing and include regulating and streamlining of socio-economic processes in higher education, guiding them in certain directions in accordance with certain goals and priorities, eliminating contradictions, obstacles, and deviations by appropriate measures. It has been found out that the regionalization of education, especially in the context of the decentralization of power, can be considered as a tool to achieve compliance with the educational needs of the region through the revitalization of its internal development resources.In turn, the educational needs of the region should be formed by means of education of those personal qualities that contribute to self-realization and vigorous civic activity.It has been determined that an important problem in the organization of educational services at all levels is accessability of education, which is socially acute with a transition to the level of higher education, which is not mandatory, but critically expedient and necessary prerequisite for ensuring quality life, social stability and prospects.It has been highlighted that in order to improve the performance of universities, there is an urgent need for the formation of a comprehensive system for managing the career process, which includes interrelated goals, functions, principles, structure and staffing.It has been concluded that establishing and ensuring the effective functioning of the mechanisms of regional management by education, especially higher education, will contribute to the formation of the level of educational services of a new type capable of introducing new principles and approaches into the practice of their activities, a new organizational culture, new technologies that will become essential components of intellectual technological infrastructure of the regional economy.
The bill of lading has, for centuries, been an integral component in the maritime shipping industry. However, the stagnation in the development of this legal instrument is contrasted with the exponential rate of development in other areas of commercial practice, which highlights the financial costs and delays associated with the use of bills of lading. The purpose of this paper is to present a modern alternative to the current paper-based bill of lading system that accounts for the practical and legal requirements of the incumbent instrument and also overcomes the deficiencies inherent in paper-based bills of lading. In the context of the regulatory uncertainty of bills of lading based on distributed ledger technology, this paper discusses approaches to regulating this new technology so as to achieve the same legal effects that the traditional, paper-based bill of lading provides. This paper presents two methods for regulating distributed ledger technology when applied to maritime shipping: the first is based on the principle of functional equivalence, which can be employed in domestic legislation, and the second is based on the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records. I conclude that, while both approaches represent steps in the right direction, the latter would imbue this technology with sufficient legal certainty so as to spark a marine cargo carriage revolution and facilitate a productive disruption of the current industry practice.
José Antonio Núñez Mora, Mario Iván Contreras-Valdez, Carlos A. Franco-Ruiz
This paper develops the ability of the normal inverse Gaussian distribution (NIG) to fit the returns of bitcoin (BTC). As the first cryptocurrency created, the behavior of this new asset is characterized by great volatility. The lack of a proper definition or classification under existing theory exacerbates this property in such a way that explosive periods followed by a rapid decline have been observed along the series, meaning bubble episodes. By detecting the periods in which a bubble rises and collapses, it is possible to study the statistical properties of such segments. In particular, adjusting a theoretical distribution may help to determine better strategies to hedge against these episodes. The NIG is an appropriate candidate not only because of its heavy-tailed property but also because it has been proven to be closed under convolution, a characteristic that can be implemented to measure multivariate value at risk. Using data on the price of BTC with respect to seven of the main global currencies, the NIG was able to fit every time segment despite the bubble behavior. In the out-of-sample tests, the NIG was proven to have an adjustment similar to that of a generalized hyperbolic (GH) distribution. This result could serve as a starting point for future studies regarding the statistical properties of cryptocurrencies as well as their multivariate distributions.
In a blockchain system, consensus protocol as an incentive and security mechanism, is to ensure the participants to build the block honestly and effectively. There are different consensus protocols for blockchain, like Proof of work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Space (PoSpace), Proof of Activities etc. But most of these consensus protocols are not designed for doing some useful jobs for society because of too much competition and scalability limitation. Massive electric power and computing resources, including CPU, RAM, storage and sensors have been wasted to run blockchain network based on these consensus protocols. Current frameworks and middleware for building decentralised applications (dApps) are largely limited to simple and less useful jobs. In this paper, we present Proofware which is designed for developers to build their dApps easily with existing public/crowd-based computing resources. Under Proofware, developers can develop and test their own Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) consensus protocols. Also, rather than depending on a centralised accounting system, each dApp has an embedded currency system to keep the whole incentive system decentralised, fair, transparent, stable and sustainable. Based on Proofware, we have built a crowd based video sharing application, called OurTube, as a case study. By the OurTube example, it has shown Proofware significantly improves the productivity to build crowd-based computing system with the features of cost-effectiveness, anti-censorship, elasticity and financial sustainability.
Trisya Rakmawati, Reece Hinchcliff, Jerico Franciscus Pardosi
The local-level impacts of decentralizing national health systems are significant yet infrequently examined. This review aims to assess whether localized health services delivery in Indonesia, which commenced a health system decentralization process in 2001, achieved its objectives or could be enhanced. A systematic review was undertaken to collate published evidence regarding this topic and synthesize key findings holistically using the six building blocks framework of the World Health Organization (WHO) to categorize health system performance. Four research databases were searched in 2016 for relevant evidence published between 2001 and 2015. The inclusion criteria were relevance to the topic of decentralization impacts at the district level, original research, and published in English. Included articles were appraised for quality using a standardized tool, with key findings synthesized using the WHO building blocks. Twenty-nine articles met the inclusion criteria and categorized under the WHO building blocks categories. The findings highlight problematic impacts of decentralization related to three building blocks: service delivery, health financing, and workforce. In the 15 years of post-decentralization in Indonesia, the service delivery, health workforce, and health financing blocks should be prioritized for further research and policy evaluation to improve the overall health system performance at the district level.
Healthcare information exchange is an important research topic, which can benefit both healthcare providers and patients. In healthcare data sharing, many cloud-based solutions have been proposed, but the trustworthiness of a third-party cloud service is questionable. Recently, blockchain has been introduced in healthcare record sharing, which does not rely on trusting a third party. However, existing approaches only focus on the records collected from medical examination. They are not efficient in sharing data streams continuously generated from sensors and other monitoring devices. Today, IoT devices have been widely deployed and sensors and mobile applications can monitor patients’ body conditions. The collected data are shared to laboratories and institutions for diagnosis and further study. Moreover, existing approaches are too rigid to efficiently support metadata change. In this paper, an efficient data-sharing scheme is proposed, called MedChain, which combines blockchain, digest chain, and structured P2P network techniques to overcome the above efficiency issues in the existing approaches for sharing both types of healthcare data. Based on MedChain, a session-based healthcare data-sharing scheme is devised, which brings flexibility in data sharing. The evaluation results show that MedChain can achieve higher efficiency and satisfy the security requirements in data sharing.
Andrew Cullen, Pietro Ferraro, Christopher King, Robert Shorten
Distributed ledgers have been proposed for a number of applications in the Internet-of-Things domain where it is essential to have an immutable and irreversible record of transactions. Directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based architectures, in particular, seem to provide a vast array of advantages over the more traditional Blockchain; however, it can be challenging to conduct a thorough analysis of DAG-based ledgers and derive reliable performance guarantees. In this article, we analyze one commonly discussed attack scenario known as the parasite chain attack, which aims at disrupting the immutability and irreversibility of the ledger, in the context of the IOTA Foundation's DAG-based system. Using a Markov chain model, we study the vulnerabilities of IOTA's core tip selection method against this attack and we present an extension of the algorithm to improve the resilience of the ledger in this scenario.
Andrew Cullen, Pietro Ferraro, Christopher King, Robert Shorten
Recently, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based Distributed Ledgers have been proposed for various applications in the smart mobility domain [1]. While many application studies have been described in the literature, an open problem in the DLT community concerns the lack of mathematical models describing their behaviour, and their validation. Building on a previous work in [1], we present, in this paper, a fluid based approximation for the IOTA Foundation's DAG-based DLT that incorporates varying transaction delays. This extension, namely the inclusion of varying delays, is important for feedback control applications (such as transactive control [2]). Extensive simulations are presented to illustrate the efficacy of our approach.
Thanh Son Lam Nguyen, Guillaume Jourjon, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Kim Thai
Blockchain has become one of the most attractive technologies for applications, with a large range of deployments such as production, economy, or banking. Under the hood, Blockchain technology is a type of distributed database that supports untrusted parties. In this paper we focus Hyperledger Fabric, the first blockchain in the market tailored for a private environment, allowing businesses to create a permissioned network. Hyperledger Fabric implements a PBFT consensus in order to maintain a non forking blockchain at the application level. We deployed this framework over an area network between France and Germany in order to evaluate its performance when potentially large network delays are observed. Overall we found that when network delay increases significantly (i.e. up to 3.5 seconds at network layer between two clouds), we observed that the blocks added to our blockchain had up to 134 seconds offset after 100 th block from one cloud to another. Thus by delaying block propagation, we demonstrated that Hyperledger Fabric does not provide sufficient consistency guaranties to be deployed in critical environments. Our work, is the fist to evidence the negative impact of network delays on a PBFT-based blockchain.
Traditional machine learning algorithms use data from databases that are mutable, and therefore the data cannot be fully trusted. Also, the machine learning process is difficult to automate. This paper proposes building a trustable machine learning system by using blockchain technology, which can store data in a permanent and immutable way. In addition, smart contracts are used to automate the machine learning process. This paper makes three contributions. First, it establishes a link between machine learning technology and blockchain technology. Previously, machine learning and blockchain have been considered two independent technologies without an obvious link. Second, it proposes a unified analytical framework for trustable machine learning by using blockchain technology. This unified framework solves both the trustability and automation issues in machine learning. Third, it enables a computer to translate core machine learning implementation from a single thread on a single machine to multiple threads on multiple machines running with blockchain by using a unified approach. The paper uses association rule mining as an example to demonstrate how trustable machine learning can be implemented with blockchain, and it shows how this approach can be used to analyze opioid prescriptions to help combat the opioid crisis.
The rapid rise in urbanization internationally is both driving and stressing our consumption patterns, including that of land use. Urban sprawl is arguably one of the most important threats to human and nature biodiversity given its reliance upon fossil fuel exploitation and consumption. The need for increasing the density of cities is required to contain urban expansion in land size. However, while the footprint density of cities is increasing, vacant plots are prized and rare in most urban areas. Tradable air rights development is seen as a potential solution to provide developers the option of increasing density while encouraging an emerging urban economy. However, the price speculation of air rights is a danger and counter to a fair and inclusive real estate market. This paper proposes a new model that encourages the trading of time-sensitive air rights through Smart Contracts in the Blockchain as a means of prevention against urban sprawl.