Mengyuan Cheng, Guoliang Liu, Yongshun Xu, Ming Chi
Blockchain is regarded as a potential technology for transforming the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, and the number of related publications is increasing rapidly. However, a systematic review of blockchain applications in the AEC industry is lacking. The objective of this study was to review the current status of blockchain applications via a bibliometric analysis combined with a systematic literature review. According to related articles collected from databases, the present status of blockchain was analysed with regard to the distribution of articles over publication years, journals, institutions, countries, cooperation networks between authors, keyword co-occurrence networks, and research methodologies. The results indicated that research on blockchain applications is still relatively new and fragmented with regard to several topics. Five areas of benefit were identified: (i) supply chain management, (ii) contract management, (iii) information management, (iv) stakeholder management, and (v) integration management. On the basis of the technology–organisation–environment framework, nine types of challenges were identified. Future research opportunities were proposed according to the research findings. This study contributes to the current body of knowledge and provides guidelines for further research on blockchain applications in the AEC industry.
Abstract Health records of any type should be confidential, but simultaneously they should be accessible to an authorized user. In the current conventional health care system, health records are processed in the local database. Only authorized hospital staff can have access to the patient health records kept in health centers. The flow of information in this kind of system is center-restricted. One technology that can potentially overcome this problem is Blockchain. Blockchain technology allows sharing of data in a distributed way with benefits like privacy-preserving and secure access control. To achieve secure access control and privacy of electronic healthcare data (EHD), a secure framework for distributed sharing of the health record is proposed. The use of blockchain will remove the requirement of a trusted 3 rd party for data storage. The framework uses searchable key attribute-based encryption (ABE) for achieving fine-grain access control. The simulation results indicate that our scheme is quite effective and secure.
Abstract The biggest obstacle to electronic migrations of many systems is the need to protect the details and to check the identity of users. Currently, the use of dual-factor authentication is based occasionally on a password. The problem with these approaches is that passwords are extremely insecure and authentication by two factors usually involves the sending of code via SMS or a third-party provider. The blockchain might be a solution to this problem. A 50 billion dollar currency is managed by blockchain. But authentication could be subject to the same cryptographic principles. Thus, blockchain authentication eliminates someone from maliciously modifying the ledger when they distribute a ledger to all network members. A majority of the network shall check its validity any time a block of data is attached to a chain. That guarantees the completeness of the ledger. You can then make sure to send passwords safely using public-key encryption, such as highly protected RSA encryption. The receiver could then search for an entry in the unchanged blockchain, which would result in a remarkably safe and reliable way of handling identity verification. These rules apply for the transformation into a stable, fast, reliable, and readily available service from the election process, state identifiers to dual-factor authentication.
Millions of students complete their education each year and go on to do higher studies or a corporate job. In this case student credentials are verified through a lengthy document verification process. This results in significant overhead as documents are transferred between institutions for verification. There is a need for an automated credential verification system which can reduce the time required for the document verification process. Blockchain Technology can be used to reduce overhead and reduce the time taken for document verification from days to mere seconds. In this work, an attempt has been made to develop a Blockchain-based verification system for academic certificates. With the advent of public Blockchain like Ethereum, DApps (Decentralized Applications) and Smart contracts, scalable and cost effective solutions can be implemented to reduce overhead and make document verification a seamless process. The proposed solution consists of a web app which will have a front-end for registering and requesting verification, along with a backend which will have two modules: An OCR module to extract details from certificates and a Blockchain module to send and verify data stored in the Blockchain.
Youcef Djenouri, Gautam Srivastava, Asma Belhadi, Jerry Chun‐Wei Lin
Abstract This article introduces a new problem of distributed knowledge graph, in IoT 5G setting. We developed an end‐to‐end solution for solving such problem by exploring the blockchain management and intelligent method for producing the better matching of the concepts and relations of the set of knowledge graphs. The concepts and the relations of the knowledge graphs are divided into several components, each of which contains similar concepts and relations. Instead of exploring the whole concepts and the relations of the knowledge graphs, only the representative of these components is compared during the matching process. The framework has outperformed state‐of‐the‐art knowledge graph matching algorithms using different scenarios as input in the experiments. In addition, to confirm the usability of our suggested framework, an in‐depth experimental analysis has been done; the results are very promising in both runtime and accuracy.
Emerging multitenant cloud computing ecosystems allow multiple applications to share virtualized pool of computing and networking resources. As a result, such ecosystems are becoming increasingly prone to data privacy concerns (personal data leakages and unauthorized access). While cloud computing providers support robust security and privacy mechanisms (e.g., public key cryptography, firewalls, and virtual private networks, among many others), they lack mechanisms and frameworks to monitor, audit, and verify these data privacy concerns. The emergence of data protection regulations around the world, such as General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Data Protection Act in the U.K., further emphasizes the need to overcome these privacy limitations. In this article, a novel technique for monitoring, auditing, and verifying the operations carried out on a user’s personal data in cloud computing ecosystems is proposed. Our research methodology leverages distributed ledger technologies (e.g., blockchain and smart contracts) for developing an immutable recording technique, which transparently logs, monitors, and verifies the operations carried out on user data. Using a healthcare pharmacy scenario and extensive real-world experiments, we validate the feasibility of the proposed technique. The proposed work handles a large pool of requests ($>$13K) ensuring minimal latency ($\approx$50–60 ms) and overheads for three different service packages varied with respect to the number of actors and operations.
Angtai Li, Guohua Tian, Meixia Miao, Jianpeng Gong
In cloud storage, public auditing is a more popular data integrity verification technique since it allows users to delegate auditing tasks to a fully trusted third-party auditor (TPA). However, it is difficult to find such a TPA in practical application. Besides, the centralised auditing model makes TPA have to bear burdensome work pressure, which limits the practicability of existing schemes. In this paper, we firstly proposed a blockchain-based generalised shared auditing mechanism BCSA in the cross-user scenario, which aims at achieving available public auditing with a non-fully trusted TPA, and reducing the user's auditing fees and TPA's work pressure by allowing data users to share their auditing procedure with others. Furthermore, we initialise a concrete construction BCSAD with Diffie–Hellman protocol for the cross-user auditing scenario with different data. Likewise, we also propose a novel construction BCSAI for the cross-user auditing scenario with identical data, which utilises a password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol to achieve shared auditing and ciphertext deduplication, reducing data storage and auditing fees for data users and alleviating service pressure on the cloud server and TPA. Security and performance analysis evaluate the practicability of the proposed scheme.
Archives, both analogue and digital, are primarily concerned with preserving records as originals. Because of this, immutable data as used in a blockchain data structure seem a logical choice when designing such systems. At the same time, archives maintain records which may need to change over the long term. It is a requirement of archival preservation to be able to update records’ metadata in order not only to guarantee authenticity after digital preservation actions but also to ensure that relationships to other records, which might be created after an original record has entered the archive (and has been registered in a blockchain), can be maintained. The need to maintain an archival bond, which represents a network of relationships between aggregation of records, i.e., the relationship connecting previous and subsequent records belonging to the same activity, is a prime example of this requirement. This paper explores realisation of the archival bond in the context of blockchain-based archival system by proposing a supporting database system which enables metadata to be changed as required but also significantly simplifies searching compared to searching on-chain information, while keeping the immutability characteristic of blockchain.
Paolo Bellavista, Christian Esposito, Luca Foschini, Carlo Giannelli · 6 authors
Blockchain technology plays a pivotal role in the undergoing fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. It is considered a tremendous boost to company digitalization; thus, considerable investments in blockchain are being made. However, there is no single blockchain technology, but various solutions exist, and they cannot interoperate with one each other. The ecosystem envisioned by the Industry 4.0 does not have centralized management or leading organization, so a single blockchain solution cannot be imposed. The various organizations hold their own blockchains, which must interoperate seamlessly. Despite some solutions for blockchain interoperability being proposed, the problem is still open. This paper aims to devise a secure solution for blockchain interoperability. The proposed approach consists of a relay scheme based on Trusted Execution Environment to provide higher security guarantees than the current literature. In particular, the proposed solution adopts an off-chain secure computation element invoked by a smart contract on a blockchain to securely communicate with its peered counterpart. A prototype has been implemented and used for the performance assessment, e.g., to measure the latency increase due to cross-blockchain interactions. The achieved and reported experimental results show that the proposed security solution introduces an additional latency that is entirely tolerable for transactions. At the same time, the usage of the Trusted Execution Environment imposes a negligible overhead.
Tri Wahyuningsih, Gunawan Gunawan, Fitra Putri Oganda, Mey Anggraeni
With the approaching of the digital age, digital education resources bring convenience to folks as a result of they're liable to duplicate and spread, however there are some disadvantages in on-line education service transactions. The safety problems with digital education resources and also the development of smuggled distribution seriously harm the rights and interests of the house owners of digital education resources. supported this, during this paper, we have a tendency to planned a blockchain-based digital education resources authentication system that uses the decentralized, tamper-resistant options of blockchain technology to store the digital education resources info within the style of a secret text. Within the system, there is no have to be compelled to need the participation of any third-party institution. The system planned during this study can greatly defend the rights and interests of the owner of digital education resources.
The global supply chain is a network of interconnected processes that create, use, and exchange records, but which were not designed to interact with one another. As such, the key to unlocking the full potential of supply chain management (SCM) technologies is achieving interoperability across participating records systems and networks. We review existing research and solutions using distributed ledger technology (DLT) and provide a survey of its current state of practice. We additionally propose a holistic solution: a DLT-based interoperable future state that could enable the interoperable, efficient, reliable, and secure exchange of records with integrity. Finally, we provide a gap analysis between our proposed future state and the current state, which also serves as a gap analysis for many fractional DLT-based SCM solutions and research.
The technological advancement and growth of the cloud computing technologies is changing network service provisioning and operation. Cloud based services represented as XaaS where X refers to service offering such as Platform, Software and Infrastructure as a service, provides flexible on-demand provisioning along with its security concerns that goes with the adoption of the cloud computing. Despite all the advantages of adopting the cloud computing option, the security and privacy of the clients’ data cannot be overlooked. Understanding these security concerns is a fundamental requirement to choosing the cloud solution. This paper focuses on the use of Blockchain technology to mitigate the security challenges of the cloud computing. Literature reviews have discussed other security options for the cloud, but little discussions have centered on the adoption of the Block Chain technology to secure the cloud and open doors for future research of cloud computing using smart contract. Keywords: Blockchain, Distributed Database Systems, Data Integrity, cryptography, Cloud Infrastructure Security, Confidentiality, Distributed Ledger
Alexandre Pinheiro, Edna Dias Canedo, Robson de Oliveira Albuquerque, Rafael T. de Sousa
The management practicality and economy offered by the various technological solutions based on cloud computing have attracted many organizations, which have chosen to migrate services to the cloud, despite the numerous challenges arising from this migration. Cloud storage services are emerging as a relevant solution to meet the legal requirements of maintaining custody of electronic documents for long periods. However, the possibility of losses and the consequent financial damage require the permanent monitoring of this information. In a previous work named "Monitoring File Integrity Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts", the authors proposed an architecture based on blockchain, smart contract, and computational trust technologies that allows the periodic monitoring of the integrity of files stored in the cloud. However, the experiments carried out in the initial studies that validated the architecture included only small- and medium-sized files. As such, this paper presents a validation of the architecture to determine its effectiveness and efficiency when storing large files for long periods. The article provides an improved and detailed description of the proposed processes, followed by a security analysis of the architecture. The results of both the validation experiments and the implemented defense mechanism analysis confirm the security and the efficiency of the architecture in identifying corrupted files, regardless of file size and storage time.
Intuitively there is a drastic distinction between the pure decentralized block-chain systems like Defis and those that only utilize block-chain as an enhancing technology but remain centralized with real-world business model and conventional technologies like database, application server, etc. Our study explores extensively this distinction from a methodological point of view, classifies them into blockchain-complete and blockchain-partial, analyzes key features of the two types, and reveals the root cause of this distinction. We analyze the function or, in more strong words, the "ultimate purpose" of blockchain in the blockchain-partial systems, and present a conceptual model we named proof-chain that quite satisfactorily represented the general paradigm of blockchain in blockchain-partial systems. A universal tension between strength of proof-chain and privacy is then revealed and the zero-knowledge based proof-chain takes shape. Several case studies demonstrate the explaining power of our proof-chain methodology. We then apply proof-chain methodology to the analysis of the ecosystem of a collaborating group of blockchain-partial systems, representing the paradigm of public and private data domain whose border the proof-chain crosses. Finally, some derived guidelines from this methodology speak usefulness of our methodology.
Three-dimensional (3D) data are easily collected in an unconscious way and are sensitive to lead biological characteristics exposure. Privacy and ownership have become important disputed issues for the 3D data application field. In this paper, we design a privacy-preserving computation system (SPPCS) for sensitive data protection, based on distributed storage, trusted execution environment (TEE) and blockchain technology. The SPPCS separates a storage and analysis calculation from consensus to build a hierarchical computation architecture. Based on a similarity computation of graph structures, the SPPCS finds data requirement matching lists to avoid invalid transactions. With TEE technology, the SPPCS implements a dual hybrid isolation model to restrict access to raw data and obscure the connections among transaction parties. To validate confidential performance, we implement a prototype of SPPCS with Ethereum and Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The evaluation results derived from test datasets show that (1) the enhanced security and increased time consumption (490 ms in this paper) of multiple SGX nodes need to be balanced; (2) for a single SGX node to enhance data security and preserve privacy, an increased time consumption of about 260 ms is acceptable; (3) the transaction relationship cannot be inferred from records on-chain. The proposed SPPCS implements data privacy and security protection with high performance.
Francis Asuncion, Adam Brinckman, Dwayne Cole, Jeffrey H. Curtis · 28 authors
Blockchains have been around for more than ten years, and since 2015, a plethora of systems have been launched to target more flexible use cases. More recently, several enterprise blockchain systems, such as Consensys Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, have been launched to make blockchain simpler to apply in complex organizational configurations. In this paper, we identify a specific Department of Defense use case, extrapolate requirements, and perform a thorough assessment of the different layers of the blockchain stack to identify the existing state of the art and undertake a gap analysis of the technology for this context. We describe a platform that meets many of these challenges and show how we architected, designed, and implemented a solution for this use case for deployment at NAVAIR. This solution connects transactions from two separate blockchain systems, Consensys Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric, by using a graph-based approach that preserves privacy while enabling full transparency across the military and supplier networks.
There is a need for fast, automatic, and trusted verification of a person’s qualifications. This paper proposes the Smart CV (Curriculum Vita) that contains links to Blockchain-based certifications of the person’s qualifications. Also, the paper proposes an architecture for the Blockchain-based Smart CV consisting of five layers: 1) Trusted certificate Issuers; 2) Trusted Distributed Ledgers; 3) Trusted management; 4) Smart CV; 5) Users. Educational institutes, accreditation organizations, public authorities, employers and others can cooperate to issue and accept these Blockchain-based certificates presented on a person’s Smart CV.
Decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges offer compelling security benefits over centralized exchanges: users control their funds and avoid the risk of an exchange hack or malicious operator. However, because user assets are fully accessible by a secret key, decentralized exchanges pose significant internal security risks for trading firms and automated trading systems, where a compromised system can result in total loss of funds. Centralized exchanges mitigate this risk through API key based security policies that allow professional users to give individual traders or automated systems specific and customizable access rights such as trading or withdrawal limits. Such policies, however, are not compatible with decentralized exchanges, where all exchange operations require a signature generated by the owner's secret key. This paper introduces a protocol based upon multiparty computation that allows for the creation of API keys and security policies that can be applied to any existing decentralized exchange. Our protocol works with both ECDSA and EdDSA signature schemes and prioritizes efficient computation and communication. We have deployed this protocol on Nash exchange, as well as around several Ethereum-based automated market maker smart contracts, where it secures the trading accounts and wallets of thousands of users.
Abstract Through virtualization and resource integration, cloud computing has expanded its service area and offers a better user experience than the traditional platforms, along with its business operation model bringing huge economic and social benefits. However, a large amount of evidence shows that cloud computing is facing with serious security and trust crisis, and building a trust-enabled transaction environment has become its key factor. The traditional cloud trust model usually adopts a centralized architecture, which causes large management overhead, network congestion and even single point of failure. Furthermore, due to a lack of transparency and traceability, trust evaluation results cannot be fully recognized by all participants. Blockchain is a new and promising decentralized framework and distributed computing paradigm. Its unique features in operating rules and traceability of records ensure the integrity, undeniability and security of the transaction data. Therefore, blockchain is very suitable for constructing a distributed and decentralized trust architecture. This paper carries out a comprehensive survey on blockchain-based trust approaches in cloud computing systems. Based on a novel cloud-edge trust management framework and a double-blockchain structure based cloud transaction model, it identifies the open challenges and gives directions for future research in this field.
To solve the problem that the safety data in the process of coal mine production are easy to be maliciously tampered with and deleted, a mine consortium blockchain data security monitoring system is proposed. The coal mine consortium blockchain includes supervision department, builds favourable centralized and decentralized production mode, and improves PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism to implement practical coal mine safety production. The evaluation shows that the architecture we proposed is more appropriate and efficient for the mine Internet of Things than the traditional blockchain architecture. The Hyperledger Fabric platform is used to build the mine consortium blockchain system to achieve the sensor data reliability, node consensus, safe operation automation management, and major equipment traceability.
Amirmohammad Pasdar, Zhongli Dong, Young Choon Lee
Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology (DLT) where data is shared among users connected over the internet. Transactions are data state changes on the blockchain that are permanently recorded in a secure and transparent way without the need of a third party. Besides, the introduction of smart contracts to the blockchain has added programmability to the blockchain and revolutionized the software ecosystem leading toward decentralized applications (DApps) attracting businesses and organizations to employ this technology. Although promising, blockchains and smart contracts have no access to the external systems (i.e., off-chain) where real-world data and events resides; consequently, the usability of smart contracts in terms of performance and programmability would be limited to the on-chain data. Hence, \emph{blockchain oracles} are introduced to mitigate the issue and are defined as trusted third-party services that send and verify the external information (i.e., feedback) and submit it to smart contracts for triggering state changes in the blockchain. In this paper, we will study and analyze blockchain oracles with regard to how they provide feedback to the blockchain and smart contracts. We classify the blockchain oracle techniques into two major groups such as voting-based strategies and reputation-based ones. The former mainly relies on participants' stakes for outcome finalization while the latter considers reputation in conjunction with authenticity proof mechanisms for data correctness and integrity. We then provide a structured description of patterns in detail for each classification and discuss research directions in the end.
Validasi dokumen merupakan hal yang sangat penting dalam menyangkut keaslian aset digital pemilik. Dimana validasi dokumen saat ini masih bersifat tradisional dengan mengunjungi tempat tersebut. Namun, saat pandemi proses validasi dokumen tidak dilakukan tatap muka karena pandemi Covid-19. Penelitian ini bertujuan agar penggunaan teknologi tanda tangan digital pintar yang menjamin keamanan dan validitasnya tanpa harus tatap muka. Smart digital signature adalah tanda tangan digital yang terenkripsi dengan RSA-SHA256 berbasis blockchain dengan fitur penyimpanan cloud storage yang memudahkan untuk berbagi dokumen. Metode analisa SWOT untuk mengetahui penggunaan sistem secara keseluruhan dimulai dari strategi, peluang, kekuatan dan kelemahan. Kombinasi SHA-256 dan Teknologi blockchain diterapkan pada Smart Digital Signature untuk menyimpan data dengan keamanan yang tinggi dan terjamin keabsahannya dan terhindar dari pemalsuan. Temuan dari penelitian ini sistem tanda tangan digital memiliki dampak yang signifikan dari pemalsuan, pengesahan dan keamanan dokumen.
In this paper, we study efficient and authorized rewriting of transactions already written to a blockchain. Mutable transactions will make a fraction of all blockchain transactions, but will be a necessity to meet the needs of privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The state-of-the-art rewriting approaches have several shortcomings, such as being coarse-grained, inability to expunge data, absence of revocation mechanisms, lack of user anonymity, and inefficiency. We present ReTRACe, an efficient framework for transaction-level blockchain rewrites, that is fine-grained and supports revocation. ReTRACe is designed by composing a novel revocable chameleon hash with ephemeral trapdoor scheme, a novel revocable fast attribute based encryption scheme, and a dynamic group signature scheme. We discuss ReTRACe, and its constituent primitives in detail, along with their security analyses, and present experimental results to demonstrate scalability.
Healthcare blockchains provide an innovative way to store healthcare information, execute healthcare transactions, and build trust for healthcare data sharing and data integration in a decentralized open healthcare network environment. Although the healthcare blockchain technology has attracted broad interests and attention in industry, government and academia, the security and privacy concerns remain the focus of debate when deploying blockchains for information sharing in the healthcare sector from business operation to research collaboration. This article focuses on the security and privacy requirements for medical data sharing using blockchain, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the security and privacy risks and requirements, accompanied by technical solution techniques and strategies. First, we discuss the security and privacy requirements and attributes required for electronic medical data sharing by deploying the healthcare blockchain. Second, we categorize existing efforts into three reference blockchain usage scenarios for electronic medical data sharing, and discuss the technologies for implementing these security and privacy properties in the three categories of usage scenarios for healthcare blockchain, such as anonymous signatures, attribute-based encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, verification techniques for smart contract security. Finally, we discuss other potential blockchain application scenarios in healthcare sector. We conjecture that this survey will help healthcare professionals, decision makers, and healthcare service developers to gain technical and intuitive insights into the security and privacy of healthcare blockchains in terms of concepts, risks, requirements, development and deployment technologies and systems.