Flavio Corradini, Alessandro Marcelletti, Andrea Morichetta, Andrea Polini · 6 authors
In modern business scenarios, more and more organisations have to deal with the critical requirements of trustworthiness and flexibility, when collaborating in multi-party business processes. This calls for new kinds of systems able to manage collaborative processes in untrusted and dynamic environments. Concerning the collaborative perspective, the Business Process Management discipline has provided effective and standardised solutions for a long time, now. Regarding the trustworthiness perspective, blockchain is advocated as one of the most prominent technologies to guarantee trust in a multi-party setting. However, while the immutability of blockchain provides transparent and secure proof of past business interactions, it hinders the flexibility of the business process execution, as the business logic regulating the process execution is immutably stored in the blockchain. On the other hand, flexibility is a property that is becoming crucial in such a setting due to the high dynamism of the business scenarios. In fact, it permits to modify a process at run-time to deal with internal or external changes. In this paper, we face this issue by proposing an architecture for the flexible blockchain-based execution of multi-party business processes. In our approach, business processes are modelled by BPMN choreography diagrams translated into code, whose execution state is then stored in the blockchain. Flexibility is achieved by decoupling the business process’s logic from its execution state, thus allowing run-time changes to the process execution without losing the fundamental properties of trust provided by the blockchain. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we provide a prototypical implementation, called FlexChain, and we use it on a case study from the healthcare application domain. The results obtained by the analysis of cost for the reported case study show the feasibility of the approach. In particular, major costs to sustain relate to one-time operations, such as the deployment and the run-time update of the model, while the most frequent actions are quite efficient.
The hybrid wireless sensor network is made up of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). Generally, many hospitals use cellular networks to support telemedicine. To provide the treatment to the patient on time, for this, an early diagnosis is required, for treatment. With the help of WBANs, collections and transmissions of essential biomedical data to monitor human health becomes easy. Compressor Sensing (CS) is an emerging signal compression/acquisition methodology that offers a protruding alternative to traditional signal acquisition. The proposed mechanism reduces message exchange overhead and enhances trust value estimation via response time and computational resources. It reduces cost and makes the system affordable to the patient. According to the results, the proposed scheme in terms of Compression Ratio (CR) is 18.18% to 88.11% better as compared to existing schemes. Also in terms of Percentage Root-Mean-Squared Difference (PRD) value, the proposed scheme is 18.18% to 34.21% better than with respect to existing schemes. The consensus for any new block is achieved in 24% less time than the Proof-of-Work (PoW) approach. The shallow CPU usage is required for the leader election mechanism. CPU utilization while the experiment lies in the range of 0.9% and 14%. While simulating a one-hour duration, the peak CPU utilization is 21%.
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to attract attention in the context of computational resource growth. Various disciplines and fields have begun to employ IoT integration technologies in order to enable smart applications. The main difficulty in supporting industrial development in this scenario involves potential risk or malicious activities occurring in the network. However, there are tensions that are difficult to overcome at this stage in the development of IoT technology. In this situation, the future of security architecture development will involve enabling automatic and smart protection systems. Due to the vulnerability of current IoT devices, it is insufficient to ensure system security by implementing only traditional security tools such as encryption and access control. Deep learning and blockchain technology has now become crucial, as it provides distinct and secure approaches to IoT network security. The aim of this survey paper is to elaborate on the application of deep learning and blockchain technology in the IoT to ensure secure utility. We first provide an introduction to the IoT, deep learning, and blockchain technology, as well as a discussion of their respective security features. We then outline the main obstacles and problems of trusted IoT and how blockchain and deep learning may be able to help. Next, we present the future challenges in integrating deep learning and blockchain technology into the IoT. Finally, as a demonstration of the value of blockchain in establishing trust, we provide a comparison between conventional trust management methods and those based on blockchain.
Remote Health Monitoring (RHM) is going to reinvent the future healthcare industry and bring about abundant value to hospitals, doctors, and patients by overcoming the many challenges currently being faced in monitoring patient's well-being, promoting preventive care, and managing the quality of drugs and equipment. Despite the many benefits of RHM, it is yet to be widely deployed due to the healthcare data security and privacy challenges. Healthcare data are highly sensitive and require fail-safe measures against unauthorized data access, leakages, and manipulations, and as such, there are stringent regulations governing how healthcare data can be secured, communicated, and stored, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The challenges and regulatory demands in RHM applications can be addressed using blockchain technology due to its distinguishing features of decentralization, immutability, and transparency to address the challenges of data security and privacy. This article will provide a systematic review on the use of blockchain in RHM, focusing primarily on data security and privacy.
Sisi Zhou, Kuan‐Ching Li, Lijun Xiao, Jiahong Cai · 6 authors
Since the birth of Bitcoin, blockchain has shifted from a critical cryptocurrency technology to an enabling technology. Due to its immutability and trustworthiness, blockchain has revolutionized many fields requiring credibility and high-quality data for decision making. Particularly in business intelligence and business process management, users can use blockchain to build their blockchain-enabled collaboration and data-sharing ecosystem with their partners. In this paper, we present the development process of blockchain and consensus mechanisms, where important blockchain consensus mechanisms are introduced. The consensus mechanism is the kernel among various blockchain components to ensure security and performance. Again, we present a comparison of these consensus mechanisms from different perspectives. We take the blockchain-enabling business as an example and analyze the relationship between blockchain and business process characteristics and the ideas and principles for selecting consensus mechanisms. Finally, we describe the differences and connections among many consensus mechanisms while laying a foundation for selecting appropriate consensus mechanisms for different scenarios and fields of application.
This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive survey on blockchain interoperability, where interoperability is defined as the ability of blockchains to flexibly transfer assets, share data, and invoke smart contracts across a mix of public, private, and consortium blockchains without any changes to the underlying blockchain systems. Analyzing the vast landscape of both research papers and industry projects, we classify the existing works into five categories, namely, (1) sidechains, (2) notary schemes, (3) hashed time lock contracts (HTLC), (4) relays, and (5) blockchain agnostic protocols. We analyze the existing works under a taxonomy that consists of system and safety characteristics, such as decentralization, direction of communication, locking mechanism, verification mechanism, trust, safety, liveness, and atomicity. Different from other surveys, we are the first to evaluate the performance of some representative interoperability approaches between Bitcoin and Ethereum covering sidechains, notary schemes, and HTLCs. Even though the performance of cross-chain transactions is low (typically fewer than 10 transactions per second), the main reason is the underlying blockchain (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum) and not the interoperability approach. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and possible research directions in blockchain interoperability. For example, we identify challenges in interoperability across permissioned and permissionless blockchains, in interacting with scripting blockchains, in security and privacy.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLT) usage is currently limited to a single platform as they do not have design-based interoperability capabilities. In general, it's challenging for a DLT to communicate with another one. Although several DLT solutions have been proposed and applied in specific application areas, building a general-purpose interoperability solution for any DLT remains a challenge. In previous work, we proposed a tailor-made interoperability solution between Hyperledger Fabric and Corda. This paper extends that work to enable interoperability between Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a new approach to enable interoperability between these two DLT. The approach follows a new request-response interaction model and future payments to enable the payments of services. A prototype was developed and evaluated through a case scenario, performance tests and cost analysis. Performance tests showed bottlenecks under heavy load scenarios due to Ethereum's design. Costs analysis showed that the approach is suitable for purchasing high-priced services. These promising results constitute a step forward in developing a general-purpose solution for DLT interoperability.
A Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is a consensus algorithm deployed in a consortium blockchain that connects a group of related participants. This type of blockchain suits the implementation of the Building Information Modeling (BIM) information exchange with few participants. However, when much more participants are involved in the BIM information exchange, the PBFT algorithm, which inherently requires intensive communications among participating nodes, has limitations in terms of scalability and performance. The proposed solution for a multi-layer BFT hypothesizes that multi-layer BFT reduces communication complexity. However, having more layers will introduce more latency. Therefore, in this paper, Double-Layer Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DLBFT) is proposed to improve the blockchain scalability and performance of BIM information exchange. This study shows a double-layer network structure of nodes that can be built with each node on the first layer, which connects and forms a group with several nodes on the second layer. This network runs the Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm to reach a consensus. Instead of having one node send messages to all the nodes in the peer-to-peer network, one node only sends messages to a limited number of nodes on Layer 1 and up to three nodes in each corresponding group in Layer 2 in a hierarchical network. The DLBFT algorithm has been shown to reduce the required number of messages exchanged among nodes by 84% and the time to reach a consensus by 70%, thus improving blockchain scalability. Further research is required if more than one party is involved in multi-BIM projects.
Abstract The rise of 5G technology has driven the development of edge computing. Computation offloading is the key and challenging point in edge computing, which investigates offloading resource-intensive computing tasks from the user side to the cloud or edge side for processing. More consideration needs to be given to load balancing, user variability, and the heterogeneity of edge facilities in relevant research. In addition, most of the research around edge collaboration also revolves around cloud-side collaboration, which pays relatively little attention to the collaboration process between edge nodes, and the incentive and trust issues of the collaboration process need to be addressed. In this paper, we consider the impact of the user demand variability and the edge facility heterogeneity, then propose a method based on Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction theory to accommodate the edge demand response (EDR) process where the number of users and service facilities do not match. The method makes users’ bidding rules satisfy the Nash equilibrium and weakly dominant strategy, which can improve the load balancing of edge nodes, has positive significance in improving the edge resource utilization and reducing the system energy consumption. In particular, combined with blockchain, we further optimize the incentive and trust mechanism of edge collaboration and consider three scenarios: no collaboration, internal collaboration, and incentive collaboration. We also consider the impact of the user task’s transmission distance on the quality of experience (QoE). In addition, we illustrate the possible forking attack of blockchain in collaborative edge computing and propose a solution. We test the performance of the proposed algorithm on a real-world dataset, and the experimental results verify the algorithm’s effectiveness and the edge collaboration’s necessity.
The maintenance of any confidential records pertaining to education, health, or finance has seen a dramatic rise in the use of advanced technologies.However, because of their uncertainties, current sophisticated technologies have some problems.In terms of anonymity, attack-free security, transparency, dependability, and flexibility, these technologies have some shortcomings.Consequently, a blockchain application can be created to handle the events of a department or college.Decentralization improves the usability and upkeep of this application without adding to the costs incurred by hosting a centralised application on a leased third-party server.This programme does not rely on any third-party storage software because it stores the documents effectively using the IPFS file system.This method allows for seamless communication between students and teachers without the interference of outside programmes like WhatsApp or Google Classroom.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Michail‐Alexandros Kourtis, George Xilouris, Michael C. Batistatos, Anastasios Kourtis · 5 authors
Abstract—Reliable and ubiquitous communications, offering high data rates, low latency and supporting large numbers of connected devices, are critical requirements for modern emergency rescue missions. Multiple teams of First Responders, operating at remote areas, on rough terrain or under harsh conditions (e.g. wildfires, earthquakes, flooding etc.) need seamless connectivity to send/receive mission data and organize their operations. Decentralized swarm computing architectures offer a wide range of capabilities to enhance and accelerate edge processing for critical use case scenarios. This paper presents a converged approach on swarm computing and intelligence using Decentralized Autonomous Organizations for emergency communications, and how a swarm of drones can leverage different edge accelerators for different applications.
A key constraint that limits the implementation of blockchain in Internet of Things (IoT) is its large storage requirement resulting from the fact that each blockchain node has to store the entire blockchain. This increases the burden on blockchain nodes, and increases the communication overhead for new nodes joining the network since they have to copy the entire blockchain. In order to reduce storage requirements without compromising on system security and integrity, coded blockchains, based on error correcting codes with fixed rates and lengths, have been recently proposed. This approach, however, does not fit well with dynamic IoT networks in which nodes actively leave and join. In such dynamic blockchains, the existing coded blockchain approaches lead to high communication overheads for new joining nodes and may have high decoding failure probability. This paper proposes a rateless coded blockchain with coding parameters adjusted to network conditions. Our goals are to minimize both the storage requirement at each blockchain node and the communication overhead for each new joining node, subject to a target decoding failure probability. We evaluate the proposed scheme in the context of real-world Bitcoin blockchain and show that both storage and communication overhead are reduced by 99.6\% with a maximum $10^{-12}$ decoding failure probability.
Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchains are enabling technologies for modern healthcare applications, offering the improved monitoring of patient health and higher data integrity guarantees. However, in rural settings, communication reliability can pose a challenge that constrains real-time data usage. Additionally, the limited computation and communication resources of IoT sensors also means that they may not participate directly in blockchain transactions, reducing trust. This paper proposes a solution to these challenges, enabling the use of blockchain-based IoT healthcare devices in low-bandwidth rural areas. This integrated system, named hybrid channel healthcare chain (HC2), uses two communication channels: short-range communication for device authorisation and bulk data transfer, and long-range the radio for light-weight monitoring and event notifications. Both channels leverage the same cryptographic identity information, and through the use of a cloud-based digital twin, the IoT device is able to sign its own transactions, without disclosing the key to said twin. Patient data are encrypted end to end between the IoT device and data store, with the blockchain providing a reliable record of the data lifecycle. We contribute a model, analytic evaluation and proof of concept for the HC2 system that demonstrates its suitability for the stated scenarios by reducing the number of long-range radio packets needed by 87× compared to a conventional approach.
The combination between innovative topics and emerging technologies lets researchers define new processes and models. New needs regard the definition of modular and scalable approaches, with society and environment in mind. An important topic to focus on is the smart city one. The use of emerging technologies lets smart cities develop new processes to improve services offered from various actors, either industries or government. Smart cities were born to improve quality of life for citizens. To reach this goal, various approaches have been proposed, but they lack on a common interface to let each stakeholder communicate in a simple and fast way. This paper shows the proposal of an architecture to overcome the actual limitations of smart cities: it uses Blockchain technology as a distributed database to let everyone join the network and feel part of a community. Blockchain can improve processes development for smart cities. Scalability is granted thanks to a context-aware approach: applications do not need to know about the back-end implementation, they just need to adapt to an interface. With Blockchain, it is possible to collect data anonymously to make some statistical analysis, to access public records to ensure security in the city and to guarantee the origin of products and energy.
Blockchain technology constitutes a paradigm shift in the way we conceive distributed architectures. A Blockchain system lets us build platforms where data are immutable and tamper-proof, with some constraints on the throughput and the amount of memory required to store the ledger. This paper aims to solve the issue of memory and performance requirements developing a multiple Blockchain architecture that mixes the benefits deriving from a public and a private Blockchain. This kind of approach enables small sensors - with memory and performance constraints - to join the network without worrying about the amount of data to store. The development is proposed following a context-aware approach, to make the architecture scalable and easy to use in different scenarios.
Vincent Gramoli, Rachid Guerraoui, Andrei Lebedev, Chris Natoli · 5 authors
With the recent advent of blockchains, we have witnessed a plethora of blockchain proposals. These proposals range from using work to using time, storage or stake in order to select blocks to be appended to the chain. As a drawback it makes it difficult for the application developer to choose the right blockchain to support their applications. In particular, the scalability and performance one can obtain from a specific blockchain is typically unknown. The claimed results are often obtained in isolation by the developers of the blockchain themselves. The experimental conditions corresponding to these results are generally missing and the lack of details make these results irreproducible.
Federico Carrozzino, Marco Fiore, Marina Mongiello
Blockchain technology is a Distributed Ledger Technology mainly used to store information in an immutable and secure way, but scalability and throughput issues are major challenges. Integration of the NoSQL paradigm within a Blockchain pipeline enhances throughput and scalability, and it can handle both on-chain and off-chain data. This work aims to study which approaches are currently used to integrate a NoSQL database in a Blockchain architecture, how the advantages of both technologies can be exploited to enhance the system's capabilities, and to propose a novel hybrid architecture that mixes Blockchain and NoSQL characteristics.
The Blockchain (BCT) is the first decentralized ledger to include a trust mechanism in its design. It establishes a trustworthy framework for distributed commands by using data redundancy at several nodes. Conspicuously, the current study presents a BCT-based lightweight IoT information exchange security architecture for data exchange. The proposed technique uses a dual chain methodology, namely transaction and data BCT working together to provide distributed storage and tamper-proofing of data. Moreover, Transaction BCT is enhanced by a consensus algorithm using a practical Byzantine fault-tolerant (PBFT) mechanism. The proposed algorithm can increase data registering efficiency, transactions, and privacy protection BCT. It is deduced that local dominance can be avoided using the dynamic game strategy of node cooperation. Furthermore, by reporting the node’s global reputation value, the status of the unknown node may be approximated. The high-trust measure is utilized to adjust the weight of the affected node in the combined node-set, leading to the Bayesian equilibrium. The proposed model is validated in several experimental simulations and results are compared with state-of-the-art techniques. Based on the results, enhanced performance is registered for the proposed techniques in terms of temporal delay, statistical efficiency, reliability, and stability.
The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened up new horizons in the field of remote health data analysis to obtain smart healthcare. However, protecting patients’ data privacy seems challenging because medical files are so sensitive. There are significant risks to data confidentiality associated with storing patient health information on third-party servers. The covid-19 epidemic also enhanced the need for a temperature sensor-based respiratory monitoring device. Sharing electronic health records can aid with diagnostic accuracy when privacy and security protection are important system challenges. Due to the benefits of immutability, blockchain has been suggested as a possible option to enable personal health data exchange with privacy and security protection. This work suggests a safe and privacy-preserving diagnostic enhancement strategy for e-Health platforms based on blockchain technology, which addresses the inadequacy of previous work in these regards. The proposed work proposes an effective access control system that would let data owners specify their preferred access controls over their privacy-sensitive medical data. Users could utilize their user transactions for key generation to efficiently cancel or add authorized doctors. Experimental data and security analyses demonstrate the proposed Health-chain's suitability for use in smart healthcare systems. The thorough experimental investigation demonstrates the blockchain's effectiveness of computing and time consumption as well as its resistance to numerous security assaults.
Chandramohan Dhasarathan, Mohammad Kamrul Hasan, Shayla Islam, Salwani Abdullah · 8 authors
Abstract This research focuses on addressing the privacy issues in healthcare advancement monitoring with the rapid establishment of the decentralised communication system in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). An integrated blockchain homomorphic encryption standard with an in‐build supervised learning‐based smart contract is designed to improvise personal data prevention. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has advanced in healthcare with the rapid establishment of decentralised communication systems. Distributed ledgers have resource constraints to leverage public, private, and hybrid blockchain transactions to facilitate heterogeneous operations. The authors propose a supervised learning strategy in healthcare to mitigate learning health‐related issues, improvise clinical monitoring, and ensure secure communication. The proposed approach handles the vast IoMT data by adopting blockchain for IoMT as (BIoMT) to preserve sensitive clinical information. It incorporates hybrid encryption techniques to improve patient and health records' privacy protection. BIoMT also maintains secured and sustainable supply chain management with a highly confidential decentralised framework using blockchain‐based smart contracts, which minimises data loss. Moreover, a framework is designed with a hybrid hashing that integrates a homomorphically encrypted algorithm to support a smart contract for decentralised applicability. The BIoMT approach is tested and compared with the relevant prevention mechanisms. The evaluation shows that the effects observed from the result analysis noted that the proposed method outperforms reliable prevention mechanisms compared to the existing approaches.
Jesús Rosa-Bilbao, Juan Boubeta-Puig, Adrian Rutle
Internet of Things (IoT) is made up of millions of devices generating large amounts of heterogeneous data from multiple sources. These devices can be from multiple manufacturers which makes their use in terms of data acquisition, processing, analysis and actions on these data challenging. Additionally, all these data must be analyzed and correlated in real time for the early detection of situations of interest (complex events) and subsequent decision making. These complex events must be able to automatically trigger decisions and be stored in a secure, immutable and accessible way. In this context, Event-Driven Applications (EDAs) are a solution to meet these needs, however, developing such applications requires vast knowledge in certain technologies. To address these challenges, an EDA is proposed in this paper to integrate Complex Event Processing (CEP) and blockchain through the low-code paradigm. This proposal allows for the development of EDAs in a user-friendly way. These applications make it possible to integrate IoT devices from multiple manufacturers and with different data formats together with CEP technology for complex event detection and blockchain for secure, immutable and accessible event storage. To demonstrate the feasibility, the architecture was applied and evaluated in a case study related to measuring and acting on air quality using IoT devices that measure different pollutants and factors such as temperature, humidity and wind. The results show that the graphically designed EDAs facilitate the real-time analysis of the collected IoT data via a CEP engine, whose outcome is transparently and automatically registered in a blockchain network.
G. Nanthakumar, Sarah Alex, V Nandhini, Mr. K .Pazhanivel
The sixth generation of wireless networks, or 6G, is expected to provide unprecedented levels of connectivity and communication capabilities. It is essential to make sure that the underlying infrastructure is dependable, secure, and trustworthy in order to meet the growing demand for high-speed and low-latency communication services. A flexible and scalable solution is also provided by the proposed infrastructure, which is essential to meet future demand for high-speed and low-latency communication services. Blockchain technology has been recognized as a possible option due to its capacity to offer security, accountability, and transparency. The proposed infrastructure is designed using permissioned distributed ledgers, which provide an efficient and secure solution to improve accountability, transparency, and security in the delivery of wireless services. The proposed method makes use of the benefits of permissioned distributed ledger technology and blockchain technology to provide a dependable and trustworthy infrastructure for 6G wireless networks. The proposed solution is modular and easily extendable, allowing for the integration of new services and applications as they become available
Many researchers have been interested in healthcare cybersecurity for a long time since it can improve the security of patient and health record data. As a result, a lot of research is done in the field of cybersecurity that focuses on the safe exchange of health data between patients and the medical setting. It still has issues with high computational complexity, increased time consumption, and cost complexity, all of which have an impact on the effectiveness and performance of the complete security system. Hence this work proposes a technique called Consultative Transaction Key Generation and Management (CTKGM) to enable secure data sharing in healthcare systems. It generates a unique key pair based on random values with multiplicative operations and time stamps. The patient data is then safely stored in discrete blocks of hash values using the blockchain methodology. The Quantum Trust Reconciliation Agreement Model (QTRAM), which calculates the trust score based on the feedback data, ensures reliable and secure data transfer. By allowing safe communication between patients and the healthcare system based on feedback analysis and trust value, the proposed framework makes a novel contribution to the field. Additionally, during communication, the Tuna Swarm Optimization (TSO) method is employed to validate nonce verification messages. Nonce message verification is a part of QTRAM that helps verify the users during transmission. The effectiveness of the suggested scheme has been demonstrated by comparing the obtained findings with other current state-of-the-art models after a variety of evaluation metrics have been analyzed to test the performance of this security model.