T. Rama Reddy, P. V. G. D. Prasad Reddy, Rayudu Srinivas, Ch. V. Raghavendran · 6 authors
Abstract Education acts as a soul in the overall societal development, in one way or the other. Aspirants, who gain their degrees genuinely, will help society with their knowledge and skills. But, on the other side of the coin, the problem of fake certificates is alarming and worrying. It has been prevalent in different forms from paper-based dummy certificates to replicas backed with database tampering and has increased to astronomic levels in this digital era. In this regard, an overlay mechanism using blockchain technology is proposed to store the genuine certificates in digital form and verify them firmly whenever needed without delay. The proposed system makes sure that the certificates, once verified, can be present online in an immutable form for further reference and provides a tamper-proof concealment to the existing certification system. To confirm the credibility of the proposed method, a prototype of blockchain-based credential securing and verification system is developed in ethereum test network. The implementation and test results show that it is a secure and feasible solution to online credential management system.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Retinal Imaging and Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help in effective planning operations and resource deployments. Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing delays in regulatory approvals, streamline the communication between diverse stakeholders of the supply chain etc. Moreover, the spread of misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak and existing platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, causing people to panic and act irrationally. Thus, developing a blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the information received by the public and government agencies are reliable and trustworthy. In this paper, we focus on blockchain abilities to track the COVID-19 data collected from various sources including news, healthcare professionals, researchers etc, verify and append them in a secure and trusted distributed ledger. Thus, we propose a generic framework using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track real-time data related to the number of new cases, deaths and recovered cases obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. The smart contract code was developed and tested in Remix environment. We present the cost and security analysis incurred by the stakeholders and highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among stakeholders.
<p>The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help in effective planning operations and resource deployments. Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing delays in regulatory approvals, streamline the communication between diverse stakeholders of the supply chain etc. Moreover, the spread of misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak and existing platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, causing people to panic and act irrationally. Thus, developing a blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the information received by the public and government agencies are reliable and trustworthy. In this paper, we focus on blockchain abilities to track the COVID-19 data collected from various sources including news, healthcare professionals, researchers etc, verify and append them in a secure and trusted distributed ledger. Thus, we propose a generic framework using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track real-time data related to the number of new cases, deaths and recovered cases obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. The smart contract code was developed and tested in Remix environment. We present the cost and security analysis incurred by the stakeholders and highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among stakeholders. </p>
D. Dharani, Kiran Kumari, S Aishwarya, G. M. Sangavi · 5 authors
Nearly every organization needs solution to handle sensitive data. Though there are different systems to store and transmit electronic records, users often deal with missing or tampered information when they distribute it in a public network. When the data is distributed, the traceability and governance of it throughout the globe is impractical. The evolving world of Data Security demands healthcare industry to have an infrastructure in place to deal with patient records. Regardless of the nature of present and future security risks, Blockchain Technology will play a vital role to maintain the originality of the digital data. Blockchain stores data in a decentralized, distributed ledger for achieving immutability and transparency. The system analyses a case study which aims at maintaining Healthcare records in Blockchain ledger to facilitate secure storage of the patient’s details. For efficient prediction of diabetes the Blockchain and machine learning algorithms are integrated. The various other applications of combining Blockchain technology with machine learning algorithms are Smart city applications, Forensic information storage systems, Energy data management systems, banking and finance management systems.
The world is becoming more interconnected every day. With the high technological evolution and the increasing deployment of it in our society, scenarios based on the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered a reality nowadays. However, and before some predictions become true (around 75 billion devices are expected to be interconnected in the next few years), many efforts must be carried out in terms of scalability and security. In this study we propose and evaluate a new approach based on the incorporation of Blockchain into current IoT scenarios. The main contributions of this study are as follows: i) an in-depth analysis of the different possibilities for the integration of Blockchain into IoT scenarios, focusing on the limited processing capabilities and storage space of most IoT devices, and the economic cost and performance of current Blockchain technologies; ii) a new method based on a novel module named BIoT Gateway that allows both unidirectional and bidirectional communications with IoT devices on real scenarios, allowing to exchange any kind of data; and iii) the proposed method has been fully implemented and validated on two different real-life IoT scenarios, extracting very interesting findings in terms of economic cost and execution time. The source code of our implementation is publicly available in the Ethereum testnet.
Faisal Jamil, Shabir Ahmad, Naeem Iqbal, Do‐Hyeun Kim
Over the past several years, many healthcare applications have been developed to enhancethe healthcare industry. Recent advancements in information technology and blockchain technologyhave revolutionized electronic healthcare research and industry. The innovation of miniaturizedhealthcare sensors for monitoring patient vital signs has improved and secured the human healthcaresystem. The increase in portable health devices has enhanced the quality of health-monitoringstatus both at an activity/fitness level for self-health tracking and at a medical level, providing moredata to clinicians with potential for earlier diagnosis and guidance of treatment. When sharingpersonal medical information, data security and comfort are essential requirements for interactionwith and collection of electronic medical records. However, it is hard for current systems to meetthese requirements because they have inconsistent security policies and access control structures.The new solutions should be directed towards improving data access, and should be managed bythe government in terms of privacy and security requirements to ensure the reliability of data formedical purposes. Blockchain paves the way for a revolution in the traditional pharmaceuticalindustry and benefits from unique features such as privacy and transparency of data. In this paper,we propose a novel platform for monitoring patient vital signs using smart contracts based onblockchain. The proposed system is designed and developed using hyperledger fabric, which isan enterprise-distributed ledger framework for developing blockchain-based applications. Thisapproach provides several benefits to the patients, such as an extensive, immutable history log, andglobal access to medical information from anywhere at any time. The Libelium e-Health toolkitis used to acquire physiological data. The performance of the designed and developed system isevaluated in terms of transaction per second, transaction latency, and resource utilization usinga standard benchmark tool known as Hyperledger Caliper. It is found that the proposed systemoutperforms the traditional health care system for monitoring patient data.
Blokzincir, bitcoin dijital para biriminin de alt yapısını oluşturan yeni bir teknolojidir. Popüler ve yaygın yatırımlar sayesinde günlük gerçekleştirilen bitcoin işlem sayısı gün geçtikçe artmaktadır. Bitcoin verisi her geçen gün artmakta ve dolayısıyla artan büyük bitcoin verisinin analizi ve madenciliği için yeni veri madenciliği yöntemlerine ihtiyaç duyulmaktadır. Buna ek olarak, Bitcoin fiyatındaki dalgalanmalar ve anormal fiyat değişimleri ve bu değişimlerdeki anormalliklerin keşfi ekonomistler için büyük önem taşımaktadır. Bu çalışmada, 2012-2019 yıllarına ait 8 yıllık bitcoin fiyat veri kümesi kullanılarak bitcoin fiyat farkı ve bitcoin fiyatı yüzdesel farkı olmak üzere iki farklı veri kümesi oluşturulup, anormallik tespiti gerçekleştirilmiştir. Öncelikle veri kümesi ön işlem aşamasından geçirilerek gereksiz sütunlar çıkarılmıştır ve daha sonra günlük fiyat farkları kullanılarak veri setleri oluşturulup, DBSCAN algoritması ile anormallik tespiti yapılmıştır. Ayrıca bu çalışmada DBSCAN aloritmasının sonuçları istatistiksel yöntemin sonuçları ile karşılaştırılıp, tartışılmıştır. Sonuçlar incelendiğinde, DBSCAN algoritması ve istatistiksel metodun bitcoin fiyatlarındaki anormallikleri her iki veri kümesinde de başarıyla tespit edebildiği görülmüştür. Bununla birlikte DBSCAN algoritması normal günlük fiyat değişimlerine yakın olan anormak fiyat değişimlerini de keşfedebildiği için istatistiksel metottan daha iyi performans göstermiştir. Ayrıca, bu çalışmada bitcoin fiyat farkı veri kümesi ve bitcoin fiyatı yüzdesel farlı veri kümesi karşılaştırılmış ve her bir veri kümesi için olan sonuçlar ve sebepleri tartışılmıştır. NOT: Makalenin düzeltilmiş haline Alper Ecemis - Düzeltme ulaşabilirsiniz.
Jacques Bou Abdo, Rayane El Sibai, Krishna Kambhampaty, Jacques Demerjian
Reputation‐based consensus algorithms are one of the most promising, but least investigated types of consensus algorithms. Its limitation to persmissioned node identity management shades its potential and causes many applications to find blockchain unsuitable. In this paper, we upgrade PoRX, an existing consensus algorithm, into becoming the first permissionless pure reputation‐based consensus algorithm. This upgrade is highly potential since it only affects the admission process and does not intervene with the consensus process, thus can be extended into other types of consensus algorithms.
Anuraag A Vazirani, Odhran O’Donoghue, David Brindley, Edward Meinert
The lack of interoperability in Britain's medical records systems precludes the realisation of benefits generated by increased spending elsewhere in healthcare. Growing concerns regarding the security of online medical data following breaches, and regarding regulations governing data ownership, mandate strict parameters in the development of efficient methods to administrate medical records. Furthermore, consideration must be placed on the rise of connected devices, which vastly increase the amount of data that can be collected in order to improve a patient's long-term health outcomes. Increasing numbers of healthcare systems are developing Blockchain-based systems to manage medical data. A Blockchain is a decentralised, continuously growing online ledger of records, validated by members of the network. Traditionally used to manage cryptocurrency records, distributed ledger technology can be applied to various aspects of healthcare. In this manuscript, we focus on how Electronic Medical Records in particular can be managed by Blockchain, and how the introduction of this novel technology can create a more efficient and interoperable infrastructure to manage records that leads to improved healthcare outcomes, while maintaining patient data ownership and without compromising privacy or security of sensitive data.
Tiago Guimarães, Hugo Silva, Hugo Peixoto, Manuel Filipe Santos
Blockchain has its focus around sharing, distribution and encryption. Particularly, the newer blockchain implementations revolve around the implementation of smart-contracts, second-layer systems and permissioned blockchains. This type of potential has generated a lot of attention towards blockchain, thus making it a great candidate technology within healthcare. In this paper, the role of permissioned and permissionless blockchain and its possible implementations will be discussed and compared as well as the process in which a blockchain network agrees whether a transaction is valid or not, maintaining consistency in ledger synchronization, or in other words, Consensus Algorithms. Several should be considered as viable and many can be used by both permissioned and permissionless blockchain frameworks. As chosen as part of this implementation Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Pbft) is presented and described. This paper presents a solution, as part of the Intelligence Decision Support Systems for Intensive Medicine (ICDS4IM) project, which objective is to increase veracity and value to data from vital sensors and monitors by assuring its immutability and oversee; and also privacy and accountability for inadequate data management.
Security, data privacy and decentralization are significant challenges in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. These challenges are inherited attribute of another emerging technology, Blockchain. This enforced convergence of IoT and Blockchain, attracting researchers to study on the effective use of Blockchain's strength to solve the challenges of IoT. Rapid IoT adoption requires standardization and mature solution on security, data protection for compliance and performance for commercialization. These demands made a surge in variant blockchain flavours and combinations catering to different problems, and one such is Lightweight Scalable Blockchain (LSB). LSB had considerable caveats that require improvement for better adoption in the IoT domain. This paper focuses on encrypting transaction transmission, improving transaction flow, block validation, hash quality, hash rate and storage cost to improvise security and performance. The experimental evaluation is demonstrated on data from the temperature sensor to showcase superior applicability of the proposed work in the IoT domain. Implementation and result comparison with conventional LSB proves, the following achievements 1) An additional layer of transaction encryption using hybrid Elliptic Curve ElGamal (EC-ElGamal) method increases the security of the transmitted transaction for security enhancement. 2) Obtained 20% reduction in transaction processing time, 22% reduction on block validation processing time, 53% improvement on the hash operation and quality with an overall 7% saving on the storage cost thereby increased the overall performance.
Showkat Ahmad Bhat, Ishfaq Bashir Sofi, Chong‐Yung Chi
The internet is progressing towards a new technology archetype grounded on smart systems, heavily relying on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain platforms, edge computing, and the internet of things (IoT). The merging of IoT, edge computing, and blockchain will be the most important factor of empowering new automatic service and commercial models with various desirable properties, such as self-verifying, self-executing, immutability, data reliability, and confidentiality provided by the advancement in blockchain smart contracts and containers. Motivated by the potential paradigm shift and the security features brought by blockchain from the traditional centralized model to a more robust and resilient decentralized model, this tutorial article proposes a multi-tier integrated blockchain and edge computing architecture for 5G and beyond for solving some security issues faced by resource-constrained edge devices. We begin with a comprehensive overview of different edge computing paradigms and their research challenges. Next, we present the classification of security threats and current defense mechanisms. Then, we present an overview of blockchain and its potential solutions to the main security issues in edge computing. Furthermore, we present the classification of facilitating developers of different architectures to select an appropriate platform for particular applications and offer insights for potential research directions. Finally, we provide key convergence features of the blockchain and edge computing, followed by some conclusions.
Ahed Abugabah, Nishara Nizamuddin, Ahmad Ali AlZubi
The healthcare sector is one of the most rapidly growing sectors globally. With the ever-growing technology, patient care, regulatory compliance, and digital transformation, there is an increased need for healthcare sectors to collaborate with all stakeholders - both within the healthcare ecosystem and in concurring industries. In recent times, telemedicine has proven to provide high quality, affordable, and predominantly adapted healthcare services. However, telemedicine suffers from several risks in implementation, such as data breach, restricted access across medical fraternity, incorrect diagnosis and prescription, fraud, and abuse. In this work, introduce blockchain-based framework that would unlock the future of the healthcare sector and improved services. Our proposed solution utilizing Ethereum smart contracts to develop a transparent, tamper-proof telemedicine healthcare framework, and ensure the integrity of sensitive patient data eliminating a central administrator. Moreover, the smart contract regulates the interaction between all the parties involved in the network and keeps the patient meticulously informed about the transactions in the network.
Mir Hassan, Jincai Chen, Adnan Iftekhar, Xiaohui Cui
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to change the way the world works from home automation to smart cities, from improved healthcare to an efficient management sys-tem in supply chains to industry 4.0 revolution. IoT is increasingly becoming an essential part of the homes and industrial automa-tion; nevertheless, there are still many challenges that need to fix. IoT solutions are costly and complicated, while issues regarding security and privacy must be addressed with a sustainable plan. Support the growing number of connected devices; the IoT is in dire need of a reboot. Blockchain technology might be the answer. Starting as a decentralized financial solution in the form of Bitcoin, Blockchain technology has expanded to diverse areas and Information Technology applications. Blockchain technology and Smart Contracts can address the outstanding security and privacy issues that impede further development of the IoT. Blockchain is a decentralized system with no central governance, facilitates interactions, promotes new and improved transaction models, and allows autonomous coordination of the devices using enhanced encryption techniques. The primary reason for this paper is to showcase the challenges and problems we are facing with the current internet of things solutions and analyze how the use of Blockchain and Smart Contracts can help achieve a new, more robust internet of things system. Finally, we examine some of the many projects using the Internet of Things together with Blockchain and Smart Contracts, to create new solutions that are only possible by integrating these technologies.
Education plays a vital role in human life. To encourage higher education, the Indian government has taken many initiatives. These include the disbursement of scholarships to financially help the students belonging to low-income families. Central Sector Scheme of Scholarship for College and University Students (CSS) is one such scheme that financially helps meritorious students in pursuing graduation and post-graduation. This scheme was introduced in 2008. Scholarships from CSS have been helping students to fund their educational expenses. But there have been some difficulties faced by the students in availing this scholarship. These include lack of traceability of application form, loss of application form in transit through Indian Postal Service, lack of transparency between students and their respective Education Boards, and lack of bank account verification. In this paper, we propose a Smart Contract for CSS Scheme that overcomes the above-mentioned drawbacks. It has four entities: Students, Education Boards, Colleges, and Banks. The Blockchain-based Smart Contract proposed in this paper, has been developed to provide a user-friendly environment to a student and maintain a transparent and constant connection between students and their respective Education Boards. Many applications have been developed on the Blockchain platform but to the best of our knowledge, there does not exists any government scholarship scheme on the Blockchain platform in India.
Blockchain is gaining extensive attention due to its provision of secure and decentralized resource sharing manner. However, the incumbent blockchain systems also suffer from a number of challenges in operational maintenance, quality assurance of smart contracts and malicious behaviour detection of blockchain data. The recent advances in artificial intelligence bring the opportunities in overcoming the above challenges. The integration of blockchain with artificial intelligence can be beneficial to enhance current blockchain systems. This article presents an introduction of the convergence of blockchain and artificial intelligence (namely blockchain intelligence). This article also gives a case study to further demonstrate the feasibility of blockchain intelligence and point out the future directions.
Blockchain naturally fits multiple industry sectors due its characteristics of decentralization, enhanced security, tamper-proof, improved traceability and transparency. However, there is a significant concern of blockchain’s performance, since blockchain trades off its performance for a completely distributed feature, which enhances its security. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art progress of blockchain, mainly from a performance and security perspective. We extracted 42 primary papers from major scientific databases and 34 online technical articles. The objective is to understand the current research trends, challenges and future directions. We briefly introduce the key technologies of blockchain including distributed ledger, cryptography, consensus, smart contracts and benchmarks. We next summarize the performance and security concerns raised in the investigation. We discuss the architectural choices, performance metrics, database management enhancements, and hybrid blockchains, and try to identify the effort that the state-of-the-art has made to balance between the performance and security. We also make experiments on Ethereum and survey other popular blockchain platforms on the scalability feature of blockchain. We later discuss the potential applications and present the lessons learned. Finally, we attempt to identify the open issues and possible research directions.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an enabling technology for numerous initiatives worldwide such as manufacturing, smart cities, precision agriculture, and eHealth. The massive field data aggregation of distributed administered IoT devices allows new insights and actionable information for dynamic intelligent decision-making. In such distributed environments, data integrity, referring to reliability and consistency, is deemed insufficient and requires immediate facilitation. In this article, we introduce a distributed ledger (DLT)-based system for ensuring IoT data integrity which securely processes the aggregated field data. Its uniqueness lies in the embedded use of IOTA’s ledger, called “The Tangle”, used to transmit and store the data. Our approach shifts from a cloud-centric IoT system, where the Super nodes simply aggregate and push data to the cloud, to a node-centric system, where each Super node owns the data pushed in a distributed and decentralized database (i.e., the Tangle). The backend serves as a consumer of data and a provider of additional resources, such as administration panel, analytics, data marketplace, etc. The proposed implementation is highly modularand constitutes a significant contribution to the Open Source communities, regarding blockchain and IoT.
Machine learning and blockchain are two of the most notable technologies of recent years. The first is the foundation of artificial intelligence and big data analysis, and the second has significantly disrupted the financial industry. Both technologies are data‐driven, and thus there are rapidly growing interests in integrating both for more secure and efficient data sharing and analysis. In this article, we review existing research on combining machine learning and blockchain technologies and demonstrate that they can collaborate efficiently and effectively. In the end, we point out some future directions and expect more research on deeper integration of these two promising technologies.
The design of access control mechanisms for healthcare systems is challenging: it must strike the right balance between permissions and restrictions. In this work, we propose a novel approach that is based on the Blockchain technology for storage patient medical data and create an audit logging system able to protect health data from unauthorized modification and access. The proposed method consists of a tree structure: a main chain linked with the patient's identity and one or several Subchains which are used for storing additional critical data (e.g., medical diagnoses or access logs).
Ahmed Faeq Hussein, Abbas K. AlZubaidi, Qais Ahmed Habash, Mustafa Musa Jaber
A crucial role is played by personal biomedical data when it comes to maintaining proficient access to health records by patients as well as health professionals. However, it is difficult to get a unified view pertaining to health data that have been scattered across various health centers/hospital sections. To be specific, health records are distributed across many places and cannot be integrated easily. In recent years, blockchain has arisen as a promising solution that helps to achieve the sharing of individual biomedical information in a secure way, whilst also having the benefit of privacy preservation because of its immutability. This research puts forward a blockchain-based managing scheme that helps to establish interpretation improvements pertaining to electronic biomedical systems. In this scheme, two blockchains were employed to construct the base, whereby the second blockchain algorithm was used to generate a secure sequence for the hash key that was generated in first blockchain algorithm. This adaptive feature enables the algorithm to use multiple data types and also combines various biomedical images and text records. All data, including keywords, digital records, and the identity of patients, are private key encrypted with a keyword searching function so as to maintain data privacy, access control, and a protected search function. The obtained results, which show a low latency (less than 750 ms) at 400 requests/second, indicate the possibility of its use within several health care units such as hospitals and clinics.