Blockchain technology (BT) has a wide range of built-in features, such as decentralization, transparency, data provenance, security, immutability, and has moved beyond the hype to practical applications in the healthcare industry. Telehealth turns out to be the most efficient and effective way of dispensing healthcare services even in remote areas. Though telehealth has the proven potential to improve the quality of healthcare, its implementation and adoption remain far from ideal. There is a need for a telehealth system that not only ensures the privacy and security of the users but also provides authentic services that enhance the trust to the highest level. Existing applications are leveraging BT and providing limited telehealth services. These applications are focused on a few services; hence do not cover all aspects of healthcare. To unveil the true potential of telehealth, this paper aims to develop an effective telehealth framework-BlockHeal which integrates all essential healthcare services under one platform and ensures a full-fledged trusted environment. The methodology employed includes survey of existing telehealth system, identifying their weaknesses and critical reasons behind their lack of widespread adoption. The proposed framework addresses the limitations and includes all stakeholders of the healthcare system instigating a consolidated platform to ensure authentic, safe, and timely healthcare facilities. Additionally, as the proposed framework is based on BT, it ensures the provision of secure, fault-tolerant, transparent, and tamper-proof data. Moreover, it offers decentralized storage via hyperledger fabric and a collection of decentralized applications (DApps). Finally, the effectiveness of the BlockHeal framework is validated by demonstrating several use-cases.
Kahlid S. Alqarni, Faris A. Almalki, Ben Othman Soufiene, Obaid Ali · 5 authors
Agriculture is confronted with several significant difficulties, such as rising air temperatures and population growth, causing the implementation of smart farming operations as an optimum solution. This research aims to contribute to the growing knowledge of the potential role of blockchain technology in promoting the concept of smart farming by enhancing the efficiency of farming operations by boosting agricultural production, lowering environmental impact, and automating the work of farmers. It proposes a secure blockchain‐based framework to establish trust among smart farming users. The framework utilizes asymmetric key exchange mechanism using an ECC authentication algorithm and SHA‐256 hash function cryptography to secure communication between sensors and drones in the farm field. The SHA‐256 hashing function ensures data integrity as attempts to tamper with data result in a different hash value, breaking the chain of blocks. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework, a proof‐of‐concept implementation was developed on the Ethereum blockchain, in which smart contracts were used to model the framework operations. The proof of concept’s performance was examined using Hyperledger Caliper for latency, throughput, and transaction success rate. The findings clearly indicate that blockchain technology can provide an efficient and scalable mechanism to advance smart farming and address some of the barriers that inhibit smart farming, particularly regarding to data integrity and availability.
Subhi Alrubei, Edward A. Ball, Jonathan Rigelsford
In this study, a new blockchain protocol and a novel architecture that integrate the advantages offered by edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), IoT end-devices, and blockchain were designed, developed, and validated. This new architecture has the ability to monitor the environment, collect data, analyze it, process it using an AI-expert engine, provide predictions and actionable outcomes, and finally share it on a public blockchain platform. For the use-case implementation, the pandemic caused by the wide and rapid spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 was used to test and evaluate the proposed system. Recently, various authors traced the spread of viruses in sewage water and studied how it can be used as a tracking system. Early warning notifications can allow governments and organizations to take appropriate actions at the earliest stages possible. The system was validated experimentally using 14 Raspberry Pis, and the results and analyses proved that the system is able to utilize low-cost and low-power flexible IoT hardware at the processing layer to detect COVID-19 and predict its spread using the AI engine, with an accuracy of 95%, and share the outcome over the blockchain platform. This is accomplished when the platform is secured by the honesty-based distributed proof of authority (HDPoA) and without any substantial impact on the devices’ power sources, as there was only a power consumption increase of 7% when the Raspberry Pi was used for blockchain mining and 14% when used to produce an AI prediction.
Sara Ait Bennacer, Abdessadek Aaroud, Khadija Sabiri, Mohamed Rguibi · 5 authors
In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, the Moroccan Interior and Health Ministries have proposed to use the health pass with a QR code to identify vaccinated people. Additionally, the government suggested a mobile application to control the health passport authenticity. However, the key problem is the possibility of anyone scanning the QR code and figuring out citizens' private information, causing severe issues about individual privacy. In this work, the main contribution is integrating a private Blockchain-based digital health passport to ensure high protection of sensitive information, security and privacy among all the actors (Government, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Health, verifiers) that comply with the CNDP (National Commission for the Control of Personal Data Protection) and the Moroccan Law 09-08. In our proposed architectural framework solution, we identify two types of actors: authorized and unauthorized, to limit and control access to the citizens' personal information. Besides, to preserve individuals' privacy, we adopt on-chain and off-chain storage (Interplanetary File Systems IPFS). In our case, smart contracts improve security and privacy in the health passport verification process. Our system implementation describes the proposed solution to grant individual privacy. To verify and validate our approach, we used Remix-IDE and Ethereum Blockchain to build smart contracts.
With the popularity of IoT devices and cloud technology in the medical industry. Sharing EHRs (Electronic Health Records) among medical institutions improves the accuracy of medical diagnosis and promotes the development of public medical. However, it is difficult to share EHRs among hospitals, and patients typically don’t know about the usage of their health records. In this paper, we propose a patient-controlled EHRs sharing scheme based on cloud computing collaborating blockchain technology. The medical abstract and the access strategy are stored in the blockchain to avoid being tampered with. To achieve the fine-grained access control, we propose the attribute-based encryption scheme and multi-keyword encryption scheme to encrypt EHRs. Moreover, we proposed a node-state-checkable Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm (sc-PBFT) to prevent the Byzantine nodes from sneaking into the consortium blockchain. First, we check the state of the elected master node to avoid the master node having any malicious records. Then, using pre-prepared, prepare, and commit processes to complete the consensus request submitted by the client. At last, the proposed consensus algorithm evaluates the state of the master node according to the completion of the three-stage process to reduce the impact of the malicious node on the whole consortium blockchain. By doing this, the malicious node will be marked and isolated into the isolation area. The experimental results show that the proposed sc-PBFT algorithm has better handling capability and lower consensus latency. Compared with the PBFT algorithm in the case of Byzantine nodes, sc-PBFT not only improves the robustness of the consortium blockchain network but also improves the handling capability.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems are crucial for any information system, such as healthcare information systems. Health IoT (HIoT) applications are targeted by attackers due to the high-volume and sensitivity of health data. Thus, IAM systems for HIoT need to be built with high standards and based on reliable frameworks. Blockchain (BC) is an emerging technology widely used for developing decentralized IAM solutions. Although, the integration of BC in HIoT for proposing IAM solutions has gained recent attention, BC is an evolving technology and needs to be studied carefully before using it for IAM solutions in HIoT applications. A systematic literature review was conducted on the BC-based IAM systems in HIoT applications to investigate the security aspect. Twenty-four studies that satisfied the inclusion criteria and passed the quality assessment were included in this review. We studied BC-based solutions in HIoT applications to explore the IAM system architecture, security requirements and threats. We summarized the main components and technologies in typical BC-based IAM systems and the layered architecture of the BC-based IAM system in HIoT. Accordingly, the security threats and requirements were summarized. Our systematic review shows that there is a lack of a comprehensive security framework, risk assessments, and security and functional performance evaluation metrics in BC-based IAM in HIoT applications.
Marios Touloupou, Marinos Themistocleous, Elias Iosif, Klitos Christodoulou
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that focuses on the safe exchange of data between several distributed applications. Despite its widespread adoption, there are areas that require further research towards the understanding of their performance characteristics. In addition, consensus algorithms, a vital part of blockchain, require a more comprehensive understanding of their technical principles and characteristics. Along with the design of different types of consensus algorithms, several challenges, such as system scalability and power consumption, have been raised. Therefore, more comprehensive research is needed to investigate the degree to which consensus algorithms are built and how they perform. To this end, this study extends the body of knowledge and contributes towards the assessment of blockchain protocol performance. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of selected studies on blockchain performance, identifying similarities and differences while attempting to identify existing work on simulators and benchmarking frameworks that aim to explore the performance of blockchain-enabled consensus algorithms.
Distributed Agile Software Development (DASD) is the most important approach for the modern software industry that allows geographically independent software development. In the past, different tools and frameworks were proposed to solve communication and collaboration issues in DASD but they lacked transparency, trust, traceability, and security. These shortcomings resulted in project failure or overdue, customer dissatisfaction, project deal cancellations, and payment clashes between the customers and development teams. This paper addresses and overcomes the major issues of transparency, trust, security, traceability, coordination, and communication in DASD by embedding blockchain technology. We have proposed a novel blockchain-based framework named as AgilePlus which executes the smart contracts on a private ethereum blockchain for acceptance testing, secure payment, verification of developer’s payment requirements, and automatic payment distribution into the digital wallets of development teams. The execution of these smart contracts automatically assign penalties to the customers for late or non-payments and also to the developers for overdue tasks. Moreover, we have also solved the blockchain’s scalability challenge in AgilePlus by utilizing Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as off-chain storage. Lastly, experimental results prove that the proposed framework enhances transparency, communication, coordination, traceability, security and solves trust issues of both customers and developers in DASD.
Mohamed Abdel Kader Mohamed Elgendy, Mohamed Aborizka, Ali Allam
A blockchain is a data structure that is implemented as a distrusted database or digital ledger. The transactions are saved to a block of transactions that is attached in turn to the blockchain after the verification process, in which each block in the chain contains a hash signature of the previous block in addition to the hash signature of the block itself. The blocks on the blockchain are chained as an immutable list using the proof-of-work procedure, where there is no way to alter or delete an attached block due to the strict security policy used for structuring the chain of blocks. Each node holds a copy of the blockchain in which the miners take the responsibility of verifying and attaching blocks to the blockchain. The Ethereum blockchain introduced the smart contract which holds logic to be processed once the contract is established. These smart contracts are developed via the Solidity programming language. This proposed paper exploits the Ethereum blockchain along with smart contracts as the base technology for implementing the proposed blockchain-based model. The paper aims to develop a multilayered blockchain-based model, in which the blockchain model is set up on a private blockchain Ethereum network where the nodes share the electronic medical records (EMR) among the P2P (peer-to-peer) network that will be used to secure the IoT medical transactions. Solidity smart contract, introduced by Ethereum, is deployed to handle the EMR “open-query-transfer” operations on the private network, whereas the miners are responsible to validate the transactions. Finally, the research conducts a performance analysis of the Ethereum network using the Ethereum Caliper, considering several performance factors, which are: Maximum Latency, Minimum Latency, Average Latency, and Throughput.
Muhammad Imran, Bin Yao, Waqas Ali, Adnan Akhunzada · 7 authors
Blockchain technology in recent years has become potentially pervasive in the cryptocurrency market, thus providing tamper-proof security to decentralized transaction management systems. Structurally, the design foundation is an ideal advancement of the distributed ledger technology that maintains a set of global states across nodes. As technology expands with a higher trend towards mobile computing, the development of new applications demands understanding the current progression, especially concerning performance, data management, and storage prospects. Here, we report the principle design structure of the blockchain technology combined with the state of the arts, thus characterizing their original topological contexts. We depart from the fundamental concepts of the technology and analyze performance of the Ethereum blockchain on two devices having different computing power. Our presentation is tailored to provide a systematic review of the technology, thus facilitating their possible adoption into the new application domains like the Internet of Things (IoT). Further, we developed Debug-Bench, the first VSCode (Visual Studio Code) extension that enables benchmarking and profiling of the blockchain applications. Finally, we demonstrate several critical challenges concerning the design space of the current blockchain platforms for their implementation over resource-constrained devices.
Zaffar Ahmed Shaikh, Abdullah Ayub Khan, Lin Teng, Asif Ali Wagan · 5 authors
This paper presents a layered hierarchy that depicts the progressive relationship between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. To begin with, data is gathered and organized into information. Information is gathered, filtered, refined, and put through an investigation process to create knowledge. Wisdom is attained after knowledge discovery through the process of filtration and aggregation through experience. The layered hierarchy in the domain of e‐healthcare necessitates higher scheduling costs for data collection, processing wisdom, and management, which is also an insecure and untrustworthy process for progressive medical service. The medical industry faces a difficult problem in providing collected data integrity, information reliability, and knowledge trustworthiness for the service of progressive medical relationships in the face of an increasing number of day‐to‐day records. The blockchain consortium hyperledger (fabric) has been used in this paper to act as a bridge that bridges the gap between electronic data, information, knowledge, and wisdom (DIKW) movement and processes by enabling the process of the layered hierarchy of schedule information and management and providing security and transparency. For e‐healthcare information management and privacy, the DIKW‐ledger, such as patients’ consultancy information, availing medical services, personal records, appointments, treatment details, and other health‐related transactions, a consortium hyperledger fabric‐enabled efficient architecture is proposed. This proposed architecture creates two networks: a public network for medical stakeholders to exchange and agree on specific medical activities before being preserved on distributed storage (read‐only after record registration) and a private network for complete DIKW process scheduling and management. We designed and created smart contracts for this purpose, as well as use‐case diagrams to describe the overall execution process. The proposed architectural solution provides more efficient information integrity, provenance, and storage procedures to immutably preserve the medical ledger in a permissioned hash‐encrypted structure.
Abstract The Gaia-X project was initiated in 2019 by the German and French Ministers of Economy to ensure that companies would not lose control of their industrial data when it is hosted by non-EU cloud service providers. Since then, Gaia-X holds an international association presence in Belgium with more than 334 members, representing both users and providers across 20 countries and 16 national hubs and 5 candidate countries. The Association aims to increase the adoption of cloud services and accelerate data exchanges by European businesses through the facilitation of business data sovereignty with jointly approved (user and provider) policy rules on data portability and interoperability. Although for many enterprises, data sovereignty is seen as a prerequisite for using the cloud, a significant driver to boost the digital economy in business is incentivizing business data sharing. Two decades of cost optimization have constrained business value creation, driving many companies to neglect the opportunity to create shared value within a wider industry ecosystem. Now, thanks to the participation of large numbers of cloud users in the domains of Finance, Health, Energy, Automotive, Travel Aeronautics, Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Mobility, among others, Gaia-X is ideally positioned to help industries define appropriate data spaces and identify/develop compelling use cases, which can then be jointly deployed to a compliant-by-design platform architecture under the Gaia-X specifications, trust, and labeling frameworks. The creation of national Gaia-X hubs that act as independent think tanks, ambassadors, or influencers of the Association further facilitates the emergence of new data spaces and use/enabler cases at a country level, before these are subsequently extended to a European scope and beyond. Gaia-X partners share the view that data spaces will play a similar role in digital business as the web played 40 years ago to help the Internet take off. The Gaia-X Working Groups are at the core of the Gaia-X discussions and deliverables. There are three committees : the Technical, the Policies and Rules, and the Data Spaces and Business. The Technical Committee focus on key architectural elements and their evolution, such as and not limited to: Identity and Access Management: bridge the traditional X509 realm and new SSI realm, creating a decentralized network of identity federations Service Composition: how to assemble services in order to create new services with higher added value Self-Description : how to build digital trust at scale with measurable and comparable criteria The Policy and Rules Committee creates the deliverables required to develop the Gaia-X framework (compliance requirements, labels and qualification processes, credentials matrix, contractual agreements, etc.): The Labels and Qualification working group defines the E2E process for labels and qualification, from defining and evolving the levels of label, the process for defining new labels, and identifying and certifying existing CABS. The Credentials and Trust Anchors working group will develop and maintain a matrix of credentials and their verification methods to enable the implementation of compliance through automation, contractual clauses, certifications, or other methods. The Compliance working group collects compliance requirements from all sources to build a unique compliance requirements pool. The Data Spaces Business Committee helps the Association expanding and accelerating the creation of new Gaia-X service in the market: The Finance working group focuses on business modeling and supports the project office of the Association. The Technical working group analyzes the technical requirements from a business perspective. The Operational Requirements working group is the business requirements unit. The Hub working groups hold close contact with all Gaia-X Hubs and support the collection and creation of the Gaia-X use and business cases. These working groups maintain the international list of all use cases and data spaces and coordinate the Hubs.
In this paper, a food anti-counterfeiting traceability system based on blockchain and the Internet of Things is proposed in response to the problems of data centre-based storage, easy data tampering and data silos in traditional food anti-counterfeiting traceability technology. The system makes use of the decentralized storage and untamperable characteristics of blockchain technology to store traceability data of food in the process of food production, sale and transportation, so as to ensure the uniqueness of food. At the same time, through the Internet of things technology to ensure the authenticity and reliability of the source data of the blockchain. The experimental results show that the system has higher security, lower transaction delay and lower communication cost.
The breakthrough of blockchain technology has facilitated the emergence and deployment of a wide range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) networks-based applications. Yet, the full utilization of these applications is still limited due to the fact that each application is operating on an isolated blockchain. Thus, it is inevitable to orchestrate these blockchain fragments by introducing a cross-blockchain platform that governs the inter-communication and transfer of assets in the UAV networks context. In this paper, we survey the literature on the state-of-the-art cross blockchain frameworks to highlight the latest advances in the field. We also provide an up-to-date review of blockchain-based UAV networks applications. Based on the outcomes of our survey, we introduce a spectrum of scenarios related to UAV networks that may leverage the potentials of the currently available cross-blockchain solutions. Finally, we identify open issues and potential challenges associated with the application of a cross-blockchain scheme for UAV networks that will hopefully guide future research directions.
Digital twin technology is recently in the spotlight because of its potential applicability in business and industry. In digital twin environments, data generated from physical assets are transmitted to a remote server, which performs simulations through digital twins in a virtual space. Then, the simulation results can be shared with the data owner or other users. However, several challenges exist in the application of digital twin technology in the real world. One of the main challenges involves determining how to share real-time data for the simulation and how to share the simulation data securely. The data generated from physical assets may include sensitive information from data owners, and the leakage of data to an adversary can cause serious privacy problems. Moreover, the sharing of data with other data users should also be considered to maximize the availability of digital twin data. To resolve these issues, we propose a system model for the secure sharing of digital twin data. The proposed system model uses cloud computing for efficient data sharing and blockchain for data verifiability. We also propose communication schemes for the proposed model to guarantee privacy preservation and data security in wireless channels. We analyze the security of the proposed protocol using informal methods and formal methods such as BAN logic and the AVISPA simulation tool. Furthermore, we compare the proposed protocol with related protocols and demonstrate that the proposed scheme is applicable to digital twin environments.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an essential part of our society. IoT devices are used in our houses, hospitals, cars, industry, etc., making our lives easier. Nonetheless, there are a number of serious concerns about security, privacy and performance issues in IoT. It has been proven that the aforementioned issues are strictly related to the high degree of centralisation of current IoT architecture. Thus, there is an increasing interest in adopting blockchain in IoT. However, blockchain adoption is not straightforward due to the power, storage and computational limitations of IoT. Consequently, the concept of lightweight blockchain is getting more and more attention from researchers and engineers. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review on the lightweight blockchain concept for IoT following the PRISMA methodology. We systematically analyse “lightweight blockchain for IoT” proposals in order to better understand the limitations of blockchain for IoT, the characteristics of the current work on this topic and further research opportunities. Specifically, we analyse the definition of lightweight blockchain that other authors give, the characteristics of the reviewed proposals, their “lightweight” aspects and their evaluation. Finally, we discuss the results of the review along with further research opportunities. Consequently, this work is mostly focused on understanding the technical and performance-related aspects of blockchain for IoT as a prelude to more specific analysis such as security (i.e., attacks, vulnerabilities, etc.).
Carlos Núñez‐Gómez, Carmen Carrión, Blanca Caminero, Francisco M. Delicado
Fog computing arises as a complement to cloud computing where computing and storage are provided in a decentralized way rather than the centralized approach of the cloud paradigm. In addition, blockchain provides a decentralized and immutable ledger which can provide support for running arbitrary logic thanks to smart contracts. These facts can lead to harness smart contracts on blockchain as the basis for a decentralized, autonomous, and resilient orchestrator for the resources in the fog. However, the potentially vast amount of geographically distributed fog nodes may threaten the feasibility of the orchestration. On the other hand, fog nodes can exhibit highly dynamic workloads which may result in the orchestrator redistributing the services among them. Thus, there is also a need to dynamically support the network connections to those services independently of their location. Software Defined Networking (SDN) can be integrated within the orchestrator to carry out a seamless service management. To tackle both aforementioned issues, the S-HIDRA architecture is proposed. It integrates SDN support within a blockchain-based orchestrator of container-based services for fog environments, in order to provide low network latency and high service availability. Also, a domain-based architecture is outlined \marev{as potential scenario} to address the geographic distributed nature of fog environments. Results obtained from a proof-of-concept implementation assess the required functionality for S-HIDRA.
Recently, there has been a remarkable amount of research being done in both, the fields of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT). Blockchain technology synergises well with IoT, solving key problems such as privacy, concerns with interoperability and security. However, the consensus mechanisms that allows trustless parties to maintain an agreement, the same algorithms that underpins cryptocurrency mining, are usually extremely computationally expensive, making implementation on low-power IoT devices difficult. More importantly, mining requires downloading and synchronizing hundred of gigabytes worth of blocks which is far beyond the capabilities of most IoT devices. In this paper, we present an efficient, portable and platform-agnostic cryptocurrency mining algorithm using the Stratum protocol to avoid downloading the entire blockchain. We implement the algorithm in four different platforms- PC, ESP32, an emulator and an old PlayStation Portable (PSP) to demonstrate that it is indeed possible for any device to mine cryptocurrencies with no assumptions except the ability to connect to the internet. To make sure of ease of portability on any platform and for reproducibility of the reported results we make the implementation publicly available with detailed instructions at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cryptominer.
Jan 1, 2022·Annals of Emerging Technologies in Computing (AETiC), Print ISSN: 2516-0281, Online ISSN: 2516-029X, pp. 1-30, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1st January 2022, Published by International Association of Educators and Researchers (IAER)
Abdullah Al Hussain, Md. Akhtaruzzaman Emon, Toufiq Ahmed Tanna, Rasel Iqbal Emon · 5 authors
The spirit of “blockchain technology” is a distributed database in which saved data is transparent, accountable, public, immutable, and traceable. This base-level disruptive technology can boost the security and privacy-related efficiency of various domains. As Bangladesh is currently aiming for sustainable development, blockchain technology adoption by the local researchers is growing robustly. However, in Bangladesh, the blockchain Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is not yet well structured which is also limiting the perspective of local developers and researchers. Therefore, sectors like governance, healthcare, security, privacy, farming, information authentication, cryptocurrencies, internet architecture, data, and so on are unable to utilize the full potential of this technology. In this research, the authors conduct an in-depth review of such types of blockchain technology-related research articles that have been published recently and are also solely focused on Bangladesh. From 5 publishers (IEEE Xplore, ACM, ScienceDirect, Taylor & Francis, and SpringerLink) this study analyses 70 articles published during the year 2016-2020. The study results find the top 13 sectors where Bangladeshi researchers are currently focusing on. Those studies identify that the rigid policy by the government, scarcity of expert researchers, and lack of resources are the main reasons why Bangladesh is still struggling to accommodate blockchain extensively. In addition, published papers are mostly based on theoretical concepts without an appropriate implementation. Finally, this study will be a great resource to the developers, entrepreneurs, and technology enthusiasts to determine the strategic plan for adopting blockchain technology in Bangladesh or even to any other developing country.
Due to the rising complexity of the metaverse's business logic and the low-latency nature of the metaverse, developers typically encounter the challenge of effectively reading, writing, and retrieving historical on-chain data in order to facilitate their functional implementations at scale. While it is true that accessing blockchain states is simple, more advanced real-world operations such as search, aggregation, and conditional filtering are not available when interacting directly with blockchain networks, particularly when dealing with requirements for on-chain event reflection. We offer Matrix Syncer, the ultimate middleware that bridges the data access gap between blockchains and end-user applications. Matrix Syncer is designed to facilitate the consolidation of on-chain information into a distributed data warehouse while also enabling customized on-chain state transformation for a scalable storage, access, and retrieval. It offers a unified layer for both on- and off-chain state, as well as a fast and flexible atomic query. Matrix Syncer is easily incorporated into any infrastructure to aggregate data from various blockchains concurrently, such as Ethereum and Flow. The system has been deployed to support several metaverse projects with a total value of more than $15 million USD.