In the last decade patient management systems or eHealth has gained huge attraction with researchers. eHealth spans from the remote access of medical records to actual data exchange of remote patient's data of their body sensors. In this paper we propose a decentralized application model that uses Ethereum private Blockchain, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS), and associated web technologies that aim to help healthcare providers, policymakers, and research organizations in Nepal. It presents the outcome of a survey conducted among the general public and a focus group discussion with medical doctors in relation to their current practices and limitations in storing and sharing patients' medical histories for examinations or treatments. The paper concludes with why blockchain technologies can be a better option for public and private healthcare institutions as well as medical practitioners to store and share patient records to deliver timely and quality healthcare services in a resource-poor country like Nepal.
Befekadu G. Gebraselase, Bjarne E. Helvik, Yuming Jiang
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain technology. It faces a challenge in making all the nodes synchronize and have the same overall view with the cost of scalability and performance. In addition, with miners' financial interest playing a significant role in choosing transactions from the backlog, small fee or small fee per byte value transactions will exhibit more delays. To study the issues related to the system's performance, we developed an $M(t)/M^N/1$ model. The backlog's arrival follows an inhomogeneous Poison process to the system that has infinite buffer capacity, and the service time is distributed exponentially, which removes $N$ transactions at time. Besides validating the model with measurement data, we have used the model to study the reward distribution when miners take transaction selection strategies like fee per byte, fee-based, and FIFO. The analysis shows that smaller fee transactions exhibit higher waiting times, even with increasing the block size. Moreover, the miner transaction selection strategy impacts the final gain.
From this global health disaster, the health profession is searching for a new technology to monitor and mitigate COVID-19 infections. Accurate and reliable data are needed to surveil and prevent the diffusion of the coronavirus. However, there is a lack of consistent data on existing technologies. Various entities—for example, medical labs and public hospitals—could provide data on patients with coronavirus infection. Yet, this information might not be precise since it is not supervised and recorded correctly. This paper proposes a Blockchain and Business Process Management (BBPM) system in healthcare to solve these problems. This system could be crucial in tracing coronavirus diffusion and discovering more dangerous patients and is extremely proficient at controlling the disease. BBPM can be utilized like a digital database that includes information concurrently utilized and distributed inside a wide, decentralized, and openly accessible network. Usage of blockchains in the medical sector is anticipated to revolutionize the industry in many regions, primarily because centralization in current health technologies inhibits information sharing and causes a lack of confidentiality. Furthermore, BBPM could help supervise the diffusion of coronavirus infection worldwide by utilizing blockchain networks on the mobile devices of individuals. Protecting patient information is one of the critical strengths of BBPM. Participating BBPM nodes can be governments, hospitals, testing labs, or patients. In addition, the digital ledger has a few documents, including patient reports, consequences, the condition of treatment, and a summary of discharge. The BBPM system is categorized into four processes. In the first process, the patient is analyzed and diagnosed by a testing lab to detect any early signs of COVID-19 infection. A sample of the patients was taken. If it is positive, the second process begins. In the second process, the patient is isolated and begins treatment for a minimum of 14 days. If the patient’s health condition is improving, the third process begins. In the third process, the patients were retested for COVID-19. If the patient sample is negative, the patient is discharged, and an outline is created. During discharge, the patient pays the hospital for treatment. However, if the patient sample is positive, the isolation period is continued for another 14 days. In the last process, the details of total COVID-19 are confirmed, recovered, and death cases are conveyed to the government by the testing labs and hospitals. Patient records are stored for upcoming usage; their confidentiality is maintained when distributed on a larger scale. BBPM can guarantee the security and accuracy of patients’ recorded data.
Blockchain technology has been recognized as a promising solution to enhance the security and privacy of Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing scenarios. Taking advantage of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol, which solves a computation intensive hashing puzzle, Blockchain assures the security of the system by establishing a digital ledger. However, the computation intensive PoW favors members possessing more computing power. In the IoT paradigm, fairness in the highly heterogeneous network edge environments must consider devices with various constraints on computation power. Inspired by the advanced features of Digital Twins (DT), an emerging concept that mirrors the lifespan and operational characteristics of physical objects, we propose a novel Miner-Twins (MinT) architecture to enable a fair PoW consensus mechanism for blockchains in IoT environments. MinT adopts an edge-fog-cloud hierarchy. All physical miners of the blockchain are deployed as microservices on distributed edge devices, while fog/cloud servers maintain digital twins that periodically update miners’ running status. By timely monitoring miner’s footage that is mirrored by twins, a lightweight Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) based detection achieves to identify individual misbehaved miners that violate fair mining. Moreover, we also design a novel Proof-of-Behavior (PoB) consensus algorithm to detect byzantine miners that collude to compromise a fair mining network. A preliminary study is conducted on a proof-of-concept prototype implementation, and experimental evaluation shows the feasibility and effectiveness of proposed MinT scheme under a distributed byzantine network environment.
The era of Electric Vehicles (EVs) has influenced the very make and manufacture of vehicles resulting in low pollution and advanced battery life. On the other hand, the internet of things has also expanded allowing a number of devices to stay connected using the internet. Massive drawbacks faced by EVs today are the limitation in battery swapping and charging stations and limitation in the range of batteries used. This proposed paper aims to efficiently manage the best battery system apart from building the essential infrastructure. In some cases battery swapping option is also provided through other EV drivers or at registered stations. Hence a complete database of the EV network is required so that it is possible to swap and charge batteries successfully. An EV management using two blockchains as a data layer and network of the application is implemented in this work. The first step involves the development of a blockchain framework using Ethereum and the next step entails a direct acyclic graph. When integrated, these two methodologies prove to be an efficient platform that offers a viable solution for battery management in Electric Vehicles.
Abstract Frequent visit of doctors during pandemicis not recommended due to COVID-19 scenario. Internet of Things (IoT) based sensors can be used to measure andto do certain tests at home. The blockchain-based strategy promises to aid in the delivery of health-care services while maintaining data privacy. To maintain transparency in the health record, medications, claim history, etc., up-to-dated distributed ledger is required. Doctors have sometimes necessitate patients to undergo lab tests or buy drugs from those organisations merely in order to generate personal profit, even if the medical shop or pathology labs have a bad reputation. Therefore, blockchain technology provides trust among multiple parties so that any party could not be misguided. At times, the patient visits the hospital in critical condition and they may not be in situation to explain about medical history. In such scenario, the information stored in distributed leger may be helpful to the doctors for further treatment. The medical emergencies such as cardiac arrest and breathing issues, the patient requires immediate treatment or medicine at his/her location, the intelligent drone is useful for faster delivery of medicines and needed medical accessories.
Zeeshan Raza, Irfan Ul Haq, Muhammad Muneeb, Omair Shafiq
Blockchain as a decentralized distributed ledger is revolutionizing the world with a secure design data storage mechanism. In the case of Bitcoin, mining involves a process of packing transactions in a block by calculating a random number termed as a nonce. The nonce calculation is done by special nodes called miners, and all the miners follow the Proof of Work (PoW) mining mechanism to perform the mining task. The transaction verification time in PoW-based blockchain systems, i.e., Bitcoin, is much slower than other digital transaction systems such as PayPal. It needs to be quicker if a system adapts PoW-based blockchain solutions, where there are thousands of transactions being computed at a time. Besides this, PoW mining also consumes a lot of energy to calculate the nonce of a block. Mining pools resulting into aggregated hashpower have been a popular solution to speed up the PoW mining, but they can be attacked by using different types of attacks. Parallel computing can be used to speed up the solo mining methods by utilizing the multiple processes of the contributing processors. In this research, we analyze various consensus mechanisms and see that the PoW-based blockchain systems have the limitations of low transaction confirmation time and high energy consumption. We also analyze various types of consensus layer attacks and their effects on miners and mining pools. To tackle these issues, we propose parallel PoW nonce calculation methods to accelerate the transaction verification process especially in solo mining. We have tested our techniques on different difficulty levels, and our proposed techniques yield better results than the traditional nonce computation mechanisms.
Ethereum, that enable development of decentralized applications, will likely to leverage cloud computing. In this research, we evaluate the performance of a cloud-based Ethereum network. We researched 3 Ethereum networks, namely: Ethereum mainnet, Ethereum testnet Ropsten, and Ethereum testnet Rinkeby. We analyze the computational resource utilization required to run an Ethereum node for a month as well as the costs involved. Research shows that the utilization of computing resources on the Main Net is generally higher than on the Test Net network. Computing resources used in the cloud cost thousands of dollars and this will increase as the number of nodes running to support the Ethereum network.
Štefan Balogh, Ondrej Gallo, Roderik Ploszek, Peter Špaček · 5 authors
Internet of Things connects the physical and cybernetic world. As such, security issues of IoT devices are especially damaging and need to be addressed. In this treatise, we overview current security issues of IoT with the perspective of future threats. We identify three main trends that need to be specifically addressed: security issues of the integration of IoT with cloud and blockchains, the rapid changes in cryptography due to quantum computing, and finally the rise of artificial intelligence and evolution methods in the scope of security of IoT. We give an overview of the identified threats and propose solutions for securing the IoT in the future.
Chitra Karunakaran, K Madhura Ganesh, Sonya Ansar, Rohitha Subramani
Electronic Health Records (EHR) is the electronic form of storing a patient's medical history. EHR contains patient’s data such as progress notes, medications, prescriptions, vital signs, scan reports and laboratory data. Transferring EHR over the internet improves the quality of health care and reduces medical costs. However, in the traditional system, the EHR are stored across different decentralised hospitals, making data sharing difficult and increasing the risk of patient privacy. A privacy-preserving framework for electronic health records using blockchain technology is implemented to address these issues. The patient has complete control over the EHR, and the patient can share their health records with doctors of various medical institutions. The privacy and security of the patient’s EHR are guaranteed by the verifiability and immutability property of the blockchain technology. The doctor upload the EHR, and it is encrypted using the SHA256 hashing algorithm and stored as a separate block. The patient shares the EHR with the doctor of any medical institution through the unique key shared via the doctor’s email. The doctor can access and update the EHR using the shared key. The block validation is done using Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm, which guarantees the privacy of the patient’s data. The proposed system based on the DPoS algorithm has considerabe reduction in resource utilisation, computational capacity, time, and cost for EHR transactions.
As a disruptive technology that originates from cryptocurrency, blockchain provides a trusted platform to facilitate industrial IoT (IIoT) applications. However, implementing a blockchain platform in IIoT scenarios confronts various security challenges due to the rigorous deployment condition. To this end, we present a novel design of secure blockchain based on trusted computing hardware for IIoT applications. Specifically, we employ the trusted execution environment (TEE) module and a customized security chip to safeguard the blockchain against different attacking vectors. Furthermore, we implement the proposed secure IIoT blockchain on the ARM-based embedded device and build a small-scale IIoT network to evaluate its performance. Our experimental results show that the secure blockchain platform achieves a high throughput (150TPS) with low transaction confirmation delay (below 66ms), demonstrating its feasibility in practical IIoT scenarios. Finally, we outline the open challenges and future research directions.
Roman-Valentyn Tkachuk, Dragos Ilie, Kurt Tutschku, Remi Robert
Digital marketplaces were created recently to accelerate the delivery of applications and services to customers. Their appealing feature is to activate and dynamize the demand, supply, and development of digital goods, applications, or services. By being an intermediary between producer and consumer, the primary business model for a marketplace is to charge the producer with a commission on the amount paid by the consumer. However, most of the time, the commission is dictated by the marketplace facilitator itself and creates an imbalance in value distribution, where producer and consumer sides suffer monetarily. In order to eliminate the need for a centralized entity between the producer and consumer, a blockchain-based decentralized digital marketplace concept was introduced. It provides marketplace actors with the tools to perform business transactions in a trusted manner and without the need for an intermediary. In this work, we provide a survey on Telecommunication Services Marketplaces (TSMs) which employ blockchain technology as the main trust enabling entity in order to avoid any intermediaries. We provide an overview of scientific and industrial proposals on the blockchain-based online digital marketplaces at large, and TSMs in particular. We consider in this study the notion oftelecommunication servicesas any service enabling the capability for information transfer and, increasingly, information processing provided to a group of users by a telecommunications system. We discuss the main standardization activities around the concepts of TSMs and provide particular use-cases for the TSM business transactions such as SLA settlement. Also, we provide insights into the main foundational services provided by the TSM, as well as a survey of the scientific and industrial proposals for such services. Finally, a prospect for future developments is given.
Aitizaz Ali, Hasliza A. Rahim, Jehad Ali, Muhammad Fermi Pasha · 8 authors
Blockchain is a promising technology in the context of digital healthcare systems, but there are issues related to the control of accessing the electronic health records. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on blockchain and multiple certificate authority that implement smart contracts and access health records securely. Our proposed solution provides the facilities of flexible policies to update a record or invoke the policy such that a patient has complete authority. A novel approach towards multiple certificate’s authority (CA) is introduced in the design through our proposed framework. Our proposed policies and methods overcome the shortcoming and security breaches faced by single certificate authority. Our proposed scheme provides a flexible access control mechanism for securing electronic health records as compared to the existing benchmark models. Moreover, our proposed method provides a re-enrolment facility in the case of a user lost enrolment.
In recent times, Blockchain has emerged as a transformational technology with the ability to disrupt and evolve multiple domains. As a decentralized, immutable distributed ledger, Blockchain technology is one of the most recent entrants to the comprehensive ideology of Smart Cities. The rise of urbanization and increased citizen participation have led to various technology integrations in our present-day cities. For cities to become smart, we need standard frameworks and procedures for integrating technology, citizens and governments. In this paper, we explore the potential of Blockchain technology as an enabler for e-governance in smart cities. We examine the daily challenges of citizens and compare them with the benefits being offered by Blockchain integration. On the basis of a comprehensive literature review, we identified four key areas of e-governance wherein Blockchain can provide monumental advantages. In the context of Blockchain integration for e-governance, the paper presents a survey of prominent published works discussing various urban applications.
Recent years have witnessed the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its emergence as a technology that could revolutionize many businesses. It helps considerably in creating data-driven business models with the insights it provides. IoT systems are deployed in data collection, monitor processes, provide insights and allow businesses to make data-driven productivity improvements. However, IoT systems are often experiencing data loss due to inevitable failures ranging from devices, networks, to the application layer, especially in scarce infrastructure resources environments. Data loss might be unrecoverable in many circumstances. As such, this research presents a blockchain based IoT model (framework) with the aim of circumventing data loss. We envisioned IoT blockchain technology in enhancing data veracity with data loss tolerance. That is, to have blockchain enhancing the IoT data veracity by leveraging on the features existed in its peer-to-peer network (P2P) and distributed ledger storage technology (DLT). Additionally, the edge computing of IoT blockchain technology is also conceptually workable; with intelligent small computing resources, it opens up a new era of bringing the intelligence of data collection, connectivity, computation and storage into the edge/device layer. A novel IoT blockchain strength monitoring system is also been studied to further enhance data veracity; this is achieved through a capacitance monitoring on the IoT blockchain system. The empirical results show that the proposed IoT blockchain with a strength monitoring model can alleviate data loss and thus enhance data veracity with data loss tolerance.
U.S.P. Srinivas Aditya, Roshan Singh, Pranav Kumar Singh, Anshuman Kalla
Robotics is the multi-disciplinary domain that is booming in today’s world, and expanding its roots deep into various fields of research, manufacturing industries, healthcare, and even in our day-to-day lives. Nevertheless, as with any other evolving technology, robotics face numerous challenges. In this context, lately, blockchain technology has been identified as a promising technology to resolve many of these issues such as identification of malicious/rogue nodes, malfunctioning/faults in automated processes, non-compliance to the agreed norms and privacy rules, security attacks on robotic systems, and non-transparency in performance monitoring and audits. In particular, blockchain with its features like decentrality, immutability, provenance, low operational cost, tight access control, and trustworthy operations, can offer significant improvements to new applications and use cases driven by robotics. Thus, the paper begins with exploring the key requirements and technical challenges encountered by robots in general. Next, it provides detailed overview of blockchain technology in a tutorial style. Then, the role of blockchain for different uses cases of robotics are surveyed. Furthermore, various technical challenges that need to be mitigated to harness full potential of blockchain for robotics are highlighted. Finally, the future research directions are presented that can pave the way ahead for advancements and profitable integration of blockchain in the realm of robotics.
Muhammad Danil Muis, Muhammad Rifki Fauzan, Parman Sukarno, Aulia Arif Wardana
This reserach build access control and file distribution management system for electronic diploma and transcript using ethereum smart contract and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The falsification of diplomas/transcripts is one of the problems in education. In Indonesia, falsification of diplomas/transcripts is a form of criminal act of falsifying letters. In addition, diplomas/transcripts that have not been digitalized make them easily damaged, lost, and difficult to manage. Therefore, this research developed digital diploma/transcript as digital twin from the hardcopy of diploma/tramscript. This research used IPFS to store data in a distributed system and Smart Contracts Blockchain to store and protect the digital diploma/transcript. The system also comes with access control to create and give approval for diplomas or transcripts to be published and saved into the system. Access control settings will be saved using the blockchain. This research using Quality of Service test method for measurethroughput, packet loss, and delay. Beside that, tis research also analysis the usage of Central Processing Unit and Random Access Memory from the system. Based on the test that has been done, the fake diploma/transcript detection system can be run properly by using 1 node to 5 nodes. The best throughput value during the process of making and validating the diploma/transcript is to use 1 node. The value of packet loss in the process of making and validating the certificate/transcript has a very good category. The value of delay in the process of making and validating the diploma/transcript has a very good category.
In all the smart applications, evolution of the Internet of Things (IOT) is utilized as a complete matured technology and in the future internet generations, established itself. Blockchain is also the blooming technique like Internet of things in which the distributed ledger which enhances the security contained in the each node of the block-chain. In the block-chain network, any fault transaction is not done by the illegal users. The block-chain is combined with the Internet of Things for the improvement of real time application performance. IOT based smart water management system is designed in this paper for the agriculture which ensures the effectiveness of the agriculture water management. The remote monitoring with the IOT is used for this purpose. By linking with 2D modelling, the control and management of the agriculture water were performed. Finally, a system is implemented for the agriculture water management through the real time data collection. The obtained result shows the data that updates the water monitoring interface with the varying number of hours. The IoT technology and remote monitoring technology is utilized to the existing water management infrastructure. For water resources management and water supply, this is the very efficient technology.
The sum of Big Data generated from different sources is increasing significantly with each passing day to extent that it is becoming challenging for traditional storage methods to store this massive amount of data. For this reason, most organizations have resolved to use third-party cloud storage to store data. Cloud storage has advanced in recent times, but it still faces numerous challenges with regard to security and privacy. This paper discusses Big Data security and privacy challenges and the minimum requirements that must be provided by future solutions. The main objective of this paper is to propose a new technical framework to control and manage Big Data security and privacy risks. A design science research methodology is used to carry out this project. The proposed framework takes advantage of Blockchain technology to provide secure storage of Big Data by managing its metadata and policies and eliminating external parties to maintain data security and privacy. Additionally, it uses mobile agent technology to take advantage of the benefits related to system performance in general. We present a prototype implementation for our proposed framework using the Ethereum Blockchain in a real data storage scenario. The empirical results and framework evaluation show that our proposed framework provides an effective solution for secure data storage in a Big Data environment.
Muhammad Shafay, Raja Wasim Ahmad, Khaled Salah, Ibrar Yaqoob · 6 authors
Deep learning has gained huge traction in recent years because of its potential to make informed decisions. A large portion of today’s deep learning systems are based on centralized servers and fall short in providing operational transparency, traceability, reliability, security, and trusted data provenance features. Also, training deep learning models by utilizing centralized data is vulnerable to the single point of failure problem. In this paper, we explore the importance of integrating blockchain technology with deep learning. We review the existing literature focused on the integration of blockchain with deep learning. We classify and categorize the literature by devising a thematic taxonomy based on seven parameters; namely, blockchain type, deep learning models, deep learning specific consensus protocols, application area, services, data types, and deployment goals. We provide insightful discussions on the state-of-the-art blockchain-based deep learning frameworks by highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we compare the existing blockchain-based deep learning frameworks based on four parameters such as blockchain type, consensus protocol, deep learning method, and dataset. Finally, we present important research challenges which need to be addressed to develop highly efficient, robust, and secure deep learning frameworks.
With the rapid development of the mobile internet and intelligent technology of in-vehicle equipment, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), centered on intelligent connected cars, has gradually entered people’s lives. However, these technologies also bring serious privacy risks and security issues in terms of data transmission and storage. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based authentication system to provide vehicle safety management. The privacy and security attributes of various vehicle authentication transactions are based on high-level cryptographic primitives, realizing temporary and formal authentication methods. At the same time, a fair blockchain consensus mechanism Auction of block generation Rights (AoR) is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the proposed scheme, security and performance analyses are presented. The relevant experimental results show that the scheme can provide superior decentralized management for IoV.