Abstract With the advancement of technology and economy, the scale of the smart home industry has exploded. While improving people’s lives, smart home systems are facing threats to privacy leaks, malicious attacks, and structural security. Effective security mechanisms are very important for protecting valuable data in smart home systems. Access control helps information systems prevent malicious access, thereby reducing the risk of privacy leakage. Blockchain can provide security support for the Internet of Things system due to its advantages of decentralization and immutability. Therefore, in this paper, a smart home access control scheme based on blockchain is proposed. The scheme uses Hyperledger Fabric and implements access control strategies through smart contracts. By designing a hybrid access control model based on dynamic attribute-based access control and static access control matrix, the remote access control initiated by the user through the Internet and the access control between local devices are well guaranteed at the same time. Through safety analysis and performance evaluation, the feasibility of the proposed scheme is demonstrated.
Blockchain's immutability can resist unauthorized changes of ledgers, thus it can be used as a trust enhancement mechanism to a shared system. Indeed, blockchain has been considered to solve the security and privacy issues of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this regard, most researches currently focus on the realization of various access control models and architectures, and are working towards making full use of the blockchain to secure IoT systems. It is worth noting that there has been an increasingly heavy pressure on the blockchain storage caused by dealing with massive IoT data and handling malicious access behaviors in the system, and not many countermeasures have been seen to curb the increase. However, this problem has not been paid enough attention. In this paper, we implement an attribute-based access control scheme using smart contracts in Quorum blockchain. It provides basic access control functions and conserves storage by reducing the number of smart contracts. In addition, a reputation-based technique is introduced to cope with malicious behaviors. Certain illegal transactions can be blocked by the credit-assessment algorithm, which deters possibly malicious nodes and gives more chance to well-behaved nodes. The feasibility of our proposed scheme is demonstrated by doing experiment on a testbed and conducting a case study. Finally, the system performance is assessed based on experimental measurement.
Abdeljalil Beniiche, Amin Ebrahimzadeh, Martin Maier
There has been a growing interest in adapting blockchain technologies to the specific needs of the Internet of Things (IoT) in order to develop a variety of blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) applications such as smart cities and Industry 4.0, where smart contracts play an important role. After briefly reviewing recent progress on BIoT, we explore the symbiosis of blockchain with other key technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, while putting our focus on the emerging Tactile Internet for advanced human-to-machine interaction. Our interest is in exploiting the concept of the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which executes smart contracts and requires the involvement from humans to perform certain tasks that autonomous AI based software agents and robots themselves cannot do. In our search for synergies between human-agent-robot teamwork (HART) and the complementary strengths of the DAO, AI, and robots, we decentralize the Tactile Internet by leveraging mobile end-user equipment via partially or fully decentralized multi-access edge computing, and crowdsourcing of human expertise to decrease the completion time of physical tasks in the event of unreliable feedback forecasting of teleoperated robots. Finally, we aim at enhancing the human capabilities of unskilled crowd members by using our proposed nudge contract.
The technological advancement and growth of the cloud computing technologies is changing network service provisioning and operation. Cloud based services represented as XaaS where X refers to service offering such as Platform, Software and Infrastructure as a service, provides flexible on-demand provisioning along with its security concerns that goes with the adoption of the cloud computing. Despite all the advantages of adopting the cloud computing option, the security and privacy of the clients’ data cannot be overlooked. Understanding these security concerns is a fundamental requirement to choosing the cloud solution. This paper focuses on the use of Blockchain technology to mitigate the security challenges of the cloud computing. Literature reviews have discussed other security options for the cloud, but little discussions have centered on the adoption of the Block Chain technology to secure the cloud and open doors for future research of cloud computing using smart contract. Keywords: Blockchain, Distributed Database Systems, Data Integrity, cryptography, Cloud Infrastructure Security, Confidentiality, Distributed Ledger
The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered a high-impact technology in many major markets. It promises many opportunities, but there are several risks and drawbacks associated with this technology stand in the way of realizing its potential opportunities, such as the IoT devices limited capabilities (restricted resources) as well as the current access control systems based on central structures and central hierarchies. with all IoT devices, the security risks and threats are enormous. Blockchain is defined as tamper-proof, tamper-resistant digital ledgers that are executed in a distributed fashion, i.e., without a central repository and usually without central authority, allowing all parties to track information over an insecure network without the need for third-party verification. This technology could be a solution to the problems facing the Internet of Things, however the integrating between blockchain and Internet of Things system comes with many challenges as such blockchain suffers from high resource consumption, slow response, etc. In this research we will propose a new architecture for how to integrate blockchain with the Internet of Things. This structure consists of the smart home responsible for its own data (own chain) and the service provider which considered indirect manager of the network. The performance of the proposed architecture will be studied in terms of expansion, decentralization, security and permanent availability.
Md. Arafatur Rahman, Mohd Saharudin Abuludin, Ling Xi Yuan, Md. Shohidul Islam · 5 authors
Massive data handling requirement in education Industry 4.0 has attracted interests in the research of microservice architectures due to their scalability, resilience, and elasticity characteristics. This development has been challenged by extensive data exchange required by a set of independent microservices to build a complete application, which could result in increasing risks and exposure to the security and privacy breaches of the data. It is imperative to see that educational data are highly sensitive, critical for ascertaining educational attainment and facilitating credentials for qualification verifications. This article puts forward a new proposal of devising a security and privacy-preserving design mechanism of data transactions in educational microservices leveraging the blockchain technology. The design comprises three phases, namely the blockchain framework, data sending–receiving, and confidentiality-integrity-availability over a secured platform with each phase having detailed mechanisms for algorithm implementation. The proposal is shown to exhibit favorable performance in terms of time cost of publishing, throughput, and latency, and shown to have high survey acceptance in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability with approximately 10% improvement from prior blockchain adoption.
Saurabh Shukla, Subhasis Thakur, Shahid Hussain, John G. Breslin · 5 authors
The healthcare Internet-of-Things (IoT) offers many benefits including data transmission in real-time mode, the ability to monitor the physiological state of the patient in a different interval of time. Devices such as blood-pressure monitors, glucose meters, heart monitoring implants, Electroencephalography (EEG), Electrocardiogram (ECG), and Electromyography (EMG) wearable devices allow health providers to collect the patient health information locally and make a real-time decision based on the Patient Health Data (PHD). Hospitals have been adopting the IoT for many years and now they have healthcare IoT devices in patients’ rooms and their bodies. However, the medical agencies, hospitals, and companies do not consider the security risk of healthcare IoT devices connected to a Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN). The IoT devices can be easily hacked and may lead to several potentially life-threatening risks due to poor authentication and encryption practices. Existing machine learning algorithms and blockchain approach working in the cloud computing environment are unable to meet the Quality of Service (QoS) like reliability, authentication, identification, and security requirements of healthcare IoT devices. Most of the traditional machine learning algorithms and techniques for healthcare IoT lacks the real-world implementation for secure data transmission. Therefore, blockchain is introduced for secure and reliable transaction in healthcare IoT. Whereas Fog Computing (FC) is introduced to extend the services of the cloud at the edge of networks. Integration of FC with blockchain can overcome the issue of healthcare IoT device identification, authentication, and verification for scalable frequent data transmission in a decentralized environment. Hence, a novel solution for the abovementioned problem is proposed using FC and blockchain. It includes an FC-based three-tier architecture, an analytical model, a mathematical framework, and an Advanced Signature-Based Encryption (ASE) algorithm for healthcare IoT device identification, verification, and Patient Health Data (PHD) authentication. The aim is to extend secure data transmission for healthcare IoT and end-users availing the real-time services. The proposed model and algorithm will be able to provide services for transaction and transmission near the edge in a secure manner. By analyzing the generated results from the proposed novel ASE algorithm for throughput, packet error, reliability, and malicious node detection accuracy; it is observed that the ASE algorithm in the FC environment easily outperforms the cloud and the other existing state of the art techniques such as FogBus, Femto cloud, Blockchain Fog-based Architecture Network (BFAN), and BeeKeeper. The malicious node detection accuracy of the ASE algorithm in the FC environment is 91% and in the cloud is 83%. Whereas the reliability percentage of the ASE algorithm in FC is 95% and in the cloud is 87%. The proposed approach is tested on simulators iFogSim (Net-Beans) and SimBlock.
The sweeping scale embracing of the smart things has a profound effect in bringing about big data explosion and sophisticated cyber threats at the network edge. Edge computing needs novel security architectures to address the security challenges in severely resource-constrained and heterogeneous edge systems. The successful design of such architectures solves the challenges of scalability [handling massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices], resource constraints and high latency for critical applications. The existing security architectures such as the cloud fail to satisfy these requirements due to remoteness and centralization. This inculcates the need for a distributed architecture that offloads overheads from the cloud and IoT devices by deploying security parameters and operations in proximity. Specifically, the proliferation of distributed architecture integrated with intelligent algorithms such as artificial intelligence (AI) has paramount importance in providing a security collaboration, autonomy and efficiency for the IoT with an improved level of robustness and resilience. However, the state-of-the-art distributed architectures are victims of integrity cyber-attacks such as insider and adversarial attacks. To solve these problems, inspired by the applications in financial industries, the emerging distributed ledger-based technology architecture can significantly boost the robustness of edge network if it is adopted for edge security architecture that can leverage AI algorithms. In this chapter, the architectures of edge computing, specifically, blockchain-based edge architecture which is fueled with the power of AI algorithms, have been proposed and analyzed.
Xuan Chen, Shujuan Tian, Kien Nguyen, Hiroo Sekiya
With data transparency and immutability, the blockchain can provide trustless and decentralized services for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, most blockchain-IoT networks, especially those with a private blockchain, are built on top of an infrastructure-based wireless network (i.e., using Wi-Fi access points or cellular base stations). Hence, they are still under the risk of Single-Point-of-Failure (SPoF) on the network layer, hindering the decentralization merit, for example, when the access points or base stations get failures. This paper presents an Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol-based solution for that issue in a private blockchain-IoT application. By decentralizing the underlying network with OLSR, the private blockchain network can avoid SPoF and automatically recover after a failure. Single blockchain connections can be extended to multiple ad hoc hops. Services over blockchain become flexible to fit various IoT scenarios. We show the effectiveness of our solution by constructing a private Ethereum blockchain network running on IoT devices (i.e., Raspberry Pi model 4) with environmental data sensing (i.e., Particular Matter (PM)). The IoT devices use OLSR to form an ad hoc network. The environment data are collected and propagated in transactions to a pre-loaded smart contract periodically. We then evaluate the IoT blockchain network’s recovery time when facing a link error. The evaluation results show that OLSR can automatically recover after the failure. We also evaluate the transaction-oriented latency and block-oriented latency, which indicates the blocks have a high transmission quality, while transactions are transferred individually.
Blockchain is a promising technology for future dynamic spectrum access (DSA) management due to its decentralization, immutability, and traceability. However, many challenges need to be addressed to integrate the blockchain to DSA, such as the trustworthiness of participating nodes’ spectrum sensing results, privacy protection of sensing nodes’ identities, and affordable lightweight consensus algorithms for IoT devices. In this article, we propose a trust-centric privacy-preserving blockchain for DSA in IoT networks. To be specific, we propose a trust evaluation mechanism to evaluate the trustworthiness of sensing nodes and design a Proof-of-Trust (PoT) consensus mechanism to build a scalable blockchain with high transaction-per-second (TPS). Moreover, a privacy protection scheme is proposed to protect sensors’ real-time geolocation information when they upload sensing data to the blockchain. Two smart contracts are designed to make the whole procedure (spectrum sensing, spectrum auction, and spectrum allocation) run automatically. Simulation results demonstrate the expected computation cost of the PoT consensus algorithm for reliable nodes is low, and the cooperative sensing performance is improved with the help of the trust evaluation mechanism. In addition, incentivization and security are also analyzed, which show that our system can not only encourage nodes’ participation, but also resist many kinds of attacks which are frequently arise in the trust management mechanism and blockchain-based IoT systems.
Carlos González-Amarillo, Cristian Leonardo Cárdenas-García, Miguel Mendoza-Moreno, Gustavo Ramírez-González · 5 authors
Sensor devices that act in the IoT architecture perception layer are characterized by low data processing and storage capacity. These reduced capabilities make the system ubiquitous and lightweight, but considerably reduce its security. The IoT-based Food Traceability Systems (FTS), aimed at ensuring food safety and quality, serve as a motivating scenario for BIoTS development and deployment; therefore, security challenges and gaps related with data integrity are analyzed from this perspective. This paper proposes the BIoTS hardware design that contains some modules built-in VHDL (SHA-256, PoW, and SD-Memory) and other peripheral electronic devices to provide capabilities to the perception layer by implementing the blockchain architecture's security requirements in an IoT device. The proposed hardware is implemented on FPGA Altera DE0-Nano. BIoTS can participate as a miner in the blockchain network through Smart Contracts and solve security issues related to data integrity and data traceability in an Blockchain-IoT system. Blockchain algorithms implemented in IoT hardware opens a path to IoT devices' security and ensures participation in data validation inside a food certification process.
Milan Groshev, Jorge Martín‐Pérez, Kiril Antevski, Antonio de la Oliva · 5 authors
Edge computing have received considerable attention as a promising candidate for the evolution of robotic systems. In this work, we propose COTORRA, an Edge driven robotic testbed that combines context information with robot sensor data to validate innovative concepts for robotic systems prior to being applied in a production environment. We have tested COTORRA in a controlled university environment as an easy applicable, serverless, and modular testbed on top of commodity network infrastructure. COTORRA supports pluggable robotic applications. To verify its feasibility and assess its performance, we ran a set of experiments that show how autonomous navigation applications can achieve target latencies bellow 15 ms, and perform an inter-domain Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) federation within 19 seconds.
Mohd Majid Akhtar, Danish Raza Rizvi, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Salil S. Kanhere · 6 authors
A potential rise in interest in the Internet of Things in the upcoming years is expected in the fields of healthcare, supply chain, logistics, industries, smart cities, smart homes, cyber physical systems, etc. This paper discloses the fusion of the Internet of Things (IoT) with the so-called "distributed ledger technology" (DLT). IoT sensors like temperature sensors, motion sensors, GPS or connected devices convey the activity of the environment. Sensor information acquired by such IoT devices are then stored in a blockchain. Data on a blockchain remains immutable however its scalability still remains a challenging issue and thus represents a hindrance for its mass adoption in the IoT. Here a communication system based on IOTA and DLT is discussed with a systematic architecture for IoT devices and a future machine-to-machine (M2M) economy. The data communication between IoT devices is analyzed using multiple use cases such as sending DHT-11 sensor data to the IOTA tangle. The value communication is analyzed using a novel "micro-payment enabled over the top" (MP-OTT) streaming platform that is based on the "pay-as-you-go" and "consumption based" models to showcase IOTA value transactions. In this paper, we propose an enhancement to the classical "masked authenticated message" (MAM) communication protocol and two architectures called dual signature masked authenticated message (DSMAM) and index-based address value transaction (IBAVT). Further, we provided an empirical analysis and discussion of the proposed techniques. The implemented solution provides better address management with secured sharing and communication of IoT data, complete access control over the ownership of data and high scalability in terms of number of transactions that can be handled.
Maria Gorbunova, Pavel Mašek, Mikhail Komarov, Aleksandr Ometov
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is making the first steps toward becoming a solution for the growing number of various decentralized systems worldwide. Unlike pure Blockchain, DLT finds many uses across different industries, including eHealth, finance, supply chain monitoring, and the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the vital DLT features is the ability to provide an immutable and commonly verifiable ledger for larger-scale and highly complex systems. Today?s centralized systems can no longer guarantee the required level of availability and reliability due to the growing number of the involved nodes, complicated heterogeneous architectures, and task load, while the publicly available distributed systems are still in their infancy. This paper aims to provide an exhaustive topical review of the state-of-theart of Distributed Ledger Technology applicability in various sectors. It outlines the importance of the practical integration of technology-related challenges, as well as potential solutions.
Sukrutha L. T. Vangipuram, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos
With the world facing the new virus SARS-CoV-2, many countries have introduced instant Internet applications to identify people carrying the infection. Internet-of-Medical-Things (IoMT) have proven useful in collecting medical data as well in tracing an individual carrying the virus. The data collected or traced belongs to an individual and should be revealed to themselves and hospital providers, but not to any third-party unauthorized agencies. In this paper we use an off-chain distributed storage solution for loading large medical data sets and a blockchain implementation to securely transfer the data from the infected person to the hospital system using the edge infrastructure, and call it CoviChain. The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) statistics are loaded on to the edge, and moved to InterPlanetary File Systems (IPFS) storage to retrieve the hash of the data file. Once the hash is obtained, it is moved to the blockchain by means of smart contracts. As the information is being hashed twice, CoviChain addresses the security and privacy issues and avoid exposing individuals' data while achieving larger data storage on the blockchain with reduced cost and time.
Since the emergence of Ethereum, blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps) have become increasingly popular and important. To balance the security, performance, and costs, a DApp typically consists of two layers: an on-chain layer to execute transactions and store crucial data on the blockchain and an off-chain layer to interact with users. A DApp needs to synchronize its off-chain layer with the on-chain layer proactively. Otherwise, the inconsistent data in the off-chain layer could mislead users and cause undesirable consequences, e.g., loss of transaction fees. However, transactions sent to the blockchain are not guaranteed to be executed and could even be reversed after execution due to chain reorganization. Such non-determinism in the transaction execution is unique to blockchain. DApp developers may fail to perform the on-chain-off-chain synchronization accurately due to their lack of familiarity with the complex transaction lifecycle. In this work, we investigate the challenges of synchronizing on-chain and off-chain data in Ethereum-based DApps. We present two types of bugs that could result in inconsistencies between the on-chain and off-chain layers. To help detect such on-chain-off-chain synchronization bugs, we introduce a state transition model to guide the testing of DApps and propose two effective oracles to facilitate the automatic identification of bugs. We build the first testing framework, DArcher, to detect on-chain-off-chain synchronization bugs in DApps. We have evaluated DArcher on 11 popular real-world DApps. DArcher achieves high precision (99.3%), recall (87.6%), and accuracy (89.4%) in bug detection and significantly outperforms the baseline methods. It has found 15 real bugs in the 11 DApps. So far, six of the 15 bugs have been confirmed by the developers, and three have been fixed. These promising results demonstrate the usefulness of DArcher.
Muhammad Awais Khan, Saptarshi Ghosh, Sherif Adeshina Busari, Kazi Mohammed Saidul Huq · 8 authors
The new developments in mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has positioned 5G and beyond in a strong position to answer the market need towards future emerging intelligent transportation systems and smart city applications. The major attractive features of V2X communication is the inherent ability to adapt to any type of network, device, or data, and to ensure robustness, resilience and reliability of the network, which is challenging to realize. In this work, we propose to drive further these features by proposing a novel robust, resilient and reliable architecture for V2X communication based on harnessing MEC and blockchain technology. A three stage computing service is proposed. Firstly, a hierarchcial computing architecture is deployed spanning over the vehicular network that constitutes cloud computing (CC), edge computing (EC), fog computing (FC) nodes. The resources and data bases can migrate from the high capacity cloud services (furthest away from the individual node of the network) to the edge (medium) and low level fog node, according to computing service requirements. Secondly, the resource allocation filters the data according to its significance, and rank the nodes according to their usability, and selects the network technology according to their physical channel characteristics. Thirdly, we propose a blockchain-based transaction service that ensures reliability. We discussed two use cases for experimental analysis, plug-in electric vehicles in smart grid scenarios, and massive IoT data services for autonomous cars. The results show that car connectivity prediction is accurate 98% of the times, where 92% more data blocks are added using micro-blockchain solution compared to the public blockchain, where it is able to reduce the time to sign and compute the proof-of-work (PoW), and deliver a low-overhead Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This approach can be considered a strong candidate architecture for future V2X, and with more general application for everything-to-everything (X2X) communications.
Improvement in the requirements for engineering practices is needed in areas such as requirement elicitation, validation, prioritization, and negotiations between stakeholders to create successful projects for COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) software. Many algorithms and techniques are used to create quality software projects, but they still need more improvement to work effectively for global pandemic COVID-19 software. By improving the reliability of requirement engineering practices using blockchain-based technology, the software will be reliable and will make it easier for the users working in a lockdown situation because of COVID-19. Therefore, our purpose is to identify the factors for reliable software engineering practices using blockchain-oriented technology for COVID-19 software. A systematic literature review is conducted to identify challenges and offer solutions. Through using blockchain-based technology for requirement engineering practices, the requirements will be gathered accurately and validated, and the conflicts between stakeholders will also be solved. It will improve the quality and reliability of COVID-19 software projects, which will help society work effectively from home. Improvement in the quality and reliability of COVID-19 software will improve users’ interest, and their working capacity will be increased.
In the contemporary world, with ever-evolving internet models in the process of automating and digitalizing various industrial and domestic implementations, the Internet of Things (IoT) has made remarkable advancements in sharing the healthcare data and triggering the associated necessary actions. Healthcare-related data sharing among the intermediate nodes, privacy, and data integrity are the two critical challenges in the present-day scenario. Data needs to be encrypted to ensure the confidentiality of the sensitive information shared among the nodes, especially in the case of healthcare-related data records. Implementing the conventional encryption algorithms over the intermediate node may not be technically feasible, and too much burden on the intermediate nodes is not advisable. This article has focused on various security challenges in the existing mechanism, existing strategies in security solutions for IoT driven healthcare monitoring frameworks and proposes a context-aware state of art model based on Blockchain technology that has been deployed for encrypting the data among the nodes in the architecture of a 5G network. The proposed strategy was examined through various performance evaluation metrics, and the proposed approach had outperformed compared to its counterparts.
Lorenzo Ghiro, Francesco Restuccia, Salvatore D’Oro, Stefano Basagni · 7 authors
The term blockchain is used for disparate projects, ranging from cryptocurrencies to applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). The concept of blockchain appears therefore blurred, as the same technology cannot empower applications with extremely different requirements, levels of security and performance. This position paper elaborates on the theory of distributed systems to advance a clear definition of blockchain allowing us to clarify its possible role in the IoT. The definition binds together three elements that, as a whole, delineate those unique features that distinguish the blockchain from other distributed ledger technologies: immutability, transparency and anonymity. We note that immutability-which is imperative for securing blockchains-imposes remarkable resource consumption. Moreover, while transparency demands no confidentiality, anonymity enhances privacy but prevents user identification. As such, we raise the concern that these blockchain features clash with the requirements of most IoT applications where devices are power-constrained, data needs to be kept confidential, and users to be clearly identifiable. We consequently downplay the role of the blockchain for the IoT: this can act as a ledger external to the IoT architecture, invoked as seldom as possible and only to record the aggregate results of myriads of local (IoT) transactions that are most of the time performed off-chain to meet performance and scalability requirements.
In this paper, we propose a decentralised double blockchain (DB) architecture for scalable, lightweight and secure Internet-of-Things (IoT) information and reputation management. We consider a heterogeneous cloud and fog IoT communication network where the information blockchain (IB) stores IoT data in the cloud layer due to limited storage resources in the fog layer and a lightweight reputation blockchain (RB) stores reputations in the fog layer to quickly identify the trust levels of IoT devices. Furthermore, we propose a fog layer DB node classification algorithm to improve the efficiency of IB and RB generation and RB storage in the fog layer. To improve security, we propose a mapping algorithm between the short RB and long IB to securely validate the reputation data based on corresponding IoT device data, and quickly identify malicious tampering of the DB. Experimental simulation results highlight the storage scalability, low latency propagation, and security of our DB architecture compared to conventional single blockchains.
BACKGROUND: Health care systems are currently undergoing a digital transformation that has been primarily triggered by emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G, blockchain, and the digital representation of patients using (mobile) sensor devices. One of the results of this transformation is the gradual virtualization of care. Irrespective of the care environment, trust between caregivers and patients is essential for achieving favorable health outcomes. Given the many breaches of information security and patient safety, today's health information system portfolios do not suffice as infrastructure for establishing and maintaining trust in virtual care environments. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to establish a theoretical foundation for a complex health care system intervention that aims to exploit a cryptographically secured infrastructure for establishing and maintaining trust in virtualized care environments and, based on this theoretical foundation, present a proof of concept that fulfills the necessary requirements. METHODS: This work applies the following framework for the design and evaluation of complex intervention research within health care: a review of the literature and expert consultation for technology forecasting. A proof of concept was developed by following the principles of design science and requirements engineering. RESULTS: This study determined and defined the crucial functional and nonfunctional requirements and principles for enhancing trust between caregivers and patients within a virtualized health care environment. The cornerstone of our architecture is an approach that uses blockchain technology. The proposed decentralized system offers an innovative governance structure for a novel trust model. The presented theoretical design principles are supported by a concrete implementation of an Ethereum-based platform called VerifyMed. CONCLUSIONS: A service for enhancing trust in a virtualized health care environment that is built on a public blockchain has a high fit for purpose in Healthcare 4.0.
Abdullah Lakhan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Ahmed Noori Rashid, Seifedine Kadry · 7 authors
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is increasingly being used for healthcare purposes. IoMT enables many sensors to collect patient data from various locations and send it to a distributed hospital for further study. IoMT provides patients with a variety of paid programmes to help them keep track of their health problems. However, the current system services are expensive, and offloaded data in the healthcare network are insecure. The research develops a new, cost-effective and stable IoMT framework based on a blockchain-enabled fog cloud. The study aims to reduce the cost of healthcare application services as they are processing in the system. The study devises an IoMT system based on different algorithm techniques, such as Blockchain-Enable Smart-Contract Cost-Efficient Scheduling Algorithm Framework (BECSAF) schemes. Smart-Contract Blockchain schemes ensure data consistency and validation with symmetric cryptography. However, due to the different workflow tasks scheduled on other nodes, the heterogeneous, earliest finish, time-based scheduling deals with execution under their deadlines. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm schemes outperform all existing baseline approaches in terms of the implementation of applications.