Blockchain is a secure and distributed ledger structure and each block is a cryptographic hash of some other factors like a timestamp. The chain is formed by linking the blocks and distributed data is present on multiple computers. The blockchain made system are more fault-tolerant and has high availability even in times of database failures. Though Linux is considered a benchmark for security, it is susceptible to various attacks. With the use of blockchain, Linux logs can be made more transparent among multiple root users and secured by hosting the logs on a decentralized Ethereum blockchain which is customized as per the requirement. It has been observed that in a scenario with multiple root users working simultaneously on same system, transparency between multiple root users can be compromised if some appropriate changes are made in few lines containing the history, Hence, with the help of Ethereum blockchain and log monitoring using log monitors, it is much easier to track the intrusions to identify the source of unauthorized access to logs or changes in them.
Academic credentials are documents that attest to successful completion of any test, exam or act as a validation of an individual's skill. Currently, the domain of academic credential management suffers from large time consumption, high cost, dependence on third-party and a lack of transparency. A blockchain based solution tries to resolve these pain-points by allowing any recruiter or company to verify the user credentials without dependence on any centralized third party. Our decentralized application is based off of BlockCerts, an MIT project that acts as an open standard for blockchain credentials. The project talks about the implementation details of the decentralized application built for BlockCerts Wallet. It is an attempt to leverage the power of the blockchain technology as a global notary for the verification of digital records.
ABSTRACT Blockchain brought about the potential for improved data reliability, but only when those data are the result of transactions that happen completely within a blockchain. The reliability of blockchain data is threatened when information is introduced from the outside world, such as when oracles are used to observe occurrences and provide this information to smart contracts. This specific threat to the reliability of blockchain data is known as the oracle problem. This study offers a working definition of blockchain oracles and argues that they should be viewed as service organizations under the auditing standards from the AICPA and PCAOB. The study then discusses risks associated with the oracle's function of collecting, storing, transforming, and transmitting information, and proposes control objectives for auditors to consider when evaluating the information provided by oracles. Finally, the study closes by discussing open questions the audit profession still needs to address with the oracle problem.
Mayra Samaniego, Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Cristian Espana, Ralph Deters
Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have emerged to support clinicians in interpreting medical images. CAD systems are traditionally combined with artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and data augmentation to evaluate suspicious structures in medical images. This evaluation generates vast amounts of data. Traditional CAD systems belong to a single institution and handle data access management centrally. However, the advent of CAD systems for research among multiple institutions demands distributed access management. This research proposes a blockchain-based solution to enable distributed data access management in CAD systems. This solution has been developed as a distributed application (DApp) using Ethereum in a consortium network.
Arun Prasad Mohan, Mohamed Asfak R., Angelin Gladston
Cloud computing is the fastest growing and most promising field in the service provisioning segment. It has become a challenging task to provide security in the cloud. The purpose of this article is to suggest a better and efficient integrity verification technique for data referred to as cloud audit. The deployment of cloud storage services has significant benefits in the management of data for users. However, this raises many security concerns, and one of them is data integrity. Though public verification techniques serve the purpose they are vulnerable to procrastinating auditors who may not perform verifications on time. In this article, a cloud data auditing system is proposed. The proposed cloud data auditing system integrates Merkle Tree-based Cloud audit and the blockchain-based audit recording system, thus the core idea is to record each verification result into a blockchain as a transaction. Utilizing the time-sensitive nature of blockchain, the verifications are time-stamped after the corresponding transaction is recorded into the blockchain, which enables users to check whether auditors have performed the verifications at the prescribed time. The proposed cloud data auditing system is experimentally validated. The investigations with varied dataset size revealed less time taken, on an average of 0.25 milliseconds with the use of Merkle Tree. Further results reveal consistency of the data integrity checking.
E-health systems have witnessed widespread usage in the last few years, mainly due to advancements in health monitoring hardware and the availability of remote diagnostic services. Given the numerous benefits, there are two main challenges: management of the e-health ecosystem and security and privacy of sensitive data. The former results from nonunified, redundant, and often replicated information across numerous independent e-health service providers. While the later stems from sensitive information stored in centralized systems that can be compromised. Blockchain has emerged as a promising technology, which can be used to secure access and privacy of data and provide an umbrella management solution to large-scale distributed and decentralized enterprise systems. In this article, we present a unified system for migrating independent conventional e-health systems to a single blockchain-based ecosystem. More specifically, we address the issues of difference in data structures for conventional relational databases and blockchain file databases. The solution describes the conversion process and synchronization of information in a unified system for large-scale e-health data. The implementation and analysis show that significant improvements in data storage, access control, and seamless migration can be achieved.
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has had a far-reaching impact on data privacy and compliance for cloud providers. GDPR influences access to, storage, processing and transmission of personal data, requiring these operations to be verified by a cloud user through explicit consent prior to execution. GDPR rules implemented for such operations can be ambiguous and often open to interpretation, making manual verification a time consuming and error prone process for cloud providers. An encoding of GDPR rules is described, with each operation carried out using these rules recorded into a Blockchain for auditing purposes. Specifically, this work shows how some GDPR rules can appear asopcodesin smart contracts to verify the operations of providers on user data in a transparent and automatic way. An abstract model is designed to demonstrate how cloud providers can access and deploy such smart contracts through a Blockchain-based virtual machine. A case study is used to demonstrate how this approach can be used in practice. The case study uses a collection of design patterns and smart contracts to verify provider operations, includingread,write,executionandtransferon user data. Validation is undertaken by deploying the smart contracts in a Blockchain test network to investigate the execution costs of GDPR compliance checking.
Blockchain technology allows the formation of a distributed record of a digital event in a decentralized manner where no third-party controls data and related transactions. This technology was used early for value transfer but now it has a wide range of applications in various fields such as healthcare, banking, the internet of things and many more. In the education sector, it gives numerous chances for decentralized management of records in educational institutions. Certificates distributed in colleges or universities are mostly hard copy. Students submit these certificates while applying for jobs at public or private sectors, where all these certificates are needed to be verified manually, it is very time-consuming process. There can be incidents where students may produce the fake certificate and it is difficult to identify them. This problem of fake academic certificates has been a longstanding issue in the academic community. There are chances that some may have produce the certificate which is not legit and that may get unnoticed by the verifier during the verification process. Because of the above situation, ineligible candidate will get a chance illegally. The key issues in Certificate verification for Workplace, banks and other businesses are in storage, retrieval and access to data with security. Blockchain technology can be enforced to solve these troubles in storing and accessing of data. This technology provides a common shared platform from where to store, retrieve and access documents securely. The very nature of the technology is in the distributed, shared, open ledgers, verifiable by all. This problem can be solved by storing the digital certificates on the Blockchain.
Daniël Reijsbergen, Paweł Szałachowski, Junming Ke, Zengpeng Li · 5 authors
We present Large-scale Known-committee Stake-based Agreement (LaKSA), a chain-based Proof-of-Stake protocol that is dedicated, but not limited, to cryptocurrencies. LaKSA minimizes interactions between nodes through lightweight committee voting, resulting in a simpler, more robust, and more scalable proposal than competing systems. It also mitigates other drawbacks of previous systems, such as high reward variance and long confirmation times. LaKSA can support large numbers of nodes by design, and provides probabilistic safety guarantees in which a client makes commit decisions by calculating the probability that a transaction is reverted based on its blockchain view. We present a thorough analysis of LaKSA and report on its implementation and evaluation. Furthermore, our new technique of proving safety can be applied more broadly to other Proof-of-Stake protocols.
Fog computing, a novel computing paradigm, migrates cloud computing to the edge of network and consequently decrease the overhead of process and movement of the large-scale big data. Fog computing is promising to lower communication delay and offload network traffic with the scale of big data increasing in large-scale IoT application, which brings micro-data centers to the network edge, enabling the network edge to perceive, process, storage and calculate the massive data, reducing the amount of transferred data. However, numerous fog nodes at the network edge face an external attack resulting in serious security threats arising from the trusting relationship vulnerability because of the lack of the consideration of the properties of the fog computing system. This paper addresses the design for developing secure distributed data management platform for fog computing in large-scale IoT application, along with a blockchain-based data management implementation of the platform, which approaches the major challenges: how to realize the integration of data security and storage management for fog computing in large-scale IoT application and enrich rational interoperability for interconnected things. Experimental results show that the system works well to empower data provenance and transparency and defend against unauthorized access effectively in fog computing, scales well with loss of the performance of communication and computing maintaining in acceptable range, verifying the efficiency and feasibility of our design to provide privacy, integrity and fine-grained data management for fog computing in large-scale IoT application by introducing the data management platform based upon the blockchain network and smart contracts therein.
Cloud of Things (CoT) refers to an IoT solution consuming the cloud services of a single cloud vendor. In this article, we have introduced the concept of a MultiCoT (http://www.MultiCoT.com) solution which refers to the collaborative execution of an IoT solution by multiple cloud vendors. Cloudlets and ad-hoc clouds are the extensions of centralized cloud services, closer to the user, in the form of fog and edge computing layers respectively and the Osmotic Computing (OC) serves as a glue by accomplishing the seamless compute sharing across these layers. The OC can also be integrated within a MultiCoT solution for extending it across three computational layers of cloud, fog and edge. However, this can only be achieved after establishing enough trust among all the vendors that are working in collaboration to simultaneously serve a particular MultiCoT solution. Blockchain has been already proven for establishing trust and supporting reliable interactions among independently operating entities. Hence, it can be used for establishing trust among the multiple cloud vendors serving a single MultiCoT solution. In this article, we have presented the importance of using the proactive Blockchain-enabled Osmotic Manager (B-OM) for improving the reliability of OC. We have also highlighted the blockchain features that can improve the reliability of OC by establishing trust among the independently operating vendors of a MultiCoT solution, followed by the challenges associated with the integration of blockchain and OC along with the future research directions for achieving the proposed integration.
The Electronic Health Record (EHR) has been widely used in cloud-based medical data platforms. Since the owner of the EHR is a patient and the manager is a doctor (or hospital), this separation of ownership of privacy data leads to privacy leakages of the EHR stored in the cloud environment. The tamper-proof and traceable features of the blockchain make it a promising way to solve EHR privacy protection issues. Nevertheless, the latest research findings on blockchain-based schemes for EHR privacy preservation are focused on single blockchain that corresponds to a designated medical institution, which are not compatible with the privacy anti-leakage demands since private data is transferred through multiple blockchains. In this regard, we put forward relay-chain as a service (RaaS), and propose a cross-blockchain based EHR Privacy-preserving scheme (CEPS), which uses relay-chain to achieve secure access to EHR data when patients visit different hospitals. Furthermore, our scheme ensures that patients can delete the link of EHR freely and effectively. Security analysis and performance evaluations are performed, which prove that CEPS is highly secure and efficient impressively.
In isolated network domains, global trustworthiness (e.g., consistent network view) is critical to the multiple-domain business partners who aim to perform the trusted corporations depending on each isolated network view. However, to achieve such global trustworthiness across distributed network domains is a challenge. This is because when multiple-domain partners are required to exchange their local domain views with each other, it is difficult to ensure the data trustworthiness among them. In addition, the isolated domain view in each partner is prone to be destroyed by malicious falsification attacks. To this end, we propose a blockchain-based approach that can ensure the trustworthiness among multiple-party domains. In this paper, we mainly present the design and implementation of the proposed trustworthiness-protection system. A cloud-based prototype and a local testbed are developed based on Ethereum. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed prototype and testbed.
This column delves into privacy risks of the IoT using risk concepts that are more native to the security domain in order to conceptually bridge our collective understanding, articulation, and management of privacy concerns in the IoT which otherwise might not be sufficiently considered or foreseen by existing legal and technical controls. Trustworthiness and privacy are of primary concern as companies connect their manufacturing and logistic infrastructures to the Internet of Things (IoT). They want to reap the benefit of automated asset management, process control and predictive maintenance. However, to do so effectively, companies need to facilitate information sharing among trustworthy partners while complying with data protection and privacy preserving regulations. In this respect, Distributed Ledgers (a.k.a. Blockchains) offer a viable solution by enabling their participants to discover one another and establish peer-to-peer trust relations without a centralized intermediary.
Tharindu Ranathunga, Ramona Marfievici, Alan McGibney, Susan Rea
An IoT eco-system includes IoT network components, network services and network participants such as organizations, consumers, governments, and businesses. Due to its diversity and scale, trustworthiness is a critical concern to be considered during architectural design and the operational phase of these eco-systems. To do this, security, privacy, reliability, resilience and safety must be assured. However, existing solutions partially address these requirements using centralized approaches that come with challenges such as a single point of failure, scalability, and dependence on a third party. In this context, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts, due to its intrinsic properties of transparency, immutability, and underlying secure-by-design architecture, allows distributed, decentralized, automated workflows, which can be incorporated to automate the management of the next generation IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a framework for IoT eco-systems providing seamless integration between IoT and DLT to create a decentralized trusted architecture, which ensures trustworthiness of IoT eco-systems at design time and a trust reputation model based on the architecture to protect it during the run-time. Furthermore, we have presented the initial steps towards the implementation of this framework.
Mahmudul Hassan Ashik, Mirza Mohd Shahriar Maswood, Abdullah G. Alharbi
Ethereum is a blockchain-based distributed network and has been a successful platform to host decentralized applications. On the other hand, fog computing has emerged as one of the most demanding field for research as it brings the services of cloud to the edge of the network, i.e. closer to the IoT devices. To satisfy the QoS requirement of latency sensitive applications, the concept of fog computing is introduced in order to implement the idea of smart home, city etc. Though the fog nodes can support latency sensitive applications, but their computational capacity is low which leads to more vulnerability against known attacks. But Ethereum has paved the way to develop smart contracts to implement any logic written in it upon calling. The usage of smart contracts in securing the fog node can be effective as it runs in a blockchain enabled network which makes the smart contract immutable and secured against modification. This creates a scope of using smart contract's logic to ensure the security of fog nodes and IoT devices which they earnestly require. This also eliminates the necessity of public-private key pair and other authentication systems used in fog-cloud architecture. In our work, we modified the conventional fog-cloud architecture by introducing blockchain-based fog layer to ensure better security and privacy for both fog layer and IoT devices.
Fernando Richter Vidal, Feliz Ribeiro Gouveia, Christophe Soares
Applications built on blockchain technology face many challenges, namely when they perform corrective operations on their databases. Unlike immutability, which is characteristic of a blockchain, corrective operations must be done without altering the existing data and guaranteeing privacy. Such conditions, make this task more complex for this kind of system. This paper discusses an approach to this problem. This approach is applied in a real domain. We propose an application in the higher education area, which uses the blockchain to issue academic certificates and proposes a mechanism to revoke digital diplomas that may have been issued incorrectly.
Abstract: Because of its accessibility and ease of use, cloud storage has become the most widely used type of storage on the market in recent years. However, the privacy and data security of cloud storage are at risk. The protection of data security and privacy is the main topic of this essay. We suggest a blockchain-based decentralised storage system. Since blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer system, any processing node connected to the internet can join and build peers' networks, maximising resource usage. Blockchain protects data security. The user's file is encrypted and shared among a number of network peers in the proposed system utilising the IPFS (Interplanetary File System) protocol. Hashes are generated by IPFS. The path of the file is indicated by the hash value, which is kept on the blockchain. This project is focused on decentralised secure data storage, high data availability, and effective storage resource usage.
Omar Ait Oualhaj, Amr Mohamed, Mohsen Guizani, Aiman Erbad
The blockchain is a storage technology and transmission of information, transparent, secure, and operating without central control. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized trust management and cooperation model where data is shared via blockchain and we explore the revenue distribution under different consensus schemes. To reduce the power calculation with respect to the control mechanism, our proposal adopts the possibility of Proof on Trust (PoT) and Proof of proof-of-stake based trust to replace the proof of work (PoW) scheme, to carry out the mining and storage of new data blocks. To detect nodes with malicious behavior to provide false system information, the trust updating algorithm is proposed..