Blockchain has tremendous potential for use in various industries, including health care. It provides an immutable, shared and transparent history of all the transactions to build the applications with trust and accountability. It helps in simplifying pharmaceutical supply chains, aiding researchers in drug development by making patients' data more secure and accessible. Health care researchers today struggle with delayed communications, scattered data and delayed medical workflows caused by conflicting eHealth care systems which makes it difficult to provide personalized care. The main problem is a lack of trust between these independent eHealth care systems which makes it difficult to establish an end-to-end accessible network. Blockchain, due to its properties, can be a potential solution to provide this link. We propose a model which focuses on providing healthcare data to researchers for statistical analysis and providing privacy at the same time. The model exhibits high data security by aggregating the customized access control protocol and asymmetric cryptography. It uses proxy re-encryption technique for sensitive medical information sharing.
Blockchain naturally fits multiple industry sectors due its characteristics of decentralization, enhanced security, tamper-proof, improved traceability and transparency. However, there is a significant concern of blockchain’s performance, since blockchain trades off its performance for a completely distributed feature, which enhances its security. In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art progress of blockchain, mainly from a performance and security perspective. We extracted 42 primary papers from major scientific databases and 34 online technical articles. The objective is to understand the current research trends, challenges and future directions. We briefly introduce the key technologies of blockchain including distributed ledger, cryptography, consensus, smart contracts and benchmarks. We next summarize the performance and security concerns raised in the investigation. We discuss the architectural choices, performance metrics, database management enhancements, and hybrid blockchains, and try to identify the effort that the state-of-the-art has made to balance between the performance and security. We also make experiments on Ethereum and survey other popular blockchain platforms on the scalability feature of blockchain. We later discuss the potential applications and present the lessons learned. Finally, we attempt to identify the open issues and possible research directions.
The Blockchain is an encrypted database that stores information statistics, or in different words, it is a virtual ledger of any transactions, contracts - that needs to be independently recorded. One of the key capabilities of Blockchain is that this virtual ledger is out there throughout several masses and heaps of computer and isn't always sure to be stored in a single place. Blockchain chain has already commenced disrupting the financial offerings area, and it's far this technology which underpins the virtual currency- bitcoin transaction. The aim of the paper is to conduct research on the effect of blockchain technology on the financial sector. There is no doubt that the world is curious to see how this promising technology will influence or shape the future of banking. Blockchain enhances safety in data storage and transmutation, avails a decentralized and transparent network infrastructure and significantly reduces the costs in operations. These remarkable attributes make blockchain a very promising and in-demand solution even in an industry as restricted as the banking sector.
Dev Arora, Siddharth Gautham, Harshit Gupta, Bharat Bhushan
The emerging blockchain technology helps in the decentralization of transactions, where every participant network verifies and validates the transaction making it immutable. With the rapid expansion of the technology, transactional data which is stored and validated is also increasing. The blockchain technology came into prominence largely due to the bitcoin and the security aspects of the technology. This technology is comparatively fast, secure and efficient. This paper discusses the generalized overview, different algorithms to reach consensus, system workflows and various security aspects of handling, transacting and storing data. This paper also throws light Smart Contracts and their applications.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Retinal Imaging and Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology has developed rapidly and has been applied in various areas. Blockchain technology has the features of decentralization, transparency, autonomy and tamper resistance etc. The blockchain, with its unique features, can address some problems in traditional areas. In traditional games area, especially the gambling game, we learn that there is a strong requirement for fairness and random numbers. But traditional games are centralized and cannot meet this requirement. Hence, we propose a blockchain-based random number generation algorithm that can provide a “true random number”. This algorithm allows all the participants to take part in the generation of a random number, which ensures that the random number will not be manipulated by anyone. We as well design a blockchain game platform adopting this random number generation algorithm. Traditional games can be deployed on this platform with a simple adaptation. Finally, we deploy a poker game on the platform to verify the algorithm and performance. The experimental results show that the algorithm is effective and the platform has good performance.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed public ledgers which holds sensitive and invariant data in an encrypted and secured manner to ensure no mid-way alterations are possible in a transaction, proving user a secure and trustable facility. While cryptocurrency like Bitcoin are major and most popular faces, Blockchain technology has gained a huge momentum recently. Objective of this paper is to layout a detailed survey on blockchain technology, to explain some important terminologies related to Blockchain, to compare IoT and traditional network on the basis of security, compatibility and capacity and to provide an insight on blockchain based IoT and Industrial IoT. Later, the challenges faced while adopting blockchain in IoT and it's future scopes are discussed.
The blockchain provides an immutable, transparent, and decentralized method for data storage. However, as the volume of data gradually increases, the public blockchain system requires significant storage space. Also the synchronization of blank nodes needs much transmission bandwidth. This paper introduces a method to compress the size of transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain by replacing hash pointers with index pointers. Simulations show that the proposed method can reduce the storage space of the Bitcoin blockchain by up to 12.71%.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technology is currently one of the most popular topics in the field of information technology. Blockchain is often associated with cryptocurrency or electronic cash, but it can also be extended to any interconnected information blocks. Now blockchain finds application in areas such as financial transactions, user identification, or the creation of cybersecurity technologies. So, in this framework we shall talk about that despite the fact that blockchain technology is reliable and supportive, the security issues and challenges of this technology cannot be left out especially when it comes to building personal privacy protection.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Since the advent of the web, the number of users who started using the internet for everyday purpose has increased tremendously. Most of the common purposes are to access their data whenever they want and wherever they want. So many companies have started providing these services to normal users. These companies store huge volume of data in the data centers. So protecting the integrity of the data is the main responsibility of these companies. Blockchain is one of the trending solutions that gives storage immutability to the users. This chapter starts with the working of blockchain and smart contracts and advantages and disadvantages of blockchain and smart contracts and then goes on to explain how blockchain can be integrated into the internet of things (IOT). This chapter ends with an architecture based on the proof-of-concept for access management, which is blockchain-based fully distributed architecture.
L. B. Krithika, Abhisek Mazumdar, Rajesh Kaluri, Wang Jing
Blockchain technology is very trending and promising. It can revolutionize the traditional way of manipulation of data in many industries. There are industries which blockchain can disrupt: banking, cyber security, smart contract, insurance, cloud storage, government, healthcare, media streaming. The decentralized approach of blockchain using peer-to-peer system to verify the correct record of the ledger, which builds a trust in the system. A system can be compiled and made to get adopted with the concept of smart contract. The aim of the work is to develop a system that is flexible enough to get implemented in the industries like finance, cyber security, data storage, buying and selling of properties, healthcare, etc. This will use a one-way encryption method known as SHA-256. A block with the 256-character code bind with the other metadata of the block will be termed as a smart contract for the item.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an enabling technology for numerous initiatives worldwide such as manufacturing, smart cities, precision agriculture, and eHealth. The massive field data aggregation of distributed administered IoT devices allows new insights and actionable information for dynamic intelligent decision-making. In such distributed environments, data integrity, referring to reliability and consistency, is deemed insufficient and requires immediate facilitation. In this article, we introduce a distributed ledger (DLT)-based system for ensuring IoT data integrity which securely processes the aggregated field data. Its uniqueness lies in the embedded use of IOTA’s ledger, called “The Tangle”, used to transmit and store the data. Our approach shifts from a cloud-centric IoT system, where the Super nodes simply aggregate and push data to the cloud, to a node-centric system, where each Super node owns the data pushed in a distributed and decentralized database (i.e., the Tangle). The backend serves as a consumer of data and a provider of additional resources, such as administration panel, analytics, data marketplace, etc. The proposed implementation is highly modularand constitutes a significant contribution to the Open Source communities, regarding blockchain and IoT.
Machine learning and blockchain are two of the most notable technologies of recent years. The first is the foundation of artificial intelligence and big data analysis, and the second has significantly disrupted the financial industry. Both technologies are data‐driven, and thus there are rapidly growing interests in integrating both for more secure and efficient data sharing and analysis. In this article, we review existing research on combining machine learning and blockchain technologies and demonstrate that they can collaborate efficiently and effectively. In the end, we point out some future directions and expect more research on deeper integration of these two promising technologies.
Liviu Hirtan, Piotr Krawiec, Ciprian Dobre, Jordi Mongay Batalla
Blockchain is a technology that offers the ability to create new business models and solves trust issues in a more efficient way. It can lead to many research opportunities and business innovations. Academia and industry proposed many blockchain based software solutions within a wide range of domains. In this paper we present a system design where blockchain technology is proposed to be used in the healthcare system, where the vital information regarding the medical analyses are shared between hospitals, medical clinics and research institutes based on access policies defined by the patients. In order to protect confidential data, our solution involves the use of two types of chains: a private one, the sidechain, which keeps information about real ID of the patients, and a public one, the mainchain, which stores information about patients' health data marked with a temporary ID. To test it, we developed the design using Hyperledger Fabric framework. Presented experimental results show good performance of the system in relation to the following metrics: 1) the time needed to identify the medical data for a particular patient, and 2) the mainchain propagation time of all the blocks within the peer to peer network.
The design of access control mechanisms for healthcare systems is challenging: it must strike the right balance between permissions and restrictions. In this work, we propose a novel approach that is based on the Blockchain technology for storage patient medical data and create an audit logging system able to protect health data from unauthorized modification and access. The proposed method consists of a tree structure: a main chain linked with the patient's identity and one or several Subchains which are used for storing additional critical data (e.g., medical diagnoses or access logs).
In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient blockchain-based data trading approach for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). First, we apply consortium blockchain technologies to ensure secure and truthful data trading, and propose a general blockchain-based data trading framework for IoV. Second, to improve the efficiency of data trading and encourage more participants to trade data, we propose an iterative double auction mechanism with the purpose of achieving social welfare maximization, in which pricing rules of buyers and sellers are designed to induce participants to submit bids and to decide the amount of traded data and its price among buyers and sellers. In particular, in our algorithm, the hidden information of individuals can be extracted gradually so that the privacy of participants in data trading can be protected well. Finally, the experimental results show the efficiency of our proposed algorithm. Moreover, the correctness of social welfare maximization, incentive compatibility, individually rationality, and weakly budget balance of our auction mechanism are verified in the experiments.
IoT devices or smart devices have become a part and parcel of the human existence. Every day, the counts of devices, which are being connected to the internet, are becoming unquantifiable. One among the prominent applications in commercial IoT is medical IoT. Privacy maintenance and ensuring security of user data is a major concern in certain scenarios such as that of the medical IoT. Conventionally the data generated from a sensor should be highly confidential and private. The centralized data management adopted in majority of IoT systems are having high set up cost and are prone to single point of failure and does not provide any guarantee of data authenticity and security. The inherent nature of IoT systems such as limited storage and low processing capabilities make them an unsuitable candidate for the use of complex and highly computational cryptographic algorithms. Even though the use of modern server platforms such as the AWS and Google helped in mitigating the issues of high setup cost and less security, the problems of data authenticity and access control still persists. Blockchain is a decentralized mechanism for secure management and exchange of data in any IoT system, particularly healthcare. Hence blockchain with its inherent properties of immutability, consensus mechanism, provenance and encryption can solve the problems of authenticity and access control in IoT. There exists several research works related to IoT security with the inclusion of blockchain framework. However, a collation of various works related to blockchain IoT is absent in the literature and this paper aims to provide a detailed amalgam of the wide range of works in blockchain IoT. We also aim to highlight the necessity of securing an IoT system and present a comparison of blockchain and other security techniques in terms of robustness, setup cost, risk of failure etc. and also propose an ideal security technique that can be adopted for IoT applications.
Recently, leading research communities have been investigating the use of blockchains for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, where multiple participants, or agents, collaborate to make consensus decisions. To achieve this, the data in the blockchain storage have to be transformed into blockchain knowledge. We refer to these types of blockchains as knowledge-based blockchains. Knowledge-based blockchains are potentially useful in building efficient risk assessment applications. An earlier work introduced probabilistic blockchain which facilitates knowledge-based blockchains. This paper proposes an extension for the probabilistic blockchain concept. The design of a reputation management framework, suitable for such blockchains, is proposed. The framework has been developed to suit the requirements of a wide range of applications. In particular, we apply it to the detection of malicious nodes and reduce their effect on the probabilistic blockchains' consensus process. We evaluate the framework by comparing it to a baseline using several adversarial strategies. Further, we analyze the collaborative decisions with and without the malicious node detection. Both results show a sustainable performance, where the proposed work outperforms others and achieves excellent results.
Blockchain came to prominence as the distributed ledger underneath Bitcoin, which protects the transaction histories in a fully-connected, peer-to-peer network. For safety against double-spending, a bitcoin transaction is only considered to be unrevokable after it is within a chain of at least six mined blocks on the blockchain-termed "six confirmations" for short. Besides the use for securing financial activity, blockchain technology is now also merged with various emerging applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET). However, such emerging applications may have comparatively low Internet connectivity due to incorporating mobile devices, that may range away from network infrastructure. This paper investigates the impact of network latency on blockchain forking behavior and possible violations of the aforementioned six confirmations convention for transaction approval. To speed up our simulations, we simplify the lockchain's data structure, and avoid the extensive computation required in proof-of-work (PoW). Through simulation, we show that the six confirmations convention is sensitive to the peer-to-peer network latency, and also show how quickly it is violated with an easier difficulty of PoW mining. Unsurprisingly, the speed at which all nodes on the blockchain converge is shown to be severely affected by the latency of the underlying peer-to-peer network. It is also shown the extent to which nodes with more frequent Internet connectivity can gain an unfair advantage in terms of proof-ofwork mining rewards. We thus recommend that networks with heterogeneous latency profiles across nodes monitor fairness, and potentially preclude some nodes from being miners.