David Froelicher, Patricia Egger, João Sá Sousa, Jean Louis Raisaro · 8 authors
Abstract Current solutions for privacy-preserving data sharing among multiple parties either depend on a centralized authority that must be trusted and provides only weakest-link security (e.g., the entity that manages private/secret cryptographic keys), or leverage on decentralized but impractical approaches (e.g., secure multi-party computation). When the data to be shared are of a sensitive nature and the number of data providers is high, these solutions are not appropriate. Therefore, we present U n L ynx , a new decentralized system for efficient privacy-preserving data sharing. We consider m servers that constitute a collective authority whose goal is to verifiably compute on data sent from n data providers. U n L ynx guarantees the confidentiality, unlinkability between data providers and their data, privacy of the end result and the correctness of computations by the servers. Furthermore, to support differentially private queries, U n L ynx can collectively add noise under encryption. All of this is achieved through a combination of a set of new distributed and secure protocols that are based on homomorphic cryptography, verifiable shuffling and zero-knowledge proofs. U n L ynx is highly parallelizable and modular by design as it enables multiple security/privacy vs. runtime tradeoffs. Our evaluation shows that U n L ynx can execute a secure survey on 400,000 personal data records containing 5 encrypted attributes, distributed over 20 independent databases, for a total of 2,000,000 ciphertexts, in 24 minutes.
Deepak K. Tosh, Sachin Shetty, Xueping Liang, Charles Kamhoua · 5 authors
Blockchain has recently attracted tremendous interest due to its ability to enhance security and privacy through a immutable shared distributed ledger. Blockchain's ability to detect integrity violations are particularly key in providing assured data provenance in cloud platform. The practical adoption of blockchain will largely hinge on consensus protocols meeting performance and security guarantees. In this paper, we present the design issues for consensus protocols for blockchain based cloud provenance. We present the blockchain based data provenance framework for cloud. We find that there are performance and security challenges in adopting proof-of-work consensus protocol within this framework. We present unique design challenges and opportunities in developing proof-of-stake for data provenance in cloud platform.
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of\ntransactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive the environment\nfor building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology\nhas been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the\nprevious work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable\nscientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the\nprovenance records. In this work, we leverage blockchain as a platform to\nfacilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and\nmanagement. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance\nmodel (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed\nframework can efficiently and securely capture and validate provenance data,\nand prevent any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the\nmajority of the participants are honest.\n
Secret sharing is an important component of cryptography protocols and has a wide range of practical applications. However, the existing secret sharing schemes cannot apply to computationally weak devices and cannot efficiently guarantee fairness. In this study, a novel outsourcing secret sharing scheme is proposed. In the setting of outsourcing secret sharing, clients only need a small amount of decryption and verification operations, while the expensive reconstruction computation and verifiable computation can be outsourced to cloud service providers (CSP). The scheme does not require complex interactive argument or zero‐knowledge proof. The malicious behaviour of clients and CSP can be detected in time. Moreover, the CSP cannot get any useful information about the secret, and it is fair for every client to obtain the secret. At the end of this study, the authors prove the security of the proposed scheme and compare it with other secret sharing schemes.
Abstract—As data is having an increasingly relevant role<br> in dierent business fields, ensuring integrity has become<br> fundamental. Modern databases rely on transaction history<br> written on redo logs to allow for data restore. However, if<br> redo logs are (maliciously) forged, data can actually be lost or<br> altered. Due its strong data integrity guarantees, blockchain<br> technology can be employed to ensure log integrity, but its<br> current performance limitations hinder actual exploitations.<br> In previous work, we proposed a layered blockchain-based<br> architecture for distributed (federated) database redo logs: a<br> fast first layer blockchain, anchored to a secure second layer<br> blockchain, based on proof-of-work to achieve strong integrity.<br> Here, we present an implementation and an experimental<br> evaluation of a prototype of that architecture, which employs a<br> total consensus algorithm on the first layer blockchain. Finally,<br> to improve availability and scalability, we refine our solution<br> by investigating, respectively, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus<br> and a Distributed Hash Table solution to shard the first<br> layer blockchain ledger among available nodes.
Carlos Oliver, Alessandro Ricottone, Pericles Philippopoulos
We propose a proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for using computational resources to solve NP-complete puzzles. The resulting blockchain will publicly store and improve solutions to problems with real world applications while maintaining a secure and fully functional transaction ledger.
Anand Kumar Mishra, Shrikant Tiwari, Kanchan Naithani, Amit Kumar Tyagi
Blockchain has drawn attention as the next-generation financial technology due to its security that suits the informatization era. In particular, it provides security through the authentication of peers that share virtual cash, encryption, and the generation of hash value. According to the global financial industry, the market for security-based blockchain technology is expected to grow to about USD 20 billion by 2020. In addition, blockchain can be applied beyond the Internet of Things (IoT) environment; its applications are expected to expand. Cloud computing has been dramatically adopted in all IT environments for its efficiency and availability. In this paper, we discuss the concept of blockchain technology and its hot research trends. In addition, we will study how to adapt blockchain security to cloud computing and its secure solutions in detail.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The rise of big data age in the Internet has led to the explosive growth of data size. However, trust issue has become the biggest problem of big data, leading to the difficulty in data safe circulation and industry development. The blockchain technology provides a new solution to this problem by combining non-tampering, traceable features with smart contracts that automatically execute default instructions. In this paper, we present a credible big data sharing model based on blockchain technology and smart contract to ensure the safe circulation of data resources.
Distributed ledger platforms based on blockchains provide a fully distributed form of data storage which can guarantee data integrity. Certain use cases, such as medical applications, can benefit from guarantees that the results of arbitrary queries against a Linked Dataset faithfully represent its contents as originally published, without tampering or data corruption. We describe potential approaches to the storage and querying of Linked Data with varying degrees of decentralisation and guarantees of integrity, using distributed ledgers, and discuss their a priori differences in performance, storage limitations and reliability, setting out a programme for future empirical research.
The Intelligent vehicle (IV) is experiencing revolutionary growth in research and industry, but it still suffers from many security vulnerabilities. Traditional security methods are incapable to provide secure IV communication. The major issues in IV communication, are trust, data accuracy and reliability of communication data in the communication channel. Blockchain technology works for the crypto currency, Bit-coin, which is recently used to build trust and reliability in peer-to-peer networks having similar topologies as IV Communication. In this paper, we are proposing, Intelligent Vehicle-Trust Point (IV-TP) mechanism for IV communication among IVs using Blockchain technology. The IVs communicated data provides security and reliability using our proposed IV-TP. Our IV-TP mechanism provides trustworthiness for vehicles behavior, and vehicles legal and illegal action. Our proposal presents a reward based system, an exchange of some IV-TP among IVs, during successful communication. For the data management of the IV-TP, we are using blockchain technology in the intelligent transportation system (ITS), which stores all IV-TP details of every vehicle and is accessed ubiquitously by IVs. In this paper, we evaluate our proposal with the help of intersection use case scenario for intelligent vehicles communication.
The Intelligent vehicle (IV) is experiencing revolutionary growth in research and industry, but it still suffers from many security vulnerabilities. Traditional security methods are incapable to provide secure IV data sharing. The major issues in IV data sharing are trust, data accuracy and reliability of data sharing data in the communication channel. Blockchain technology works for the crypto currency, Bit-coin, which is recently used to build trust and reliability in peer-to-peer networks having similar topologies as IV Data sharing. In this paper, we have proposed Intelligent Vehicle data sharing we are proposing a trust environment based Intelligent Vehicle framework. In proposed framework, we have use the blockchain technology as backbone of the IV data-sharing environment. The blockchain technology is provide the trust environment between the vehicles with the based on proof of driving.
Joshua Lind, Christian Priebe, Divya Muthukumaran, Dan O’Keeffe · 12 authors
Trusted execution support in modern CPUs, as offered by Intel SGX enclaves , can protect applications in untrusted environments. While prior work has shown that legacy applications can run in their entirety inside enclaves, this results in a large trusted computing base (TCB). Instead, we explore an approach in which we partition an applica- tion and use an enclave to protect only security-sensitive data and functions, thus obtaining a smaller TCB. We describe Glamdring , the first source-level parti- tioning framework that secures applications written in C using Intel SGX. A developer first annotates security- sensitive application data. Glamdring then automatically partitions the application into untrusted and enclave parts: (i) to preserve data confidentiality, Glamdring uses dataflow analysis to identify functions that may be ex- posed to sensitive data; (ii) for data integrity, it uses back- ward slicing to identify functions that may affect sensitive data. Glamdring then places security-sensitive functions inside the enclave, and adds runtime checks and crypto- graphic operations at the enclave boundary to protect it from attack. Our evaluation of Glamdring with the Mem- cached store, the LibreSSL library, and the Digital Bitbox bitcoin wallet shows that it achieves small TCB sizes and has acceptable performance overheads.
Mutual Distributed Ledger (MDL, aka blockchain) technology is in an emergent phase. New applications are under development; new uses are being researched; new consortia are being formed to explore MDL applications. Considering appropriate governance structures has had a lower priority so far, but trust in the increasingly popular systems will depend on their incorporating good governance principles. It was the aim of this study to identify those principles, in order to provide a roadmap for developers and users alike.
An analysis of the material collected through desktop research, as well as several discussions with practitioners and stakeholders including a conference and webinar on the subject, has revealed that effective governance in MDL systems relies on people rather than software and rests on three pillars:
Architecture: The role of the governance structure, its composition, remit, powers, responsibilities, and its relationship with users, is a critical component.
Accountability: Effective governance of MDLs enhances trust. Trust is enhanced when a governance structure is accountable to its stakeholders, transparent in its decision-making, and subject to periodic audit and third party review.
Action: The governance structure must develop strategic and risk management plans, which are delivered through effective performance management frameworks. Trust can be further enhanced through the use of the voluntary standards market to independently verify performance metrics and the systems established to compile them.
The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements, we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase the transparency with respect to the access and usage of data. We identify and discuss three different models for our approach with different granularity and scalability requirements where contracts can be used to encode data usage policies and provenance tracking information in a privacy-friendly way. From these three models we designed, implemented, and evaluated a model where contracts are deployed by data subjects for each data controller, and a model where subjects join contracts deployed by data controllers in case they accept the data handling conditions. Our implementations show in practice the feasibility and limitations of contracts for the purposes identified in this paper.
Christoph Prybila, Stefan Schulte, Christoph Hochreiner, Ingo Weber
The usage of process choreographies and decentralized Business Process Management Systems has been named as an alternative to centralized business process orchestration. In choreographies, control over a process instance is shared between independent parties, and no party has full control or knowledge during process runtime. Nevertheless, it is necessary to monitor and verify process instances during runtime for purposes of documentation, accounting, or compensation. To achieve business process runtime verification, this work explores the suitability of the Bitcoin blockchain to create a novel solution for choreographies. The resulting approach is realized in a fully-functional software prototype. This software solution is evaluated in a qualitative comparison. Findings show that our blockchain-based approach enables a seamless execution monitoring and verification of choreographies, while at the same time preserving anonymity and independence of the process participants. Furthermore, the prototype is evaluated in a performance analysis.
Traditional cloud storage has relied almost exclusively on large storage providers, who act as trusted third parties to transfer and store data. This model poses a number of issues including data availability, high operational cost, and data security. In this paper, we introduce a system that leverages blockchain technology to provide a secure distributed data storage with keyword search service. The system allows the client to upload their data in encrypted form, distributes the data content to cloud nodes and ensures data availability using cryptographic techniques. It also provides the data owner a capability to grant permission for others to search on her data. Finally, the system supports private keyword search over the encrypted dataset.
It is a challenge to ensure data integrity for cloud-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications because of the inherently dynamic nature of IoT data. The available frameworks of data integrity verification with public auditability cannot avoid the Third Party Auditors (TPAs). However, in a dynamic environment, such as the IoT, the reliability of the TPA-based frameworks is far from being satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework for Data Integrity Service. Under such framework, a more reliable data integrity verification can be provided for both the Data Owners and the Data Consumers, without relying on any Third Party Auditor (TPA). In this paper, the relevant protocols and a subsequent prototype system, which is implemented to evaluate the feasibility of our proposals, are presented. The performance evaluation of the implemented prototype system is conducted, and the test results are discussed. The work lays a foundation for our future work on dynamic data integrity verification in a fully decentralized environment.
ABSTRACT Since 2009, blockchain has served as a potentially transformative information technology expected to be as revolutionary as the Internet. Originally developed as a methodology to record cryptocurrency transactions, blockchain's functionality has evolved into a large number of applications, such as banking, financial markets, insurance, voting systems, leasing contracts, and government service. Despite such advancements, the application of blockchain to accounting and assurance remains under-explored. This paper aims to provide an initial discussion on how blockchain could enable a real-time, verifiable, and transparent accounting ecosystem. Additionally, blockchain has the potential to transform current auditing practices, resulting in a more precise and timely automatic assurance system.
Sachin Shetty, Val A. Red, Charles Kamhoua, Kevin Kwiat · 5 authors
Ever increasing adoption of cloud technology scales up the activities like creation, exchange, and alteration of cloud data objects, which create challenges to track malicious activities and security violations. Addressing this issue requires implementation of data provenance framework so that each data object in the federated cloud environment can be tracked and recorded but cannot be modified. The blockchain technology gives a promising decentralized platform to build tamper-proof systems. Its incorruptible distributed ledger/blockchain complements the need of maintaining cloud data provenance. In this paper, we present a cloud based data provenance framework using block chain which traces data record operations and generates provenance data. We anchor provenance data records into block chain transactions, which provide validation on provenance data and preserve user privacy at the same time. Once the provenance data is uploaded to the global block chain network, it is extremely challenging to tamper the provenance data. Besides, the provenance data uses hashed user identifiers prior to uploading so the blockchain nodes cannot link the operations to a particular user. The framework ensures that the privacy is preserved. We implemented the architecture on ownCloud, uploaded records to blockchain network, stored records in a provenance database and developed a prototype in form of a web service.
Emerging decentralized storage services such as Storj and Filecoin show promise as a new paradigm for data outsourcing. These services tie cryptocurrency to personal storage resources and leverage blockchain technology to ensure data integrity in distributed networks. Compared to current cloud storage, they are expected to be more scalable, cost effective, and secure. In addition to the features above, strong guarantees of data privacy are seriously desired due to today's prevalent data leak and abuse incidents. However, simply using end-to-end encryption limits the search capability and thus will degrade the user experience. In this paper, we propose an encrypted decentralized storage architecture that can support trustworthy and private keyword search functions. We start from searchable encryption to achieve search on encrypted data. Yet, only adopting this primitive is not sufficient to address particular threats in our target decentralized service model. Service peers would maliciously return incorrect results, while user peers would fraudulently refuse to pay service fees. To resolve those threats, we devise specific secure data addition and keyword search protocols to enable client-side verifiability and blockchain based fair judgments on the search results. For practical considerations, we integrate an efficient dynamic searchable encryption scheme to our protocols as an instantiation to lower the blockchain overhead. Our security and performance analysis indicates the advance of the proposed architecture.
Xueping Liang, Sachin Shetty, Deepak K. Tosh, Charles Kamhoua · 6 authors
Cloud data provenance is metadata that records the history of the creation and operations performed on a cloud data object. Secure data provenance is crucial for data accountability, forensics and privacy. In this paper, we propose a decentralized and trusted cloud data provenance architecture using blockchain technology. Blockchain-based data provenance can provide tamper-proof records, enable the transparency of data accountability in the cloud, and help to enhance the privacy and availability of the provenance data. We make use of the cloud storage scenario and choose the cloud file as a data unit to detect user operations for collecting provenance data. We design and implement ProvChain, an architecture to collect and verify cloud data provenance, by embedding the provenance data into blockchain transactions. ProvChain operates mainly in three phases: (1) provenance data collection, (2) provenance data storage, and (3) provenance data validation. Results from performance evaluation demonstrate that ProvChain provides security features including tamper-proof provenance, user privacy and reliability with low overhead for the cloud storage applications.
Intellectual-property (IP) rights refer to the ownership of intellectual achievement.Microfilms are getting popular nowdue to their low production cost. However, their IP rights are often violated as microfilms can be copied and transmitted via mobile devices easily.This paper proposes using blockchain (BC) to develop an IP-protection model for microfilms. Information registered at a BC cannot be changed without being notified, and this provides an ideal setting for IP protection. This paper proposes a BC-based framework for microfilms in China.