Xi Lin, Jianhua Li, Jun Wu, Haoran Liang · 5 authors
Nowadays, benefit from more powerful edge computing devices and edge artificial intelligence (edge-AI) could be introduced into Internet of Things (IoT) to find the knowledge derived from massive sensory data, such as cyber results or models of classification, and detection and prediction from physical environments. Heterogeneous edge-AI devices in IoT will generate isolated and distributed knowledge slices, thus knowledge collaboration and exchange are required to complete complex tasks in IoT intelligent applications with numerous selfish nodes. Therefore, knowledge trading is needed for paid sharing in edge-AI enabled IoT. Most existing works only focus on knowledge generation rather than trading in IoT. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) knowledge market to make knowledge tradable in edge-AI enabled IoT. We first propose an implementation architecture of the knowledge market. Moreover, we develop a knowledge consortium blockchain for secure and efficient knowledge management and trading for the market, which includes a new cryptographic currency knowledge coin, smart contracts, and a new consensus mechanism proof of trading. Besides, a noncooperative game based knowledge pricing strategy with incentives for the market is also proposed. The security analysis and performance simulation show the security and efficiency of our knowledge market and incentive effects of knowledge pricing strategy. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to propose an efficient and incentive P2P knowledge market in edge-AI enabled IoT.
User's digital identity information has privacy and security requirements. Privacy requirements include confidentiality of the identity information itself, anonymity of those who verify and consume a user's identity information and unlinkability of online transactions which involve a user's identity. Security requirements include correctness, ownership assurance and prevention of counterfeits of a user's identity information. Such privacy and security requirements, although conflicting, are critical for identity management systems enabling the exchange of users' identity information between different parties during the execution of online transactions. Addressing all such requirements, without a centralized party managing the identity exchange transactions, raises several challenges. This paper presents a decentralized protocol for privacy preserving exchange of users' identity information addressing such challenges. The proposed protocol leverages advances in blockchain and zero knowledge proof technologies, as the main building blocks. We provide prototype implementations of the main building blocks of the protocol and assess its performance and security.
David Hawig, C. Zhou, Sebastian Fuhrhop, Andre S Fialho · 5 authors
BACKGROUND: Distributed ledger technology (DLT) holds great potential to improve health information exchange. However, the immutable and transparent character of this technology may conflict with data privacy regulations and data processing best practices. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to develop a proof-of-concept system for immutable, interoperable, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant exchange of blood glucose data. METHODS: Given that there is no ideal design for a DLT-based patient-provider data exchange solution, we proposed two different variations for our proof-of-concept system. One design was based purely on the public IOTA distributed ledger (a directed acyclic graph-based DLT) and the second used the same public IOTA ledger in combination with a private InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) cluster. Both designs were assessed according to (1) data reversal risk, (2) data linkability risks, (3) processing time, (4) file size compatibility, and (5) overall system complexity. RESULTS: The public IOTA design slightly increased the risk of personal data linkability, had an overall low processing time (requiring mean 6.1, SD 1.9 seconds to upload one blood glucose data sample into the DLT), and was relatively simple to implement. The combination of the public IOTA with a private IPFS cluster minimized both reversal and linkability risks, allowed for the exchange of large files (3 months of blood glucose data were uploaded into the DLT in mean 38.1, SD 13.4 seconds), but involved a relatively higher setup complexity. CONCLUSIONS: For the specific use case of blood glucose explored in this study, both designs presented a suitable performance in enabling the interoperable exchange of data between patients and providers. Additionally, both systems were designed considering the latest guidelines on personal data processing, thereby maximizing the alignment with recent GDPR requirements. For future works, these results suggest that the conflict between DLT and data privacy regulations can be addressed if careful considerations are made regarding the use case and the design of the data exchange system.
We present models that utilize smart contracts and interledger mechanisms to\nprovide decentralized authorization for constrained IoT devices. The models\ninvolve different tradeoffs in terms of cost, delay, complexity, and privacy,\nwhile exploiting key advantages of smart contracts and multiple blockchains\nthat communicate with interledger mechanisms. These include immutably recording\nhashes of authorization information and policies in smart contracts, resilience\nthrough the execution of smart contract code on all blockchain nodes, and\ncryptographically linking transactions and IoT events recorded on different\nblockchains using hash and time-lock mechanisms. The proposed models are\nevaluated on the public Ethereum testnets Rinkeby and Ropsten, in terms of\nexecution cost (gas), delay, and reduction of data that needs to be sent to the\nconstrained IoT devices.\n
Koosha Mohammad Hossein, Mohammad Esmaeili, Tooska Dargahi, Ahmad Khonsari
Since the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT), e-health has become one of the main research topics. Due to the sensitivity of patient data, preserving the privacy of patients appears to be challenging. In healthcare applications, patient data are usually stored in the cloud, which makes it difficult for the users to have enough control over their data. However, due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is the data subject's right to know where and how his data has been stored, who can access his data and to what extent. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based architecture for e-health applications which provides an efficient privacy-preserving access control mechanism. We take advantage of Blockchain (BC) special features, i.e., immutability and anonymity of users, while modifying the classic blockchain structure in order to overcome its challenges in IoT applications (i.e., low throughput, high overhead and latency). To this end, we cluster the miners of BC, store and process data at the nearest cluster to the patient. While our proposal is a work in progress, we provide a security analysis of our proposed architecture.
Medical diagnostics such as medical tests, x-rays etc. are stored in two ways- Physical records and Online records, which cannot be accessed by patients without authorized permission. Even doctors/medical professionals do not get this data during crucial times. This could be avoided by sharing medical data of patients to the doctors and patient directly. Present storage method is also at a security threat of being tampered and accessed by unauthorized. This paper proposes blockchain network to address the issues related to medical records system which is easily accessed by the patient or doctor to take better and effective decisions ensuring immutability. Doctors view/update past visits for a medical record, if given the permission to by the respective patients. The proposed model uses Hyperledger Composer, Composer REST server, Hyperledger Fabric and Angular 4. Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain framework thus allowing the model to have permission control. The UI allows doctors/patients to easily access the patients records as and when required. The patients grant permission to a particular doctor when required and revoke access once the doctor as completed a visit. Similarly every doctor is allowed to view a patients data only when granted permission and is then allowed to update the history. Only a doctor can update the patient's history to ensure data integrity.
Liang Wang, Gilad Asharov, Rafael Pass, Thomas Ristenpart · 5 authors
We explore how to build a blind certificate authority (CA). Unlike conventional CAs, which learn the exact identity of those registering a public key, a blind CA can simultaneously validate an identity and provide a certificate binding a public key to it, without ever learning the identity. Blind CAs would therefore allow bootstrapping truly anonymous systems in which no party ever learns who participates. In this work we focus on constructing blind CAs that can bind an email address to a public key. To do so, we first introduce secure channel injection (SCI) protocols. These allow one party (in our setting, the blind CA) to insert a private message into another party's encrypted communications. We construct an efficient SCI protocol for communications delivered over TLS, and use it to realize anonymous proofs of account ownership for SMTP servers. Combined with a zero-knowledge certificate signing protocol, we build the first blind CA that allows Alice to obtain a X.509 certificate binding her email address alice@domain.com to a public key of her choosing without ever revealing ``alice'' to the CA. We show experimentally that our system works with standard email server implementations as well as Gmail.
In Blockchain networks involving multiple applications, the quality of service of an application is affected by the transaction ordering. We study a setting where each application is represented by a node, which might attempt to prioritize its own transactions through including them early in blocks added to the blockchain. A fair block proposal of a node follows a random selection of the transactions among the set of pending transactions the node is aware of. On the contrary, a dishonest node includes more of its transactions at the expense of transactions of other applications. In this work, we propose a toolbox of techniques to enforce such a fair block selection. First, we design an accurate statistical testing for the honesty of a proposal and explain it. Next, we describe a reputation system, documenting honesty of nodes to encourage fairness. Our last technique enforces fair block selection through concise commitments on the set of pending transactions known to a node.
May 1, 2019·2019 IEEE 5th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
With the development of big data and machine learning techniques, medical data sharing for the use of disease diagnosis has received considerable attention. Blockchain, as an emerging technology, has been widely used to resolve the efficiency and security issues in medical data sharing. However, the existing studies on blockchain-based medical data sharing have rarely concerned about the reasonable incentive mechanism. In this paper, we propose a cooperation model where medical data is shared via blockchain. We derive the topological relationships among the participants consisting of data owners, miners and third parties, and gradually develop the computational process of Shapley value revenue distribution. Specifically, we explore the revenue distribution under different consensuses of blockchain. Finally, we demonstrate the incentive effect and rationality of the proposed solution by analyzing the revenue distribution.
Shuming Seng, Xi Li, Changqing Luo, Hong Ji · 5 authors
The past few years have witnessed the explosive growth of mobile user equipment (UEs) and the popularity of computation-intensive applications, leading to a mobile edge computing paradigm for Ultra-dense wireless networks (UDNs). Since numerous UEs need to offload a large amount of computation tasks to edge servers/UEs, it is very challenging to coordinate computation offloading among UEs and edge servers in UDNs. To address this issue, we propose a decentralized computation offloading coordination platform that is based on the blockchain. Specifically, we first establish a blockchain platform for announcing computation offloading requests and coordinate computation offloading among UEs and edge servers. Then, we develop a modified GS-based user matching algorithm to find the matching relationship between offloading requester's computation tasks and the edge server/UEs. In particular, user matching is based on task execution time and energy consumption. We conduct simulations and provide extensive simulation results to show the significant performance improvement achieved by the proposed offloading scheme.
This paper proposes a new device-to-device edge computing and networks (D2D-ECN) framework which facilitates low-latency execution of real-time Internet-of Things applications through computation offloading with minimal overhead. Our framework accounts for key challenges of D2D-ECN in terms of the efficiency of the resource management and the resulting security concerns caused by lacking trustworthy between task owners and resource providers. In particular, we propose to use a blockchain-empowered framework for implementing resource trading and task assigment as the smart contracts. However, the existing Proof-of-Work (PoW) is impractical for the resource-constrained IoT devices due to high computational complexity of the mining process. Thus, we present a reputation-based consensus mechanism called proof-of-reputation (PoR), where the device with the highest reputation score is responsible for packaging the resource transactions and reputation records in the blockchain. Furthermore, we evaluate the reputation score of each device according to the current computation performance and history reputation. Security, feasibility analysis and numerical results show that our proposed computation offloading scheme can be deployed in the decentralized D2D-ECN system safely and effectively.
Raphael Matile, Bruno Rodrigues, Eder J. Scheid, Burkhard Stiller
Democracy in the digital age has attracted a lot of public attention in recent years. However, bringing the human right of secrecy in voting to electronic systems is difficult. Properties, such as the possibility of verifying universally that any vote counted was indeed carrying the decision made by a voter, are often conflicting and a trade-off must be found. This paper proposes a blockchain-based electronic voting system providing explicitly cast-as-intended verifiability. By using a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of knowledge any voter can verify that his or her encrypted vote represents the decision voted for while maintaining at the same time the secrecy of the ballot. In addition, any required cryptographic material can be generated in linear time with respect to the number of voters, making the system suitable for large scale elections, thus scalable.
A supply chain is a system that includes multiple entities such as suppliers, manufacturers, carriers, retailers, and customers. How to encourage the willingness to cooperate and share information between these entities has always been one of the major challenges in the field of supply chain management. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) can help entities get real-time data in the supply chain to share the key information and reduce costs. However, the supply chain not only needs to know how to gather the data but also ensures that the data processed is not leaked. Since Blockchain, as the main technology of Bitcoin, has the advantages of traceability and anti-counterfeiting, blockchain is the right tool to tackle the date sharing problem in supply chain. In this paper, we connect IIoT devices to the blockchain by combining the monitoring and recording of IIoT devices and storing real-time data in the network by smart contract. In addition, a blockchain-based supply chain structure is proposed. This structure provides collaboration solutions between different entities in the supply chain. In this structure, a fine-grained data sharing scheme for supply chain is proposed. By setting access policies to the smart contract, only the companies that satisfy the attributes of access policies can execute the smart contract and view the details of the transaction. The proposed scheme ensures reliability of data in the supply chain, and the privacy protection of the chain.
Marcela Tuler de Oliveira, Lúcio Henrik A. Reis, Ricardo C. Carrano, Flávio Luiz Seixas · 10 authors
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are highly sensitive information shared among peers to keep up-to-date patient history. Providing security, privacy, and availability to these sensitive data is a challenge because, typically, after data publication the patient loses control over them. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach to secure EMR for healthcare applications, where access control is patient-centric. Our proposal keeps encrypted EMRs in the blockchain, and the patient shares the decryption key only with healthcare professionals in which he/she trusts. Blockchain allows untrusted node, in a distributed peer-to-peer network to correctly and verifiably interact with each other, without any reliable intermediary. We investigate the scalability of our approach through simulations. Results show that it scales well since increasing the number of nodes in the network implies a linear increase in the size of the stored chain. Results also reveal that the time for inserting a new EMR in the blockchain remains low even when the number of nodes in the network increases.
Shubhani Aggarwal, Mohammad Shojafar, Neeraj Kumar, Mauro Conti
Data Dissemination is the distribution of data/statistics to the end users. With the adoption of Internet of Drones (IoD) environment for data dissemination, an efficient scheme is proposed which provides data integrity, identity anonymity, authentication, authorization, accountability (AAA) to the system model. We propose a system model having Ethereum based public blockchain distributed network in order to secure drone communication for the data collection and transmission. The proposed model provides secure communication between the drones and the users in a decentralized way. In this paper, blockchain technology is used for the storage of collected data from the drones and update the information into the distributed ledgers to reduce the burden of drones. It also provides integrity, authentication, and authorization to the collected data by the drones in the system model. Motivated by this consideration, the goal of this paper is threefold. First, we select a forger node from the number of drones. Second, we create blocks and validate their processes. Third, we provide secure data dissemination by applying Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Afterward, we evaluate the security of the presented system model compared against the corresponding ones of some state-of-the-art in terms of communication time/cost. The results confirm that our system model is reliable and scalable for data dissemination in the IoD environment.
The main objective of the paper is to provide an answer to the question whether new technologies such as blockchain that enter various spheres of public life are safe for users and what impact they have on national legislations. Cryptocurrencies, which are based on blockchain technology, can be used as a means of payment, investment or capital accumulation. Therefore, blockchain becomes more and more popular. The main research method used in the paper consists of the analysis of legislation and jurisprudence as well as linguistic and purposive interpretation which affects the functioning of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. The introductory part of the paper contains a general historical outline and basic principles related to blockchain technology. Real and potential threats posed by the discussed technology are also discussed in the paper as well as the question whether governments or, more broadly, the international community, offer sufficient level of protection against risks related to the use of new technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Using blockchain to streamline logistic activities or to speed up transactions is useful in itself, but in the hands of private entities the technology may pose a risk of losing funds if not properly secured. The financial market is and should be supervised and controlled by the state which is the guarantor of economic freedom. Another vital question is whether legislators keep up with the advances in technology. It seems that the development of blockchain technology triggers development of new legal regulations. The more blockchain technology enters everyday life, the more legal documents appear in the form of case law, legal provisions, opinions etc. The role of these documents is to regulate, define and specify new technologies as they appear.
In the era of big data, the sale of digital data has became a promising business. Although data trading brings a big dividend, it still has the issues of data authentic right and infringement tracking difficulty. The solutions of monitoring consumers and platform regulation introduce privacy and security issues. To overcome these challenges, a blockchain-based accountable data trading platform is proposed. The platform uses the blockchain technology to build a distributed secure and trusted environment for big data trading. Before listing datasets on the data market, a secure dataset similarity comparison method is used to detect illegal resale. The misbehavior of customers can be traced by the blockchain nodes because the key points of the data trading are recorded in the blockchain. Through secure analysis and performance evaluation, we evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the trading platform.
Dirk van Bokkem, Rico Hageman, Gijs Koning, Luat Nguyen · 5 authors
With the advancement of technology and subsequently the age of digital information, online trustworthy identification has become increasingly more important. With respect to the various data breaches and privacy regulations, the current identity solutions are not fully optimized. In this paper, we will take a look at several Self-Sovereign Identity solutions which are already available. Some of them are built upon blockchain technology as this already provides decentralised persistent data and consensus. We will explore the emerging landscape of Self-Sovereign Identity solutions and dissect their implementations under multiple aspect criteria to determine the necessity of blockchain technology in this field. We conclude that blockchain technology is not explicitly required for a Self-Sovereign Identity solution but it is a good foundation to build up on, due to various technical advantages that the blockchain has to offer.
While most of humanity is suddenly on the net, the value of this singularity is hampered by the lack of credible digital identities: Social networking, person-to-person transactions, democratic conduct, cooperation and philanthropy are all hampered by the profound presence of fake identities, as illustrated by Facebook's removal of 5.4Bn fake accounts since the beginning of 2019. Here, we introduce the fundamental notion of a \emph{genuine personal identifier}---a globally unique and singular identifier of a person---and present a foundation for a decentralized, grassroots, bottom-up process in which every human being may create, own, and protect the privacy of a genuine personal identifier. The solution employs mutual sureties among owners of personal identifiers, resulting in a mutual-surety graph reminiscent of a web-of-trust. Importantly, this approach is designed for a distributed realization, possibly using distributed ledger technology, and does not depend on the use or storage of biometric properties. For the solution to be complete, additional components are needed, notably a mechanism that encourages honest behavior and a sybil-resilient governance system.
Apr 20, 2019·MaxEnt 2019 - Proceedings of the 39th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering, Garching, Germany, 30 June - 5 July 2019
Randomization is an integral part of well-designed statistical trials, and is also a required procedure in legal systems. Implementation of honest, unbiased, understandable, secure, traceable, auditable and collusion resistant randomization procedures is a mater of great legal, social and political importance. Given the juridical and social importance of randomization, it is important to develop procedures in full compliance with the following desiderata: (a) Statistical soundness and computational efficiency; (b) Procedural, cryptographical and computational security; (c) Complete auditability and traceability; (d) Any attempt by participating parties or coalitions to spuriously influence the procedure should be either unsuccessful or be detected; (e) Open-source programming; (f) Multiple hardware platform and operating system implementation; (g) User friendliness and transparency; (h) Flexibility and adaptability for the needs and requirements of multiple application areas (like, for example, clinical trials, selection of jury or judges in legal proceedings, and draft lotteries). This paper presents a simple and easy to implement randomization protocol that assures, in a formal mathematical setting, full compliance to the aforementioned desiderata for randomization procedures.
Mohamed El Ghazouani, Moulay Ahmed El Kiram, Latifa Er-Rajy
Recently, data storage represents one of the most important services in Cloud Computing. The cloud provider should ensure two major requirements which are data integrity and storage efficiency. Blockchain data structure and the efficient data deduplication represent possible solutions to address these exigencies. Several approaches have been proposed, some of them implement deduplication in Cloud server side, which involves a lot of computation to eliminate the redundant data and it becomes more and more complex. Therefore, this paper proposed an efficient, reliable and secure approach, in which the authors propose a Multi-Agent System in order to manipulate deduplication technique that permits to reduce data volumes thereby reduce storage overhead. On the other side, the loss of physical control over data introduces security challenges such as data loss, data tampering and data modification. To solve similar problems, the authors also propose Blockchain as a database for storing metadata of client files. This database serves as logging database that ensures data integrity auditing function.
Marco Alessi, Alessio Camillò, Enza Giangreco, Marco Matera · 6 authors
Sharing personal data with service providers is a fundamental resource for the times we live in. But data sharing represents an unavoidable issue, due to improper data treatment, lack of users' awareness to whom they are sharing with, wrong or excessive data sharing from end users who ignore they are exposing personal information. The problem becomes even more complicate if we try to consider the devices around us: how to share devices we own, so that we can receive pervasive services, based on our contexts and device functionalities. The European Authority has provided the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in order to implement protection of sensitive data in each EU member, throughout certification mechanisms (according to Art. 42 GDPR). The certification assures compliance to the regulation, which represent a mandatory requirement for any service which may come in contact with sensitive data. Still the certification is an open process and not constrained by strict rule. In this paper we describe our decentralized approach in sharing personal data in the era of smart devices, being those considered sensitive data as well. Having in mind the centrality of users in the ownership of the data, we have proposed a decentralized Personal Data Store prototype, which stands as a unique data sharing endpoint for third party services. Even if blockchain technologies may seem fit to solve the issue of data protection, because of the absence of a central authority, they lay to additional concerns especially relating such technologies with specifications described in the regulation. The current work offers a contribution in the advancements of personal data sharing management systems in a distributed environment by presenting a real prototype and an architectural blueprint, which advances the state of the art in order to meet the GDPR regulation. Address those arisen issues, from a technological perspective, stands as an important challenge, in order to empower end users in owning their personal data for real.
Yang Xiao, Ning Zhang, Jin Li, Wenjing Lou · 5 authors
The abundance and rich varieties of data are enabling many transformative applications of big data analytics that have profound societal impacts. However, there are also increasing concerns regarding the improper use of individual data owner's private data. In this paper, we propose PrivacyGuard, a system that leverages blockchain smart contract and trusted execution environment (TEE) to enable individual's control over the access and usage of their private data. Smart contracts are used to specify data usage policy, i.e., who can use what data under which conditions and what analytics to perform, while the distributed blockchain ledger is used to keep an irreversible and non-repudiable data usage record. To address the efficiency problem of on-chain contract execution and to prevent exposing private data on the publicly viewable blockchain, PrivacyGuard incorporates a novel TEE-based off-chain contract execution engine along with a protocol to securely commit the execution result onto blockchain. We have built and deployed a prototype of PrivacyGuard with Ethereum and Intel SGX. Our experiment result demonstrates that PrivacyGuard fulfills the promised privacy goal and supports analytics on data from a considerable number of data owners.