Nazar Waheed, Ateeq Ur Rehman, Anushka Nehra, Mahnoor Farooq · 9 authors
The rapid adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in healthcare has introduced new challenges in preserving data privacy, security and patient safety. Traditional approaches need to ensure security and privacy while maintaining computational efficiency, particularly for resource-constrained IoT devices. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach by combining federated learning and blockchain technology to provide a secured and privacy-preserved solution for IoT-enabled healthcare applications. Our approach leverages a public-key cryptosystem that provides semantic security for local model updates, while blockchain technology ensures the integrity of these updates and enforces access control and accountability. The federated learning process enables a secure model aggregation without sharing sensitive patient data. We implement and evaluate our proposed framework using EMNIST datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving data privacy and security while maintaining computational efficiency. The results suggest that our hybrid approach can significantly enhance the development of secure and privacy-preserved IoT-enabled healthcare applications, offering a promising direction for future research in this field.
Yang Liu, Liangjie Lin, Lin Jiang, Weizhe Zhang · 9 authors
Abstract In the era of digital marketing, advertisements have become an indispensable part. One of the central challenges is advertising attribution which explains the amount of contribution every publisher has with the conversions. However, through observation, we have found that current advertising platforms attribution, advertisers attribution, or third‐party platforms attribution all have the problems of trust, data leakage, and data forgery. To fill the gap, our work's main contribution is combining blockchain with advertising attribution to propose an architecture for improving the privacy‐preserving degree and amount. In the proposed architecture, publishers, and advertisers can store real‐time data on a blockchain. The attribution results are credible because blockchain is decentralized, tamper‐proof, and traceable. We combine privacy set intersection and zero‐knowledge proof technology to increase the privacy of flowing data. In addition, we describe a preliminary prototype in which publishers, advertisers, and advertising platforms can get the corresponding attribution details. To show its effectiveness, we analyze it from different perspectives, including communication cost, attribution accuracy, and time cost. The results show that our communication cost has significantly reduced compared to the recent studies.
The Republic and Canton of Jura has decided to adopt and integrate the CERTUS digital seal and the KSI blockchain as the central technological components of their e-government portal and of their digital government transformation program. However, this project is taking place in turbulent times. While blockchain suffers from a bad reputation for ecological reasons and while the Swiss Confederation has rejected the selected blockchain solution, this article seeks to answer how to grasp the paradoxes of blockchain technologies acceptance by state citizens in an extreme management situation. Through an action research that aims to solve practical problems and create scientific knowledge, this study highlights the paradox of trust and considers blockchain technologies to enhance trust between citizens in politically stable countries. Furthermore, it investigates the paradox of transparency of blockchain technologies in an extreme management situation and proposes communicating in two levels of abstraction to limit tensions in turbulent times.
Farida Habib Semantha, Sami Azam, Bharanidharan Shanmugam, Kheng Cher Yeo
Privacy in Electronic Health Records (EHR) has become a significant concern in today’s rapidly changing world, particularly for personal and sensitive user data. The sheer volume and sensitive nature of patient records require healthcare providers to exercise an intense quantity of caution during EHR implementation. In recent years, various healthcare providers have been hit by ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks, halting many emergency services during COVID-19. Personal data breaches are becoming more common day by day, and privacy concerns are often raised when sharing data across a network, mainly due to transparency and security issues. To tackle this problem, various researchers have proposed privacy-preserving solutions for EHR. However, most solutions do not extensively use Privacy by Design (PbD) mechanisms, distributed data storage and sharing when designing their frameworks, which is the emphasis of this study. To design a framework for Privacy by Design in Electronic Health Records (PbDinEHR) that can preserve the privacy of patients during data collection, storage, access and sharing, we have analysed the fundamental principles of privacy by design and privacy design strategies, and the compatibility of our proposed healthcare principles with Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To demonstrate the proposed framework, ‘PbDinEHR’, we have implemented a Patient Record Management System (PRMS) to create interfaces for patients and healthcare providers. In addition, to provide transparency and security for sharing patients’ medical files with various healthcare providers, we have implemented a distributed file system and two permission blockchain networks using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain. This allows us to expand the proposed privacy by design mechanisms in the future to enable healthcare providers, patients, imaging labs and others to share patient-centric data in a transparent manner. The developed framework has been tested and evaluated to ensure user performance, effectiveness, and security. The complete solution is expected to provide progressive resistance in the face of continuous data breaches in the patient information domain.
As the use of digital subscription services like electronic tickets (E-ticketing) has grown in the age of e-commerce, so too have instances of copyright and violation. Because it is dependent on the centralized authority administration of authoritative institutions, the traditional E-ticketing system has a significant cost associated with it. Blockchain, which is a distributed system, has the characteristics of decentralization, anonymity, auditability, security, and persistency. These attributes allow it to address the problems that are currently being experienced by the E-ticketing system. In this study, we present a framework for E-ticketing that makes use of blockchain technology. The blockchain-based electronic ticketing model eliminates the involvement of third parties while also lowering the potential of data leaks and improving users' levels of privacy. This is accomplished by separating the credential information of users from the financial transactions. In the meanwhile, a blockchain implementation of the existing E-ticketing architecture has the potential to improve throughput, reduce the amount of redundant work, and boost the efficiency of consensus. An examination of the experimental data shows that the framework has a number of advantages, some of which are a high throughput, flexible scalability, and efficient ticket holding times.
Farhan Shikalgar, Farhaan Khan, Saud Kadiri, Anas Khan
Improving efficiency and performance is an important topic in the world today. As it is well-known, cooperative computing is an effective and traditional approach, and it is widely used in various fields. Inspired by this idea, take E- commerce for example, Security is one of its important indicators. In E-commerce, the security technology has become a major issue restricting the rapid development and popularization of E- commerce.With the advent of new technologies, Blockchain plays a major role in ecommerce sector.With the characteristics of decentralization, persistency, anonymity and auditability, blockchain technology is a new tool to solve the product traceability, information security and privacy, payment efficiency and cost reduction in cross- border e-business.Existing E-commerce models are trapped in a dilemma between the proof of ownership and privacy protection. To address this issue,We have made a platform Shoppingverse which is a blockchain based ecommerce.we design a privacy-preserving business protocol by employing private smart contracts in the negotiation phase. The protocol allows counterparties make deals without the disclosure of private information such as identities, addresses, and phone numbers. Moreover, we employ the zero- knowledge proof to guarantee the ownership. Key Words: Ethereum, Blockchain, Ecommerce, Smart Contract.
Metaverse is the new virtual world that runs in parallel to the physical world. Multiple verses come together to form a large metaverse where various users, avatars, and devices communicate with one another using various technologies like AR, VR, XR, and MR. The traditional way of implementing these solutions is in a centralized way. Consequently, the authentication mechanisms used in the Metaverse are also centralized. The centralized nature of authentication has many limitations and is prone to authentication security threats. As users and avatars move across various verses in the metaverse, it becomes critical to have a decentralized mechanism for authentication. There are certain decentralized solutions proposed in the literature. But they come with their own limitations. Blockchain is a decentralized ledger technology that can provide an anonymous identity mechanism. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-enabled architecture for the authentication of Avatars and users. This framework will ensure the decentralized authentication and traceability of the Avatar across the Metaverse. It will help in resolving security issues like impersonation, sever spoofing, identity interoperability, mutual authentication issues, replay, etc.
The emergence of marketplaces, such as Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook-Marketplace, enables significant restructuring of economic activities by facilitating transactions between independent supply and demand-side parties. However, in a traditional marketplace, gaining customers’ trust remains a persistent obstacle as it does not provide any purchase protection for buyers or sellers, needs more potential product verification, and relies upon third parties for the secure transference of products. Therefore, blockchain marketplaces are a new paradigm of peer-to-peer systems that eliminate the need for intermediaries by leveraging the transparency and trustworthiness of distributed ledger technology. However, all the Blockchain-based existing marketplaces, such as Origami and OpenSea, only provide support for digital products. Hence, this paper presents BlockPlace, a blockchain-based marketplace framework that supports both digital and physical products. IoT devices that serve as gateways between buyers and sellers ensure the authenticity of the products and increase security in the transference of goods. In addition, lockers rely upon the security of blockchain technology. We provide a detailed operational model for token generation, data management, governance, and our reputation system to illustrate that designing such a physical marketplace is sound, safe, and viable.
Recently, innovations in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), information and communication technologies, and machine learning (ML) have enabled smart healthcare. Pooling medical data into a centralized storage system to train a robust ML model, on the other hand, poses privacy, ownership, and regulatory challenges. Federated learning (FL) overcomes the prior problems with a centralized aggregator server and a shared global model. However, there are two technical challenges: 1) FL members need to be motivated to contribute their time and effort and 2) the centralized FL server may not accurately aggregate the global model. Therefore, combining the blockchain and FL can overcome these issues and provide high-level security and privacy for smart healthcare in a decentralized fashion. This study integrates two emerging technologies, blockchain and FL, for healthcare. We describe how blockchain-based FL plays a fundamental role in improving competent healthcare, where edge nodes manage the blockchain to avoid a single point of failure, while IoMT devices employ FL to use dispersed clinical data fully. We discuss the benefits and limitations of combining both technologies based on a content analysis approach. We emphasize three main research streams based on a systematic analysis of blockchain-empowered: 1) IoMT; 2) electronic health records (EHRs) and electronic medical records (EMRs) management; and 3) digital healthcare systems (internal consortium/secure alerting). In addition, we present a novel conceptual framework of blockchain-enabled FL for the digital healthcare environment. Finally, we highlight the challenges and future directions of combining blockchain and FL for healthcare applications.
In this study, the proposed model of acceptance factors of cryptocurrencies was analyzed to recognize user behavioral intention by using; web quality, facilitating conditions, perceived risk, e-WOM, and perceived ease of use with the mediating role of the trust factor. An efficient and effective better arrangement of understanding this unique virtual delusion of the use of cryptocurrencies has become an essential part of the virtual world for each stakeholder. So many deliberations on the regulatory frameworks of cryptocurrencies have taken place among government regulators, financial advisors, tax consultants, politicians, thinkers, economists, and lawmakers, but there is inconclusive evidence on legislation in Pakistan.
Abstract: Blockchain allows users and data providers to ensure authentication, authorization and data validity with proper multi-key exchange authentication for user identity and hash key for Blockchain so that the data is not just stored but also validated each time the user access. In this paper, we apply Zero Knowledge proof to a Strong rooms using RFID Card reader and Camera module IoT systems to prove that a prover without disclosing information such as public key enhances the anonymity of Blockchain
Privacy and verifiability are crucial security requirements in e-voting systems and combining them is considered to be a challenge given that they seem to be contradictory. On one hand, privacy means that cast votes cannot be traced to the corresponding voters. On the other hand, linkability of voters and their votes is a requirement of verifiability which has the consequence that a voter is able to check their vote in the election result. These two contradictory features can be addressed by adopting privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, which at the same time as achieving privacy, achieve verifiability. Many end-to-end schemes that support verifiability and privacy have the need for some voter action. This makes ballot casting more complex for voters. We propose the PVPBC voting system, which is an e-voting system that preserves privacy and verifiability without affecting voter usability. The PVPBC voting system uses an effective and distributed method of authorization, which is based on revocable anonymity, by making use of a permissioned distributed ledger and smart contract. In addition, the underlying PVPBC voting system satisfies election verifiability using the Selene voting scheme. The Selene protocol is a verifiable e-voting protocol. It publishes votes in plaintext accompanied by tracking numbers. This enables voters to confirm that their votes have been captured correctly by the system. Numerical experiments support the claim that PVPBC scales well as a function of the number of voters and candidates. In particular, PVPBC’s authorization time increases linearly as a function of the population size. The average latency associated with accessing the system also increases linearly with the voter population size. The latency incurred when a valid authentication transaction is created and sent on the DLT network is 6.275 ms. Empirical results suggest that the cost in GBP for casting and storing an encrypted ballot alongside a tracker commitment is a linear function of the number of candidates, which is an attractive aspect of PVPBC.
Blockchain, the backbone of Bitcoin, has recently gained a lot of attention. Blockchain functions as an immutable record that enables decentralized transactions. Blockchain-based applications are sprouting up in a variety of industries, including financial services, reputation systems, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others. However, many hurdles of blockchain technology, including scalability and security issues, have to be overcome. Many industries, including finance, medicine, manufacturing, and education, use blockchain applications to capitalize on this technology's unique set of properties. Blockchain technology (BT) has the potential to improve trustworthiness, collaboration, organization, identity, credibility, and transparency. We provide an overview of blockchain architecture, various different kinds of blockchain as well as information about the Decentralized apps which are also known as Dapps. This paper provides an in-depth look at blockchain technology
The integration of sensor nodes with public blockchains is possible with the help of low-power communication networks that use Bluetooth low energy and long range. However, power-consuming Wi-Fi is still the main means of communication for the existing sensor nodes, especially in urban environments. Typically high power consumption, private key disclosure, and high transaction fees are the issues that prevent battery-powered sensor nodes from being integrated with a public blockchain. Therefore, this article proposes a data protection protocol that is able to secure the data integrity of the stored sensor data, help to reduce transaction fees, and prolong battery life for IoT devices that are used with public blockchain networks. A proof of concept is presented using an ESP32S2 device to evaluate and verify the performance of the proposed data storage protocol. A smart contract is designed and analyzed using a formal smart contract analysis tool. A decentralized Web application is designed to display and verify the sensor data extracted from the public blockchain. The power consumption, memory usage, and security of the proposed solution are evaluated. The evaluation results show that data integrity can be achieved even for low-power sensor nodes that connect to public blockchains via Wi-Fi network.
Big Data is emerging as the most valuable asset for businesses in the digital world. Data enters the online world along with the privacy concerns attached to it. Technology invasion has adversely affected the user's right to privacy. However, blockchain technology and big data analytics play vital roles in creating a balance between the security of data and the enhancement of productivity of platforms dealing with big data. However, there is a palpable refutation between big data security and the widespread use of big data. This paper reviews the existing studies and focuses on issues in the big data privacy and security landscape. The paper emphasizes the significance of technologies on big data. This study covers the challenges that the technologies relating to big data face in the data privacy landscape. The paper highlights various privacy-friendly mechanisms created to safeguard privacy. The paper suggests certain privacy-friendly tools and techniques that can ensure big data security. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the impact of blockchain and data analytics technology on big data ensuring data protection. The paper also highlights various existing challenges and suggests privacy preservation mechanisms in big data. Finally, the study concludes with ideas that can be adopted.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was necessary to validate a person’s health status along with their identity to permit travel. This was facilitated via paper-based certificates and centralized digital apps. Even after COVID-19, it is anticipated that such health status verifications will be required for travel and other purposes. As a result, there needs to be an additional credential, a “Health Passport,” that establishes whether a person satisfies the health requirements for various purposes. Digital credentials so prepared should be trustable, unforgeable, and verifiable. The Health Passport should be designed to protect the end-users’ privacy and give people control over the data they use to confirm their credentials. This article explores the requirements for a generalized Health Passport system and uses agent-oriented modeling (AOM) to design a blockchain-based self-sovereign identity (SSI) system integrated with the Personal Health Record (PHR) to address this requirement. The article demonstrates the feasibility of the solution by implementing a proof of concept on Hyperledger Indy and Aries, integrated with the PHR – MediTrans. Credential issuance and verification time were calculated, and it was observed that the time overhead was minimal. This solution allows users to verify their credentials with the verifier without revealing any significant personal information. Our solution can be integrated into any PHR solution as the SSI solution is added as a plugin to the PHR accessible via a mobile/web app.
With the Internet of Things' (IoTs) rapid expansion, effect, and potential, the healthcare industry is shifting to a new paradigm that permits wearable devices to collect patient medical data and use it for monitoring and diagnosis. Tamper-proof data and avoidance of the centralized record-keeping mechanism are crucial requirements in any wellness system due to its exigent and precise necessity of data requests. Along with the same, transactions’ auditability and revocation of access rights upon certain records for specific stakeholders are also a few of the other prerequisites in the medical segment. Blockchain, as a distributed ledger, offers a solution for securely storing data while providing transparency in transactions and interactions among stakeholders. Synchronous interaction among patient, doctor, pharmacy, consultant, hospital, etc. with all possible data security is another concern that could be resolved through the usage of Blockchain’s smart contracts wherein interaction among these stakeholders is permitted in a traceable and irreversible mode. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the potential use of Blockchain technology in the healthcare sector to achieve data security, transparency, and reliability without the involvement of a trusted third party. In terms of security and privacy, we survey and provide an exhaustive review of Blockchain-based access control systems for the healthcare system. In addition, for the healthcare system, we propose and implemented a decentralized role-based access control model based on Ethereum smart contract.
—In the second decade of the twenty-first century, blockchain is considered one of the most popular computer technologies. Blockchain is a zero-trust network, making it a potent tool for various services provided that people are ready to believe and invest in it. In the Ethereum world, the blockchain runs on smart contracts, self-executing applications that come at the cost of security. As technology is used increasingly, Election is facing new issues of trust and management. Therefore, E-voting systems are increasingly acceptable because they are more accurate, reliable, practical, and secure. This research purpose is to propose a decentralized elections application based on Ethereum; the application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The actions of the software were written into an Ethereum smart contract, which was then deployed on the Ethereum network. A web interface had been used to read the user's vote before it was broadcast to the Ethereum network through the web3.js API. The ganache was utilized as the Ethereum client. Metalmark was used as a wallet on a website, and the remix was used to deploy the smart contract on the main network, the results of implementing the proposed system show that the cost of each transaction is not stable, its increases with the increase the network load, and the throughput ends up at 14 transactions per second.
Victoria Neumann, Gail Davidge, Mike Harding, James A. Cunningham · 9 authors
In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the use of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), also known as blockchain, in health data sharing contexts. However, there is a significant lack of research that examines public attitudes towards the use of this technology. In this paper, we begin to address this issue and present results from a series of focus groups which explored public views and concerns about engaging with new models of personal health data sharing in the UK. We found that participants were broadly in favour of a shift towards new decentralised models of data sharing. Retaining 'proof' of health information stored about patients and the capacity to provide permanent audit trails, enabled by immutable and transparent properties of DLT, were regarded as particularly valuable for our participants and prospective data custodians. Participants also identified other potential benefits such as supporting people to become more health data literate and enabling patients to make informed decisions about how their data was shared and with whom. However, participants also voiced concerns about the potential to further exacerbate existing health and digital inequalities. Participants were also apprehensive about the removal of intermediaries in the design of personal health informatics systems.
Md Ahmad, Gautami Tripathi, Farheen Siddiqui, Mohammad Afshar Alam · 7 authors
The overwhelming popularity of technology-based solutions and innovations to address day-to-day processes has significantly contributed to the emergence of smart cities. where millions of interconnected devices and sensors generate and share huge volumes of data. The easy and high availability of rich personal and public data generated in these digitalized and automated ecosystems renders smart cities vulnerable to intrinsic and extrinsic security breaches. Today, with fast-developing technologies, the classical username and password approaches are no longer adequate to secure valuable data and information from cyberattacks. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can provide an effective solution to minimize the security challenges associated with legacy single-factor authentication systems (both online and offline). This paper identifies and discusses the role and need of MFA for securing the smart city ecosystem. The paper begins by describing the notion of smart cities and the associated security threats and privacy issues. The paper further provides a detailed description of how MFA can be used for securing various smart city entities and services. A new concept of blockchain-based multi-factor authentication named "BAuth-ZKP" for securing smart city transactions is presented in the paper. The concept focuses on developing smart contracts between the participating entities within the smart city and performing the transactions with zero knowledge proof (ZKP)-based authentication in a secure and privacy-preserved manner. Finally, the future prospects, developments, and scope of using MFA in smart city ecosystem are discussed.
Yao Xiao, Lei Xu, Can Zhang, Liehuang Zhu · 5 authors
The metaverse is an advanced digital world where users can have interactive and immersive experiences. Users enter the metaverse through digital objects created by extended reality and digital twin technologies. The ownership issue regarding these digital objects can be solved by the blockchain-based nonfungible token (NFT), which is of vital importance for the economics of the metaverse. Users can utilize NFTs to engage in various social and economic activities. However, current NFT protocols expose the owner’s information to the public, which may contradict with the privacy requirement. In this article, we propose a protocol, NFTPrivate, that can realize anonymous and confidential trading of digital objects. The key idea is to utilize cryptographic commitments to hide users’ addresses. By constructing proper zero-knowledge proofs, the owner can initiate privacy-preserving yet publicly verifiable transactions. Illustrative results show that the proposed protocol has higher computation and storage overhead than traditional NFT protocols. We think this is an acceptable compromise for privacy protection.
Revin Naufal Alief, Made Adi Paramartha Putra, Augustin Gohil, Jae‐Min Lee · 5 authors
The usage of the federated learning (FL) concept in the artificial intelligence (AI) field has increased. The main concept of FL is to tackle the centralized-based approach, which requires the model to update training data to the cloud server by creating a decentralized deep learning (DL) model. However, the current FL model is still not completely decentralized, as each client needs to upload the training data to a centralized aggregator. Thus, this paper proposed an implementation of the FL scheme by using blockchain to tackle this problem. The proposed system uses the blockchain as the place to exchange training data instead of sending the training data immediately to the aggregator. In addition, this paper also tried to implement the layer 2 blockchain to minimize the time needed to exchange training information between each client and aggregator. The simulation result of this paper shows that we are able to implement the layer 2 blockchain in the FL system successfully. Also, it is shown that by using the layer 2 blockchain, training data exchange time is able to be reduced by around 50% compared to the layer 1 blockchain. In addition, this paper shows that the implementation of the layer 2 blockchain does not affect the performance of the FL model in terms of accuracy.
With the growing use of digital technologies, the vision of a predictive, preventive and personalised healthcare system, commonly termed healthcare 4.0, is becoming tangible. However, the manifestation of healthcare 4.0 relies on empowering patients as active stakeholders of the healthcare system and transforming traditionally siloed data repositories into accessible ones. Combining blockchain-like distributed technology and Airbnb-like sharing economy model, this paper proposes a digital health data marketplace (DHDM) through which patients, as the data producer, can sell their health data to data consumers like medical practitioners, researchers, policymakers and machine learning algorithm developers without compromising privacy and security. In conjunction with the Welsh Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank, a traditional centralised and siloed data repository, DHDM was evaluated in a simulated environment to understand the technical feasibility, regulation compliance and, most importantly, the impact of such marketplace on healthcare 4.0 transformation.