Blockchain Papers

Junghoon Woo, Sangyun Shin, Ashish T. Asutosh, Jiaxuan Li · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Gautami Tripathi, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Sara Paiva

Technological innovations have enabled the realization of a utopian world where all objects of everyday life, as well as humans, are interconnected to form an “Internet of Things (IoT).” These connected technologies and IoT solutions have led to the emergence of smart cities where all components are converted into a connected smart ecosystem. IoT has envisioned several areas of smart cities including the modern healthcare environment like real-time monitoring, patient information management, ambient-assisted living, ambient-intelligence, anomaly detection, and accelerated sensing. IoT has also brought a breakthrough in the medical domain by integrating stake holders, medical components, and hospitals to bring about holistic healthcare management. The healthcare domain is already witnessing promising IoT-based solutions ranging from embedded mobile applications to wearable devices and implantable gadgets. However, with all these exemplary benefits, there is a need to ensure the safety and privacy of the patient’s personal and medical data communicated to and from the connected devices and systems. For a smart city, it is pertinent to have an accessible, effective, and secure healthcare system for its inhabitants. This paper discusses the various elements of technology-enabled healthcare and presents a privacy-preserved and secure “Smart Medical System (SMS)” framework for the smart city ecosystem. For providing real-time analysis and responses, this paper proposes to use the concept of secured Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) for performing critical time-bound computations on the edge itself. In order to protect the medical and personal data of the patients and to make the data tamper-proof, the concept of blockchain has been used. Finally, this paper highlights the ways to capture and store the medical big data generated from IoT devices and sensors.

Bhabendu Kumar Mohanta, Debasish Jena, Somula Ramasubbareddy, Mahmoud Daneshmand · 5 authors

Internet of Things (IoT) has been the most emerging technology in the last decade because the number of smart devices and its associated technologies has rapidly grown in both industrial and research prospectives. The applications are developed using IoT techniques for real-time monitoring. Due to low processing power and storage capacity, smart things are vulnerable to the attacks as existing security or cryptography techniques are not suitable. In this study, we initially review and identify the security and privacy issues that exist in the IoT system. Second, as per blockchain technology, we provide some security solutions. The detailed analysis, including enabling technology and integration of IoT technologies, is explained. Finally, a case study is implemented using the Ethererum-based blockchain system in a smart IoT system and the results are discussed.

Gunasekaran Manogaran, Bharat S. Rawal, Vijayalakshmi Saravanan, Priyan Malarvizhi Kumar · 8 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Tanweer Alam

The idea of blockchains technology (BT) in the Internet of Things (IoT) is to allow the physical things to trust in the transactions held within the IoT network. The BT is a distributed, decentralized, publicly shared its digital ledger and secured technology to eternally record the transactions across the shared database. The BT in IoT can be called Trust Machine to eliminate the intermediates and enables the physical things to trust with each other. This research evaluates the performance of BT in IoT. The simulated results are tested and can be used in the sustainable development of the integration of BT and IoT.

Rania El-Gazzar, Karen Stendal

There has been an increasing interest in blockchain technology from the health care sector in the last couple of years. The value proposition for using blockchain technology in the health care sector is to share sensitive patient data among health care entities securely and to empower patients. Blockchain technology allows patients to have an active role in developing and updating their own patient data. However, is blockchain technology really the silver bullet it seems to be? With this paper, we aim to understand the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology in the health care sector. We discuss innovation and security implications concerning blockchain technology in health care. Furthermore, we show that there is a need for more use cases to ensure the secure sharing of data within the health care sector. In our opinion, blockchain technology will not solve the issues encountered by the health care sector; in fact, it may raise more issues than it will solve.

Dounia Marbouh, Tayaba Abbasi, Fatema Maasmi, Ilhaam A. Omar · 8 authors

The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help in effective planning operations and resource deployments. Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing delays in regulatory approvals, streamline the communication between diverse stakeholders of the supply chain etc. Moreover, the spread of misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak and existing platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, causing people to panic and act irrationally. Thus, developing a blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the information received by the public and government agencies are reliable and trustworthy. In this paper, we focus on blockchain abilities to track the COVID-19 data collected from various sources including news, healthcare professionals, researchers etc, verify and append them in a secure and trusted distributed ledger. Thus, we propose a generic framework using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track real-time data related to the number of new cases, deaths and recovered cases obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. The smart contract code was developed and tested in Remix environment. We present the cost and security analysis incurred by the stakeholders and highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among stakeholders.

Ernest Bonnah, Shiguang Ju

No abstract is available for this record.

Lewis Tseng, Xinyu Yao, Safa Otoum, Moayad Aloqaily · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Dounia Marbouh, Tayaba Abbasi, Fatema Maasmi, Ilhaam A. Omar · 8 authors

<p>The sudden development of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems to handle public health emergencies. It is evident that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help in effective planning operations and resource deployments. Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector such as improved clinical trial data management by reducing delays in regulatory approvals, streamline the communication between diverse stakeholders of the supply chain etc. Moreover, the spread of misinformation has intensely increased during the outbreak and existing platforms lack the ability to validate the authenticity of data, causing people to panic and act irrationally. Thus, developing a blockchain-based tracking system is important to ensure that the information received by the public and government agencies are reliable and trustworthy. In this paper, we focus on blockchain abilities to track the COVID-19 data collected from various sources including news, healthcare professionals, researchers etc, verify and append them in a secure and trusted distributed ledger. Thus, we propose a generic framework using Ethereum smart contracts and oracles to track real-time data related to the number of new cases, deaths and recovered cases obtained from trusted sources. We present detailed algorithms that capture the interactions between stakeholders in the network. The smart contract code was developed and tested in Remix environment. We present the cost and security analysis incurred by the stakeholders and highlight the challenges and future directions of our work. Our work demonstrates that the proposed solution is economically feasible and ensures data integrity, security, transparency, data traceability among stakeholders. </p>

Noureddine Lasla, Lina Alsahan, Mohamed Abdallah, Mohamed Younis

This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one block at a time and assign a reward to the first place winner of a computation race. To reduce the mining-related energy consumption, we propose to compensate the computation effort of the runner(s)-up of a mining round, by granting them exclusivity of solving the upcoming block in the next round. This will considerably reduce the number of competing nodes in the next round and consequently, the consumed energy. Our proposed scheme divides time into epochs, where each comprises two mining rounds; in the first one, all network nodes can participate in the mining process, whereas in the second round only runners-up can take part. Thus, the overall mining energy consumption can be reduced to nearly $50\%$. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed scheme is the first to considerably improve the energy consumption of the original PoW algorithm. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our scheme in reducing energy consumption, the probability of fork occurrences, the level of mining centralization presented in the original PoW algorithm, and the effect of transaction censorship attack.

Leila Ismail, Huned Materwala, Moien AB Khan

Healthcare records management system has been revolutionized over the last decade aiming to provide accurate, efficient and enhanced patient care. The existing management system is either based on a client/server approach where each hospital maintains its own database or on a cloud approach where the health records are stored in a cloud server and managed by a third-party cloud service provider. However, these approaches suffer from the issues of security, privacy, data vulnerability and fragmentation. Furthermore, healthcare providers and patients are unable to have a unified view of a patient's medical history from all visited medical care centers. This results in additional treatment costs, repeated medical tests and increased time to diagnosis. The data traceability, immutability, transparency, replication, security and privacy traits of the emerging blockchain technology have a promising potential in the healthcare domain addressing these issues. In this paper, we propose BlockHR, a patient-centric healthcare records management system for efficient medical care at an optimal cost. The system enables healthcare providers to enter the patients' medical record data to the blockchain network and allows patients to enter their social data such as sleeping habits, physical activities, and current location. Consequently, BlockHR provides support to doctors for better diagnosis and prognosis. We evaluate the performance of BlockHR in terms of execution time and the total amount of data transferred for ledger update with an increasing number of hospitals and blocks in the network.

Jinsu Kim, Namje Park

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a limitation in that it is only in the passive cognition area, so its operating process is not transparent; therefore, the technology relies on learning data. Since raw data for AI learning are processed and inspected manually to assure high quality for sophisticated AI learning, human errors are inevitable, and damaged and incomplete data and differences from the original data may lead to unexpected outputs of AI learning for which processed data are used. In this context, this research examines cases where AI learning data were inaccurate, in terms of cybersecurity, and the need for learning data management before machine learning through analysis of cybersecurity attack techniques, and we propose the direction of establishing a data-preserving AI system, which is a blockchain-based learning data environment model to verify the integrity of learning data. The data-preserving AI learning environment model is expected to prevent cyberattacks and data deterioration that may occur when data are provided and utilized in an open network for the processing and collection of raw data.

Emmanouil Dimogerontakis, Leandro Navarro, Mennan Selimi, Sergio Mosquera · 5 authors

Universal connectivity is still unavailable or expensive for half of the global population, despite being critical for social participation. The deployment of crowdsourced networking infrastructures creates an opportunity for local development, where anyone can deploy a new device. In such infrastructures connectivity offer can expand incrementally and be sustainable through investment and fees resulting from the demand and consumption of content and services, including Internet access, that compensate the cost of the underlying network. While routing coordinates network data flows, economic flows can be coordinated by smart contracts built over a local distributed ledger. We define crowdsourced networks, the concept, architecture, and implementation using a local Ethereum PoA blockchain with Solidity smart contracts that compensate the data traffic contribution and consumption recorded by a traffic monitoring system, on a wireless mesh network. The prototype software has been validated in a controlled mesh network environment. Functional tests show its ability to account and route economic flows with small resource consumption, and therefore confirms these networks can develop organically by the addition of consumer and provider participants to reach the typical scale of most wireless mesh access networks and deliver networking services that aim to be socially and economically sustainable.

Ke Wang, Zhang Yu, Elizabeth Chang

Blockchain is viewed as one of the most promising and disruptive inventions and is considered to have the potential to significantly change current auditing profession and reshape the business ecosystem. With the advancement of blockchain, it has been concerned in some studies that auditing could be significantly impacted and eventually replaced. Meanwhile, another viewpoint argues that blockchain technology would push the existing auditing industry to a new direction rather than eliminating the need for auditing in the immediate future. This discussion can hardly be settled without evaluation, however, studies exploring how blockchain technology can be employed in auditing practice or how continuous auditing can be conducted using blockchain technology are limited. This paper analyses the impact of blockchain features on existing audit processes and discusses the possibility of applying blockchain characteristics including immutability, distributed ledger, real-time settlement to the auditing domain. Based on the systematic analysis, this study proposes a conceptual model for blockchain-based auditing information system, which provides solutions to employ blockchain technology in auditing profession, significantly improving the efficiency and effectiveness of auditing and promoting the transformation of the auditing paradigm to real-time, continuous and intelligent auditing.

Meng Li, F. Richard Yu, Pengbo Si, Wenjun Wu · 5 authors

Recently, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) provides plenty of opportunities and challenges in various fields. As an essential part of IoT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications open a novel way that the machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) are connected and communicated without any human intervention. Meanwhile, delay-tolerant data play an important role in M2M communications-based IoT, and it puts more emphasis on powerful data caching, computing, and processing, as well as the security and stability of data transmission. To meet these requirements in M2M communications networks, in this article, we introduce some promising technologies, such as edge computing and blockchain, and propose a joint optimization framework about caching, computation, and security for delay-tolerant data in M2M communications networks based on dueling deep Q-network (DQN). According to the dynamic decision process by DQN, the optimal selection and decision of caching servers, computing servers, and blockchain systems can be made to achieve maximum system rewards, which includes higher efficiency of data processing, lower network costs, and better security of data interaction. Extensive simulation results with different system parameters show that our proposed framework can effectively improve the system performance for blockchain-enabled M2M communications compared to the existing schemes.

Mohamed Ikbal Nacer, Simant Prakoonwit, Ismail Alarab

The Smart Distributed Ledger (aka blockchain) has attracted much attention in recent years. According to the European Parliament, this technology has the potential to change the lives of many people. The blockchain is a data structure built upon a hashed function in a distributed network, enabled by an incentive mechanism to discourage malicious nodes from participation. The consensus is at the core of the blockchain technology, and is driven by information embedded into a data structure that takes many forms such as linear, tree, and graph chains. The found related information will be subject to various validation incentives among the miners, such as proof of stake and proof of work. However, all the existing solutions suffer from a heavy state transition before dealing with the problem of a validation mechanism which suffers from resource consumption, monopoly or attacks. This work raises the following question: "Why is there a need for consensus where all participants can make a quick and correct decision?", and underlines the fact that sometimes ledger is subject to maintenance from regional parties in the data that leads to partial territories and eliminates monopoly, which is the hurdle to eliminating the trusted party. The validity of the blockchain transaction comes from the related information scattered above the data structure, and the authenticity lies in the digital signature. The aim is to switch from a validator based on incentives to a broadcaster governed by an unsupervised clustering algorithm, and the integrity does lie in the intersection among regions. However, the data structure takes advantage of the Petri network regarding its suitability. Building the entire ledger in the Petri network model will allow parallel processing of the transactions and securing of the total order between the participants on the memory reference layer. Moreover, it takes account of validation criteria quickly and safely before adding the new transaction list using the graph reachability.

Haoxiang Wang

There has been revolutionary developments in the healthcare industry with the advancement of technology over the past years. Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Blockchain technology, lab-on-chip, non-invasive and minimally invasive surgeries and so on has simplified several dreadful diseases. The research as well as healthcare industry have been greatly impacted by these new technologies. Clinical exams and self-health tracking can be done by means of miniaturized healthcare sensors that are powered by IoT. They help in early diagnosis and treatment guidance by clinicians at remote locations without directly being in contact with the users. The access control structures and inconsistent security policies have been a hinderance in meeting the security requirements of these data. Blockchain based smart contracts and enterprise-distributed ledger framework can be used for monitoring the vital signs of the patient. This enables accessing medical information of patients globally at any time along with immutable and extensive history log. In comparison with the traditional patient monitoring system, the proposed system offers better monitoring, improved connectivity and enhanced data security.

Xin Cong, Lingling Zi

Blockchain is a promising technology, which may change the way of transactions and affect our lives in the future, and has attracted the attention of more and more scholars recently. This paper provides an overview of the important issues of blockchain and the aim is to lead researchers to comprehensive understand applications, challenges and evaluation from the technical perspective. The basic technology including authorization, incentive and consensus is presented, focusing on their latest methods. Then, a wide range of blockchain applications are described. Specially, some of the latest intersection and integration areas with blockchain are introduced. Moreover, research challenges of blockchain are summarized and analyzed. Finally, evaluation metrics of blockchain are presented and as far as we know, these metrics are first designed for evaluating blockchain performance.

Shuiguang Deng, Guanjie Cheng, Hailiang Zhao, Honghao Gao · 5 authors

Blockchain is regarded as one of the most promising technologies to upgrade e-commerce. This article analyzes the challenges that current e-commerce is facing and introduces a new scenario of e-commerce enabled by blockchain. A framework is proposed for mining tasks in this scenario offloaded onto edge servers based on mobile edge computing. Then, the offloading issue is modeled as a multi-constrained optimization problem, and evolutionary algorithms are utilized and re-designed as solvers. The experimental results validate the efficiency of the framework and algorithms and also show that the lower bound of computation resources exists to obtain the maximum overall revenue.

Mohammad Hossein Chinaei, Hassan Habibi Gharakheili, Vijay Sivaraman

Verification of data generated by wearable sensors is increasingly becoming of concern to health service providers and insurance companies. These devices are typically vulnerable to a wide range of cybersecurity attacks, attempting to manipulate sensing data. Most of these disastrous attacks would remain undetected since neither healthcare servers nor Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors are aware of the existence of attackers in the middle of communication. Thus, there is a need for a verification framework that various authorities can request a verification service for the local network data of a target IoT device. In this article, we leverage blockchain as a distributed platform to realize an on-demand verification scheme. This allows authorities to automatically transact with connected devices for witnessing services. A public request is made for witness statements on the data of a target IoT that is transmitted on its local network, and subsequently, devices (in close vicinity of the target IoT) offer witnessing service. Our contributions are threefold: 1) we develop a system architecture based on blockchain and smart contract that enables authorities to dynamically avail a verification service for data of a subject device from a distributed set of witnesses which are willing to provide (in a privacy-preserving manner) their local wireless measurement in exchange of monetary return; 2) we then develop a method to optimally select witnesses in such a way that the verification error is minimized subject to monetary cost constraints; and 3) finally, we evaluate the efficacy of our scheme using real Wi-Fi session traces collected from a five-storeyed building with more than thirty access points, representative of a hospital. According to the current pricing schedule of the Ethereum public blockchain, our scheme enables healthcare authorities to verify data transmitted from a typical wearable device with the verification error of the order 0.01% at cost of less than $ 2 for 1-hr witnessing service.

Chao Qiu, Xiaofei Wang, Haipeng Yao, Jianbo Du · 6 authors

Recently, the term “Internet of Things” (IoT) has elicited escalating attention. The flexibility, agility, and ubiquitous accessibility have encouraged the integration between machine learning (ML) with IoT. However, there are many challenges that present the key inhibitors in moving ML to the public solution, such as centralized training, poor training efficiency, and heavy computing capabilities requirements. Therefore, bringing learning intelligence to edge IoT nodes has been spotlighted for some researches. Meanwhile, how to govern the use of learning results efficiently, reliably, scalably, and safely is hampered by the heterogeneity and nonconfidence among IoT nodes. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based collective Q-learning (CQL) approach to address the above issues, where lightweight IoT nodes are used to train parts of learning layers, then employing blockchain to share learning results in a verifiable and permanent manner. We further improve the traditional Proof of Work (PoW). Instead of solving a meaningless puzzle, we regard the learning process in the IoT node as a piece of work. Accordingly, the winner is the IoT node with the minimum reduced percentage of the learning loss function, referred to as the Proof-of-Learning (PoL) consensus protocol. Specifically, in order to show how the CQL approach works, we use it to address a networking integrated cloud-edge-end resource allocation in IoT. The experimental results reveal the superior performance of the proposed scheme.

Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali

Drones are equipped with high-vision cameras, advanced sensors, and GPS receivers to deliver diverse services from high altitude thereby creating an airborne network. In this environment, physical things (drones, sensors, etc.,) are controlled using computational algorithms to form a cyber-physical system for the Internet of drones. Although the drones provide manifold benefits still there are many issues (security, privacy, and data integrity) which must be resolved before the usage of drones in smart cyber-physical systems. So, in this paper, a blockchain-based security mechanism for cyber-physical systems is proposed to ensure secure transfer of information among drones. In this mechanism, the miner node is selected using a deep learning-based approach, i.e., a deep Boltzmann machine, using features like computational resources, the available battery power, and flight time of the drone. The proposed mechanism is evaluated based on different performance metrics and the results obtained show the potential benefits of the proposed scheme.

Xiaolong Xu, Dawei Zhu, Xiaoxian Yang, Shuo Wang · 6 authors

Currently, the integration of the supply chain and blockchain is promising, as blockchain successfully eliminates the bullwhip effect in the supply chain. Generally, concurrent Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus method, named C-PBFT, is powerful to deal with the consensus inefficiencies, caused by the fast node expansion in the supply chain. However, due to the tremendous complicated transactions in the supply chain, it remains challenging to select the credible primary peers in the concurrent clusters. To address this challenge, the peers in the supply chain are classified into several clusters by analyzing the historic transactions in the ledger. Then, the primary peer for each cluster is identified by reputation assessment. Finally, the performance of C-PBFT is evaluated by conducting experiments in Fabric.