Blockchain Papers

Shaomin Zhang, Jieqi Rong, Baoyi Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Polina Durneva, Karlene Cousins, Min Chen

BACKGROUND: Blockchain offers a promising new distributed technology to address the challenges of data standardization, system interoperability, security, privacy, and accessibility of medical records. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this review is to assess the research on the use of blockchain technology for patient care and the associated challenges and to provide a research agenda for future research. METHODS: This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines. We queried the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed, Excerpta Medica dataBASE (EMBASE), and Web of Science databases for peer-reviewed research articles published up to December 2019 that examined the implementation of blockchain technology in health care settings. We identified 800 articles from which we selected 70 empirical research articles for a detailed review. RESULTS: Blockchain-based patient care applications include medical information systems, personal health records, mobile health and telemedicine, data preservation systems and social networks, health information exchanges and remote monitoring systems, and medical research systems. These blockchain-based health care applications may improve patient engagement and empowerment, improve health care provider access to information, and enhance the use of health care information for medical research. CONCLUSIONS: Blockchain health information technology (HIT) provides benefits such as ensuring data privacy and security of health data, facilitating interoperability of heterogeneous HIT systems, and improving the quality of health care outcomes. However, barriers to using blockchain technology to build HIT include security and privacy vulnerabilities, user resistance, high computing power requirements and implementation costs, inefficient consensus algorithms, and challenges of integrating blockchain with existing HIT. With 51% of the research focused on medical information systems such as electronic health record and electronic medical record, and 53% of the research focused on data security and privacy issues, this review shows that HIT research is primarily focused on the use of blockchain technologies to address the current challenges HIT faces. Although Blockchain presents significant potential for disrupting health care, most ideas are in their infancy.

Pradip Singh Maharjan

Blockchain technologies have drawn massive attention to the world these past few years mostly because of the burst of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Etherium, Ripple and many others. A Blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology, has demonstrated huge potential in saving time and costs. This open-source technology which generates a decentralized public ledger of transactions is widely appreciated for ensuring a high level of privacy through encryption and thus sharing the transaction details only amongst the participants involved in the transactions. The Blockchain is used not only for cryptocurrency but also by various companies to meet their business ends, such as efficient management of supply chains and logistics. The rise and fall of numerous crypto-currencies based on blockchain technology have generated debate among tech-giants and regulatory bodies. There are various groups which are working on standardizing the blockchain technology. At the same time, numerous groups are actively working, developing and fine-tuning their own blockchain platforms. Platforms such as etherium, hyperledger, parity, etc. have their own pros and cons. This research is focused on the performance analysis of blockchain platforms which gives a comparative understanding of these platforms.

C. Ramesh

Internet of Things (IoT) is a set of technologies that enable network-connected devices to perform an action or share data among several connected devices or to a shared database. The actions can be anything from switching on an Air Conditioning device remotely to turning on the ignition of a car through a command issued from a remote location or asking Alexa or Google Assistant to search for weather conditions in an area. IoT has proved to be game-changing for many industries such as Supply Chain, Shipping and Transportation providing updates on the status of shipments in real time. This has resulted in a huge amount of data created by a lot of these devices all of which need to be processed in real time. In this thesis, we propose a method to collect sensor data from IoT devices and use blockchain to store and retrieve the collected data in a secure and decentralized fashion within a closed system, suitable for a single enterprise or a group of companies in industries like shipping where sharing data with each other is required. Much like blockchain, we envision a future where IoT devices can connect and disconnect to distributed systems without causing downtime for the data collection or storage or relying on a cloud-based storage system for synchronizing data between devices. We also look at how the performance of some of these distributed systems like Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum Swarm compare on low-powered devices like the raspberry pi.

Hui Li, Lishuang Pei, Dan Liao, Xiong Wang · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Eric Ke Wang, Ruipei Sun, Chien‐Ming Chen, Zuodong Liang · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Spyridon Nikolaidis, Ioannis Refanidis

No abstract is available for this record.

Priya Maidamwar, Nekita Chavhan

Data is one of the most significant resources. In this digital era, cyber security has become the worldwide issue. Since cyber criminals are getting progressively skilful in their attempts to destroy the valuable data, securing this data has become mandatory. Different procedures have been developed in the past to secure the data, but there are no bounds to security threats, resulting in theft of information from the devices. Currently Blockchain technology is the best tool to secure the data. Blockchain, originally known as Bitcoin, has become very popular technology to digitally create and manage transactions. It is a form of distributed public ledger which analyses and verifies transactions in decentralized manner and data is not under the control of any third party organization. This rapidly evolving technology can possibly change the opinion about digital transactions in various areas such as energy supply, peer-to-peer global payments, financial transactions, agriculture and industry. Regardless, this rising innovation is still in its beginning period of progression. Inspite of several opportunities offered by blockchain, it has limitations such as transaction cost, scalability, consistency security and administration issues which has not yet been addressed and investigated. In spite of the fact that there are a couple of studies on the security and privacy issues of the blockchain, they do not have an efficient assessment of the securing blockchain architectures. This paper presents a detailed architecture of blockchain technology along with systematic study of the security attacks rising in blockchain technology.

Sangyeon Woo, Je-Ho Song, Sungyong Park

is a problem that defines a mechanism for how to safely bring external data to the blockchain. Although there have been various research efforts to solve this problem, existing solutions are limited in that they do not support either data availability or data integrity. Furthermore, no solution has been proposed to minimize the response time when an oracle server is malicious or overloaded. This paper proposes a distributed oracle using Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The proposed approach uses multiple oracle servers to support data availability. It also supports data integrity using Intel SGX and Transport Layer Security (TLS) communication. The reputation system, which favors oracle servers with short response times, minimizes the average response time even if some of the oracle servers are malicious. The benchmarking results show that the response time of the proposed approach with 3 oracle servers is only 14% slower than a centralized oracle called Town-crier and scales well even if the number of oracle servers is increased up to 9. The reputation system is also evaluated, and its feasibility is analyzed using various experiments.

Pradip Kumar Sharma, Jong Hyuk Park, Kyungeun Cho

No abstract is available for this record.

Yu-Tse Lee, Jhan-Jia Lin, Jane Yung-jen Hsu, Ja‐Ling Wu

This paper presents a blockchain-based time bank system on the basis of the Hyperledger Fabric framework, which is one of the permissioned blockchain networks. Most of the services provided by existing Time Bank systems were recorded and conducted manually in the past; furthermore, jobs for matching services with receivers were managed by people. Running a time bank in this way will cost lots of time and human resources and, worse, it lacks security. This work designs and realizes a time bank system enabling all the service-related processes being executed and recorded on a blockchain. The matching between services’ supply-and-demand tasks can directly be done through autonomous smart contracts. Building a time bank system on blockchain benefits the transaction of time credit which plays the role of digital currency on the system. In addition, the proposed time bank also retains a grading system, allowing its members to give each other a grade for reflecting their degrees of satisfaction about the results provided by the system. This grading system will incentivize the members to provide a better quality of service and adopt a nicer attitude for receiving a service, which may positively endorse the development of a worldwide time bank system.

Wenmin Lin, Xiaochun Yin, Shoujin Wang, Mohammad R. Khosravi

No abstract is available for this record.

Yan Zhuang, Yin-Wu Chen, Zon‐Yin Shae, Chi‐Ren Shyu

BACKGROUND: Data coordination across multiple health care facilities has become increasingly important for many emerging health care applications. Distrust has been recognized as a key barrier to the success of such applications. Leveraging blockchain technology could provide potential solutions tobuild trust between data providers and receivers by taking advantage of blockchain properties such as security, immutability, anonymity, decentralization, and smart contracts. Many health technologies have empirically proven that blockchain designs fit well with the needs of health care applications with certain degrees of success. However, there is a lack of robust architecture to provide a practical framework for developers to implement applications and test the performance of stability, efficiency, and scalability using standard blockchain designs. A generalized blockchain model is needed for the health care community to adopt blockchain technology and develop applications in a timely fashion. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed at building a generalized blockchain architecture that provides data coordination functions, including data requests, permission granting, data exchange, and usage tracking, for a wide spectrum of health care application developments. METHODS: An augmented, 3-layered blockchain architecture was built on a private blockchain network. The 3 layers, from bottom to top, are as follows: (1) incorporation of fundamental blockchain settings and smart contract design for data collection; (2) interactions between the blockchain and health care application development environment using Node.js and web3.js; and (3) a flexible development platform that supports web technologies such as HTML, https, and various programing languages. Two example applications, health information exchange (HIE) and clinical trial recruitment, were developed in our design to demonstrate the feasibility of the layered architecture. Case studies were conducted to test the performance in terms of stability, efficiency, and scalability of the blockchain system. RESULTS: A total of 331,142 simulated HIE requests from accounts of 40,000 patients were successfully validated through this layered blockchain architecture with an average exchange time of 11.271 (SD 2.208) seconds. We also simulated a clinical trial recruitment scenario with the same set of patients and various recruitment criteria to match potential subjects using the same architecture. Potential subjects successfully received the clinical trial recruitment information and granted permission to the trial sponsors to access their health records with an average time of 3.07 seconds. CONCLUSIONS: This study proposes a generalized layered blockchain architecture that offers health technology community blockchain features for application development without requiring developers to have extensive experience with blockchain technology. The case studies tested the performance of our design and empirically proved the feasibility of the architecture in 2 relevant health application domains.

Yan Zhuang, Lincoln Sheets, Yin-Wu Chen, Zon‐Yin Shae · 6 authors

Health Information Exchange (HIE) exhibits remarkable benefits for patient care such as improving healthcare quality and expediting coordinated care. The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology is seeking patient-centric HIE designs that shift data ownership from providers to patients. There are multiple barriers to patient-centric HIE in the current system, such as security and privacy concerns, data inconsistency, timely access to the right records across multiple healthcare facilities. After investigating the current workflow of HIE, this paper provides a feasible solution to these challenges by utilizing the unique features of blockchain, a distributed ledger technology which is considered "unhackable". Utilizing the smart contract feature, which is a programmable self-executing protocol running on a blockchain, we developed a blockchain model to protect data security and patients' privacy, ensure data provenance, and provide patients full control of their health records. By personalizing data segmentation and an "allowed list" for clinicians to access their data, this design achieves patient-centric HIE. We conducted a large-scale simulation of this patient-centric HIE process and quantitatively evaluated the model's feasibility, stability, security, and robustness.

Suyel Namasudra, Ganesh Chandra Deka, Prashant Johri, Mohammad Hosseinpour · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Mengtian Xu, Guorui Feng, Yanli Ren, Xinpeng Zhang

With the rise of cryptocurrencies, blockchain, which is the underlying technology of them, has gained more attention and been used in the Internet of Things (IoT) and other fields. However, there are bottlenecks that hinder its application, such as the storage capacity. Due to the large number of IoT devices which always act as data generators in many systems, the transactions will be generated at a high rate. The storage problem will be more serious in IoT. In this article, to expand the capacity of blockchain, for each peer, we select old blocks which are created previously and less likely to be queried and store them in the cloud. Based on this idea, we develop objective functions related to query probability, storage cost, and local space occupancy, which naturally narrows down the problem to block selection. The results can be obtained by solving a multiobjective optimization problem. We design a nondominated sorting genetic algorithm with clustering (NSGA-C), which changes the method of selecting individuals from the critical dominance layer by adding clustering to ensure diversity. A suitable solution can be selected from the Pareto set to fulfil the requirements of different users. We then compare the algorithm with the improved NSGA-II and NSGA-III, which both add integer constraints to the decision variables. The results show that our method is better than NSGA-II and NSGA-III in terms of local space occupancy in the blockchain application. In addition, it can also effectively avoid the risk of block overflow.

Rui Hou, Huan Liu, Yang Hu, Yunhao Zhao

No abstract is available for this record.

Seong-Kyu Kim, Jun‐Ho Huh

This paper seeks to use artificial intelligence blockchain algorithms to ensure safe verification of medical institution PHR data and accurate verification of medical data as existing vulnerabilities. Artificial intelligence has recently spread and has led to research on many technologies thanks to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is a very important factor in healthcare as well as the healthcare industry’s position. Likewise, blockchain is very safe to apply because it encrypts and verifies these medical data in case they are hacked or leaked. These technologies are considered very important. This study raises the problems of these artificial intelligence blockchains and recognizes blockchain, artificial intelligence, neural networks, healthcare, etc.; these problems clearly exist, so systems like EHR are not being used. In the future, ensuring privacy will be made easier when these EHRs are activated and data transmission and data verification between hospitals are completed. To overcome these shortcomings, we define an information security blockchain artificial intelligence framework and verify blockchain systems for accurate extraction, storage, and verification of data. In addition, various verification and performance evaluation indicators are set to obtain the TPS of medical data and for the implementation of standardization work in the future. This paper seeks to maximize the confidentiality of blockchain and the sensitivity and availability of artificial intelligence.

Jiahao Li, Gengyu Wei

The security of the Internet of things(IoT) has become a very critical and sensitive issue. In the limited network based on COAP, due to the limited ability of nodes and the lack of reliable authentication and access control mechanism in the Resource Directory (RD), devices are easy to be attacked and cause data leakage. This paper proposes a method to enhance the security of COAP nodes by using blockchain. By extending the business capability of the CoAP RD, the semantics of the security attributes are added; and a security service access agent is defined to be responsible for the blockchain operation; the RD can be involved in the authentication/access control of the blockchain when the CoAP node resource access is parsed. The CoAP node can transfer the device and service data to the blockchain for secure storage. In this paper, the Californium COAP framework and Ethereum are used as the verification platform to realize the software and security service access agent software that extend the RD security semantics. The authentication / access control is carried out in combination with the blockchain, and the COAP node provides the security storage capacity in combination with the blockchain. The work of this paper shows that it is feasible to use blockchain technology to improve the security capability of COAP nodes in the IoT.

Jannik Lockl, Vincent Schlatt, André Schweizer, Nils Urbach · 5 authors

The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the concept of physical objects equipped with identifying, sensing, networking, and processing capabilities being connected to the Internet. Architectures for the IoT typically rely on transmitting data to centralized cloud servers for processing. Although cloud services are supposed to enhance the IoT in storage, computation, and communication capabilities, this approach often generates isolated data silos and requires trust in third parties operating the cloud servers, which become single point of failure. In addition, centralized cloud-based applications lack transparency and allow for undetected manipulation and concealment of IoT data. To overcome these downsides, we develop and evaluate a blockchain-based IoT sensor data logging and monitoring system, employing a design science research approach. In this article, we show that such systems should provide modularity, data parsimony, and availability in addition to domain-specific principles. The prototype improves data integrity and availability but uncovers challenges, such as high operating costs through smart contract computation fees. Furthermore, semistructured interviews with practitioners allowed us to derive insights for developing blockchain-based IoT ecosystems and reveal that cooperation with organizations is key for transferring solutions into production. We contribute to the IoT knowledge base by providing design principles as well as managerial and technological recommendations.

Weimin Lang, Desheng Shan, Han Zhang, Shengyun Wei · 5 authors

As a typical representative of a new generation military information technology, the value and significance of Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) has been widely recognized by the world's military forces. At the same time, Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) is facing serious scalability and security challenges. This paper presents the basic concept and six-domain model of IoBT, explains the integration security framework of IoBT and blockchain. Furthermore, we design and build a novel IoT framework called IoBTChain based on blockchain and smart contracts, which adopts a credit-based resource management system to control the amount of resources that an IoBT device can obtain from a cloud server based on pre-defined priority rules, application types, and behavior history. We illustrate the deployment procedure of blockchain and smart contracts, the device registration procedure on blockchain, the IoBT behavior regulation workflow and the pricing-based resource allocation algorithm.

Han Zhang, Weimin Lang, Chengming Liu, Bingpeng Zhang

With the rapid development of Internet of things technology, IoT security problems are increasingly prominent. Blockchain is a new application model of distributed data storage, point-to-point transmission, consensus mechanism, encryption algorithm and other computer technologies, which provides a new solution to solve the security problems of IoT. This paper envisages a blockchain-based security approach architecture for IoT, which aims to construct a space of mutual trust between devices for reliable data transmission.

Antonio Celesti, Armando Ruggeri, Maria Fazio, Antonino Galletta · 6 authors

In a pandemic situation such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. Leveraging the recent Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper aims at proposing a tele-medical laboratory service where clinical exams are performed on patients directly in a hospital by technicians through IoT medical devices and results are automatically sent via the hospital Cloud to doctors of federated hospitals for validation and/or consultation. In particular, we discuss a distributed scenario where nurses, technicians and medical doctors belonging to different hospitals cooperate through their federated hospital Clouds to form a virtual health team able to carry out a healthcare workflow in secure fashion leveraging the intrinsic security features of the Blockchain technology. In particular, both public and hybrid Blockchain scenarios are discussed and assessed using the Ethereum platform.

Shareen Irshad, Muhammad Nawaz Brohi, Tariq Rahim Soomro

Abstract In this day and age, access to the Internet has become very easy, thereby providing access to different educational resources posted on the cloud even easier. Open access to resources, such as research journals, publications, articles in periodicals etc. is restricted to retain their authenticity and integrity, as well as to track and record their usage in the form of citations. This gives the author of the resource his fair share of credibility in the community, but this may not be the case with open educational resources such as lecture notes, presentations, test papers, reports etc. that are produced and used internally within an organisation or multiple organisations. This calls for the need to build a system that stores a permanent and immutable repository of these resources in addition to keeping a track record of who utilises them. Keeping in view the above-mentioned problem in mind, the present research attempts to explore how a Blockchain based system called Block-ED can be used to help the educational community manage their resources in a way to avoid any unauthorised manipulations or alterations to the documents, as well as recognise how this system can provide an innovative method of giving credibility to the creator of the resource whenever it is utilised.