Anuraag A Vazirani, Odhran O’Donoghue, David Brindley, Edward Meinert
The lack of interoperability in Britain's medical records systems precludes the realisation of benefits generated by increased spending elsewhere in healthcare. Growing concerns regarding the security of online medical data following breaches, and regarding regulations governing data ownership, mandate strict parameters in the development of efficient methods to administrate medical records. Furthermore, consideration must be placed on the rise of connected devices, which vastly increase the amount of data that can be collected in order to improve a patient's long-term health outcomes. Increasing numbers of healthcare systems are developing Blockchain-based systems to manage medical data. A Blockchain is a decentralised, continuously growing online ledger of records, validated by members of the network. Traditionally used to manage cryptocurrency records, distributed ledger technology can be applied to various aspects of healthcare. In this manuscript, we focus on how Electronic Medical Records in particular can be managed by Blockchain, and how the introduction of this novel technology can create a more efficient and interoperable infrastructure to manage records that leads to improved healthcare outcomes, while maintaining patient data ownership and without compromising privacy or security of sensitive data.
As edge computing applications become increasingly relevant to society, data processing and storage requirements are expected to increase at the 5G networked edge. At the same time, with the emergence of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, one can provide support for trust, immutability, and transparency to share information among networked entities at the edge and in the cloud in 5G networks. A performance model for a permissioned private blockchain platform is developed. Depending on the latency sensitivity and throughput requirements of a 5G edge application, different possibilities are explored to provide support for blockchain technology at the edge. In particular, applications to 5G use-cases are considered, and lazy ledger decoupling between the 5G edge and the 5G cloud is proposed to meet edge latency constraints.
IOT adoption is significantly increasing across different industries in the recent decade and the security is the biggest concern for the enterprise and industries to safe guard the data which is emanating out of IOT sensors, Drones and aggregators. In this paper we discuss how blockchain's smart contracts will help to manage the security challenges of IOT sensors and devices. We provide the literature review and approaches on how we build Agro's drone specific smart contracts with different ledger and platform in section II and III. We will elaborate the high-level approach with conceptual framework in section V. we will share the deployment considerations and issues in section VI. In section VII we will present our significance and in section VIII we will share our recommendations and conclusion
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) is a setup that controls and monitors the physical world around us. The advancement of these systems needs to incorporate an unequivocal spotlight on making these systems efficient. Blockchains and their inherent combination of consensus algorithms, distributed data storage, and secure protocols can be utilized to build robustness and reliability in these systems. Blockchain is the underlying technology behind bitcoins and it provides a decentralized framework to validate transactions and ensure that they cannot be modified. By distributing the role of information validation across the network peers, blockchain eliminates the risks associated with a centralized architecture. It is the most secure validation mechanism that is efficient and enables the provision of financial services, thereby giving users more freedom and power. This upcoming technology provides internet users with the capability to create value and authenticate digital information. It has the capability to revolutionize a diverse set of business applications, ranging from sharing economy to data management and prediction markets. In this paper, we present a holistic survey of various applications of CPS where blockchain has been utilized. Smart grids, health-care systems, and industrial production processes are some of the many applications that can benefit from the blockchain technology and will be discussed in the paper.
Blockchain is evolving to be a secure and reliable platform for secure data sharing in application areas such as the financial sector, supply chain management, food industry, energy sector, internet of things and healthcare. In this paper, we review existing literature and applications available for the healthcare system using blockchain technology. Besides, this work also proposes multiple workflows involved in the healthcare ecosystem using blockchain technology for better data management. Different medical workflows have been designed and implemented using the ethereum blockchain platform which involves complex medical procedures like surgery and clinical trials. This also includes accessing and managing a large amount of medical data. Within the implementation of the workflows of the medical smart contract system for healthcare management, the associated cost has been estimated for this system in terms of a feasibility study which has been comprehensively presented in this paper. This work would facilitate multiple stakeholders who are involved within the medical system to deliver better healthcare services and optimize cost.
To overcome the fast-changing block withholding attacks among multiple mining pools composed of miners in the blockchain system, this paper proposes a mining pool computing power allocation (MPPA) algorithm, which significantly improves the revenues of mining pools with block withholding attacks. MPPA first establishes the revenue optimization model of mining pools, which includes current adequate total computing power, the revenues of honest mining, and the revenues of block withholding attacks. Then MPPA calculates the revenue gain generated by block withholding attacks on other mining pools. To adjust the fixed computing power in each iteration, we have the mining pool computing power allocation algorithm with a fixed change of computing power (MPPA_F). To adjust the optimal recovery and attack computing power, we have the mining pool computing power allocation algorithm with an optimal change of computing power (MPPA_O). The simulation results demonstrate that MPPA_F and MPPA_O can find the optimized solutions of power computing allocation for each mining pool and outperform the state-of-arts such as WSFS, ALLC, and ALLD.
Blockchain serves as an immutable ledger which allows transactions to take place in a decentralized manner. The proposed solution incorporates the use of Blockchain for Supply Chain Management of Relief Materials after a Disaster. The proposed solution also provides many additional features when compared to the current system like being tamper-proof, providing anonymity and accountability to the users. Our solution incorporates a box-in-box approach whilst keeping tabs via tamper-proof barcodes. Barcodes will be frequently scanned at designated locations. Users also have the facility to track the donated items online through a dedicated website. For blockchain infrastructure, we have used Hyperledger Fabric.
The articles in this special section focuses on blockchain for scalable Internet of Things (IoT) management, access, and accountability. The articles highlight new blockchain architectures and techniques that can be leveraged to enable scalable management, access and accountability of massive numbers of IoT devices to effectively support various IoT applications.
The rapid advance of Blockchain has been used for the Internet-of-Things to provide reliable distributed infrastructure and applications without a centralized authority. This paper aims to create a new consensus protocol that can be efficiently and resiliently used for the Internet-of-Things based on the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm (PBFT), which is critical for IoT scalability and reliability. The traditional PBFT algorithm fails to provide two significant features: a) resiliency against denial of service (DoS) attacks, and b) high-throughput to quickly reach final consensus when under attack. This paper analyzes the current implementation of PBFT consensus protocol and proposes a new secure approach for achieving consensus by adding the properties of random hash generation and threshold comparison in order to defend against DoS attacks.
Saleh Albahli, Rehan Ullah Khan, Ali Mustafa Qamar
eHealth is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to enhance health quality access. Health care innovations are an essential element of Vision 2030 and National Transformation Program (NTP) 2020 operational plan that will lead to an improvement in the quality of health care in Saudi Arabia. The objective of this paper is to address the healthcare system limitations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in general and the Qassim region in particular to global standards. In practice, the creation of an infrastructure for storing and seamless sharing of health data between different entities is studied. Furthermore, an in-depth analysis of current practices w.r.t. the health data, as well as finding similarities between NTP 2020 and Health 2020 (European Union) has been performed. A multi-level blockchain eHealth system is proposed to provide seamless electronic health records to the patients. Moreover, the current practices being employed in Qassim province, KSA has been analyzed. It was found that private hospitals give access to medical reports to their patients besides allowing them to manage their appointments. On the other hand, access to the government hospitals' medical records is minimal.
Blockchain system is affected by many factors with the rapid development of technology. In order to study the blockchain system more realistically, the processes of transaction consensus and transaction storage are simulated in this paper, and factors such as interference factors, impatience phenomena of transactions and fault repairable conditions of the system during the service process are considered. Vacation queueing model with negative customers, impatient customers, repairable fault and two-phase service that customers can select sever in the first service is established. Using the matrix-geometric solution method, the expressions of the average confirmation time of transactions and other performance measures are given. The parameters of the system are obtained based on the statistics of the blockchain transaction data. The influence of each parameter on the performance measures of blockchain system is analyzed by using MATLAB software. The equilibrium reception rate is discussed by constructing the revenue function of the system, and equilibrium numerical results are obtained.
Existing implanted medical devices often do not use any form of authentication due to resource constraints, resulting in unauthorized access or programming of devices. In this paper, we introduce Medical Implant Consent (MedIC), a non-embedded, blockchain-based solution that provides authentication and authorization according to patient consent. We design protocols for doctors to obtain digital medical licenses and for patients to obtain and verify digital patient consent. We evaluate the performance and cost of our solution, using time measurements and memory footprint of relevant operations. We also enumerate our cryptographic operations and compute the energy with benchmarked measurements. Our results demonstrate a memory footprint of 4436 MB and timing delay of 200 ms to authenticate according to our patient’s consent.