André Henrique Mayer, Cristiano André da Costa, Rodrigo da Rosa Righi
Blockchain could reinvent the way patient's electronic health records are shared and stored by providing safer mechanisms for health information exchange of medical data in the healthcare industry, by securing it over a decentralized peer-to-peer network. Intending to support and ease the understanding of this distributed ledger technology, a solid Systematic Literature Review was conducted, aiming to explore the recent literature on Blockchain and healthcare domain and identify existing challenges and open questions, guided by the raise of research questions regarding EHR in a Blockchain. More than 300 scientific studies published in the last ten years were surveyed, resulting in an up-to-date taxonomy creation, challenges and open questions identified, and the most significant approaches, data types, standards and architectures regarding the use of Blockchain for EHR were assessed and discussed.
Suboh Alkhushayni, Du’a Al-Zaleq, Nadine L Gadjou Kengne
Blockchain technology is on the cusp of revolutionizing the way we handle healthcare data, in term of storage and utilization. The main goal is to empower patients to be the center of their own health record so that, the patient doesn't have to rely on different institutions or hospitals they might visit. Blockchain technology and smart contracts provide an interesting and innovative way to keep track of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). This technology could help the patients to have better control of their own data. Health professionals and institutions, such as hospitals, could have access to patient’s data owned by other institutions. In the present article, we discuss how blockchain technologies can be used to handle EHR while improving the efficiency of operations through streamlining processes and transparency. We propose an architecture to manage and share healthcare data among different organizations. The proposed work could significantly reduce the time needed to share patient data among different health organizations and reduce the overall cost.
Scott Ruoti, Benjamin Kaiser, Arkady Yerukhimovich, Jeremy Clark · 5 authors
Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly Blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines Blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding Blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is Blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for Blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other approache distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on Blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to Blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of Blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.
The importance of the Internet of Things is constantly growing, together with the proliferation of IoT devices which are changing our daily life and empowering industrial processes. However, the most IoT devices and protocols were not designed with security in mind, and economic and energyconsumption constraints make the implementation of security measures a non-trivial problem. One of the most used messaging protocol in IoT, which is MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport), leaves to developers the task to implement security, as native security services provided by the protocol are very weak. This paper focuses on MQTT authentication, which is definitely insecure in the protocol, even though the implementations can combine MQTT with other mechanisms to obtain a suitable level of security. The aim of the present work is to propose an innovative OTP-authentication scheme for MQTT which uses Ethereum to implement an independent logic channel for the second-factor authentication. The implementation of the proposed scheme relies on the trusted behavior of smart contracts and adopts suitable strategies to preserve the privacy of users.
Ke Huang, Xiaosong Zhang, Yi Mu, Fatemeh Rezaeibagha · 6 authors
The advances of artificial intelligence (AI) propels big data processing and transmission for Internet of Things (IoT), by capturing and structuring big data produced by heterogeneous devices. While applying blockchain to manage IoT devices and associated big data, the blockchain itself suffers from abuse of decentralization from anonymous users. Specifically, it has been utilized to facilitate black market trades and illegal activities. Ateniese et al. proposed using the chameleon hash (CH) to derive redactable blockchain (EuroS&P), which works by embedding a trapdoor in the basic hash function so that block content can be rewritten without causing major hard forks. In short, the redacted block hash remains unchanged. However, there is lacking intelligent design where any mistakes observed in the chain can be corrected universally and automatically. This creates disincentives to use redactable blockchain (RB) for managing big data or any data-driven business mainly due to ineffective chain redaction. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose the notion of the self-redactable blockchain (SRB) to support intelligent execution of chain redaction. Specifically, we propose the first revocable chameleon hash (RCH) to power RB. It enables an ephemeral trapdoor for finding collision without any co-operation. Periodical expiration is applied to committed hash and an ephemeral trapdoor to prevent any abuses of redaction power. We instantiate how to use our RCH to build SRB as an intelligent trust-layer for IoT. We also give a rigorous analysis as well as comprehensive experiments to validate our proposals. The evidence showed that our proposal is secure and acceptably efficient for IoT devices.
Bin Cao, Mengyang Li, Lei Zhang, Yixin Li · 5 authors
The impact of communication transmission delay on the original blockchain, has not been well considered and studied since it is primarily designed in stable wired communication environment with high communication capacity. However, in a wireless scenario, due to the scarcity of spectrum resource, a blockchain user may have to compete for wireless channel to broadcast transactions following media access control (MAC) mechanism. As a result, the communication transmission delay may be significant and pose a bottleneck on the blockchain system performance and security. To facilitate blockchain applications in wireless industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs), this article aims to investigate whether the widely used MAC mechanism, carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA), is suitable for wireless blockchain networks or not. Based on tangle, as an example to analyze the system performance in term of confirmation delay, transaction per second and transaction loss probability by considering the impact of queueing and transmission delay caused by CSMA/CA. Next, a stochastic model is proposed to analyze the security issue taking into account the malicious double-spending attack. Simulation results provide valuable insights when running blockchain in wireless network, the performance would be limited by the traditional CSMA/CA protocol. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the probability of launching a successful double-spending attack would be affected by CSMA/CA as well.
Lei Yang, Vivek Bagaria, Gerui Wang, Mohammad Alizadeh · 7 authors
Bitcoin is the first fully decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol and achieves a high level of security: the ledger it maintains has guaranteed liveness and consistency properties as long as the adversary has less compute power than the honest nodes. However, its throughput is only 7 transactions per second and the confirmation latency can be up to hours. Prism is a new blockchain protocol which is designed to achieve a natural scaling of Bitcoin's performance while maintaining its full security guarantees. We present an implementation of Prism which achieves a throughput of 70,000 transactions per second and confirmation latencies of tens of seconds.
The paper proposed the framework for rocket and satellite launch information management systems based on blockchain technology to meet the requirements for the storage and use of credible information. First, the launch stages of a rocket or satellite are analysed, and the roles of the participants in the launch process are identified. Then, the system framework is proposed. The framework includes an application layer, a contract and consensus layer, a data layer and a network layer. Each layer is designed in detail. Finally, the characteristics of the proposed framework are analysed to show its advantages.
This article investigates how choosing a different hash function might affect the overall performance of a blockchain. We focus on the selection of hash function for Ethereum and carry out extensive experiments to evaluate the performance change after the replacement of hash function. Our findings indicate that some performance metrics of a blockchain might be significantly affected by the hash function used. This suggests that selection of a specific hash function may not be a trivial decision for designing a blockchain.
Manufacturing enterprises are facing the challenges of productivity improvement, product and process quality management due to the lack of data interaction and manufacturing process traceability. In modern factory, number of machineries are pipelined into assembly/production lines which may merge and branch to meet the procedure requirements. Each machine on the assembly line generates huge amount of sensing data and manufacturing data. However, many manufacturing system are not ready to manage big data. This paper aims on developing the distributed traceability system with Blockchain technology on IoT devices in order to improve the stability of the factory production line, to reduce defect rate and to bring the operational performance to a new level. Without depending on centralized storage, it is a robust, truly distributed peer-to-peer system and capable of node failure tolerance. With better scalability and data interaction, this distributed ledger network enables the use of data collection with security and potential of public traceability system protocol which allows multiple factories to participate, build an ecosystem of traceability together.
To promote the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart communities and smart cities, a real-time data marketplace middleware platform, called the Intelligent IoT Integrator (I3), has been recently proposed. While facilitating the easy exchanges of real-time IoT data streams between device owners and third-party applications through the marketplace, I3 is presently a monolithic, centralized platform for a single community. Although the service oriented architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted in the IoT and cyber-physical systems (CPS), it is difficult for a monolithic architecture to provide scalable, inter-operable and extensible services for large numbers of distributed IoT devices and different application vendors. Traditional security solutions rely on a centralized authority, which can be a performance bottleneck or susceptible to a single point of failure. Inspired by containerized microservices and blockchain technology, this paper proposed a BLockchain-ENabled Secure Microservices for Decentralized Data Marketplaces (BlendSM-DDM). Within a permissioned blockchain network, a microservices based security mechanism is introduced to secure data exchange and payment among participants in the marketplace. BlendSM-DDM is able to offer a decentralized, scalable and auditable data exchanges for the data marketplace.
Since the advent of the web, the number of users who started using the internet for everyday purpose has increased tremendously. Most of the common purposes are to access their data whenever they want and wherever they want. So many companies have started providing these services to normal users. These companies store huge volume of data in the data centers. So protecting the integrity of the data is the main responsibility of these companies. Blockchain is one of the trending solutions that gives storage immutability to the users. This chapter starts with the working of blockchain and smart contracts and advantages and disadvantages of blockchain and smart contracts and then goes on to explain how blockchain can be integrated into the internet of things (IOT). This chapter ends with an architecture based on the proof-of-concept for access management, which is blockchain-based fully distributed architecture.
The global popularity of digital cryptocurrencies and research in a decentralized system have led to the foundation of blockchain, which is fundamentally a public digital ledger to share information in a trustworthy and secure way. The concept and applications of blockchain have now spread from cryptocurrencies to various other domains, including business process management, smart contracts, IoT, and so on. Cryptocurrency is a mechanism designed to work for the online secure payments system using cryptography. Cryptography maintains confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. Cryptocurrency has come as a novel way of making payments that keep all the transactions secure and safe, which avoids any type of intermediaries such as a bank. This chapter will shed light on the concept of blockchain technology, security, and its applications in various domains.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is one of the fastest growing and most important technologies in the world. Most of the people think that blockchain is all about cryptocurrency or bitcoin, but it is beyond that. It is a technology that creates immutable and distributable data records that are shared between peers in network database systems and records digital events in such a way that it cannot be altered or recognized until it reaches the recipient. In recent times, many of the industries are using blockchain as a tool to innovate their functionality. Some of the well-known industries are banking sector, real estate, healthcare, internet of things, insurance, and many more. Out of these industries, healthcare is one of the industries that is adopting blockchain very rapidly. This chapter will discuss the blockchain and how it has transformed the healthcare industry.
Blockchain – a distributed and public database of transactions – has become a platform for decentralized applications. Despite its increasing popularity, blockchain technology faces a scalability problem: the throughput does not scale with the increasing network size. Thus, in this paper, we propose a scalable blockchain protocol to solve the scalability problem. The proposed method was designed based on a proof of stake (PoS) consensus protocol and a sharding protocol. Instead of transactions being processed by the whole network, the sharding protocol is employed to divide unconfirmed transactions into transaction shards and to divide the network into network shards. The network shards process the transaction shards in parallel to produce middle blocks. Middle blocks are then combined into a final BLOCK in a timestamp recorded on the blockchain. Experiments were performed in a simulation network consisting of 100 Amazon EC2 instances. The latency of the proposed method was approximately 27 s and the maximum throughput achieved was 36 transactions per second for a network containing 100 nodes. The results of the experiments indicate that the throughput of the proposed protocol increases with the network size. This confirms the scalability of the proposed protocol.
Cloud computing plays a critical role in modern society and enables a range of applications from infrastructure to social media. Such system must cope with varying load and evolving usage reflecting societies interaction and dependency on automated computing systems whilst satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Enabling these systems are a cohort of conceptual technologies, synthesized to meet demand of evolving computing applications. In order to understand current and future challenges of such system, there is a need to identify key technologies enabling future applications. In this study, we aim to explore how three emerging paradigms (Blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence) will influence future cloud computing systems. Further, we identify several technologies driving these paradigms and invite international experts to discuss the current status and future directions of cloud computing. Finally, we proposed a conceptual model for cloud futurology to explore the influence of emerging paradigms and technologies on evolution of cloud computing.
Healthcare networking and computing infrastructure is rapidly changing from closed environments to open environments that incorporate ubiquitous medical devices and novel application scenarios. For example, home-based healthcare involves the collection and analysis of data from pervasive sensors (often in real time) to guide therapy or to perform medical interventions. In this article, we address the challenges of data interoperability and regulatory compliance when designing and deploying healthcare applications in a heterogeneous home-edge-cloud environment. We propose the ChainSDI framework that leverages the blockchain technique along with abundant edge computing resources to manage secure data sharing and computing on sensitive patient data. We implement programmable ChainSDI application programming interfaces to facilitate the specification of home-based healthcare services running on a software-defined infrastructure (SDI). This article is a collaboration between computer scientists, medical researchers, healthcare IT professionals as well as healthcare providers with the goal of increasing the availability of SDI infrastructures while meeting the performance and regulatory requirements of healthcare applications. Our prototype demonstrates the feasibility of the framework and serves as a testbed for novel experimental studies in the context of emerging healthcare applications.