Blockchain Technology has as of late got a great deal of interest from specialists and professionals. This is generally attributable to its particular qualities, which incorporate decentralization, security, trustworthiness, and information honesty. Regardless of this rising interest, little is had some familiarity with the current degree of information and practice with regards to the utilization of blockchain innovation in instruction. This paper presents an exhaustive outline of examination on blockchain-based instructive applications. Its concentrations on three primary themes: (1) educational applications manufactured using blockchain technology, (2) the benefits that blockchain technology might offer to education, and (3) the obstacles of implementing blockchain in education. For each subject, a full analysis of the data was performed, as well as an in-depth discussion based on the findings. Other educational fields that might benefit from blockchain technology are also discussed in this report. The present article focused on blockchain technology's potential educational uses and looked at how it may be used to address certain educational concerns. Before looking into some of the current educational blockchain applications, this article first examined the capabilities and benefits of blockchain technology. The merits and downsides of applying blockchain technology in education were discussed, as well as several unique uses of blockchain technology.
Latifah Almuqren, Khalid Mahmood, Sumayh S. Aljameel, Ahmed S. Salama · 6 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a technology enabler to enhance the urban physical architecture and render public services. But, public access to accumulated heterogeneous IoT urban information is prone to hackers attacking connected devices to the internet intellectual property as well. IoT security serves a dynamic part in the smart city. Some IoT devices are connected in smart homes, and these connections were centred on gateways. In smart homes, the gateways gain a lot of significance; but their centralized structure causes many security vulnerabilities like availability, integrity, and certification. Unified “cloud-like” computing networks and Blockchain (BC) type systems should be used to sort out these problems. Therefore, this article develops a Blockchain-Assisted Secure Smart Home Network using Gradient Based Optimizer with Hybrid Deep Learning (BSSHN-GBOHDL) model. The presented BSSHN-GBOHDL technique employs BC technology to improve the confidentiality of the data in the smart home environment. In addition, the BSSHN-GBOHDL technique identifies malicious activities in the smart home environment via three sub-processes namely data preprocessing, hybrid deep learning (HDL)-based malicious activity classification, and GBO-based hyperparameter tuning. The GBO algorithm assists in the proficient hyperparameter selection of the HDL model, which aids in accomplishing increased detection efficiency. The experimental validation of the BSSHN-GBOHDL approach is tested on a benchmark NSL-KDD dataset with 65495 normal and 60743 attack samples. The results highlight the betterment of the BSSHN-GBOHDL approach over other recent methods with maximum accuracy of 98.29%.
Rapid technological advancement has enabled modern healthcare systems to provide more sophisticated and real-time services on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). The existing cloud-based, centralized IoMT architectures are vulnerable to multiple security and privacy problems. The blockchain-enabled IoMT is an emerging paradigm that can ensure the security and trustworthiness of medical data sharing in the IoMT networks. This article presents a private and easily expandable blockchain-based framework for the IoMT. The proposed framework contains several participants, including private blockchain, hospital management systems, cloud service providers, doctors, and patients. Data security is ensured by incorporating an attribute-based encryption scheme. Furthermore, an IoT-friendly consensus algorithm is deployed to ensure fast block validation and high scalability in the IoMT network. The proposed framework can perform multiple healthcare-related services in a secure and trustworthy manner. The performance of blockchain read/write operations is evaluated in terms of transaction throughput and latency. Experimental outcomes indicate that the proposed scheme achieved an average throughput of 857 TPS and 151 TPS for read and write operations. The average latency is 61 ms and 16 ms for read and write operations, respectively.
Faneela, Muazzam A. Khan, Suliman A. Alsuhibany, Walid El‐Shafai · 6 authors
The advancements in sensing technologies, information processing, and communication schemes have revolutionized the healthcare sector. Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) facilitate the patients, doctors, hospitals, and other stakeholders to maintain valuable data and medical records. The traditional EHRs are based on cloud-based architectures and are susceptible to multiple cyberattacks. A single attempt of a successful Denial of Service (DoS) attack can compromise the complete healthcare system. This article introduces a secure and immutable blockchain-based framework for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to address the stated challenges. The proposed architecture is on the idea of a lightweight private blockchain-based network that facilitates the users and hospitals to perform multiple healthcare-related operations in a secure and trustworthy manner. The efficacy of the proposed framework is evaluated in the context of service execution time and throughput. The experimental outcomes indicate that the proposed design attained lower service execution time and higher throughput under different control parameters.
Blockchains, or distributed ledgers, are innovative information and communication technology (ICT) solutions that are emerging within various sectors and industries across the globe. This distributed ledger technology (DLT) is already widespread in certain sectors, mainly in the banking industry, often through corresponding banking, or syndicating and peer-to-peer (P2P) loans. Outstandingly, blockchain technology has the capability to enhance the transparency and authenticity of transactional processes throughout the whole supply chain. Another significant benefit that Blockchain technology provides, mainly coming from its transparent and decentralized nature, is the capability to decrease the information asymmetries among the collaborating partners. Through e.g. the digitalization of transactional mechanisms, decentralization of authority, Internet of Things (IoT) and asset management enabling as well as smart contracting, the improvement of the business's day-to-day operations is firmly forecasted. Importantly, the digitalization of the energy and other sectors will cause major alterations in current structures, and thus, it will require business model innovation. It is claimed that the decentralized nature of blockchain, mainly due to a reduction of middlemen could revolutionize current market structures and supply chains.Importantly, blockchain application is systematically growing across different industries, for instance in healthcare, voting systems, manufacturing, supply chain management, or luxury goods. It has also gained the attention of the energy industry, where digitalization is already visible in solutions such as smart meters and smart grids, electric e-mobility, vehicle-to-grid (V2G), energy cryptocurrencies and tokens, etc. This has resulted in the introduction of a novel concept of the Internet of Energy (IoE) in the academic literature. This literature analysis serves to determine the impact of blockchain on the imminent business models based on the renewable energy sector. The outcomes of this curiosity study provide numerous theoretical and managerial implications that can foster the widespread blockchain technology diffusion in global energy systems.
Cryptocurrencies use a secure, distributed ledger system called blockchain and mining is an essential part of it. It adds records of past transactions, enables consensus, and creates new units of currency. They are designed as peer-to-peer systems and rely on miners to validate transactions. The paper evaluates different mining techniques used by major cryptocurrencies, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and potential threats. It provides an overview of the various ways in which cryptocurrencies can be mined and highlights their unique strengths and vulnerabilities.
The rapid expansion of digital platforms, electronic health systems, IoT devices, and cross-organisational data-sharing environments have resulted in the exchanged amount and sensitivity of personal data growing. Conventional consent management models are centralised, non-transparent, and hard to audit, exposing threats of unauthorised distribution, poor interoperability, and substandard compliance with regulations. Traditional systems have a hard time delivering dynamic, fine-grained and verifiable user control over consent. They do not have transparent audit trails, do not support the use of multi-party authorization, and do not impose the use of data in a manner specific to purpose, particularly when regulated by laws like GDPR. The issue of scalability, the absence of automation, and immutable logging also contribute to the growth of trust and security concerns. The objective of the research is to assess in a critical manner the concept of blockchain-based and smart contract-based consent management models to determine the architectural designs, performance aspects, cryptographic techniques, and compliance measures that enhance personal data control within healthcare, fitness tracking, and wider data-sharing systems. Solution: This paper summarises the evidence regarding the benefits of hybrid on-chain/off-chain architectures, purpose-based access control, threshold cryptography, pseudonymization layers, and business-process-sensitive workflows in improving the transparency, auditability, and automation of consent management through the analytical review of nineteen blockchain-based consent systems. Smart contract systems give enforceability of rules, minimise risk of breach and enhance precision of consent revocation. The remaining issues are scalability, fluctuations in the cost of gas, GDPR-compatible deletion, and multidimensional approval. In general, consent systems based on smart contracts provide a technically plausible and legally consistent platform on which to build the systems of personal data-sharing in the future.
Background: The rapid development of modern technologies renders a convenient and efficient solution to implement Electronic Health Records (EHRs) systems. The rapid growth of healthcare data has a distinctive attribute of digital transformations. The big datasets of healthcare, their complexity and their dynamic nature have posed severe challenges associated with the analysis, pre-processing, privacy, security, storage, usability and data exchange. Material and Methods: We have performed the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and followed the Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) methodology. SLR refers to the methodology that discovers, analyses and accesses recent research literature related to the subject field. The research papers were searched from academic repositories like IEEE, WOS, Scopus and PubMed for the previous five years on March 2023. Results: The designed search string provides 199 research articles in total. We filter the research articles based on inclusion-exclusion strategies and quality assessment metrics. Six main criteria for research inclusion-exclusion for SLR are formulated. These works of literature insight into 1) the issues associated with interoperability and security of EHRs by using the Blockchain (BC) technology, 2) different frameworks and tools to improve privacy and security in the healthcare domain, 3) the open issues of using BC technology in the electronic healthcare domain, 4) the standardized ways to store EHRs, 5) various ways to handle the big data using the BC systems and 6) the usage of Federated Learning (FL) to preserve the privacy of EHRs in the healthcare domain. We acquired 46 research articles based on the criteria (inclusion-exclusion) that investigate the above-mentioned issues. Conclusion: The SLR will serve as the state-of-the-art (SOTA) for future researchers in the field of BC in healthcare. Additionally, the paper provides insights to the new researchers to revolutionize the healthcare domain by adopting the latest digitalized technologies. The proposed study identified various reflections. It analyzed the architectural mechanism that supports the security and interoperability of EHRs. Secondly, the study described different tools and frameworks to improve the privacy and security of EHRs using the BC. Thirdly, the open issues of storing and preserving the EHRs using BC in the healthcare system were determined. Fourth, it analyzed and provided a detailed view of using standardized ways for storing and handling big data by using the BC system. Lastly, the usage of FL to preserve the privacy of EHRs was analyzed.
Ilhaam A. Omar, Raja Jayaraman, Khaled Salah, Haya R. Hasan · 6 authors
Crop insurance serves as a crucial risk mitigation strategy for farmers facing uncertainties stemming from unpredictable weather conditions and vulnerabilities within the agricultural production process. Unfortunately, the prevailing traditional methods of crop insurance are laden with complexities, high costs, and, more critically, a lack of trust, which has deterred farmers from safeguarding their crops. Addressing these challenges, we present an innovative blockchain-based crop index insurance solution aimed at delivering multiple benefits. Our solution leverages blockchain technology to ensure unprecedented transparency throughout the insurance ecosystem. Every transaction and data exchange among farmers, insurers, and weather data providers is recorded on an immutable ledger, fostering trust, accountability, and confidence among all stakeholders. Moreover, blockchain’s inherent immutability and the use of smart contracts mitigate the risk of fraudulent activities in the crop insurance domain. Claims are processed autonomously, significantly reducing the possibility of fraudulent claims and enhancing the integrity of the system. One of the primary concerns of farmers, delayed claim settlements, is addressed by our solution. Smart contracts enable automated and prompt claim processing, ensuring that farmers receive timely payouts. Furthermore, our solution substantially reduces costs by eliminating intermediaries and streamlining administrative processes. This affordability democratizes crop insurance, making it accessible to a broader spectrum of farmers, including those in low-income countries. Our comprehensive approach integrates advanced algorithms for secure information sharing and interaction among stakeholders. We have rigorously tested the smart contract code under diverse scenarios using the Remix IDE, with the code’s availability on GitHub as a reference. Security vulnerabilities have been meticulously assessed and addressed. Thus, our paper presents an effective, low-cost, and trustworthy solution utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts to facilitate timely crop insurance for farmers. By enhancing transparency, reducing fraud, expediting claim processing, and increasing affordability, our solution aims to revolutionize crop insurance, making it more accessible and reliable for farmers worldwide.
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) with the internet of things (IoT) plays an integral role in smart city developments and enables substantial developments in modern human lifestyles. With the emergence of Fifth-Generation (5G) communication technologies, high-speed communications are enabled among multiple internet-connected devices. However, security, reliability, and scalability are significant factors that affect the communication performance of ITS. The conventional security models are mostly centralized and unsuitable for distributed low-powered IoT-enabled 5G ITS. The new-age distributed ledger technology blockchain can improve the security and reliability of ITS services. Therefore, this paper investigates a blockchain-based security mechanism, Blockchainbased Secure IoT Communication (BSIC), that protects the 5G-ITS from potential security threats. The BSIC utilizes a consortium blockchain model with Improved Proof of Reputation (IPoR) to achieve its objectives. It handles the resource limitation issues of IoT by integrating Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) services. Further, the BSIC design includes two main components: reputation computation strategy and the IPoR mining process. The proposed model successfully builds a secure IoT communication system by integrating multi-criteria factors in subjective logic-based reputation estimation. It selects the miners by adjusting the consensus pool size according to network density and reputation and improves the consensus efficiency with minimum delay. Moreover, the experimental evaluations are carried out to analyze the efficiency of BSIC using performance metrics such as attack detection rate, consensus delay, and reputation estimation accuracy.
Muhammad Imran Sarwar, Louai A. Maghrabi, Imran Khan, Qamar H. Naith · 5 authors
Blockchain has shifted the paradigm of computer-based commercial applications during the last decade. Initially developed as a public ledger for Bitcoin transactions, it has already shown that it has the potential to revolutionize the world, where trust, security, privacy, and anonymity are the assurances. The data stored within the blockchain remains unchangeable, resistant to tampering, and distributed across multiple locations within a decentralized network. The existence and reliability of blockchain rely heavily on robust cryptographic primitives, as these are fundamental to its operation. While blockchain faces significant challenges in the ever-evolving landscape of hardware and software technologies, it has retained its reputation for being secure due to its underlying cryptographic primitives. The architecture of blockchain, various consensus protocols, and the impacts of quantum computing are also discussed here. This study reviews the existing academic literature on cryptographic primitives used in blockchain and endeavours to bridge the gaps and provide a detailed understanding of their role in blockchain security. An exploratory qualitative research methodology is used in this study and is based on the latest literature on the topics. The findings of this study provide a valuable reference to the knowledge body and enhance the comprehension of blockchain, cryptography, and cryptographic primitives in blockchain for both new and experienced researchers, enabling them to identify new opportunities and challenges in the domain.
Mohammad Maroufi, Reza Abdolee, Behzad Mozaffari Tazehkand, Seyed Amir Mortezavi
This paper introduces a lightweight Blockchain-based architecture for 5G-enabled Internet-of-Thing (IoT) networks that employs a low-complexity consensus algorithm suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. By combining 5G technology with a lightweight Blockchain consensus algorithm, the proposed architecture guarantees high availability, real-time data delivery, security, reliability, and low-latency connectivity. Two transaction types are considered in this architecture, i.e., local and public. Local transactions are exchanged within devices located in the same Small Cell (SC) or Macro Cell (MC) private Blockchains, while public transactions exchange data among different MCs in the public Blockchain and store verified data in the distributed ledger. Performance evaluation reveals that the proposed architecture outperforms conventional 5G (without Blockchain) regarding security against data manipulation and fraud. The proposed architecture improves hashing and encryption protocols compared to conventional 5G but slightly reduces the data traffic rate and increases local transaction processing time. In contrast, the proposed architecture reduces the consensus processing time in the public Blockchain compared to Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) by about thirty percent due to adding a Distributed Trust Algorithm (DTA). We evaluate the proposed architecture’s performance against conventional 5G and PoET in terms of processing time and power consumption. The results indicate that the proposed architecture provides superior performance, and the DTA algorithm’s addition enhances the public transaction’s consensus processing time.
A cyber-physical system is considered to be a collection of strongly coupled communication systems and devices that poses numerous security trials in various industrial applications including healthcare. The security and privacy of patient data is still a big concern because healthcare data is sensitive and valuable, and it is most targeted over the internet. Moreover, from the industrial perspective, the cyber-physical system plays a crucial role in the exchange of data remotely using sensor nodes in distributed environments. In the healthcare industry, Blockchain technology offers a promising solution to resolve most securities-related issues due to its decentralized, immutability, and transparency properties. In this paper, a blockchain-inspired secure and reliable data exchange architecture is proposed in the cyber-physical healthcare industry 4.0. The proposed system uses the BigchainDB, Tendermint, Inter-Planetary-File-System (IPFS), MongoDB, and AES encryption algorithms to improve Healthcare 4.0. Furthermore, blockchain-enabled secure healthcare architecture for accessing and managing the records between Doctors and Patients is introduced. The development of a blockchain-based Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) exchange system is purely patient-centric, which means the entire control of data is in the owner's hand which is backed by blockchain for security and privacy. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed architecture is robust to handle more security attacks and can recover the data if 2/3 of nodes are failed. The proposed model is patient-centric, and control of data is in the patient's hand to enhance security and privacy, even system administrators can't access data without user permission.