Blockchain is an especially promising and revolutionary technology that brings transparency in a scalable way for multiple organizations and this is thanks to its several features. There are some exciting blockchain features but among them, decentralization is undoubtedly the most interesting one. Organizations can share data within a distributed ledger. As a consequence, each one can access synchronized data stored in its local Blockchain node. This functionality improves transaction tracking and facilitates access to data within a private group of organizations. However, in some cases, even if organizations accept to share data, they require to hide some private information related to their users or their business model. To tackle privacy and trust issues between organizations, this paper presents a blockchain architecture based on the proxy re-encryption scheme. This scheme is integrated within smart contracts to provide a very efficient, fast, and secure platform. The proposed architecture is implemented in an Hyperledger Blockchain and tested in a real transport and mobility use case.
Modern Internet of Things (IoT) networks including vehicle networks face an increased demand for security and access control with respect to privacy for sensitive data. Data manipulation and tampering of emissions values due to the economic incentives and environmental and health issues require a tamper-proof solution with the use of blockchain (BC) where the integrity of data is ensured. In this paper, we propose the integration of a public permissioned Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) framework with a permissioned consortium BC based architecture. This innovatively supports the decentralization of the authentication and authorization processes to overcome the single point of failure problems and the use of SSI to assign identities to IoT devices. Additionally, it gives full control to the holders for their identities, whether they are humans, organizations or smart vehicles. With the practice of advanced zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) cryptographic techniques, the exposure of sensitive and private information is minimized to the absolute necessary and gains in performance and scalability are achieved. Furthermore, the way this ecosystem of technologies is combined guarantees a trusted environment for enabling and automating vehicles' emissions certification according to emissions standards and regulations. Detailed descriptions of the processes required to integrate Hyperledger Indy (HLI) SSIs to authenticate and authorize entities on a Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) network are being quoted.
Nov 1, 2020·2020 International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics (Cybermatics)
Social interaction is the foundation of the Internet. Nevertheless, contract drafting is a tedious task and often too complex for normal social interactions between individuals or small service providers, which has led to the rise of centralized services to manage contracts, purchases or other arrangements. In order to give regular users more privacy and a place for self-organization, this paper describes the definition of a novel protocol that allows the creation of generic smart contracts which can be processed by machines or create social interaction between humans while maintaining a high level of privacy and anonymity.
Dongcheng Li, W. Eric Wong, Matthew Chau, Sean Pan · 5 authors
Near-field communication (NFC) is one of the essential technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) that has facilitated mobile payment across different services. The technology has become increasingly popular, as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have revolutionized how payment systems can be designed. However, this technology is subject to security problems, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, doublespending, and replay attacks, raising the need to incorporate other solutions such as blockchain technology. Concerns about the security and privacy of payments using NFC technology raise the need to adopt blockchain-based cryptocurrency payment. For instance, NFC payment has been criticized for a lack of measures to counter potential attacks, such as brute force or double-spending. Thus, incorporating blockchain technology is expected to improve the security features of the NFC mobile payment protocol and improve user experience. Blockchain technology has been praised for enabling fair payment, as it permits direct transactions without engaging a third party. Therefore, integrating blockchain cryptocurrency in IoT devices will revolutionize the NFC payment method and provide value transfer using IoT devices. Combining NFC with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is necessary to address security and privacy problems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential behind incorporating blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in the NFC payment protocol.
Social robots can cause privacy concerns for humans, both because they collect personal data while moving around globally, and because humans can perceive them as social actors. Nowadays, robots can record and transmit (private) data in a human-readable format, which is identified as a problem in human-robot interaction (HRI). Privacy is an individual's right to have control over its data. With this problem in mind, we present BlockRobot - a new privacy-by-design conceptual model for access control of personal data based on Blockchain (BC) technology. With this solution, we ensure data privacy rights by giving each user control over its data in a decentralized manner without the need for an intermediate data controller. This BC solution grants confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation of data transparently and fairly to every user. As proof of concept, we demonstrate the initial implementation of a Decentralized Application (DAP) based on EOS Blockchain integrated with robotic events that contain private data. This paper details the experiments conducted with a Social Robot (SR) in a non-lab environment, and the collected data is analyzed using process mining techniques.
BACKGROUND: Recent advancements in active assisted living (AAL) technologies allow older adults to age well in place. However, sensing technologies increase the complexity of data collection points, making it difficult for users to consent to data collection. One possible solution for improving transparency in the consent management process is the use of blockchain, an immutable and timestamped ledger. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to provide a conceptual framework based on technology aimed at mitigating trust issues in the consent management process. METHODS: The consent management process was modeled using established methodologies to obtain a mapping of trust issues. This mapping was then used to develop a conceptual framework based on previous monitoring and surveillance architectures for connected devices. RESULTS: In this paper, we present a model that maps trust issues in the informed consent process; a conceptual framework capable of providing all the necessary underlining technologies, components, and functionalities required to develop applications capable of managing the process of informed consent for AAL, powered by blockchain technology to ensure transparency; and a diagram showing an instantiation of the framework with entities comprising the participants in the blockchain network, suggesting possible technologies that can be used. CONCLUSIONS: Our conceptual framework provides all the components and technologies that are required to enhance the informed consent process. Blockchain technology can help overcome several privacy challenges and mitigate trust issues that are currently present in the consent management process of data collection involving AAL technologies.
Ali Mansour Al-madani, Ashok T. Gaikwad, Vivek Mahale, Zeyad A. T. Ahmed
Nowadays the use of the Internet is growing; E-voting system has been used by different countries because it reduces the cost and the time which used to consumed by using traditional voting. When the voter wants to access the E-voting system through the web application, there are requirements such as a web browser and a server. The voter uses the web browser to reach to a centralized database. The use of a centralized database for the voting system has some security issues such as Data modification through the third party in the network due to the use of the central database system as well as the result of the voting is not shown in real-time. However, this paper aims to provide an E-voting system with high security by using blockchain. Blockchain provides a decentralized model that makes the network Reliable, safe, flexible, and able to support real-time services.
Currently, the data collected by the Internet of Healthcare Things, i.e., healthcare oriented Internet of Things (IoT), still rely on cloud-based centralized data aggregation and processing. To reduce the need for transmission of data to the cloud, the edge computing architecture may be adopted to facilitate machine learning at the edge of the network through leveraging on the amassed computation resources of pervasive IoT devices. In this article, federated learning (FL) is proposed to enable privacy-preserving collaborative model training at the edge of the network across distributed IoT users. However, the users in the FL network may have different willingness to participate (WTP), a hidden information unknown to the model owner. Furthermore, the development of healthcare applications typically requires sustainable user participation, e.g., for the continuous collection of data during which a user’s WTP may change over time. As such, we leverage on the dynamic contract design to consider a two-period incentive mechanism that satisfies the intertemporal incentive compatibility (IIC), such that the self-revealing mechanism of the contract holds across both periods. The performance evaluation shows that our contract design satisfies the IIC constraints and derives greater profits than that of the uniform pricing scheme, thus validating its effectiveness in mitigating the adverse impacts of the information asymmetry.
The on-demand mobility market, including ridesharing, is becoming increasingly important with e-hailing fares growing at a rate of approximately 130% per annum since 2013. By increasing utilization of existing vehicles and empty seats, ridesharing can provide many benefits including reduced traffic congestion and environmental impact from vehicle usage and production. However, the safety of riders and drivers has become of paramount concern and a method for privacy-preserving identity verification between untrusted parties is essential for protecting users. To this end, we propose a novel privacy-preserving identity verification system, extending zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) and blockchain for use in ridesharing applications. We design a permissioned blockchain network to perform the ZKP verification of a driver's identity, which also acts as an immutable ledger to store ride logs and ZKP records. For the ZKP module, we design a protocol to facilitate user verification without requiring the exchange of any private information. We prototype the proposed system on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, with the Hyperledger Ursa cryptography library, and conduct extensive experimentation. To measure the prototype's performance, we utilize the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool to perform extensive analysis and the results show that our system is suitable for use in real-world ridesharing applications.
Dick Carrillo, Lam Duc Nguyen, Pedro H. J. Nardelli, Evangelos Pournaras · 14 authors
In this paper, we propose a global digital platform to avoid and combat epidemics by providing relevant real-time information to support selective lockdowns. It leverages the pervasiveness of wireless connectivity while being trustworthy and secure. The proposed system is conceptualized to be decentralized yet federated, based on ubiquitous public systems and active citizen participation. Its foundations lie on the principle of informational self-determination. We argue that only in this way it can become a trustworthy and legitimate public good infrastructure for citizens by balancing the asymmetry of the different hierarchical levels within the federated organization while providing highly effective detection and guiding mitigation measures toward graceful lockdown of the society. To exemplify the proposed system, we choose a remote patient monitoring as use case. This use case is evaluated considering different numbers of endorsed peers on a solution that is based on the integration of distributed ledger technologies and NB-IoT (narrowband IoT). An experimental setup is used to evaluate the performance of this integration, in which the end-to-end latency is slightly increased when a new endorsed element is added. However, the system reliability, privacy, and interoperability are guaranteed. In this sense, we expect active participation of empowered citizens to supplement the more usual top-down management of epidemics.
Chang Lu, Danielle Alves Batista, Hoda Hamouda, Victoria L. Lemieux
BACKGROUND: Although researchers are giving increased attention to blockchain-based personal health records (PHRs) and data sharing, the majority of research focuses on technical design. Very little is known about health care consumers' intentions to adopt the applications. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to explore the intentions and concerns of health care consumers regarding the adoption of blockchain-based personal health records and data sharing. METHODS: Three focus groups were conducted, in which 26 participants were shown a prototype of a user interface for a self-sovereign blockchain-based PHR system (ie, a system in which the individual owns, has custody of, and controls access to their personal health information) to be used for privacy and secure health data sharing. A microinterlocutor analysis of focus group transcriptions was performed to show a descriptive overview of participant responses. NVivo 12.0 was used to code the categories of the responses. RESULTS: Participants did not exhibit a substantial increase in their willingness to become owners of health data and share the data with third parties after the blockchain solution was introduced. Participants were concerned about the risks of losing private keys, the resulting difficulty in accessing care, and the irrevocability of data access on blockchain. They did, however, favor a blockchain-based PHR that incorporates a private key recovery system and offers a health wallet hosted by government or other positively perceived organizations. They were more inclined to share data via blockchain if the third party used the data for collective good and offered participants nonmonetary forms of compensation and if the access could be revoked from the third party. CONCLUSIONS: Health care consumers were not strongly inclined to adopt blockchain-based PHRs and health data sharing. However, their intentions may increase when the concerns and recommendations demonstrated in this study are considered in application design.
Communication security between IoT devices is a major concern in this area, and the blockchain has raised hopes that this concern will be addressed. In the blockchain concept, the majority or even all network nodes check the validity and accuracy of exchanged data before accepting and recording them, whether this data is related to financial transactions or measurements of a sensor or an authentication message. In evaluating the validity of an exchanged data, nodes must reach a consensus in order to perform a special action, in which case the opportunity to enter and record transactions and unreliable interactions with the system is significantly reduced. Recently, in order to share and access management of IoT devices information with distributed attitude a new authentication protocol based on blockchain is proposed and it is claimed that this protocol satisfies user privacy preserving and security. However, in this paper, we show that this protocol has security vulnerabilities against secret disclosure, replay, traceability, and <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"> <a:mtext>Token</a:mtext> </a:math> reuse attacks with the success probability of 1 and constant complexity of also 1. We also proposed an improved blockchain-based authentication protocol (IBCbAP) that has security properties such as secure access management and anonymity. We implemented IBCbAP using JavaScript programming language and Ethereum local blockchain. We also proved IBCbAP’s security both informally and formally through the Scyther tool. Our comparisons showed that IBCbAP could provide suitable security along with reasonable cost.
Yang Xia, Bing Li, Yan Zhang, Jiaxin Wu · 5 authors
With the development of the Internet of Things technology, the use of smart devices is ubiquitous, thereby making the smart home become an innovative IoT application to change our lives. However, the application of smart home should serve thousands of families and the number of edge servers and terminal devices s huge. Thus, it is difficult for a single central server or cluster to manage such large-scale devices with high efficiency. In addition, the structure of IoT is flexible and the edge or terminal devices can join a certain IoT system without strict restriction. The system may suffer from unauthorized access from malicious devices. In this paper, a physically secure authentication scheme for smart home based on a hybrid blockchain is proposed. A novel structure of the blockchain is leveraged to relieve the stress of the central server and storage device’s information permanently. Physical unclonable functions are used to provide identities for authorized devices. The security and evaluation analysis shows that our scheme has reliable security features and is the potential to improve the efficiency of the smart home system.
Activity-tracking applications and location-based services using short-range communication (SRC) techniques have been abruptly demanded in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for automated contact tracing. The attention from both public and policy keeps raising on related practical problems, including1) how to protect data security and location privacy? 2) how to efficiently and dynamically deploy SRC Internet of Thing (IoT) witnesses to monitor large areas?To answer these questions, in this paper, we propose a decentralized and permissionless blockchain protocol, namedBychain. Specifically, 1) a privacy-preserving SRC protocol for activity-tracking and corresponding generalized block structure is developed, by connecting an interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol and the key escrow mechanism. As a result, connections between personal identity and the ownership of on-chain location information are decoupled. Meanwhile, the owner of the on-chain location data can still claim its ownership without revealing the private key to anyone else. 2) An artificial potential field-based incentive allocation mechanism is proposed to incentivize IoT witnesses to pursue the maximum monitoring coverage deployment. We implemented and evaluated the proposed blockchain protocol in the real-world using the Bluetooth 5.0. The storage, CPU utilization, power consumption, time delay, and security of each procedure and performance of activities are analyzed. The experiment and security analysis is shown to provide a real-world performance evaluation.
The outbreak of the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused the world to face an existential health crisis. To contain the infectious disease, many countries have quarantined their citizens for several weeks to months and even suspended most economic activities. To track the movements of residents, the governments of many states have adopted various novel technologies. Connecting billions of sensors and devices over the Internet, the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), has been used for outbreak control. However, these technologies also pose serious privacy risks and security concerns with regards to data transmission and storage. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based system to provide the secure management of home quarantine. The privacy and security attributes for various events are based on advanced cryptographic primitives. To demonstrate the application of the system, we provide a case study in an IoT system with a desktop computer, laptop, Raspberry Pi single-board computer, and the Ethereum smart contract platform. The obtained results prove its ability to satisfy security, efficiency, and low-cost requirements.
Dana Haj Hussein, Ragunath Anbarasu, Ashraf Matrawy, Mohamed Ibnkahla
The Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are transforming traditional businesses into digital-based platforms allowing for more service innovation, performance efficiency and customer satisfaction. Novel services enable users to utilize their personal devices (eg. mobile phones or laptops) to access the IoT platform, process data, and control the IoT infrastructure. However, these services impose critical user authentication and access control requirements. In this paper, we propose a decentralized user authentication and access control system for the IoT platforms via a permissioned blockchain network. We define an authorization sensitivity factor to provide clients with specific access control privileges and we consider an ehealth system as a use case example to demonstrate our solution. The proposed system is implemented using Ethereum platform. Besides, we investigate a threat model that considers an insider Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The proposed defense mechanism utilizes a modifier function in the smart contract and keeps a real-time record of legitimate users to restrict function calls. The results illustrate the benefits of the defense mechanism in terms of the system response time.
In recent decades, several countries have faced political tensions due to citizens' perceptions that their elections are fraudulent; some electors have even chosen not to vote because they believe that the results may be falsified. Thus, electoral fraud is a major issue. E-governance and e-voting are now being used in many countries, some of which are investigating blockchain solutions. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential contributions of blockchain technology to peace on a worldwide level by securing voting systems. Unfortunately, this technology is complex and could potentially generate conflict between actors in elections. Taking an exploratory approach, the authors chose a qualitative method to address this specific topic. Election observers and blockchain experts were interviewed to identify the technology's strengths and weaknesses. Our results emphasize the importance of trust and human factors in the voting process.
Transformation of data into knowledge is the hallmark of modern medicine. As an evolving field of medicine, e-Health involves the electronic processing of a patient's personal, medical and other health-related data to improve healthcare delivery. Data captured from clinical interactions between patients and their care providers, as well as health data collected through medical sensors, provide a rich source of data, known as patient medical records (PMRs), which can be processed in various ways to enhance the delivery of healthcare services. However, indiscriminate processing of PMRs could potentially result in the violation of the security or privacy of patients. To ensure that PMRs are not processed in ways that could be harmful to the security or privacy of the patients, modern data protection regulations, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requires healthcare service provides to obtain the consent of a patient for any processing operation on their PMRs. The mechanism by which a patient exercises their right to control who can process their PMRs, when and for what purpose, is referred to as consent management in e-Health. Existing health information technology systems do not provide adequate support for consent management; there is a lack of transparency and auditability in the existing systems to monitor and ensure that healthcare service providers comply to the relevant data protection regulations in processing PMRs. The emerging blockchain technology offers an opportunity to design an e-Health consent management system that is compliant with modern data protection regulations such as GDPR. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an e-Health consent management framework, based on the state-of-the-art blockchain technologies, for processing PMRs. Our analysis confirms that our system satisfies the requirements for consent management in e-Health.
Anton Hasselgren, Paul Kengfai Wan, Margareth Horn, Katina Kralevska · 5 authors
The transparent and decentralized characteristics associated with blockchain can be both appealing and problematic when applied to a healthcare use-case. As health data is highly sensitive, it is therefore, highly regulated to ensure the privacy of patients. At the same time, access to health data and interoperability are in high demand. Regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and HIPAA are, amongst other objectives, meant to contribute to mitigating the risk of privacy violations of health data. Blockchain features can likely improve interoperability and access control to health data, and at the same time, preserve or even increase, the privacy of patients. Blockchain applications should address compliance with the current regulatory framework to increase real-world feasibility. This exploratory work indicates that published proof-of-concepts in the healthcare domain comply with GDPR, to an extent. Blockchain developers need to make design choices to be compliant with GDPR since currently, none available blockchain platform can show compliance out of the box.