Dalia Elwi, Osama Abu-Elnasr, A. S. Tolba, Samir Elmougy
Blockchain is a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that allows users to exchange values directly without a need for trusted third parties. Bitcoin is one of the most popular digital cryptocurrencies that is based on blockchain technology. However, it faces scalability problems including transaction throughput, latency, and starvation. Bitcoin transaction throughput is very low compared to traditional payment methods. Additionally, many Bitcoin transactions suffer from delays and starvation as miners prefer transactions with higher fees. More of the current research focuses on how to enhance Bitcoin scalability by improving the performance of consensus techniques, dividing the network into smaller ones with different parts of the blockchain, or completely changing the blockchain data structure. Unfortunately, engaging in this problem usually affects either decentralization or security; this is called the blockchain trilemma. This paper proposes the Cooperative Mining System (CMS), which depends on enhanced proof of work consensus algorithm. This proposed system increases transaction throughput and eliminates transaction latency and starvation without affecting decentralization and security. In CMS for each epoch, miners cooperated to create one super-block that contains more transactions than the traditional Bitcoin block. Whereas miners create their traditional blocks simultaneously, broadcast them, wait to receive other miners’ blocks, and lastly create a super-block that contains all the transactions of the gathered blocks. The Simulation results of the CMS and Bitcoin system using different case scenarios show a significant improvement in CMS compared to the current Bitcoin system. The CMS greatly increases the transaction throughput and eliminates transaction latency and starvation.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Our proposed method utilizes blockchain technology to safeguard the ownership of specific regions within image data. In our approach, diverse values could be assigned to each region based on its importance, and only users with ownership rights can access these designated regions. This ensures the protection of ownership rights for individuals in any given region of an image. Identified regions are individually encrypted using an XOR cipher, and a corresponding key image is generated for decryption, thereby preserving the privacy of the encrypted region. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are employed to protect the key image and manage the ownership of each object in the image data. The NFT for the key image is generated by the key holder (who possesses the entire image), and the ownership NFT is acquired by the user who needs access to the key NFT. Furthermore, the ownership NFT and the key NFT are verified for a match by the judgment function, and only upon successful validation, the NFT is displayed on the screen. This method enables different values to be assigned to various parts of an image, facilitating the transfer and sharing of ownership. Additionally, the original image?s owner can benefit financially based on the value of the image, thus enhancing the overall security of image data.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Sejal Sudhendu Dhamgaye, Shrikant V. Sonekar, Mirza Moiz Baig
The rise of the internet of things has revolutionized the way people work and live. It has also created a vast amount of data that can be collected and stored by various devices. Unfortunately, the centralization of this data has raised concerns about its security. With the help of blockchain technology, a secure and decentralized method of transmission can be established. The concept of blockchain technology is a globally distributed ledger that records and transactions using cryptography. Due to the rapid technological development taking place in the field, it is now considered a key component of Web 3.0. It allows applications to run on a secure and stable basis. In terms of tech terms, data stored on a blockchain is immutable. Various sectors where blockchain shows comprehensive success like e-learning Banking & Finance Online shopping. Reason for success of blockchain. These innovations have the potential to transform our daily lives. The Internet of Things is a vast network that collects and transmits vast data. This data is often sensitive and non-critical, raising questions about its ownership and protection of it. The goal of this paper is to explore the potential of blockchain technologies to address the security challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT). It will first introduce the concept of the secure blockchain framework and its various features. The paper will then introduce the framework for implementing secure and decentralized transmission of IoT data. It will discuss the various features of this technology and its selection of appropriate cryptographic methods and consensus algorithms. It will be subjected to a series of tests to evaluate its performance and security. The findings of the tests will be discussed and analyzed, and recommendations for future developments will be provided. The paper also concludes by summarizing the results. The paper will provide an evaluation of the various aspects of secure blockchain technology for the transmission of data from the Internet of Things. It will also explore its potential to improve the security of the networks that are connected to it.
Haneef Khan, Ishan Budhiraja, Sarfaraz Ahmad Wahaj, Malik Zaib Alam · 6 authors
By 2025, more than 96% of products will have Internet of Things (IoT) components at their core, the rapid spread of IoT inspires the development of novel applications for the end user, illustrating just how dominant this technology will become. However, if proper safety measures are not taken, serious issues may arise, such as the victimization of innocent people in crimes like burglary caused by the unauthorized disabling of a smart system. Blockchain, a distributed ledger system, is rapidly becoming a match in the field of data transfer with security. The Internet of Things (IoT) network will get the benefit from blockchain technology, which makes IoT possible to build trust in distributed networks without the need for a governing body to intervene. In this article, we focus on the most significant challenges that have still to be solved in order to achieve integration in between IoT and the Blockchain.
With the rapid development of blockchain technology and industries, scalability has been widely realized as one of the primary and urgent concerns for the large-scale adoption of blockchain, especially for cryptocurrencies. In this respect, directed acyclic graph (DAG) proves to be an elegant solution to scaling blockchain but suffers from weak consistency and security issues. In this article, we designed a novel DAG-BLOCK architecture for blockchain-enabled cryptocurrency markets in order to improve the scalability. In our work, DAG is used to replace the Merkel-tree-based transaction structure within the block, and a novel design of open blocks is proposed to enable user nodes to participate in verifying the transactions in blockchain systems. On this basis, we designed a new segmented market structure, in which each miner serves only a group of users instead of all users, so as to reduce miners’ workload and thus scale transaction processing capabilities. Our work can help improve the scalability of cryptocurrencies via evolving the underlying blockchain systems to graph-based distributed ledgers and is expected to shed new light on designing blockchain-based decentralized markets.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain is one of the most emerging technology in the present IT world. It powers some highly monetized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many more. The uses of blockchain are not just limited to cryptocurrencies; researchers are working to implement real-world applications using blockchain. Blockchain has shown potential use cases in many domains like IoT, Logistics, Healthcare, E-commerce, Finance, and Security. Blockchain’s fundamental properties, like its decentralized nature, immutable architecture, transparent behaviour, and security, are the main reason behind its immense popularity. In this paper, a blockchain-based educational credential verification system is proposed, independent of credentials format and size, that uses the power of blockchain to provide a secure, decentralized interface to process, store and verify students’ academic credentials. The proposed solution can also deal with any archived credential with any well-known digital format like PDF, DOCX, JPG, PNG, etc.
In the digital age, all the data has been moved to an electronic form and so are the electronic health records. The patients tend to have their records in various health organizations in different parts of the world. This becomes the issue of the accessibility of these records at very crucial times and to collect these fragmented parts of the records makes for an entirely new problem. For storing the patient data and to make it accessible as well, the Blockchain smart contracts can be utilized to provide a regulatory solution. With the implementation of smart contracts which will make this a self-sufficient system, any third party dependency would be easily removed. On the Blockchain all: invocation, record creation, and validation will take place. This article focuses on a non-interpolatable, self-driven, and permanent system using Blockchain, which by definition of the Blockchain make it decentralized and patient-centric, where smart contracts can be added in the future to increase data interchange potential.
This paper presents an approach for building a robust lottery platform using a smart contracts and blockchain. This lottery platform is deployed on the rinkeby test network and the smart-contracts are created using the solidity programming language. Solidity is an object-oriented programming language which is useful for deploying smart contracts. A combination of blockchain and smart contracts provides security and transparency. Blockchain is a decentralized technology in which no single entity has complete authority. The suggested lottery system involves selling, buying, registration, and the winner's announcement. The study also discusses the differences between traditional and blockchain-based lottery systems.
Nowadays, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technology is growing and leading the revolution in the global healthcare field. Exchanged information through IoMT permits attackers to hack or modify the patient’s data. Hence, it is of critical importance to ensure the security and privacy of this information. The standard privacy techniques are not secured enough, so this paper introduces blockchain technology that is used for securing data. Blockchain is used with the smart contract to secure private patient records. This paper presents how a patient may send his vital signs to the physician through the Internet without meeting with the latter in person. These vital signs are collected from the IoMT system that we developed before. In the proposed method, each medical record is stored in the block and connected to the previous block by a hashing function. In order to secure the new block, the SHA256 algorithm is used. We modified the SHA256 algorithm by using run-length code in compressing data. If any hacker attempts to attack any medical record, he must change all previous blocks. In order to preserve the rights of the doctor and patient, a smart contract is built into the blockchain system. When the transaction begins, the smart contract withdraws the money from the patient’s wallet and stores it in the smart contract. When the physician sends the treatment to the patient, the smart contract transfers the money to the physician. This paper shows that all recent work implements Blockchain 2 into the security system. This paper also shows that our security system can create a new block with O (n + d) time complexity. As a result, our system can create one hundred blocks in two minutes. Additionally, our system can deposit the money from the patient’s wallet into the physician’s wallet promptly. This paper also shows that our method performs better than all subsequent versions of the original blockchain.
Dalia Elwi, Osama Abu-Elnasr, A. S. Tolba, Samir Elmougy
Abstract Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency which had become the focus of scientific research in the modern era. Blockchain is the underlying technology of Bitcoin because of its decentralization, transparency, trust-less, and immutability features. However, blockchain can be considered the cause of Bitcoin scalability issues especially storage. Nodes in Bitcoin network need to store the full blockchain to validate transactions. By time, the blockchain size will be extremely huge. So, the full nodes will prefer to leave the network, and this leads to the blockchain being centralized and trusted. Therefore, security will be adversely affected. In this paper, we propose a Stateful Layered Chain Model which is based on storing accounts’ balances to reduce the size of the Bitcoin blockchain. This model changes the structure of the traditional blockchain from blocks to layers. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model reduces the size of blockchain by about 50.6%. Imlicitly, the transaction throughput can also be nearly doubled.
Alain Hennebelle, Leila Ismail, Huned Materwala, Juma Al Kaabi · 6 authors
Diabetes Mellitus, one of the leading causes of death worldwide, has no cure to date and can lead to severe health complications, such as retinopathy, limb amputation, cardiovascular diseases, and neuronal disease, if left untreated. Consequently, it becomes crucial to take precautionary measures to avoid/predict the occurrence of diabetes. Machine learning approaches have been proposed and evaluated in the literature for diabetes prediction. This paper proposes an IoT-edge-Artificial Intelligence (AI)-blockchain system for diabetes prediction based on risk factors. The proposed system is underpinned by the blockchain to obtain a cohesive view of the risk factors data from patients across different hospitals and to ensure security and privacy of the user's data. Furthermore, we provide a comparative analysis of different medical sensors, devices, and methods to measure and collect the risk factors values in the system. Numerical experiments and comparative analysis were carried out between our proposed system, using the most accurate random forest (RF) model, and the two most used state-of-the-art machine learning approaches, Logistic Regression (LR) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), using three real-life diabetes datasets. The results show that the proposed system using RF predicts diabetes with 4.57% more accuracy on average compared to LR and SVM, with 2.87 times more execution time. Data balancing without feature selection does not show significant improvement. The performance is improved by 1.14% and 0.02% after feature selection for PIMA Indian and Sylhet datasets respectively, while it reduces by 0.89% for MIMIC III.
Now a day, Internet of Things (IoT) are being used in several areas such as vehicular systems, smart city, healthcare, and supply chain management. Sensor data is stored in the cloud in an IoT system. Therefore, there is always a security concern with this data. There are several techniques for maintaining security, but most of them work in a centralized manner. However, blockchain is an emerging technology that works in a distributed manner and is based on peer-to-peer computing. Security can be enhanced using blockchain in any system. Blockchain technology offers decentralised security and privacy. Sensors used in loT systems are resource constrained. Therefore, implementing blockchain in any loT system creates several research challenges. This paper provides a discussion on such performance issues and research challenges while integrating blockchain with loT. The paper also gives some insights to overcome such issues.
Syed Agha Hassnain Mohsan, Abdul Razzaq, Shahbaz Ahmed Khan Ghayyur, Hend Khalid Alkahtani · 6 authors
Several academicians have been actively contributing to establishing a practical solution to storing and distributing medical images and test reports in the research domain of health care in recent years. Current procedures mainly rely on cloud-assisted centralized data centers, which raise maintenance expenditure, necessitate a large amount of storage space, and raise privacy concerns when exchanging data across a network. As a result, it is critically essential to provide a framework that allows for the efficient exchange and storage of large amounts of medical data in a secure setting. In this research, we describe a unique proof-of-concept architecture for a distributed patient-centric test report and image management (PCRIM) system that aims to facilitate patient privacy and control without the need for a centralized infrastructure. We used an Ethereum blockchain and a distributed file system technology called the Inter-Planetary File System in this system (IPFS). Then, to secure a distributed and trustworthy access control policy, we designed an Ethereum smart contract termed the patient-centric access control protocol. The IPFS allows for the decentralized storage of medical metadata, such as images, with worldwide accessibility. We demonstrate how the PCRIM system design enables hospitals, patients, and image requestors to obtain patient-centric data in a distributed and secure manner. Finally, we tested the proposed framework in the Windows environment by deploying a smart contract prototype on an Ethereum TESTNET blockchain. The findings of the study indicate that the proposed strategy is both efficient and practicable.
Siwei Cui, Gang Zhao, Yifei Gao, Tien Tavu · 5 authors
Solana is a rapidly-growing high-performance blockchain powered by a Proof of History (PoH) consensus mechanism and a novel stateless programming model that decouples code from data. With parallel execution on the PoH Sealevel runtime (instead of PoW), it achieves 100X-1000X speedups compared to Ethereum in terms of transactions per second. With the new programming model, new constraints (owner, signer, keys, bump seeds) and vulnerabilities (missing checks, overflows, type confusion, etc.) must be carefully verified to ensure the security of Solana smart contracts.
Garima Sethia, Sambarapu Namratha, H Srikanth, C. S. Sreeja
Academic certificates are essential for an individual's career and hence they are more prone to being tampered. This paper proposes an idea of sharing certificates and verifying their authenticity using blockchain technology. Blockchain paves the way for secure storage and sharing of information. Its main focus is to maintain trust among users. This proposal focuses on designing and implementing a system that will prove to be a solution for addressing the issue of fake certificates using Hyperledger Fabric. The technology here is tamper-proof and maintains transparency. This system will have a database of academic certificates awarded by the University, which is recorded as a transaction using the Hyperledger Fabric, which further can be referred by other organizations present in the network to verify the authenticity of the certificates using the information provided by the students to the database. This system provides end to end encryption.
As the underlying technology of bitcoin, blockchain is essentially a distributed ledger that can only add data, which is shared and maintained among unreliable nodes. Consensus algorithm is one of the core technologies of blockchain, which is used to solve the consistency problem of distributed system. Aiming at the problems of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm, such as high communication consumption, low scalability, and nodes can not to dynamically join and exit the system, an improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm is proposed, which reduces the complexity of the algorithm and improves the efficiency of consensus on the premise of ensuring the reliability of the consensus mechanism, and designs the join and exit mechanism of nodes. The experimental results show that the improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm can significantly reduce the completion time of transaction consensus and the number of communication between nodes, so as to support more nodes, reduce the system communication consumption, and CPU computing resource consumption, and increase the throughput of the blockchain system.
The Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, despite the wide range of application is not without loop holes of which cyberattackers can take advantage. In order to improve the platform's security while also increasing other features, it has been proposed that blockchain technology be implemented in any IoT system. However, while blockchain technology has many advantages, it is important to consider other options because they all have their own drawbacks that may not be ideal for every use case situation. IoT network devices have limited computer power, storage space, and bandwidth. As a result, these systems are easily prone to assault than other network connected devices, such PCs, cell phones and tablets. With focus on IoT security challenges and the countermeasures offered by the blockchain technology, consensus algorithm, data encryption and smart contracts were discovered to be the common and effective algorithm employed by the blockchain technology in securing Iot systems over time.
Blockchain technology has gained increasing popularity in the research of Internet of Things (IoT) systems in the past decade. As a distributed and immutable ledger secured by strong cryptography algorithms, the blockchain brings a new perspective to secure IoT systems. Many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy. In comparison, the blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is much less studied. Nonetheless, we see the potential of blockchain in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. This paper proposes an innovative IoT service platform powered by consortium blockchain technology. The presented solution abstracts machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) communications into services provided by IoT devices. Then, it materializes data exchange of the IoT network through smart contracts and blockchain transactions. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary storage layer to the proposed platform to address various data storage requirements. Our proof-of-concept implementation is tested against various workloads and connection sizes under different block configurations to evaluate the platform's transaction throughput, latency, and hardware utilization. The experiment results demonstrate that our solution can maintain high performance under most testing scenarios and provide valuable insights on optimizing the blockchain configuration to achieve the best performance.
In this paper, the authors have amplified the concept that EHRs need to be patient-centric and patient-driven, that is the patient should be the real owner as well as the manager of his medical records. The authors propose patient-centric multichain healthcare record (PCMHR) that implements health records using smart contracts on ethereum blockchain and also utilizes the multichain framework - Polygon. PCMHR can concurrently implement blockchain functionality while addressing the concerns of interoperability among authorized hospitals and patient health information confidentiality that damages our healthcare system. The authors propose a solution to fully decentralize the current medical healthcare system by storing PCMHR on IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) to resolve the limitation of blockchain-based applications in scalability and high cost. The authors have depicted the cost and time analysis of transactions on the polygon framework to give a clear view of this multichain framework and its advantages over the ethereum blockchain.
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of smart devices to collect data and make intelligent decisions. However, a lack of intrinsic security measures makes next generation IoT more vulnerable to privacy and security threats. With its “security by design,” Blockchain (BC) can help in addressing major security requirements in IoT. Blockchain is an ever-growing list of records that are linked and protected using cryptographic methods. It offers its users the flexibility to conduct transactions with lower costs and faster speeds. Blockchain ledgers are also decentralized and a ledger is maintained at each node in the network. Blockchain’s security and adaptability help in making even entire systems on it a much easily task with the benefit of decentralization. BC capabilities like immutability, transparency, auditability, data encryption, and operational resilience can help solve most architectural shortcomings of IoT. In the vision of the Internet of Things, traditional devices are becoming smarter and more autonomous. This vision is becoming reality as technology advances but there are still challenges to be resolved. This is especially true in a security domain like data trust, and with the expected evolution of the IoT in the coming years, it is important to ensure that this great source of data arrives. This paper began with an overview of blockchain and IoT, as well as explore the IoT blockchain application challenges. This article also focuses to review the most relevant tasks to analyse how IoT blockchain can improve and examine current research concerns and developments in the use of blockchain-related techniques and technologies in the context of IoT security in depth. One of the best parts of working or learning about blockchain and its application is the curiosity about how it can impact the things that we have been accustomed to without trying to improve and make things more efficient and productive.