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1,379 results · page 41 of 58
Francisco Luis Benítez-Martínez, María Visitación Hurtado, Esteban Romero‐Frías
No abstract is available for this record.
Tomás Robles, Borja Bordel, Ramón Alcarria, Diego Sánchez-de-Rivera
Users are each day more aware of their privacy and data protection. Although this problem is transversal to every digital service, it is especially relevant when critical and personal information is managed, as in eHealth and well-being services. During the last years, many different innovative services in this area have been proposed. However, data management challenges are still in need of a solution. In general, data are directly sent to services but no trustworthy instruments to recover these data or remove them from services are available. In this scheme, services become the users’ data owners although users keep the rights to access, modify, and be forgotten. Nevertheless, the adequate implementation of these rights is not guaranteed, as services use the received data with commercial purposes. In order to address and solve this situation, we propose a new trustworthy personal data protection mechanism for well-being services, based on privacy-by-design technologies. This new mechanism is based on Blockchain networks and indirection functions and tokens. Blockchain networks execute transparent smart contracts, where users’ rights are codified, and store the users’ personal data which are never sent or given to external services. Besides, permissions and privacy restrictions designed by users to be applied to their data and services consuming them are also implemented in these smart contracts. Finally, an experimental validation is also described to evaluate the Quality of Experience (in terms of user satisfaction) and Quality of Service (in terms of processing delay) compared to traditional service provision solutions.
Mohd Anuaruddin Bin Ahmadon, Shingo Yamaguchi
This paper proposes a connection management mechanism for IoT devices using blockchain smart contracts. In recent years, with the development of network technology, the number of devices connected to the network is increasing exponentially as the number of devices increases, the risk of attacks increases. Therefore, blockchain plays a vital role in protecting IoT systems. In this paper, we propose and discuss a decentralized connection management mechanism to eliminate the threat associated with IoT by using blockchain's smart contract. We proposed a multi-layer management mechanism to reduce the cost of smart contract processing costs due to a large number of IoT devices. We also proposed a tool to manage the connection of IoT devices using smart contracts. In the evaluation, we evaluated our proposed management scheme by applying two types of connection structure i.e., hub-based layer and sink-based layer. The novelty of this method is the implementation of a hierarchical management system for each layer. The effectiveness is the reduction of the smart contact processing cost of devices that disconnects and reconnects to the network.
Abhishek Mahindrakar, Karuna Pande Joshi
Data Protection regulations, like GDPR, mandate security controls to secure Personal Identifiable Information (PII) of the users which they share with service providers. With the volume of shared data reaching exascale proportions, it is challenging to ensure GDPR compliance in real time. We propose a novel approach that integrates GDPR Ontology with Blockchain to facilitate real time automated data compliance. Our framework ensures data operation is allowed only when validated by data privacy policies in compliance with privacy rules in GDPR. When a valid transaction takes place the PII data is automatically stored off-chain in a database. Our system, built using Semantic Web and Ethereum Blockchain, includes an access-control system that enforces data privacy policy when data is shared with third parties.
Rafał Tomasz Prabucki
For some time now, blockchain technology has been used for many purposes all over the world. The question arises – how do we regulate proving facts in a dispute between agreement parties when they use self-executing contracts? The answer to this question is explored in this research in the context of civil issues. Furthermore, the Polish law has introduced a new tool in the form of a ‘contract of evidence’ (similar to the parol evidence rule) which may increase the popularity of smart contracts. The research methodology is based on the analysis of the two existing regulations from the Civil Procedure Code and the Commercial Code. Moreover, legal scientific studies that indicate the risks associated with using self-executing contracts in such a way will be analysed. All efforts have been taken to obtain conclusions regarding the future of this type of solution in Poland and Polish smart cities.
Thomas Sødring, Petter Reinholdtsen, Svein Ølnes
Purpose This paper aims to examine the role blockchain can play for record-keeping by exploring what information from a record-keeping system it is possible to publish to a blockchain. A credible approach is presented, followed by a discussion on both benefits and limitations. Design/methodology/approach The approach is a combination of theorised possibilities verified with practical software implementation. The basis for the work is relevant record-keeping and blockchain literature. Findings The results show that it is possible to separate the formal record keeping structure from content, and this opens for new possibilities when integrating record keeping and block chain technologies. However, the approach does come with some limitations. Research limitations/implications The approach is beneficial where there is a record-keeping standard that has a clearly defined metadata model, and that also makes use of globally unique identifiers. Privacy legislation, for example, GDPR, may limit the scope of an implementation of the approach. Originality/value The originality lies in presenting an approach whereby a record-keeping standard is analysed, separating structural and content information to publish structural information to a blockchain.
Yan Zhuang, Yin-Wu Chen, Zon‐Yin Shae, Chi‐Ren Shyu
BACKGROUND Data coordination across multiple health care facilities has become increasingly important for many emerging health care applications. Distrust has been recognized as a key barrier to the success of such applications. Leveraging blockchain technology could provide potential solutions tobuild trust between data providers and receivers by taking advantage of blockchain properties such as security, immutability, anonymity, decentralization, and smart contracts. Many health technologies have empirically proven that blockchain designs fit well with the needs of health care applications with certain degrees of success. However, there is a lack of robust architecture to provide a practical framework for developers to implement applications and test the performance of stability, efficiency, and scalability using standard blockchain designs. A generalized blockchain model is needed for the health care community to adopt blockchain technology and develop applications in a timely fashion. OBJECTIVE This study aimed at building a generalized blockchain architecture that provides data coordination functions, including data requests, permission granting, data exchange, and usage tracking, for a wide spectrum of health care application developments. METHODS An augmented, 3-layered blockchain architecture was built on a private blockchain network. The 3 layers, from bottom to top, are as follows: (1) incorporation of fundamental blockchain settings and smart contract design for data collection; (2) interactions between the blockchain and health care application development environment using Node.js and web3.js; and (3) a flexible development platform that supports web technologies such as HTML, https, and various programing languages. Two example applications, health information exchange (HIE) and clinical trial recruitment, were developed in our design to demonstrate the feasibility of the layered architecture. Case studies were conducted to test the performance in terms of stability, efficiency, and scalability of the blockchain system. RESULTS A total of 331,142 simulated HIE requests from accounts of 40,000 patients were successfully validated through this layered blockchain architecture with an average exchange time of 11.271 (SD 2.208) seconds. We also simulated a clinical trial recruitment scenario with the same set of patients and various recruitment criteria to match potential subjects using the same architecture. Potential subjects successfully received the clinical trial recruitment information and granted permission to the trial sponsors to access their health records with an average time of 3.07 seconds. CONCLUSIONS This study proposes a generalized layered blockchain architecture that offers health technology community blockchain features for application development without requiring developers to have extensive experience with blockchain technology. The case studies tested the performance of our design and empirically proved the feasibility of the architecture in 2 relevant health application domains.
M.E in Computer Engineering from SVBIT, GTU, Gandhinagar, India., Pratik Patel, Pinkal Chauhan, M.E in Computer Engineering from LDRP, Gandhinagar, India.
In our everyday lives, IoT plays a vital role. It is crucial to sense, capture and share data from connected devices via internet. Existing system proposed centralized client/server approach where central authority keeps a record of all the activities. Failure of such centralized authority makes the whole system fail. A decentralized / distributed approach is therefore needed if a single failure point is avoided. In this paper contains information to integrating Blockchain in IoT ecosystem in order to achieve access control. We proposed smart contract based architecture which consist multiple permission contract, one decision contract and one entry contract, to achieve distributed and secure IoT device access control. To conclude system framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with two laptops and one Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the PCs, DC and EC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.
Christian Killer, Bruno Rodrigues, Raphael Matile, Eder J. Scheid · 5 authors
Digitization of electoral processes depends on confident systems that produce verifiable evidence. The design and implementation of voting systems has been widely studied in prior research, bringing together expertise in many fields. Switzerland is organized in a federal, decentralized structure of independent governmental entities. Thus, its decentralized structure is a real-world example for implementing an electronic voting system, where trust is distributed among multiple authorities.
Galia Kondova, Jörn Erbguth
This paper studies three existing technical solutions for a self-sovereign identity on blockchains and analyzes the arising issues related to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU). In particular, the paper provides an overview of the existing Sovrin self-sovereign identity on the Hyperledger Indy public permissioned blockchain as well as uPort and Jolocom on the Ethereum public permissionless blockchain. The paper then concludes with a discussion on the GDPR-compliance of the blockchain-based identity concepts.
Yuntao Wang, Zhou Su, Kuan Zhang, Abderrahim Benslimane
The autonomous driving era is coming with tremendous potential to revolutionize transportation systems with improved safety, comfort, and intelligence on the road. Integrating connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and rising social networking, autonomous vehicular social networks (AVSNs) can facilitate the data dissemination in safety-critical and entertainment-related applications for autonomous driving. However, with time-varying, delay-constrained, and location-dependent characteristics in autonomous driving, it faces great challenges to incentivize CAVs to disseminate massive content in AVSNs. Meanwhile, attackers may not only disseminate fake information to confuse the network, but also pose security vulnerabilities and privacy issues for CAVs. In this article, we investigate secure and incentive content delivery in AVSNs based on the advanced blockchain. Specifically, we first present a blockchain-enabled AVSN framework to safeguard content delivery. Then, we investigate the task-based and credit-based reputation models to evaluate the trustworthiness of CAVs and RSUs, respectively. The reputation increase and task reward are explored as incentives for CAVs delivering reliable content. In addition, a novel proof of reputation consensus protocol is devised to efficiently reach consensus in blockchain-enabled AVSNs while motivating RSUs to behave honestly. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework outperforms the existing approaches, delivering vehicular content more reliably and securely. Finally, future research directions in this emerging area are discussed.
Sahla Sherin O, Anna Joshy, Neethu Subash
The security and accountability issues are a challenge to the traditional structure from still widespread elections. General e-voting system use a centralized system, where one organization manages overall system. These organisations have full control over the database and system, allowing manipulation of the database. There should be no e-voting system to secure data and potential attacks should be able to withstand. Blockchain technology should solve certain voting problems. In this paper we are implementing an ethereum blockchain based electronic voting system. Ethereum blockchain networks are used to transfer money and store data. Networks are organized by one or more machines. Every node is a machine that running an ethereum client. The eligible one can run the node. By adopting blockchain in e-voting system database distribution, one of the cheating sources of database manipulation and data loss can be reduced. This can be a better solution for the currently existing issues over rigging the electronic voting machines to win elections by the political parties in our government.
Christoph Thiel, Christian Thiel, Christian Thiel, Christian Thiel
No abstract is available for this record.
Oskar Josef Gstrein, Dimitry Kochenov
While the digital layer of social interaction continues to evolve, the recently proclaimed hopes in the development of digital identity could be both naïf and dangerous. Rather than just asking ourselves how we could digitize existing features of identity management, and corresponding financial transactions on a community or state level, we submit that truly useful and innovative digital identities need to be accompanied by some significant rethinking of the essential basics behind the organization of the world. Once digital technologies leave the realm of purely on-line or deeply local projects, the confrontation with the world of citizenship’s biases and the random distribution of rights and duties precisely on the presumption of the lack of any choice and absolute pre-emption of any disagreement comes into a direct conflict with all the benefits Distributed Ledger Technology purports to enable. Some proponents of Distributed Ledger Technology-based identity systems envisage ‘cloud communities’ with truly ‘self-sovereign’ individuals picking and choosing which communities they belong to. We rather see a clear risk that when implemented at the global scale, digital identity systems could be deeply harmful, reinforcing and amplifying the most repugnant aspects of contemporary citizenship. In this contribution we present a categorization of existing digital identity systems from a governance perspective, and discuss it on basis of three corresponding case studies which allow us to infer opportunities and limitations of Distributed Ledger Technology based identity. Subsequently, we put our findings in the context of existing preconditions of citizenship law, and conclude with a suggestion of a combination of several tests which we propose to avoid the plunge into a neo-feudal ‘brave new world’. We would like to draw attention to the perspective that applying digital identity without rethinking the totalitarian assumptions behind the citizenship status will result in perfecting the current inequitable system, which is a move away from striving towards justice and a more dignified future of humanity. We see the danger that those might be provided with plenty of opportunities who already do not lack such under current governance structures, while less privileged individuals will witness their already weak position becoming increasingly worse.
Filip Fatz, Philip Hake, Peter Fettke
Information exchange between tax administrations, businesses, and auditors is key to effective tax enforcement. Therefore, organizations proposed the application of blockchain technology to interconnect the different actors and increase tax transparency. However, the lack of confidentiality measures hampers further development. Especially, businesses are concerned about the disclosure of commercially sensitive information that might threaten their competitive advantage. In this paper, we investigate how the application of zero-knowledge-proofs can contribute to solving the dilemma between transparency and confidentiality in blockchain-based tax systems. To meet this end, we provide a conceptual design of a confidentiality-preserving distributed tax ledger. Moreover, we present a prototype addressing reporting obligations in the context of value-added tax. Our evaluation shows that zero-knowledge proofs are an effective measure to trade off transparency against confidentiality. Still, their application is challenging and future research must focus on better abstractions of proving statements.
Maurício Moreira Neto, Carlos Sergio da S.Marinho, Emanuel Ferreira Coutinho, Leonardo O. Moreira · 6 authors
E-health applications are health-related computing solutions that use the internet to provide services to users. One of the main challenges of E-health applications is the data privacy and security of patients. E-health application need should provide security and privacy mechanisms due to sensitive user data such as medical exams, DNA sequences, and others. Blockchain technology has become a research focus on several sectors that require their inherent characteristics, especially, about the security and privacy of data. This paper aims to present research opportunities with the use of Blockchain technology in applications that manipulate DNA sequence data. For this purpose, we propose an architecture for general E-health applications with Blockchain and implement a Proof of Concept (POC) to analyze the use of Blockchain technology in E-health applications using DNA sequence data. We also listed a set of research opportunities that permeate this topic.
Dominik Schmelz, Karl Pinter, Johannes Brottrager, Phillip Niemeier · 6 authors
The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been effective for more than a year. Even though several million euros have been spent on GDPR projects, companies are insecure about being fully compliant. The status quo is that companies lack processes and infrastructure for several legal responsibilities regarding rights of data subjects. This leads to manual effort and long waiting times for users. Data protection authorities receive complaints about these waiting times, but affected people cannot legally submit a proof for request initiation since these requests are usually done via the companies' platforms or email. This paper presents a technical solution to this problem by installing a blockchain-based application to submit and track requests for data access securely whilst preserving data protection for the subjects to be able to file complaints and ultimately ensure the given data protection rights.
William J. Magnuson
In Blockchain Democracy, William Magnuson provides a breathtaking tour of the world of blockchain and bitcoin, from their origins in the online scribblings of a shadowy figure named Satoshi Nakamoto, to their furious rise and dramatic crash in the 2010s, to their ignominious connections to the dark web and online crime. Magnuson argues that blockchain's popularity stands as a testament both to the depth of distrust of government today, and also to the fervent and undying belief that technology and the world of cyberspace can provide an answer. He demonstrates how blockchain's failings provide broader lessons about what happens when technology runs up against the stubborn realities of law, markets, and human nature. This book should be read by anyone interested in understanding how technology is changing our democracy, and how democracy is changing our technology.
Andrea Peláez-Repisow
In the last year, the concept of distributed ledgers has entered mainstream company and policy agendas. Between different types of ledgers, it can be said that blockchain is the most notable. Different studies have shown that blockchain technology can reduce bureaucracy, increase the level of trust in public recordkeeping. In order to make further progress in its implementation in the different areas, it is necessary first of all that technological and ecosystem maturity of distributed ledgers have to increase in order to unlock the transformative power of blockchain; and in second instance the Policy agenda should focus on non-technological barriers, and create new administrative processes that can be re-engineered for blockchain. But, this new context, faces new legal challenges: personal data, free circulation of data..., which must to be analysed. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the new legal challenges from technical and methodological points of view.
Huajie Shen, Jun Zhou, Zhenfu Cao, Xiaolei Dong · 5 authors
Blockchain can be utilized to enhance both security and efficiency for location-based service (LBS) in vehicular social networks (VSNs), due to its inherent decentralization, anonymity, and trust properties. Unfortunately, the existing approaches either lack effective authentication, which is vulnerable to the man-in-the-middle attack, or require an online certificate authority (CA) where frequent interactions with resource-constrained vehicles are required. To address these challenging issues, in this article, a lightweight threshold CA for consortium blockchain along with a privacy-preserving LBS protocol in blockchain enforced VSNs is proposed. First, a lightweight threshold CA framework LTCA is proposed by devising a threshold proxy signature, where the proxy signing key is issued by a coalition of threshold number of CAs playing the roles of authorized nodes in the consortium blockchain. Without the intervene of an online CA, each vehicle in the online phase can authenticate its identity by itself each time its blockchain address (i.e., account address) is updated. Then, based on the proposed LTCA, an efficient privacy-preserving LBS protocol PPVC is contrived to protect each vehicle’s conditional identity privacy with a moderate cost. Finally, both security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed LTCA and PPVC in blockchain enforced VSNs.
Yongle Chen, Xiaojian Wang, Yuli Yang, Hong Li
Advanced wireless technology in Internet of Things (IoT) devices is increasing and facing various security threats. The authentication of IoT devices is the first line of defense for the wireless network. Especially in a Wi-Fi network, the existing authentication methods mainly use a password or digital certificate, these methods are inconvenient to manage due to certificate issuance or prone to be attacked because passwords are easily cracked. In this paper, we propose a location-aware authentication scheme using smart contracts to ensure that IoT devices can securely perform Wi-Fi network authentication. The scheme adopts the concept of secondary authentication and consists of two phases: the registration phase, which is mainly designed to complete the generation of the public and private keys, and to link the device information with its related device information; the authentication phase, which is mainly designed to determine whether the requesting device is within a legal location range. We use the smart contract to ensure the credibility and irreparability of the authentication process. Analysis of the attack model and the attacks at different stages proves that this certification scheme is assured, and the simulation results show that the overhead introduced by this scheme is acceptable, this scheme can provide greater security for the Wi-Fi authentication of IoT devices.
Merrill Warkentin, Craig P. Orgeron
No abstract is available for this record.
Nakhoon Choi, Heeyoul Kim
Recently, with the increase of smart factories, smart cities, and the 4th industrial revolution, internal user authentication is emerging as an important issue. The existing user authentication and Access Control architecture can use the centralized system to forge access history by the service manager, which can cause problems such as evasion of responsibility and internal corruption. In addition, the user must independently manage the ID or physical authentication medium for authentication of each service, it is difficult to manage the subscribed services. This paper proposes a Hybrid blockchain-based integrated ID model to solve the above problems. The user creates authentication information based on the electronic signature of the Ethereum Account, a public blockchain, and provides authentication to a service provider composed of a Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain. The service provider ensures the integrity of the information by recording the Access History and authentication information in the Internal-Ledger. Through the proposed architecture, we can integrate the physical pass or application for user authentication and authorization into one Unification ID. Service providers can prevent non-Repudiation of responsibility by recording their authority and access history in ledger.
Bin Luo, Xinghua Li, Jian Weng, Jingjing Guo · 5 authors
While enjoying the convenience brought by Location Based Service (LBS), the location privacy of vehicles in VANET may be disclosed. Distributed k-anonymity, as one of the most popular privacy protection methods, fails to take the trustworthiness of participants into account, resulting in malicious tracing of vehicles, which further leads to the sensitive information leakage, and even the safety threat of personal property. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain enabled trust-based location privacy protection scheme in VANET. Specifically, by analyzing the different requirements of the request vehicle and the cooperative vehicle during the process of constructing the anonymous cloaking region, as well as combining the characteristics of these two roles, we devise the trust management method based on Dirichlet distribution, such that both the requester and the cooperator will only cooperate with the vehicles they trust. Moreover, by employing blockchain, we also proposed the data structure to record the trustworthiness of vehicles on publicly available blocks timely, so that any vehicle can access the historical trust information of counterparties whenever necessary. Finally, the construction process of anonymous cloaking region is presented. Security analysis and extensive experiments indicate that the proposal is resilient to various trust model attacks, it can effectively detect the malicious vehicles, and preserve the location privacy of vehicles in the anonymous cloaking region construction, while the required time delay is limited.