Privacy and integrity of medical records while preserving and sharing them within any healthcare system is of high importance. Recently, India's Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) aims to address various issues of the existing healthcare systems and proposes a federated healthcare system to bring all the players under a common umbrella. However, it falls short on various aspects, including transparency, auditability, and traceability of activities and information within the system. In this proposal, we aim to bridge these existing gaps and propose an extension of the ABDM proposal by incorporating a blockchain layer instrumented with additional features such as traceable consent management, auditable access logs, etc., while keeping in mind its performance and scalability. We present a proof of concept of our proposal based on Hyperledger Fabric and related backend technologies and manifest experimental results to reinforce the practicality of our proposal.
Zipline is a protocol for trustless relaying of sync committee attested block roots from an Ethereum beacon chain to the execution layer of another blockchain. These in turn can be used to prove transactions or state to support crosschain applications. Zipline's operation is similar to that of an optimistic rollup but rather than updating a blockchain state via transactions it updates a beacon chain light client state. Under normal operation Zipline is able to maintain an updated view of the beacon chain block roots with minimal execution. In the case of relayer fraud it borrows from state-of-the-art fault proving strategies to identify and revert fraudulent blocks under an honest minority assumption.
Smart Contracts have enabled Distributed Ledger Technologies and Blockchains to execute business logic over decentralized and distributed networks. Consequently, Blockchain technology boosted through Smart Contracts has become increasingly widespread in decentralized finance and industrial applications in recent years. Although Blockchain-based development systems have experienced significant growth in adoption areas, Smart Contract testing is still an immature aspect of the Blockchain development life cycle, even if it is involved in mission-critical financial and non-financial applications. To contribute to remedying this state of affairs, we provide the design guidelines for implementing a Smart Contract testing approach based on log analysis and programming language independence. We thus describe the key aspects of this testing strategy, such as the integration of the Elastic Search (ELK) stack and the feasibility of its use in distributed and decentralized applications.
Kealan Dunnett, Shantanu Pal, Zahra Jadidi, Raja Jurdak
CTI sharing is increasingly used by organisations to strengthen security. The sensitivity of CTI has led to research on trust-based sharing, yet most existing CTI sharing approaches only support static trust-based decisions or centralised trust evaluation, limiting their scalability and lead to centralised risk. This paper proposes a blockchain-based CTI sharing framework that relies on trustless delegates for dynamic trust-based decision-making and decentralised trust evaluation. To facilitate trustless delegation, our proposal allows CTI producers to intentionally inject false data on a periodic basis into the system to audit the behaviour of delegates. Moreover, unlike existing approaches, delegates within our framework facilitate sharing of CTI directly with consumers such that scalable CTI sharing occurs. The results of a qualitative evaluation of the proposed framework's security show that it is resilient to common privacy and trust concerns. Moreover, a quantitative evaluation of a proof-of-concept prototype using Ethereum show that the proposed framework is scalable and cost-effective.
Marco Di Francesco, Lodovica Marchesi, Raffaele Porcu
Trading data sets is not easy. The owner of valuable data, once they are sold the first time, cannot be sure that they will not be copied and resold. On the other hand, the buyer, cannot be sure that the seller will not sell the same data to a competitor. The advent of blockchain technology, or DLT, can mitigate, or event solve these issues, because it can certify the data ownership, and act as a broker between seller and buyer. In this paper we present Kryptosafe, a system developed following sound software engineering practices, aimed to manage the trade of data sets taking advantage of the unique features of immutability and trustfulness of Ethereum blockchain, and of IPFS distributed DBMS. Kryptosafe allows data sellers to sell a whole encrypted data set or to show potential buyers a subset of it, allowing full access only after the sale is finalized. Using ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens, it also manages one-time sales, when the data set ownership is simply transferred to the buyer, or multiple sales of the same data set to different buyers.
Blockchain is a distributed and immutable ledger managed by all participants. The full nodes which store the entire ledger play an essential role in managing it in a transparent and decentralised manner. However, it is difficult to verify that full nodes store the entire ledger in their dedicated storage due to Sybil, outsourcing, or generation attacks. Existing work on proving storage for cloud computing and remote data storage applications has high latency for decryption, and its impact on decentralisation is unclear, rendering it impractical for use in blockchain. In this paper, we propose a decentralised Practical Proof of Storage (PPoS) solution for blockchain full nodes with asymmetric latencies for encryption and decryption, which introduces a chained encryption and decryption architecture. To generate a unique replica of a block, each full node performs encryption with its own address and a previously encrypted block, storing the unique block in its dedicated storage. In PPoS, encryption is expensive and time consuming, enabling it to detect outsourcing and generation attacks and to deter Sybil attacks. Simultaneously, decryption is about 25 times faster than encryption, resulting in minimal performance overhead. The proof process is also decentralised by randomly selecting provers, verifiers, and encrypted blocks. Our experiments use up to 720 real BitCoin blocks to evaluate the performance and quantify the decentralisation of PPoS. Our results show that PPoS's asymmetric design reduces decryption time 25-fold over existing approaches, while maintaining a high degree of decentralisation, confirming its suitability for blockchain full nodes.
The metaverse is a unified, persistent, and shared multi-user virtual environment with a fully immersive, hyper-temporal, and diverse interconnected network. When combined with healthcare, it can effectively improve medical services and has great potential for development in realizing medical training, enhanced teaching, and remote surgical treatment. The metaverse provides immersive services for users through massive and multimodal data, and its data scale and data growth rate are bound to show exponential growth. Blockchain-based distributed storage is a fundamental way to keep the metaverse running continuously; however, many blockchains, such as Ethereum and Filecoin, suffer from low transaction throughput and high latency, which seriously affect the efficiency of distributed storage services and make it difficult to apply them to the metaverse environment. To this end, this paper first proposes a network architecture for distributed storage systems based on proof of retrievability to address the problem of centralized decision making and single point of access in centralized storage. The secure data storage of the metaverse health system is ensured. Secondly, we designed two data transmission protocols through vector commitment and encoding functions to achieve the transfer of time cost from the critical path to storage nodes and improve the efficiency of data verification between nodes as well as the scalability of the metaverse health system. Finally, this paper also conducts security analysis and performance analysis of the proposed scheme, and the results show that our scheme is secure and efficient.
To prevent DoS attacks, Ethereum assigns a fixed gas cost to every atomic operation in the EVM and the party who creates a transaction has to pay for its overall gas usage. While the gas model is successful in preventing DoS attacks, it causes significant costs in transaction fees. For example, in June-September 2022, the average daily gas usage of Ethereum was almost four million dollars. We propose a solution to minimize these fees by moving most of the execution of a contract off-chain and storing only the bare minimum on-chain. We then trigger an on-chain execution only if there is a disagreement between the parties to the contract, which is in turn only possible if at least one party is acting dishonestly. In such cases, our approach can identify and penalize the dishonest party by making them pay not only for the gas usage of their own function calls, but also calls made by other parties. Thus, it is game-theoretically irrational to behave dishonestly in this protocol. If all parties are rational, the total gas usage goes down significantly. Notably, our approach does not require a sidechain and works directly on the main Ethereum blockchain. We also provide extensive experiments over real-world Ethereum smart contracts, demonstrating that our protocol reduces their gas usage by 40.09%.
S. Veena, C J Tejas Mallikarjun, S Vishwesh Adiga, B C Venkatesh Reddy · 5 authors
In today's digital age, it's becoming increasingly common for individuals and businesses alike to opt for cloud-based storage over traditional on-premise storage. However, this shift towards cloud computing also brings with it a host of new security challenges. Data stored on public cloud infrastructure is susceptible to various types of vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks that can compromise its confidentiality, availability, and integrity. To address these concerns, we propose an innovative architecture that integrates multiple entities - including multiple public clouds, a private cloud, smart contracts, and the data owner, client, or user. Our decentralized cloud architecture provides a robust form of security for data by incorporating smart contracts between the data owner and the private cloud, as well as between the client and the data owner. By utilizing this approach, we can help ensure that data is protected from unauthorized access, while also providing users with a highly flexible and scalable solution for managing their data in the cloud. With our architecture, businesses and individuals can enjoy the benefits of cloud-based storage while also maintaining the highest levels of security and peace of mind.
saving the patient medical record electronically is done via electronic medical records (EMRs) where all the patient-related information that consider private and sensitive is usually related to the treatment process, as well as the diagnoses process of a specific patient usually this information needs to be shared and re-submit by many peers doctors with each, In this paper, propose a novel approach for electronic medical records system using a non-fungible token (NFT) based on a customized permission blockchain built with secret sharing technology to reduce the key management overhead as well as provide a readable extension of the ledger to ensure it is easy to read and easy access from any type of computer. The system that uses NFT for electronic medical records (NFT-EMR) ensures easy access and guarantees availability, privacy, and security providing authority to the patient over his data as well as proof of ownership which is done using proof of secret shares and consistency this system can be used in real-world between hospitals and medical centers and within metaverse world. The NFT-ERM system was evaluated using the main evaluation factors used to evaluate blockchain and compared to the standard ERM system.
In the past few years, Internet users are at danger due to the exponential surge in cyberattacks. Given the importance of privacy techniques like zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), their study and development are the major areas of interest. A cryptographic method called ZKPs can conceal information while still enabling data validation. In this work, we outline various schemes highlighting the value of zero-knowledge evidence in the context of cyber security and how it can reduce the risk of cyberattacks. We have discussed two models of ZKPs, which are interactive and noninteractive ZKPs with their applications and issues. The goal of this research is to develop communication- and computation-efficient protocols for zero-knowledge arguments and proofs of propositions that include a significant number of “simple” predicates. The study finishes with real-world examples, practicality, and usability of ZKP applications using blockchain, zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs, and the cryptocurrency Zcash.
Quratulain Arshad, Wazir Zada Khan, Faisal Azam, Muhammad Khurram Khan · 6 authors
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) vision has astoundingly transcended environmental sensing with integrated computing systems and smart devices, providing seamless connectivity among humans, machines, and their environment to cooperate for convenience and economical benefits. Apart from all the tremendous benefits of IoT, this paradigm still suffers from challenges of security and privacy vulnerabilities and demands a secure system for effective utilization of services in real-world IoT scenarios relying on which the IoT consumers expect secure and trustworthy communications. Trust Management (TM), which is a crucial aspect of security, plays a vital role in ensuring the exchange of information in a secure manner and maintaining the reliability of a system by measuring the degree of trust on IoT devices, reducing the uncertainties and risks involved in the systems. Thus, in recent years, Blockchain technology has been utilized for developing security innovations in TM field for different classes of IoT applications. It can provide tamper-proof data by enabling more reliable trust information and integrity verification, ultimately enhancing its availability and privacy when storing and sharing information. This paper provides a comprehensive survey that aims at analyzing and assessing Blockchain-based decentralized trust management systems (BCDTMS) for IoT. The contributions of this study are threefold; first, we provide the comprehensive and comparative analysis of state-of-the-art BCDTMS devised for different IoT classes such as Internet of Medical of Things (IoMT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Social IoT (SIoT). To make it an extensive study, we perform a detailed assessment of the existing BCDTMS in the literature in the aspects of Blockchain and TM. Second, we present requirements for developing Blockchain-based TM systems for IoT, and third we have highlighted the challenges in the context of using Blockchain for TM in various IoT applications.
Abstract The audiovisual media content (AMC) industry, focused on film and television drama production, is confronted with a broken business model due to the dominance of centralized streaming platforms. The top platforms dominate global distribution but only offer slices of produced and heritage content. In addition, they compete with the AMC industry by producing a majority of content distributed. This leaves fewer gatekeepers deciding on the content to be distributed and less diverse content easily accessible to audiences Consequently, audiences are compelled to engage in pirating movies despite a willingness to pay. Recent blockchain innovations towards the so-called Web3 promise to restore this broken business model by re-establishing direct contact between the producers of films and their audiences. The benefits of networks (peer-to-peer or community based) in combination with Web3 follow the principle of decentralized disintermediation while comprising elements such as FIAT to crypto-payment mechanisms, self-sovereign identity authentication, blockchain oracles, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO), and so on. A gap exists with regard to methodological designs of Web3 decentralized applications (DApp) and their ecosystems for restoring a viable AMC business model that not only eliminates the need for piracy activities but even the need for platforms. The DApp architecture designs for the film- and media industry ecosystem creation in this paper allow, on the one hand, for a legal compliance check ahead of a costly deployment. On the other hand, the DApp designs of this paper also allow for a tailored blockchain technology stack development. Ultimately, this research is a continuation of an earlier whitepaper to establish a participatory economy in the film industry from peer-to-peer streaming.
Abstract Blockchain and Decentralized Applications (DApps) are increasingly important for creating trust and transparency in data storage and computation. However, on-chain transactions are often costly and slow. To overcome this challenge, off-chain nodes can be used to store and compute data. Unfortunately, this introduces the risk of untrusted nodes. To address this, authenticated data structures have been proposed, however, this ignores the compute of data from the raw data. We tackle this challenge by introducing zk-Oracle, which provides an efficient and trusted compute and storage off-chain. There is a challenge in using zero-knowledge proofs (zk-proof for short), which is the large proof generation time. We aim to overcome it with novel designs in zk-Oracle. zk-Oracle builds on zk-proofs technologies to achieve two goals. First, the computation of data structures from raw data and the corresponding proof generation is improved in terms of performance. Second, the verification on-chain is inexpensive and fast. Our experiments show that we can speed up zk-proof generation by up to $$550 \times $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>550</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> faster than the baseline method.
Izdehar M. Aldyaflah, Wenbing Zhao, Himanshu Upadhyay, Leonel Lagos
In this paper, we present a secure datastore based on an Ethereum smart contract. Our research is guided by three research questions. First, we will explore to what extend a smart-contract-based datastore should resemble a traditional database system. Second, we will investigate how to store the data in a smart-contract-based datastore for maximum flexibility while minimizing the gas consumption. Third, we seek answers regarding whether or not a smart-contract-based datastore should incorporate complex processing such as data encryption and data analytic algorithms. The proposed smart-contract-based datastore aims to strike a good balance between several constraints: (1) smart contracts are publicly visible, which may create a confidentiality concern for the data stored in the datastore; (2) unlike traditional database systems, the Ethereum smart contract programming language (i.e., Solidity) offers very limited data structures for data management; (3) all operations that mutate the blockchain state would incur financial costs and the developers for smart contracts must make sure sufficient gas is provisioned for every smart contract call, and ideally, the gas consumption should be minimized. Our investigation shows that although it is essential for a smart-contract-based datastore to offer some basic data query functionality, it is impractical to offer query flexibility that resembles that of a traditional database system. Furthermore, we propose that data should be structured as tag-value pairs, where the tag serves as a non-unique key that describes the nature of the value. We also conclude that complex processing should not be allowed in the smart contract due to the financial burden and security concerns. The tag-based secure datastore designed this way also defines its applicative perimeter, i.e., only applications that align with our strategy would find the proposed datastore a good fit. Those that would rather incur higher financial cost for more data query flexibility and/or less user burden on data pre- and post-processing would find the proposed database too restrictive.
P. Hari Babu, J. Anusha, J. Jaya Prakash, Ch. Krishna Veni · 5 authors
Trust is the main barrier preventing widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent infrastructures for implementing data trust prevents many data owners from sharing their data and concerns data users regarding the quality of the shared data. Blockchain technology proposes a distributed and transparent administration by employing multiple parties to maintain consensus on an immutable ledger. This project presents an end-to-end framework for data trust to enhance trustworthy data sharing utilizing blockchain technology. We also suggest an adaptive solution to determine the number of transaction validators based on the computed trust value.
Ayei E. Ibor, Edim Bassey Edim, Arnold Adimabua Ojugo
This paper focuses on highlighting the problems that are associated with the absence of privacy and security of medical records in a healthcare system. It seeks to bridge the gap between the currently used security protocols in the management of health information, and encryption algorithms that should be used. Extant health information systems have always been developed with conventional databases. With all the privileges to read, write and execute assigned to the administrator, who has centralised control over all medical records, there is the likelihood of the misuse, distortion and loss of such records in the event that the administrator becomes compromised or inadvertent system failure. To solve this problem, the use of decentralised and distributed databases becomes paramount. Blockchain technology has recently received much attention due to its ability to permit a peer-to-peer network with distributed databases that can be stored locally on each node in the network. Subsequently, all updates on records in a database are communicated to all participating parties, hence addressing the problem of centralised control. In this paper, we propose a health information system on a blockchain to create a trust-free system for both health personnel and patients. From the results obtained, we achieved the decentralisation of the medical records’ database to enhance the security and privacy of data on the modeled peer-to-peer network.
Purpose The purpose of this study is to look into the concept of blockchain technology which stores data in a distributed, tamper-resistant setting and how this technology may affect the future library and information (LI) centers’ operations and policy. It explores the potential benefits and limitations of this technology, for LI centers are the core objectives of this paper. Design/methodology/approach A systematic review of both academic and practitioner literature was conducted. It followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (2020) standards. Findings The review shows that the decentralized nature of blockchain will transform the work in libraries and improve the inter-communication among communities. It can provide better privacy of user data thus increasing collaboration. However, there might be technological, financial, legal and social challenges that may act as hurdles to the realization of these goals in the true sense. The overall result shows that by keeping data updated, libraries can evaluate blockchain opportunities and make the best use of this technology. Practical implications Given the huge investments by industry, academic research that explores potential ramifications and supports libraries is required. The adoption of blockchain was investigated in this study from a variety of perspectives for LI center’s while also providing directions for future research. Originality/value It is evident that globally there is progress in blockchain technology development in terms of research and adoption in many industries, but the intention to adopt blockchain by libraries is still a fantasy. The lack of empirical evidence in the existing literature justifies the gap that needs to be filled. This systematic review attempts to fill the gaps in the existing knowledge which may serve as a reference for future initiatives in this field.
Mohammad Tabrez Quasim, Mohammad Mufareh Mobarak, Khair Ul Nisa, Mohammad Meraj · 5 authors
Global healthcare systems are going through substantial changes in access, data processing, monitoring, and healthcare. By 2020, it's anticipated that connected and data-capturing equipment will have produced around 2314 exabytes of healthcare data. Cybercriminals work very hard to get access to medical information. Due to this challenge, the market for cybersecurity is predicted to reach $27.1 billion in 2026. To collect data for clinical research, a central repository will be formed with blockchain technology. This article proposes a secure mechanism utilizing Blockchain to guarantee the security of electronic health records (EHR). Databases, the Internet of Things, sensors, and other computing resources are part of the architecture. In comparison to the conventional healthcare system, the security and privacy of EHR will be improved by this framework for security