The last few years have seen a steep increase in blockchain interoperability research. Most solutions connect public blockchains; hence, the main cross-chain use case is token transfer. By-design platform transparency, tamper-resistance, and auditability make blockchains an infrastructure candidate for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), but bridging CBDCs is an important missing piece in general. In this paper, we leverage an asset transfer protocol, ODAP/SATP, to define an extendable and dependable blockchain interoperability middleware that can bridge CBDC from Hyperledger Fabric to EVM-based permissioned blockchains. The key interoperation enabler in the solution is a shared asset definition enforced by both sides of the bridge, accompanied by a mapping between Fabric Identities and Ethereum addresses for Identity management. We implement our design for the CBDC use case utilizing Hyperledger Cactus. Through a preliminary performance evaluation, we show that the underlying ledgers heavily influence the latency of the solution, not the bridging components.
The metaverse gradually evolves into a virtual world containing a series of interconnected sub-metaverses. Diverse digital resources, including identities, contents, services, and supporting data, are key components of the sub-metaverse. Therefore, a Domain Name System (DNS)-like system is necessary for efficient management and resolution. However, the legacy DNS was designed with security vulnerabilities and trust risks due to centralized issues. Blockchain is used to mitigate these concerns due to its decentralized features. Additionally, it supports identity management as a default feature, making it a natural fit for the metaverse. While there are several DNS alternatives based on the blockchain, they either manage only a single type of identifiers or isolate identities from other sorts of identifiers, making it difficult for sub-metaverses to coexist and connect with each other. This paper proposes a Multi-Identifier management and resolution System (MIS) in the metaverse, supporting the registration, resolution, and inter-translation functions. The basic MIS is portrayed as a four-tier architecture on a consortium blockchain due to its manageability, enhanced security, and efficiency properties. On-chain data is lightweight and compressed to save on storage while accelerating reading and writing operations. The resource data is encrypted based on the attributes of the sub-metaverse in the storage tier for privacy protection and access control. For users with decentralization priorities, a modification named EMIS is built on top of Ethereum. Finally, MIS is implemented on two testbeds and is available online as the open-source system. The first testbed consists of 4 physical servers located in the UK and Malaysia while the second is made up of 200 virtual machines (VMs) spread over 26 countries across all 5 continents on Google Cloud.
The massive amount of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) and the need to store that data presents a huge challenge for storage. However, meeting this challenge has also driven the development of storage technologies, especially those related to cloud storage. Although attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes are commonly used to achieve data confidentiality and fine-grained access control in cloud storage, there is still an inherent problem with ABE schemes, namely the key escrow problem. In this paper, we propose a revocable blockchain-aided ABE with escrow-free (BC-ABE-EF) system that resolves the key escrow problem by replacing the traditional key authority with a consortium blockchain. The keys are generated between the blockchain and the data user through a secure key issuing protocol, and the blockchain cannot obtain the user's full key alone. Furthermore, utilize the decryption cloud server to schedule pre-decryption operations in cloud and introduce a group manager to update the group keys of unrecovered users and generate re-encryption keys. The security analysis shows that our scheme is secure under the Decisional Computation Diffie Hellman (DCDH) assumption. The effectiveness of the scheme is demonstrated by simulating the BC-ABE-EF scheme and comparing it based on performance analysis.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies have emerged as one of the most revolutionary distributed systems, with the goal of eliminating centralised intermediaries and installing distributed trusted services. They facilitate, trustworthy trades and exchanges, over the Internet, power cryptocurrencies, ensure transparency for documents, and much more. Committee-based blockchains are considered today as a viable alternative to the original Proof-ofWork paradigm, since they offer strong consistency and are energy efficient. One of the most popular committee-based blockchains is Tendermint used as core by several popular blockchains such as Tezos, Binance Smart Chain and Cosmos. Tendermint as many other committee-based blockchains is designed to tolerate one-third of Byzantine nodes. In this paper we propose TenderTee, an enhanced version of Tendermint, able to tolerate one half of Byzantine nodes. The resilience improvement is due to the use of a trusted abstraction, a light version of attested append-only memory, which makes the protocol immune to equivocation (i.e. behavior of a faulty node when it sends different faulty messages to different nodes.). Furthermore, we prove the correctness of TenderTee for both one-shot and repeated consensus specifications.
A. Ramachandran, Punyala Ramadevi, Ahmed Alkhayyat, Yousif Kerrar Yousif
Nowadays, numerous applications are associated with cloud and user data gets collected globally and stored in cloud units. In addition to shared data storage, cloud computing technique offers multiple advantages for the user through different distribution designs like hybrid cloud, public cloud, community cloud and private cloud. Though cloud-based computing solutions are highly convenient to the users, it also brings a challenge i.e., security of the data shared. Hence, in current research paper, blockchain with data integrity authentication technique is developed for an efficient and secure operation with user authentication process. Blockchain technology is utilized in this study to enable efficient and secure operation which not only empowers cloud security but also avoids threats and attacks. Additionally, the data integrity authentication technique is also utilized to limit the unwanted access of data in cloud storage unit. The major objective of the projected technique is to empower data security and user authentication in cloud computing environment. To improve the proposed authentication process, cuckoo filter and Merkle Hash Tree (MHT) are utilized. The proposed methodology was validated using few performance metrics such as processing time, uploading time, downloading time, authentication time, consensus time, waiting time, initialization time, in addition to storage overhead. The proposed method was compared with conventional cloud security techniques and the outcomes establish the supremacy of the proposed method.
Despite the maturity of cloud services (e.g., outsourcing of computational tasks), a number of operational challenges remain. For example, how do we ensure trust between outsourcers and workers in a zero-trust environment? While a number of blockchain-based solutions that eliminate the reliance on trusted third parties have been presented, many of these existing approaches do not achieve robust fairness and/or support compatibility with other systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient fair payment system using blockchain (EFPB), designed to achieve robust fairness and compatibility. Specifically, EFPB comprises a number of cryptographic building blocks, mainly: one-way accumulator (RSA-based construction), stealth address and symmetric encryption. We then evaluate the performance of EFPB to demonstrate that it is more efficient and low-cost than other competing schemes, as well as presenting a comparative summary of functionalities.
In this paper, we are proposing a blockchain-based architectural model to ensure the integrity of healthcare-sensitive data in an AI-based medical research context. In our approach, we will use the HL7 FHIR standardized data structure to ensure the interoperability of our approach with the existing hospital information systems (HIS). Indeed, structuring the data coming from several heterogeneous sources would enhance its quality. In addition, a standardised data structure would help establish a more accurate security and data protection model throughout the process of data collection cleansing and processing. Hence, we designed our architecture to be interoperable with all FHIR-based HISs to add a trust layer to the current medical research process. In this paper we are to achieve our goal, we will combine continua healthcare IoT architecture and Hyperledger fabric architecture. Our trust layer model is composed of four components: (1) an architecture that integrates with the HL7 FHIR data exchange framework, which extends an open protocol that supports efficient standards-based healthcare data exchange (2) a blockchain layer to support access control and auditing of FHIR health records that are stored in the data exchange network databases; (3) a distributed architecture consisting of multiple trusted nodes ensure privacy protection for health data; and (4) an application programming interface (API) will be available for use by the network.
The financial technology (FinTech) has promoted the wide application of FinTech with the help of artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, data science and other new technologies. Trust evaluation has become a forward-looking issue for the rapid development of FinTech. The existing trust evaluation methods of FinTech do not consider the impact of the timeliness, reliability and non-invasive factors of trust on trust evaluation, which results in low accuracy of trust evaluation and incapability of effectively identifying malicious behaviors of users. Firstly, this paper introduces the blockchain technology to construct a four-layer architecture structure and multiple trust evaluation indicators based on blockchain service data. Secondly, the paper proposes a blockchain based FinTech trust evaluation mechanism (BFTEM), which utilizes blockchain to record relevant data and multiple trust parameters during the transmission process of each block, and verify the trust degree issued by the trust holder through the comprehensive trust value of the user. Finally, the block generation time, throughput, delayed response time and comprehensive trust value are experimentally studied through simulation experiments. Simulation experiments show that BFTEM mechanism can better improve the security and reliability of FinTech data, and has advantages in improving the accuracy of trust evaluation and expanding potential applications.
The article outlines the potential benefits of blockchain technology in the education sector, particularly in open educational resources. The literature on open educational resources, blockchain technology and credential authentication is reviewed. The potential benefits and possible challenges of adopting blockchain technology to the process of verifying and authenticating students' academic achievements, which are crucial to ensure their credibility and recognition in other institutions as well as in the labour market, were presented. The main objective of this article was to provide students' perspectives on their familiarity with ORE, blockchain technology and how it can be adopted to verify educational credentials. The author of the article highlights the new benefits of implementing blockchain technology, primarily in terms of verifying the authenticity of diplomas and educational achievements, increasing their value and credibility in the eyes of employers. The introduction of these technologies can influence a more transparent teacher evaluation process and ensure secure storage of learner data. The results of this study indicate the potential of blockchain technology in enhancing the credibility and authenticity of academic achievement in OER. The study highlights the importance of further education and awareness initiatives, dealing with technical complexities and addressing data privacy and security issues to ensure the successful integration of blockchain into the education system. Through the use of distributed registries, a secure and transparent platform can be created to share and verify educational credentials.
Storage requirements are increasing rapidly with fast-growing Cloud computing technology.The more data storage and transaction processing requirements, the more chances of malicious activities.Storage security is a vital concern nowadays.To deal with this problem, in this research, we propose a system that provides an efficient security mechanism for data storage on the Cloud with enhanced access control policies by using Blockchain technology, which is immutable in nature.The usage of smart contracts improves transparency and creates a trust model that eliminates the requirement of a trusted third party.The system manages the log trails of all transactions and accomplishes all access policies.The proposed model is transparent, traceable, and secure.Data owners hold all rights to their data and any activity pertaining to accessing the data illegitimately shall not be accepted by the network and shall be notified to all the concerns.We demonstrate our proposed mechanism with details about all concerned stakeholders.The Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) scheme is used with multiple authorities to manage the user attributes that avoid the use of the central authority.The smart contract avoids the computational burden on the user side and reduces communication costs.We analyze security and compare the performance of our proposed model.
The development of information technology allows the collaborative business process to be run across multiple enterprises in a larger market environment. However, while collaborative business expands the realm of businesses, it also causes various hazards in collaborative Interaction, such as data falsification, inconstancy, and misuse. To solve these issues, a blockchain-based collaborative business modeling approach was proposed and analyzed. However, the existing studies lack the blockchain risk problem-solving specification, and there is no verification technique to examine the process. Consequently, it is difficult to confirm the appropriateness of the approach. Thus, here, we propose and build a blockchain-based trust model to strengthen and verify the integrity and security of the collaborative business process; Integrity and security address the validity of collaborative interactions in terms of a trust, and we construct a blockchain pattern based on trust elements to meet the required the characteristics. Specifically, a trust model can be applied to the healthcare data-sharing process, and then the achievement of the trust-based safe data-sharing process can be proven. Our model can be used as a trust-building guidance tool or for integrity and security verification with the collaborative business process in a distributed environment with blockchain.
Aysha Alnuaimi, Diana Hawashin, Raja Jayaraman, Khaled Salah · 5 authors
Healthcare credentialing plays a vital role in ensuring the competence and integrity of healthcare professionals. However, the current credentials verification process suffers from time-consuming procedures due to the large number of intermediaries, limited information access, data fragmentation and the persistent risk of fraudulent credentials, leading to delayed hiring, increased administrative burden, and loss of trust and reputation in the healthcare system. In this paper, we utilize blockchain technology to enhance the credentialing process by streamlining the verification steps, improving data security, and providing stakeholders with confidence through secure storage of credentials. In addition, we utilize advanced security techniques, such as proxy re-encryption and cryptographic algorithms, to ensure the protection of sensitive data, facilitate secure communication, and prevent unauthorized access. We develop smart contracts which eliminate the need for intermediaries, automate the verification process, and enhance transparency and data integrity. We present system architecture, sequence diagrams, entity relationship diagrams, and the underlying algorithms of our blockchain-based solution. We discuss how our proposed solution attains the objectives outlined in the paper. We conduct cost evaluation and security analysis to validate the effectiveness of our solution. Additionally, we compare our proposed system with existing blockchain-based solutions, highlighting its novelty. The code of our smart contracts is made publicly available on GitHub.
Emerging blockchain technology has become the cornerstone of many applications providing trusted data services. However, existing blockchain platforms cannot meet the growing demand for big data storage. Blockchain should duplicate both transactions and other user-defined data across nodes for integrity assurance. The rapid expansion of data on blockchain (on-chain data) increases the difficulty of deploying a full node, resulting in decreasing the degree of decentralization and adding the risk of broken data. To tackle these problems, we propose sChain, a novel framework for improving blockchain storage capacity, which does not revise blockchain implementation and can be applied to almost all the existing blockchain platforms. sChain outsources the user data to storage devices that are structurally external to the blockchain network. In theory, a user can outsource unlimited data to sChain. However, those off-chain data may suffer from corruption. To verify the data integrity, we propose a new provable data possession (PDP) scheme, which does not need a centralized entity to maintain any secret keys and therefore eliminates a single point of failure. What is more, we also design a prototype to accelerate the proposed PDP scheme through Intel SGX technology and parallel processing. Security analysis and evaluation results show that sChain can protect data security and effectively improve the blockchain storage capacity, respectively.
Khaled Chait, Abdelkader Laouid, Mostefa Kara, Mohammad Hammoudeh · 6 authors
The transformative potential of blockchain technology has resulted in its widespread adoption, bringing about numerous advantages such as enhanced data integrity, transparency, and decentralization. Blockchain has effectively proven its ability to establish trustworthy systems across a multitude of applications. As the number of transactions recorded into a blockchain grows, the blockchain’s size expands significantly posing challenges to the network, particularly in terms of storage capacity and processing power. To address this problem, we present a cryptosystem based on RSA to provide aggregate signatures in blockchains. The aggregate signature replaces all transaction signatures of a block. In this scheme, all participating blockchain nodes use the same modulusN, each with its own private and public key pair generated fromN. Regardless of the number of transactions, nodes, and signers, the aggregate signature size is alwaysO(k), wherekis a security parameter. The miner that constructs a candidate block computes the aggregate signature σ, replaces all transaction signatures by σ, and transmits the block with only one aggregate signature. The proposed scheme incorporates a flexible and accountable subgroup aggregate signature mechanism, allowing any subsettofntotal elements to sign data, wheretis the required number of signers. To verify that a set of elements signed the block, the verifier requires the aggregate signature, the aggregate public key, and the data hash. This approach requires minimal interaction between the signers, which results in reduced network traffic. Regardless of the network size, there are alwayst+nexchanged messages. Experimental analysis shows the proposed aggregate signature scheme’s effectiveness in increasing security robustness and reducing block size and overall network traffic.
A. Sasikumar, Logesh Ravi, Ketan Kotecha, Ajith Abraham · 6 authors
Data security and integrity are becoming increasingly important as the volume of data being created and stored grows. A controlled third party that provides most of the existing big data security systems makes them susceptible to several security risks. By resolving current technology challenges, including scalability, non-tampering, trustworthiness, data governance, and transparency, blockchain technology plays a vital role and has a significant potential to safeguard personal information. Therefore, this work focuses on addressing real-time big data storage issues based on a transdisciplinary research approach. This study introduces a brand-new approach to big data storage security that leverages blockchain technology and applies highway protocol to generate new blocks. The proposed highway protocol works based on the flexible finality condition to overcome issues of baseline models. The highway allows blocks to run the consensus mechanism to configure security thresholds more freely. The proposed protocol also allows blocks with lower thresholds to reach finality more quickly than blocks requiring greater degrees of confidence. Therefore, the proposed big data framework can dynamically control data manipulation and continuously support individuals to participate in the data-sharing process. A comparison was performed with the number of data requests in terms of hit ratio, and a highway protocol provides better results than baseline models. The proposed model provides a data processing period of 13 to 30 ms and an energy consumption of 32 to 41 mJ.
Conventional copyright systems are governed nationally, and there is no global ledger for storing copyright data. Due to the lack of a global copyright monitoring system, it is difficult to provide cross-border copyright protection. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized copyright system based on a consortium blockchain, which ensures cross-border copyright protection of individuals’ digital content and solves existing challenges in international copyright management. The proposed system enables a synchronized platform to register and trade copyright globally without using a global cloud. Individual countries receive membership from a copyright federation and participate in block creation by executing the energy-efficient proof of authority consensus algorithm. These countries are regarded as the authorities of the platform. They validate transactions conducted by users and store them in the blockchain. Anyone, either registered or unregistered, can investigate a copyrighted work, but only registered users can make transactions. A token-based payment method is also proposed for paying copyright charges (i.e., transaction fees) to authorities through the federation. A prototype of the system was implemented, and its performance was evaluated. This paper provides direction and guidance towards international copyright management.
Osama A. Khashan, Sultan Alamri, Waleed Alomoush, Mutasem K. Alsmadi · 6 authors
In recent times, technology has advanced significantly and is currently being integrated into educational environments to facilitate distance learning and interaction between learners. Integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) into education can facilitate the teaching and learning process and expand the context in which students learn. Nevertheless, learning data is very sensitive and must be protected when transmitted over the network or stored in data centers. Moreover, the identity and the authenticity of interacting students, instructors, and staff need to be verified to mitigate the impact of attacks. However, most of the current security and authentication schemes are centralized, relying on trusted third-party cloud servers, to facilitate continuous secure communication. In addition, most of these schemes are resource-intensive; thus, security and efficiency issues arise when heterogeneous and resource-limited IoT devices are being used. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based architecture that accurately identifies and authenticates learners and their IoT devices in a decentralized manner and prevents the unauthorized modification of stored learning records in a distributed university network. It allows students and instructors to easily migrate to and join multiple universities within the network using their identity without the need for user re-authentication. The proposed architecture was tested using a simulation tool, and measured to evaluate its performance. The simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed architecture to significantly increase the throughput of learning transactions (40%), reduce the communication overhead and response time (26%), improve authentication efficiency (27%), and reduce the IoT power consumption (35%) compared to the centralized authentication mechanisms. In addition, the security analysis proves the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in resisting various attacks and ensuring the security requirements of learning data in the university network.