Abstract With an increasing affinity towards patient‐centric care, sharing real‐time sensitive data for collaboration between multiple parties with finer access control becomes critical. Most existing studies based on the blockchain technology in the medical field discuss various application scenarios and security aspects, without focusing on data ownership, secure data sharing, or finer access control. In this work, a non‐fungible token (NFT)‐based system is proposed to implement a health record marketplace. The system leverages the NFT technology to provide dual ownership along with finer access control and efficiency in data sharing. The advantage of permissioned blockchain along with InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) are taken for off‐chain data storage to improve security and efficiency. Because price determination is critical in the market, Stackelberg game theory is utilized to determine pricing strategies for both data owners and consumers. Also, to efficiently achieve finer access control, a popularity‐based adaptive NFT management scheme using reinforcement learning is proposed. Simulation experiments are carried out to demonstrate accuracy and efficiency of our proposed schemes.
Naga Ramya Bhamidipati, Varsha Vakkavanthula, George Stafford, Masrik A. Dahir · 10 authors
Insurance claims processing involves multi-domain entities and multi-source data, along with a number of human-agent interactions. Consequently, this processing is traditionally manually-intensive and time-consuming. Blockchain technology-based platforms for intelligent automation can significantly improve the scale and response time of claims processing. However, there is a need to secure such platforms against fraud (e.g., duplicate claims) and the loss of data integrity caused due to cyber-attacks (e.g., Sybil attack). In this paper, we propose a novel “ClaimChain”, a consortium Blockchain platform that transforms the state-of-the-art NICB/ISO database architecture approach through increased shared intelligence and participation of insurance companies. ClaimChain features include: (a) automation of insurance claim processing via implementation of a Blockchain infrastructure, (b) infrastructure-level threat modeling via attack tree formalism for data integrity attacks, and (c) application-level fraud modeling for identified prominent red flags through machine learning models and risk scoring on the basis of risk severity. We evaluate the scalability of ClaimChain by simulating realistically large number of Blockchain transactions of claim processing. Further, we show that data integrity attacks at the infrastructure-level can be mitigated (as seen in reduction of 24% probability in loss) through implementation of security design principles. We also perform fraud-detection over an open dataset in ClaimChain to show how machine learning models can detect fraudulent activity with 98% accuracy.
Circulated record advances (DLTs) are getting a lot of consideration. As interest grows in the future applications of DLTs, contributions to Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) are increasing to provide a secret supporting base. BaaS entails a specialist organisation providing and managing components of a DLT system in order to promote and enhance efficiencies in the creation, experimentation, arrangement, and progression of DLT applications across the board.
In any case, a significant part of the enthusiasm for DLTs originates from their capability to decentralize, disintermediate, and empower 'trustless' associations. From the start sight, BaaS
– being offered by a supplier – seems to contradict this. Practically speaking, regardless of whether BaaS raises substantive trust concerns relies upon the idea of the contribution, the application's points of interest, and the members' objectives and hazard hunger.
Akmal Akhatov, Fayzullo Makhmadiyarovich Nazarov, Akbar Rashidov
This study examines the directions and mechanisms for improving data reliability in Bigdata and blockchain technologies. Currently, there is a sharp increase in data flow, data processing is performed in computer networks, and an increase in the volume of data also leads to an increase in the problem of data reliability. It is important to identify solutions based on the use of modern technologies to solve these problems. Observations show that data reliability violations are mainly observed in three areas, namely due to artificial and natural redundancy in data transmission, the integrity of interconnected data in data transmission and storage, and errors in large-scale data processing. The features and capabilities of Bigdata class data and blockchain technology to improve data reliability were mentioned. Data from the Bigdata class was analyzed to improve the reliability of data based on blockchain mechanisms.
Miguel Morales‐Sandoval, J. A. Llorens Molina, Heidy M. Marin-Castro, J. L. Gonzalez‐Compean
In an Inter-Organizational Business Process (IOBP), independent organizations (collaborators) exchange messages to perform business transactions. With process mining, the collaborators could know what they are actually doing from process execution data and take actions for improving the underlying business process. However, process mining assumes that the knowledge of the entire process is available, something that is difficult to achieve in IOBPs since process execution data generally is not shared among the collaborating entities due to regulations and confidentiality policies (exposure of customers’ data or business secrets). Additionally, there is an inherently lack-of-trust problem in IOBP as the collaborators are mutually untrusted and executed IOBP can be subject to dispute on counterfeiting actions. Recently, Blockchain has been suggested for IOBP execution management to mitigate the lack-of-trust problem. Independently, some works have suggested the use of Blockchain to support process mining tasks. In this paper, we study and address the problem of IOBP mining whose management and execution is supported by Blockchain. As contribution, we present an approach that takes advantage of Blockchain capabilities to tackle, at the same time, the lack-of-trust problem (management and execution) and confident execution data collection for process mining (discovery and conformance) of IOBPs. We present a method that (i) ensures the business rules for the correct execution and monitoring of the IOBP by collaborators, (ii) creates the event log, with data cleaning integrated, at the time the IOBP executes, and (iii) produces useful event log in XES and CSV format for the discovery and conformance checking tasks in process mining. By a set of experiments on real IOBPs, we validate our method and evaluate its impact in the resulting discovered models (fitness and precision metrics). Results revealed the effectiveness of our method to cope with both the lack-of-trust problem in IOBPs at the time that contributes to collect the data for process mining. Our method was implemented as a software tool available to the community as open-source code.
Youcef Djenouri, Gautam Srivastava, Asma Belhadi, Jerry Chun‐Wei Lin
Abstract This article introduces a new problem of distributed knowledge graph, in IoT 5G setting. We developed an end‐to‐end solution for solving such problem by exploring the blockchain management and intelligent method for producing the better matching of the concepts and relations of the set of knowledge graphs. The concepts and the relations of the knowledge graphs are divided into several components, each of which contains similar concepts and relations. Instead of exploring the whole concepts and the relations of the knowledge graphs, only the representative of these components is compared during the matching process. The framework has outperformed state‐of‐the‐art knowledge graph matching algorithms using different scenarios as input in the experiments. In addition, to confirm the usability of our suggested framework, an in‐depth experimental analysis has been done; the results are very promising in both runtime and accuracy.
The global supply chain is a network of interconnected processes that create, use, and exchange records, but which were not designed to interact with one another. As such, the key to unlocking the full potential of supply chain management (SCM) technologies is achieving interoperability across participating records systems and networks. We review existing research and solutions using distributed ledger technology (DLT) and provide a survey of its current state of practice. We additionally propose a holistic solution: a DLT-based interoperable future state that could enable the interoperable, efficient, reliable, and secure exchange of records with integrity. Finally, we provide a gap analysis between our proposed future state and the current state, which also serves as a gap analysis for many fractional DLT-based SCM solutions and research.
Sidra Malik, Volkan Dedeoglu, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak
Blockchain offers traceability and transparency to supply chain event data and hence can help overcome many challenges in supply chain management such as: data integrity, provenance and traceability. However, data privacy concerns such as the protection of trade secrets have hindered adoption of blockchain technology. Although consortium blockchains only allow authorised supply chain entities to read/write to the ledger, privacy preservation of trade secrets cannot be ascertained. In this work, we propose a privacy-preservation framework, PrivChain, to protect sensitive data on blockchain using zero knowledge proofs. PrivChain provides provenance and traceability without revealing any sensitive information to end-consumers or supply chain entities. Its novelty stems from: a) its ability to allow data owners to protect trade related information and instead provide proofs on the data, and b) an integrated incentive mechanism for entities providing valid proofs over provenance data. In particular, PrivChain uses Zero Knowledge Range Proofs (ZKRPs), an efficient variant of ZKPs, to provide origin information without disclosing the exact location of a supply chain product. Furthermore, the framework allows to compute proofs and commitments off-line, decoupling the computational overhead from blockchain. The proof verification process and incentive payment initiation are automated using blockchain transactions, smart contracts, and events. A proof of concept implementation on Hyperledger Fabric reveals a minimal overhead of using PrivChain for blockchain enabled supply chains.
DNS has always been criticized for its inherent design flaws, making the system vulnerable to kinds of attacks. Besides, DNS domain names are not fully controlled by the users, which can be easily taken down by the authorities and registrars. Since blockchain has its unique properties like immutability and decentralization, it seems to be promising to build a decentralized name service on blockchain. Ethereum Name Service (ENS), as a novel name service built atop Etheruem, has received great attention from the community. Yet, no existing work has systematically studied this emerging system, especially the security issues and misbehaviors in ENS. To fill the void, we present the first large-scale study of ENS by collecting and analyzing millions of event logs related to ENS. We characterize the ENS system from a number of perspectives. Our findings suggest that ENS is showing gradually popularity during its four years' evolution, mainly due to its distributed and open nature that ENS domain names can be set to any kinds of records, even censored and malicious contents. We have identified several security issues and misbehaviors including traditional DNS security issues and new issues introduced by ENS smart contracts. Attackers are abusing the system with thousands of squatting ENS names, a number of scam blockchain addresses and malicious websites, etc. Our exploration suggests that our community should invest more effort into the detection and mitigation of issues in Blockchain-based Name Services towards building an open and trustworthy name service.
Hao Sen Andrew Fang, Teng Hwee Tan, Cheryl Yan Fang Tan, Marcus Chun Jin Tan
BACKGROUND: Blockchain technology has the potential to enable more secure, transparent, and equitable data management. In the health care domain, it has been applied most frequently to electronic health records. In addition to securely managing data, blockchain has significant advantages in distributing data access, control, and ownership to end users. Due to this attribute, among others, the use of blockchain to power personal health records (PHRs) is especially appealing. OBJECTIVE: This review aims to examine the current landscape, design choices, limitations, and future directions of blockchain-based PHRs. METHODS: Adopting the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) guidelines, a cross-disciplinary systematic review was performed in July 2020 on all eligible articles, including gray literature, from the following 8 databases: ACM, IEEE Xplore, MEDLINE, ScienceDirect, Scopus, SpringerLink, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Three reviewers independently performed a full-text review and data abstraction using a standardized data collection form. RESULTS: A total of 58 articles met the inclusion criteria. In the review, we found that the blockchain PHR space has matured over the past 5 years, from purely conceptual ideas initially to an increasing trend of publications describing prototypes and even implementations. Although the eventual application of blockchain in PHRs is intended for the health care industry, the majority of the articles were found in engineering or computer science publications. Among the blockchain PHRs described, permissioned blockchains and off-chain storage were the most common design choices. Although 18 articles described a tethered blockchain PHR, all of them were at the conceptual stage. CONCLUSIONS: This review revealed that although research interest in blockchain PHRs is increasing and that the space is maturing, this technology is still largely in the conceptual stage. Being the first systematic review on blockchain PHRs, this review should serve as a basis for future reviews to track the development of the space.
Feb 23, 2021·Proceedings of the ... annual Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Systems and Applications Meeting/Proceedings of a meeting - Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Systems and Applications Meeting
"Transcript of Video Presentation" Legal time and traceability to official time sources are becoming increasingly important. Engineering for civil timekeeping purposes demands timestamps with sufficient metadata to accurately represent local time. Spatial-temporal geographic information systems (GIS), or 4D GIS, provide three dimensions of geographic coordinates to identify a physical space and the fourth dimension referring to time. Geographic location information significantly enhances the provenance of local timestamps. “Traceability” has different meanings. One is of markers for abstract elements such as data, intellectual properties, or events stating when and where those were recorded or taken place. The other is of evidence attached to physical assets attesting to their origin, their transit between locations, and chain of custody. These applications of traceability share universal ground-truths of earth-bound locations and UTC timekeeping. This paper describes an aggregate of two efforts that were presented at past PTTI conferences in 2019 and 2020: Common Calendar Timestamp system (CCT) by EdlMax and modern timekeeping for IT solutions by Sync-n-Scale. This collaboration introduces “geostamping” as a tool for meeting traceability needs across multitude of industry segments. A geostamp is an atomic data element consisting of a geographic location (e.g. cartesian latitude, longitude, and altitude) and CCT timestamp. Its authenticity is established by combining a demonstrably trusted geographic coordinate and a UTC-traceable accurate timestamp. A geostamp is human readable and technically accurate for interpretive and forensic purposes. It can be examined afterwards and away from its issuing system for determination of where and when it was recorded. This characteristic makes it suitable for general and legal purposes where time recording is used for tracking and auditing. Trusted geostamps are also suitable for a wide range of 4D GIS applications in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics and Blockchain distributed ledgers. The CCT specification has been extended to include geographic coordinates to support geostamp. Organization of its code base has been refined to provide clear guidance on the interpretation of IERS Leap Seconds, IANA Time Zone Database and geographic information, algorithms for UTC calculation, binary and character timestamp formats, methods for populating and reading the two formats, and a high-level API for convenient manipulation and calculation of calendaring operations. The C/C++ reference implementation has been updated to accommodate the full breadth of civil time data provided by Tz database. It is now also available to the community on GitHub. The authors hope these improvements will find support in general adoption and look forward to engaging with the community for future features.
Jieh‐Haur Chen, Mu‐Chun Su, Vidya Trisandini Azzizi, Ting-Kwei Wang · 5 authors
Technological developments have made the construction industry efficient. The aim of this research is to solve communication interaction problems to build a project management platform using the interactive concept of natural language processing technology. A comprehensive literature review and expert interviews associated with techniques dealing with natural languages suggests the proposed system containing the Progressive Scale Expansion Network (PSENet), Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), and Bi-directional Recurrent Neutral Networks Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (BRNN-CNN) toolboxes to extract the key words for construction projects contracts. The results show that a fully automatic platform facilitating contract management is achieved. For academic domains, the Contract Keyword Detection (CKD) mechanism integrating PSENet, CRNN, and BRNN-CNN approaches to cope with real-time massive document flows is novel in the construction industry. For practice, the proposed approach brings significant reduction for manpower and human error, an alternative for settling down misunderstanding or disputes due to real-time and precise communication, and a solution for efficient documentary management. It connects all contract stakeholders proficiently.
Manal Hader, Abderrahman El Mhamedi, Abdellah Abouabdellah
This paper represents how supply chain will be more empowered when the ERP system will be integrated with Blockchain technology, it also details out how the two technologies will work together to provide transparency, and cost reduction to supply chain features.
Jan 1, 2021·Proceedings of the 36th IFIP TC 11 International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (IFIP SEC 2021)/IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol. 625, 2021, 19-35
Stefan More, Peter Grassberger, Felix Hörandner, Andreas Abraham · 5 authors
Recruiters and institutions around the world struggle with the verification of diplomas issued in a diverse and global education setting. Firstly, it is a nontrivial problem to identify bogus institutions selling education credentials. While institutions are often accredited by qualified authorities on a regional level, there is no global authority fulfilling this task. Secondly, many different data schemas are used to encode education credentials, which represents a considerable challenge to automated processing. Consequently, significant manual effort is required to verify credentials. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by introducing a decentralized and open system to automatically verify the legitimacy of issuers and interpret credentials in unknown schemas. We do so by enabling participants to publish transformation information, which enables verifiers to transform credentials into their preferred schema. Due to the lack of a global root of trust, we utilize a distributed ledger to build a decentralized web of trust, which verifiers can query to gather information on the trustworthiness of issuing institutions and to establish trust in transformation information. Going beyond diploma fraud, our system can be generalized to tackle the generalized problem for other domains lacking a root of trust and agreements on data schemas.
Roxana Martínez, Rocío Andrea Rodríguez, Pablo Martín Vera
This paper analyzes the quality of the data in the data sets presented in the open portal sites of the Argentine Republic, considering the portal of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (C.A.B.A) and the decentralized organizations of the country. The objective is to show results compared to the analysis of the data sets published in the open portals, with some important considerations when maintaining, managing and reusing systems, in order to generate added value to the community. Finally, the open data catalogs are validated, using a Python library (pydatajson), to verify if they comply with a standard catalog structure, proposed by the government of the Argentine Republic.
Liang Shen, HAO Baozhong, Li Yang, Yu Han · 7 authors
Although the continuous construction of smart grid and power Internet of Things has brought massive data to grid enterprises, the cost of data storage, operation and maintenance is gradually increasing, on the contrary, the value of data has not been effectively mined and utilized, the main reason is that the current data asset management of State Grid Corporation of China is still an infancy stage, and still faces the problems of data aggregation quality, safety and compliance control, shared application scope, and management mechanism efficiency and so on. In order to solve the above problems, Big Data Center of State Grid Corporation of China takes advantage of the blockchain with distributed consensus autonomy and data storage, non-tampering and traceability, and business intelligence contract script, explores the application of blockchain in power grid data asset management, and then, tries to construct the architecture of power grid data asset management based on blockchain, which is to promote security compliance and open sharing of power grid data operation, and realize the efficient management and operation of power grid data assets.
Current smart contract-enabled blockchain technology exhibits limited support for data quality assessment of transaction payloads. This is critical because blockchain aims at removing intermediaries, which often play an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of the quality of data used by a system. Moreover, owing to the immutability typical of blockchain, poor quality data are bound to remain stored in a blockchain, possibly forever. This article contextualizes the issue of data quality in blockchains, discussing how to extend or adapt blockchain technology to support data quality assessment and identifying a set of challenges for future research.