Mahmood K. Mohammed, Alharith A. Abdullah, Zaid A. Abod
In general, health records include important information like the patient’s history, findings of examinations and assessments, diagnosis reports, documentation of consent, and treatment plans. Sharing this information has grown to be a challenge concerning data security, as it could result in compromising patient privacy. Therefore, the patient's information should not be misused or tampered with. In this paper, a full process of storing and retrieving medical records is proposed using a decentralized system through the integration of two emerging technologies: Blockchain and Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). The system provides solutions for the major security concerns associated with medical files, including authentication and authorization, database breaches, data integrity of local and cloud storage, and data availability. The obtained results indicate a high level of safety by adding security layers such as confidentiality, authentication, authorization and access control, based on different factors. All these aspects contribute to reaching the aim of the proposed system, which is storing and retrieving medical records in a decentralized and safe manner.
The lack of data outsourcing in healthcare management systems slows down the intercommunication and information sharing between different entities. A standard solution is outsourcing the electronic health record (EHR) to a cloud service provider (CSP). The outsourcing of the EHR should be performed securely without compromising the CSP functionalities. Searchable encryption would be a viable approach to ensure the confidentiality of the data without compromising searchability and accessibility. However, most existing searchable encryption solutions use centralised architecture. These systems have trust issues as not all the CSPs are fully trusted or honest. To address these problems, we explore blockchain technology with smart contract applications to construct a decentralised system with auditable yet immutable data storage and access. First, we propose a blockchain-based searchable encryption scheme for EHR storage and updates in a decentralised fashion. The proposed scheme supports confidentiality of the outsourced EHR, keyword search functionalities, verifiability of the user and the server, storage immutability, and dynamic updates of EHRs. Next, we implement a prototype using JavaScript and Solidity on the Ethereum platform to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed solution. Finally, we compare the performance and security of the proposed scheme against existing solutions. The result indicates that the proposed scheme is practical while providing the desired security features and functional requirements.
Qian Mei, Hu Xiong, Yeh-Cheng Chen, Chien‐Ming Chen
In this article, we propose a secure and effective blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving authentication scheme for the transportation cyber-physical system (CPS) with the cloud-edge computing environment, which supports unconditional anonymity and data batch integrity verification while greatly simplifying key management issues. The proposed privacy-preserving authentication scheme employs an elliptic curve to construct a pairing-free ring signature scheme, which greatly reduces the resources overhead in the transportation CPS with cloud-edge computing. Moreover, the authentication process is performed on the blockchain to provide more reliable service information for vehicular communication. Furthermore, the security proof of the scheme is demonstrated based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem under the random oracle model, and gives the corresponding security analysis. Finally, a simulation experiment demonstrates that the proposed scheme is feasible compared with the existing schemes.
Abstract Electronic health record (EHR) allows patients to use an open channel (ie, Internet) to control, share and manage their health records among family members, healthcare providers and other third party data users. Thus, in such an environment, privacy, confidentiality, and data consistency are the major challenges. Although cloud‐based EHR addresses the aforementioned discussions, these are prone to various malicious attacks, trust management and non‐repudiation among servers. Recently, due to the property of immutability, blockchain technology has been introduced to be as an auspicious solution for achieving EHR sharing with privacy and security preservation. Motivated by the above debates, we present BFHS, a blockchain‐based fine‐grained secure EHR sharing mechanism. On BFHS, we encrypt the EHR using ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based encryption (CP‐ABE) and upload it to the interplanetary file system (IPFS) for storage, while the matching index is encrypted via proxy re‐encryption and kept in a medical consortium blockchain. In addition, we created a credit assessment mechanism and incorporated it into the smart contract. Smart contracts, proxy re‐encryption, a credit evaluation mechanism, and IPFS all work together to give patients with a trustworthy EHR sharing environment and a dynamic access control interface. The thorough comparison and experimental analysis show that the proposed BFHS has more comprehensive security features and is more practicable.
With the advancement of medical science, the implementation of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) for enhancing the efficiency and reliability of healthcare services has become a widespread phenomenon. However, EMRs are stored in hospitals and medical institutions independently, leading to sharing challenges. Moreover, the highly sensitive EMRs are prone to be tampered with and abused, posing privacy and security threats. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an Anti- Quantum Attribute-based Signature(AQ — ABS) for Secure EMRs Sharing with Blockchain. Initially, We are the first ones to design an Attribute-based Signature (ABS) that can resist quantum attacks in E-health, called AQ — ABS. Further, the owner and provider of the EMR encrypt and sign it via the AQ — ABS scheme, then store EMR to a secure and distributed file storage system, i.e. Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Finally, the index hashes generated by IPFS and keywords are re-signed and stored in the consortium blockchain. Security analysis indicates that our proposed scheme fulfills the properties of signers’ anonymity, EMRs unforgeability, EMRs shareability, and fine-grained access control. Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed scheme performs low overhead as well as outperforms existing ABS and EMR systems.
Maruti M Arer, Praveen M. Dhulavvagol, Shashikumar G. Totad
In current distributed file system, Big data storage suffers from security issues, single point of failure and scalability problems. With the popularity of bitcoin and crypto world, Blockchain has emerged as new decentralized framework. Now, Blockchain is also used as distributed storage framework for storing large data. When the volume of data increases, blockchain suffers from storage overhead and scalability issues. To solve this problem, we propose blockchain based distributed big data storage using IPFS(Inter-Planetary File System). IPFS reduces the storage overhead by storing small pieces of large file in multiple nodes and collectively generating hash of the file. Further elasticsearch is also used for efficient query retrieval. Overall,the above architecture of blockchain, IPFS and Elasticsearch enhances the big data storage, search latency and precision. It also provides access control mechanism which allows only authorized user to access the files. Thus this framework provides efficient data storage, security and its retrieval.
With the explosive growth of data, cloud storage has become a widely used storage method. To protect the integrity and availability of data in cloud storage systems, multireplica provable data possession has gradually become a research hotspot. This paper uses smart contracts to replace traditional third-party auditor (TPA) and proposes a noninteractive multireplica provable data possession scheme based on smart contracts, making the verification process public, immutable, traceable, and able to be carried out periodically and automatically. This paper introduces the concept of noninteractivity to reduce the transaction fees caused by the frequent operation of blockchain in the verification process. By stipulating payment rules in the smart contract, we can ensure the fairness of all parties. Finally, we give the correctness proof of the scheme and the security proof in the random oracle model, comparing it with other schemes and verifying the practicability of our scheme through experiments.
The rapid growth of various vehicular apps such as automotive navigation and in-car entertainment has brought the explosion of vehicular data. Such a growth has given rise to a huge challenge of maintaining the quality of cloud storage services for the whole period of storage in vehicular networks. As a result, poor quality of services easily causes data corruption problems and thereby threats vehicular data integrity. Blockchain, a tamper-proofing technique, is considered a promising approach for mitigating data integrity risks in cloud storage. However, existing blockchain-based schemes for auditing long-term cloud data integrity suffer from poor communication performance in a vehicular network. In this study, a blockchain-based offline auditing scheme for cloud storage in the vehicular network is proposed to improve auditing performance. Inspired by the data structure of blockchain, we design an evidence chain to achieve offline auditing, which allows the cloud to spontaneously generate data integrity evidence without communicating with auditors during the evidence generation phase. Furthermore, we extend our scheme to support public and automatic validation based on the smart contract. We prove the security of the proposed scheme under the random oracle model and further provide the performance evaluation by comparing with the state-of-the-art approaches.
Jien Song, Yang Yang, Jie Mei, Gaofeng Zhou · 12 authors
The need to accelerate the innovation and application of the supply chain has been suggested by the State Council of China. To solve the problem of data isolation caused by privacy protection in the power material supply chain, a data traceability and sharing mechanism based on blockchain is designed in this paper. Firstly, the existing problems of the power material supply chain are introduced, and the applicability of blockchain in the power material supply chain in view of these problems is analyzed. Secondly, blockchain-based power material supply deployment and application structures are proposed. Then, considering the problem of data isolation in the material inspection and distribution links between suppliers and the material company, a data traceability mechanism based on blockchain is designed to provide evidence for the data authenticity and a proxy re-encryption method is used to ensure security and privacy in data sharing. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed data traceability and sharing mechanism is verified using the Hyperledger Fabric platform for power material case studies. The simulation results show that the combination of proxy re-encryption and blockchain technology in the power material supply chain can confirm the validity of the historical data and keep the private data of the material company confidential, so as to realize the traceability and sharing of the power material supply data.
This article presents a review of the application of blockchain and blockchain-based smart contracts in the chemical and related industries. We introduce the basic concepts of blockchain and smart contracts and explain how some of their features are enabled. We review several typical or novel applications of blockchain and smart contract technologies and their enabling concepts and underlying technologies. We classify the selected literature into five categories and discuss their motivations and technical designs. We recognize that the trend of decentralization creates a need to use blockchain and smart contracts to implement trust and distributed control mechanisms. We also speculate on future applications of blockchain and smart contracts. We believe that, in the future, blockchains with different consensus mechanisms will be studied and applied to achieve more efficient and practical decentralized systems. Also, blockchain-based smart contracts will be more widely applied to enhance autonomous distributed controls in decentralized systems.
The digital ecosystems have experienced a paradigm shift as there is a growing level of integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), distributed computing apparatus, and robotic policy enforcement strategies. Governance structures are faced with the difficult task of negotiating the vagaries of privacy laws and decentralized data processing and the use of algorithmic decision-making with the migration of data-intensive applications to web-based environments. The increasing regulatory environment, such as GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific data protection requirements, have significant forces on the requirement to have strong policy-driven governance infrastructures that entrench privacy and security at every layer of the web application stack. Although cloud platforms and microservice architectures have been developed, modern governance solutions have weaknesses in terms of scalability, being context-aware and dynamically adapting to changes in policy constraints. The research paper presents the AI-Enabled Policy-Driven Web Governance Framework that has been developed on the Full-Stack Java ecosystem which involves spring boot, Jakarta EE, containerized deployment platforms and intelligent agents which are rule-based. The framework incorporates machine learning-related policy interpretation, semantic arguments engines, as well as automated monitoring applications that regulate user interactions, data activities, service coordination, and cross-layer correspondence. AI agents will adapt legal and organizational privacy requirements into dynamic policies that are explicitly and dynamically implemented in real-time at the front-end, API, middleware, and database tiers. These challenges in digital governance that are solved are minimization of data, contextual privacy, verification of compliance, detection of anomalies, and fine-grained access control. The given architecture proposes a Multi-Layer Governance Orchestration Model (MGOM) that divides the governance issues into policy ingestion, AI interpretation, runtime enforcement, auditability, and compliance reporting. The framework also includes three levels of privacy shield with a static code analysis, user behavior analytics (UBA), and encrypted data pipelines. Through an extensive assessment analysis, it is evident that the framework has the ability to be highly precise in automated policy enforcement, decreases the latency of governance and enhances consistency of compliance over the traditional rule-based systems. The findings of the experiments point out that AI-enabled governance engine helps to improve the accuracy of policy compliance by 27.8 percent, minimize privacy invasions by 42.1 percent, and decrease administrative workload by 34.6 percent. A combination of a supervised learning, the natural language processing (NLP) and the symbolic rule mining allow the system to be autonomously adapted to new regulatory conditions without being reconfigured by human operators. Security benchmarks also indicate resiliency to partial attack vectors, such as inference attacks, unauthorized data elevation, and access patterns analysis. The paper will add value to the digital governance field by offering a holistic, scalable, and future-proof implementation that can assist with current web environments of many services including medicine, finance, online commerce, and smarter cities. The framework ensures the creation of a novel model of transparent, compliant, and privacy-conscious digital ecosystems by entrenching AI at the core of policy interpretation and enforcement. The publication contributes to the discussion of intelligent governance systems and offers a reference design to the developers, policymakers, and researchers, who seek to develop trustful and ethically aligned digital spaces
The journey towards Industry 4.0 have driven the workforce with the need for continuous competency development to stay on top of their profession and remain attractive to their employers. In this context, E-Portfolio has been conceived as a promising tool for both professionals and employers, in assessing and providing guidance for further workplace learning. Nevertheless, the challenges in implementing E-Portfolio are daunting, particularly with regard to lack of interoperability while collecting and sharing the competency evidences across multiple organizations and institutions. The increasing move towards professional (learner)-centered interoperability poses additional challenges that needs to be addressed to realize the full potential of E-Portfolio in the context of Industry 4.0. This work puts emphasize on realization of professional-centered interoperability and proposes a framework leveraging the advantage of blockchain, decentralized storage system interplanetary file system, smart contract and session management for E-Portfolio creation and sharing evidences across multiple organizations without comprising the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the shared evidences. The proof of concept simulation on Ethereum official test network Rinkeby demonstrates the feasibility of proposed framework in practice. In addition, the evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates its effectiveness from the aspects of cost and security as a potential solution for implementing E-Portfolio and helping the professional to remain competitive in global labor market.
Dan Bogdanov, Joosep Jääger, Peeter Laud, Härmel Nestra · 10 authors
We present ZK-SECREC, a domain-specific language for zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. We focus on its type system, making the point that this is the most appropriate mechanism for tracking information flows in a statement that is meant to be proved using a zero-knowledge protocol. The appropriateness stems from the necessary distinctions between the two involved parties and between the computations made locally or on top of the protocol. The appropriateness also stems from how the types match with the major steps of typical ZK protocols, including the generation of Common Reference Strings. We compare the type system of ZK-SECREC with those of the previously proposed languages for ZK proofs and privacy-preserving computations, and show how ZK-SECREC handles certain aspects better.
Data privacy and data availability remain the major concern in centralized cloud storage, which could be handled effectively through the concept of decentralized data storage. However, the secrecy of data sharing is a rising concern in the decentralized data storage for which the effective access control and data sharing scheme, hash and session key-dependent attribute-based encryption (HS-ABE) is proposed in this research. Accordingly, the multi-level access control and sharing strategy authenticates the genuine requestors and assures access to the requestors upon the authentication of their attribute sets. In this perspective of access control and secure data sharing, Ethereum blockchain, decentralized Interplanetary File System (IPFS), HS-ABE are organized. The data owners (DOs) provide the secret attribute set for the requestors ensuring fine-grained access over the data. The performance of the developed HS-ABE scheme is investigated and compared with the conventional strategies, where the memory usage of the proposed scheme is 5812 Kbps, which proclaims a well-defined secure access control and authentication in the Blockchain-based cloud storage.
<strong>Abstract: </strong><em>Strategic management is an important part of an entity’s resources to achieve its goals. Involving the manager and the management team, knowing the context in which they act, setting goals, identifying trends in the field of activity, technological upgrade, identifying directions of action, global policies in the area, legislation and alignment with the online environment, make the organization’s target easier to reach. This study is a review of the literature and articles, to help managers have a complete picture and to be a potential tool to help make decisions in the use or acceptance of cryptocurrencies. The world of cryptocurrencies is developing at a dizzying pace and it is imperative to ask ourselves if it can be a viable alternative to the classic payment methods for Romanian companies as well.</em> <strong>Keywords:<em> </em></strong><em>cryptocurrencies, strategic management, blockchain, management strategies</em> <strong>JEL Classification:</strong><em> G23, G24, G28</em>
The data outsourcing services provided by cloud storage have greatly reduced the headache of data management for users, but the issue of remote data integrity poses further security concerns and computing burdens. The introduction of a third-party auditor (TPA) frees data owners from the auditing burden and alleviates disputes over the audit results between data owners and cloud storage providers. However, malicious cloud servers may collude with TPAs to deceive users for financial profits. Hiring multiple auditors in a single audit assignment appears to be a method to address the above problem, but the ensuing voting issues need to be further explored. In this paper, we proposed a smart contract-based outsourced data integrity auditing scheme for multiauditor scenarios. Unlike some existing schemes using reputation like factors as their voting weights, auditors in our scheme vote equally and audit as they go, without any maintenance. This mechanism not only frees auditors from trivia not related to the auditing but also avoids the drawbacks of centralization associated with over-high voting weights. The challenge used to check the integrity of the outsourced data is jointly generated by each involved auditor. Any collusion would be detected as long as there exists more than one honest auditor in the audit. We implement and deploy the scheme as Ethereum smart contracts. With the help of blockchain, the entire auditing process is public and transparent. Both the generated data and the obtained results are persisted with immutability, which ensures the traceability of all historical audits. The comprehensive theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate that our scheme meets the claimed targets with high efficiency and low gas costs.
This paper presents a crypto Non Fungible Token (NFT) for real estate information. Current issues with real estate are the lack of asset information availability, and once data is retrieved, its veracity. Moreover, data can be out of data or artificially manipulated for an economic benefit. An example could be the fire alarm inspection logs. On the other hand, the main benefits of tokenisation are 1) decentralisation from a single source of authority, 2) encryption of data that avoids tampering, and 3) digital proof of ownership. The NFT registers real estate static and dynamic information to be traded in the data marketplace between the different users and stakeholders such as investors, occupiers, insurers and property managers. The information registered in the NFT contains real estate deeds, transactions and relevant parameters that change over time. The infrastructure of the proposed real estate NFT consists of a private token in a private blockchain entirely developed for this application rather than ERC-1155 or ERC-721; therefore, a new crypto token is created. Furthermore, the consensus protocol is a mixture between the proof of work and proof of stake mechanisms by choosing random validators with staked Cryptocurrency already, such as Ethereum. Experimental results show that the increment of the NFT at every transaction does not produce an equal increment of mining time or mining nonce, making the NFT predictable for higher complex models.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Digital document communication between an enterprise and a customer is becoming a primary form of communication rather than the traditional physical document communication. A PDF document, the most popular document format, provides an identical document layout regardless of OS or device and has a content integrity verification feature with a digital signature. However, it has a bad user experience, such as low readability on a mobile device. On the other hand, an HTML document has a weakness in verifying the content integrity even though it is the primary document format and provides a good user experience on mobile devices. There are certified document services using blockchain technology, but it is still vulnerable to verifying content integrity. Furthermore, research on the document HTML has proposed the trusted document generation technique by HTML conformance and digital signature; however, this research does not provide content delivery verification, and there is a file size overhead. In this paper, we have developed the chained document HTML by defining HTML conformance, digital signature, and blockchain technology. First, the chained document HTML has to embed all resources and does not allow loading content on-demand. Second, the file is signed by a digital signature, and the signature value is added in the file header. Lastly, the metadata to verify the content integrity is inserted in a blockchain node. We have created the chained document HTML generation and verification experiment environment by Ethereum and Python. We have confirmed that the chained document HTML provides content and delivery integrity verification in the research. We expect the chained document HTML will be widely used in document communication between an enterprise and a customer, especially if the document has sensitive personal information that might have a legal dispute.
As increasing clients tend to outsource massive multimedia data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the cloud, data auditing is becoming crucial, as it enables clients to verify the integrity of their outsourcing data. However, most existing data auditing schemes cannot guarantee 100% data integrity and cannot meet the security requirement of practical multimedia services. Moreover, the lack of fair arbitration leads to clients not receiving compensation in a timely manner when the outsourced data is corrupted by the cloud service provider (CSP). In this work, we propose an arbitrable data auditing scheme based on the blockchain. In our scheme, clients usually only need to conduct private audits, and public auditing by a smart contract is triggered only when verification fails in private auditing. This hybrid auditing design enables clients to save audit fees and receive compensation automatically and in a timely manner when the outsourced data are corrupted by the CSP. In addition, by applying the deterministic checking technique based on a bilinear map accumulator, our scheme can guarantee 100% data integrity. Furthermore, our scheme can prevent fraudulent claims when clients apply for compensation from the CSP. We analyze the security strengths and complete the prototype’s implementation. The experimental results show that our blockchain-based data auditing scheme is secure, efficient, and practical.