The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays an important role in Industry 4.0, but the existing IIoT systems could be vulnerable to a single point of failure and malicious attacks, failing to provide reliable services. IIoT devices have some particularities, such as mobility, limited performance, and distributed deployment, which are challenging to traditional centralized access control methods in the large-scale IIoT environment. To resolve the challenges, we propose an access control system for the Industrial Internet of Things. The system contains three smart contracts: device contract (DC), policy contract (PC), and access contract (AC). The device contract provides a method of storing the URL of the resource data generated by the equipment and a query method. The policy contract provides the function of managing the attribute-based access control (ABAC) of the administrator user. The access contract is the core program that implements the access control method for ordinary users. Combining ABAC and blockchain technology provides decentralized, fine-grained, and dynamic access control management for IIoT.
Tridip Bhowmik, Sagir Mahmud Sefat, Aysha Akmal, Md. Ismail Jabiullah
Cryptocurrency data communications are very demanding issues in current high-speed online currency transactions. Here, a key-based AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption-decryption algorithm is used to impose more security levels on cryptocurrency data communications. For this, the sender first creates a key and sends it to the intended receiver through a secured and trusted channel. Then by that key one can easily encrypt the cryptocurrency data using the AES encryption algorithm and produced the ciphertext and then send it to the destination. On the receiverâs end, the decryption process of AES is performed by using the same shared secret key that retrieved the plaintext from the received ciphertext. The security of the proposed process depends on the shared secret key and the algorithm AES and it can be applied for any financial data transactions securely. This can be used in all kinds of cryptocurrency data communication with a higher level of security.
Seunghyeon Lee, HongâWoo Seok, Kirim Lee, Hoh Peter In
When surveying national reference points using a global positioning system (GPS), appropriate work regulations pertaining to the surveying time must be observed. However, such data can be modified easily, so identifying non-compliance with work regulations and forgeries is challenging. If such incidents occur in cadastral surveys, it may result in financial damages to stakeholders, such as citizens and the state. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the reliability by ensuring the integrity of the GPS positioning data and allowing anyone to track them. In this study, a prototype system was developed to record GPS data and the corrections generated during survey processes using the Ethereum blockchain network. Blockchain is a distributed ledger system that prevents the manipulation of uploaded data without the need for a centralized institution by allowing anyone to check the data. Unlike in the past, the proposed system improves the data integrity and reliability for the entire survey process through blockchain, thereby ensuring transparency of the checks using smart contract addresses.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are essential in contemporary healthcare as they facilitate the storage and sharing of personal patient data. Traditional cloud-based EHR systems, though, are afflicted with centralized control, privacy threats, restricted interoperability, and susceptibility to data breaches. To alleviate these challenges, this paper suggests a blockchain-based, patient-centered EHR management system that uses Ethereum smart contracts, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for safe, distributed, and effective handling of health data.The system put forward puts patients at the forefront of EHR access and control, allowing them to grant or withdraw permissions to healthcare providers, insurers, or researchers using fine-grained, attribute-based policies executed through smart contracts. DIDs remove the need for third-party identity providers, providing secure and verifiable user authentication directly on the blockchain. IPFS, on the other hand, provides cost-effective, tamper-proof off-chain storage of medical records, with metadata and access logs stored on-chain to minimize gas usage.Extensive testing on the Ethereum Goerli testnet proves that the system provides greater security, lower storage costs, efficient access control, and better interoperability than conventional models. This method not only solves existing shortcomings in EHR systems but also opens the door to scalable, transparent, and patient-enabled healthcare data management.
Various services based on blockchain technology are reported daily. There are many unfortunate proposals to use blockchain as a distributed database merely, and a flowchart that allows you to self-confirm whether blockchain is really necessary there has been announced. Under these circumstances, as an example of making good use of blockchain technology, digital issuance of claims corresponding to physical certificates such as diplomas is considered to be one of the suitable applications, and there are cases where it was actually put into service.In this paper, we consider a new model that assumes that IDs are given ERC735 claim-style credentials in the Ethereum blockchain. We can think of "cotton candy" as a metaphor that expresses how multiple claims cling to a specific ID, that we can entangle various attributes by an identifier (a stick of the cotton candy). We will introduce a use case in which such credentials are stored in the blockchain and can confirm official certificates such as proof of enrollment in the digital space, and propose a new concept called e-KYC-e. e-KYC-e is considered to be socially acceptable because in the last few years multiple vendors and consortia have been able to manage their own DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers) and concepts such as SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity) to control their "cotton candy".
The sharing of electronic healthcare records (EHRs) is important to healthcare and medical research. However, institutions are faced with difficulties in privacy protection and efficiently secure data exchange. The main objective of this study is to propose a controllable secure blockchain-based EHRs sharing scheme. For this purpose, blockchain technologies are combined with interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to provide efficient secure EHRs sharing. Firstly, the IPFS-based EHR file system (IEFS) is designed to save and share large-size EHR files among medical institutions. With the high-throughput content-addressed block storage model and appropriate redundant backup of IPFS, IEFS is tamper-resistant and free of a single point of failure. Secondly, the blockchain is used to implement the blockchain-based EHR abstract system (BEAS) to manipulate EHR abstracts access. In BEAS, the EHR file addresses generated by IEFS are encrypted and saved in EHR abstracts for privacy protection. Since EHR abstracts are encrypted by patients' public keys, the sharing of EHR files is under the control of patients. In our experiment, a prototype system is developed to validate the proposed scheme. The experimental results showed that (1) EHRs are securely shared under the control of patients and (2) EHR files are retrieved at an acceptable speed supported by IPFS technology. In this paper, solutions to some important practical issues such as incapacitated patients, encryption key forgetting/missing, and efficient interaction of doctors with EHRs sharing scheme are also seriously discussed.
The first special section is dedicated to Edge Consumer Electronics (ECE) that include gadgets or appliances, equipped with contemporary circuitry to carry out domestic tasks. They are designed and used exclusively for communication, entertainment, safety, and home-office endeavors. The abundance of consumer electronics is indebted to the semiconductor and appliance of related software solutions. T
This paper proposes an energy efficient approach for securing inter-connecting IOT devices with servers. A scheme using blockchain and a second network for security management was previously described [1]. To overcome the drawbacks and shortcomings of using traditional smart contract with Ethereum, a new approach is proposed. The proposed approach ensures that the overall IoT network is âhardenedâ against attack using a framework which is environmentally sustainable and meets the stringent requirements of mission critical applications. This new approach also results in shorter latency, higher throughput and consuming less power, thus suitable for edge computing environment in mobile.
With the rapid development of blockchain technology, data sharing has been widely studied in academia and industry in recent years, and a series of important achievements have been made. At present, there is a security problem of data sharing in blockchain technology. Firstly, it summarizes the data security sharing. Then, the data security sharing is divided into three aspects: confidentiality, integrity and availability, and the existing challenges and corresponding solutions are analyzed. Finally, the development status and trend of data security sharing in blockchain are summarized, and the important research directions in the future are prospected.
Cong Deng, Lin You, Xianghong Tang, Gengran Hu · 5 authors
Zero-Knowledge Proof is widely used in blockchains. For example, zk-SNARK is used in Zcash as its core technology to identifying transactions without the exposure of the actual transaction values. Up to now, various range proofs have been proposed, and their efficiency and range-flexibility have also been improved. Bootle et al. used the inner product method and recursion to construct an efficient Zero-Knowledge Proof in 2016. Later, Benediky BĂŒnz et al. proposed an efficient range proof scheme called Bulletproofs, which can convince the verifier that a secret number lies in [0,2Îșâ1] with Îș being a positive integer. By combining the inner-product and Lagrangeâs four-square theorem, we propose a range proof scheme called Cuproof. Our Cuproof can make a range proof to show that a secret number v lies in an interval [a,b] with no exposure of the real value v or other extra information leakage about v. It is a good and practical method to protect privacy and information security. In Bulletproofs, the communication cost is 6+2logÎș, while in our Cuproof, all the communication cost, the proving time and the verification time are of constant sizes.
Blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) guarantees revision safety of transaction logs independent from usage scenarios. Thus, trust is ensured by DLT in a long-term perspective. Hence, one can pose the question, whether DLT is an attractive technology for long-term archiving of data. In this paper we juxtapose distributed ledger and data preservation approaches as two candidates for continuous archival workings. We show that, although the DLT seems to be a viable solution for the long-term preservation of data from a naive perspective, long time effects and efficiency considerations prevent the effective use of DLTs. We discuss hidden costs of transactions, that are not reflected in current price structures. We conclude that data stored on the distributed ledger might not be as preserved for future generations as usually assumed. In fact, data preservation in an archivist's perspective resembles the trust preservation in DLTs.
Ghulam Qadar Butt, Toqeer Ali Sayed, Rabia Riaz, Sanam Shahla Rizvi · 5 authors
The transfer of information is a demanding issue, particularly due to the presence of a large number of eavesdroppers on communication channels. Sharing medical service records between different clinical jobs is a basic and testing research topic. The particular characteristics of blockchains have attracted a large amount of attention and resulted in revolutionary changes to various business applications, including medical care. A blockchain is based on a distributed ledger, which tends to improve cyber security. A number of proposals have been made with respect to the sharing of basic medical records using a blockchain without needing earlier information or the trust of patients. Specialist service providers and insurance agencies are not secure against data breaches. The safe sharing of clinical records between different countries, to ensure an incorporated and universal medical service, is also a significant issue for patients who travel. The medical data of patients normally reside on different healthcare units around the world, thus raising many concerns. Firstly, a patientâs history of treatment by different physicians is not accessible to the doctor in a single location. Secondly, it is very difficult to secure widespread data residing in different locations. This study proposed record sharing in a chain-like structure, in which every record is globally connected to the others, based on a blockchain under the suggestions and recommendations of the HL7 standards. This study focused on making medical data available, especially of patients who travel in different countries, for a specific period of time after validating the required authentication. Authorization and authentication are performed on the Shibboleth identity management system with the involvement of patient in the sanction process, thereby revealing the patient data for the specific period of time. The proposed approach improves the performance with respect to other record sharing systems, e.g., it reduces the time to read, write, delete, and revoke a record by a noticeable margin. The proposed system takes around three seconds to upload and 7.5 s to download 250 Mb of data, which can contain up to sixteen documents, over a stable network connection. The system has a latency of 413.76 ms when retrieving 100 records, compared to 447.9 and 459.3 ms in previous systems. Thus, the proposed system improved the performance and ensured seclusion by using a blockchain.
As the confidentiality and scalability of smart contracts have become a crucial demand of blockchains, off-chain contract execution frameworks have been promising. Some have recently expanded off-chain contracts to Multi-Party Computation (MPC), which seek to transition the on-chain states by off-chain MPC. The most general problem among these solutions is MPT, since its off-chain MPC takes on- and off-chain inputs, delivers on- and off-chain outputs, and can be publicly verified by the blockchain, thus capable of covering more scenarios. However, existing Multi-Party Transaction (MPT) solutions lack at least one of data availability, financial fairness, delivery fairness, and delivery atomicity. These properties are crucially valued by communities, e.g., the Ethereum community, or users. Even worse, these solutions require high-cost interactions between the blockchain and off-chain systems. This paper proposes a novel MPT-enabled off-chain contract execution framework, DECLOAK. DECLOAK is the first to achieve data availability of MPT, and our method can apply to other fields that seek to persist user data on-chain. Moreover, DECLOAK solves all mentioned shortcomings with even lower gas costs and weaker assumptions. Specifically, DECLOAK tolerates all but one Byzantine party and TEE executors. Evaluating on 10 MPTs, DECLOAK reduces the gas cost of the SOTA, Cloak, by 65.6%. Consequently, we are the first to not only achieve such level secure MPT in practical assumption, but also demonstrate that evaluating MPT in the comparable gas cost to normal Ethereum transaction is possible. And the cost superiority of DECLOAK increases as the number of MPT parties grows.
Nowadays, cloud servers are gathering an increasing amount of data. Data is commonly stored on cloud servers in the form of ciphertext to protect security and concealment of data. When a consumer requests to access of encrypted data , a third party must provide an access key. The system's security, however, will be compromised if the third party or internal personnel are dishonest. To address this issue, a novel blockchain-based secure decentralized system using IPFS is proposed in this research for secure data transfer. Because all participant of system model are recorded the every action on the chain, and the continuously extending chain makes it conditionally difficult to modify any block without being detected, a blockchain based system is often regarded as a safe platform. In the proposed approach, the data owner uploads an encrypted file to IPFS, which is subsequently separated into n secret sections called hash codes for data security. The data owner must additionally write the access permissions in order to achieve access to this secure data. For security, the system uses two-level key management: first, the data owner encrypts the file, and then the IPFS server makes a hash code of that encrypted file. The proposed solution, which employs blockchain technology, enables consumers to be handled across several domains, erase the single-point failure in traditional centralized systems, and overhead related to communication and computation are decreased at the consumer level. According to the security analysis, the proposed system might effectively resist single and collaboratively malicious persons, as well as untrustworthy cloud servers.
Guangxia Xu, Jingnan Dong, Chuang Ma, Jun Liu · 5 authors
The emergence of edge computing makes it possible to realize new technologies, such as virtual reality and augmented reality. However, a large number of devices and more messages at the edge bring more security problems. Therefore, it is an important research topic to provide users with faster network services while ensuring confidentiality and authentication of data transmission. Because signcryption can encrypt and sign messages at the same time, it has become a new cryptographic primitive. In the meantime, certificateless signcryption guarantees data confidentiality and authentication and addresses traditional single point failure problems based on the trust center and the problem of relying on a trusted third party. Therefore, certificateless signcryption has attracted great attention from academia and industry. But certificateless signcryption also faces two types of attacks. In order to more effectively resist these two types of attacks, we propose a certificateless signcryption mechanism based on blockchain. This mechanism can make good use of the nontamperable feature of blockchain, prevent illegal users from substituting the public key of the user, and guarantee signature nonrepudiation. And our scheme is investigated in a comparative study with eight schemes. Comparative analysis outcomes demonstrate our scheme has achieved better results in efficiency and security. The process of signcryption and unsigncryption consumes the least amount of computation, which is very suitable for the edge computing environment.
Flavio Corradini, Alessandro Marcelletti, Andrea Morichetta, Andrea Polini · 6 authors
A key challenge in engineering distributed systems consists in the integration into their development of a decentralised infrastructure allowing the system participants to trust each other. In this article, we face such a challenge by proposing a model-driven methodology and a related framework to support the engineering of trustable and auditable systems. The approach is based on choreography diagrams specified in the Business Process Model and Notation standard, describing the interactions that should occur among the distributed components of systems. We support the whole lifecycle of choreographies, from their modelling to their distributed execution and auditing. The framework, based on blockchain technology, is named ChorChain. More specifically, ChorChain takes as input a BPMN choreography model and automatically translates it into a Solidity smart contract. The smart contract permits us to enforce the interactions among the cooperating components as prescribed by the choreography model. By leveraging on the auditability of blockchain, ChorChain also supports the activity of auditors continuously. In such a way, ChorChain enables auditors to get some degree of assurance on what happens simultaneously with, or shortly after, information disclosure. We assess the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methodology and framework through experiments conducted on the Rinkeby Ethereum Testnet.
Yang Ming, Chenhao Wang, Hang Liu, Yi Zhao · 7 authors
As the rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, large amounts of data are needed to be stored and transmitted in the online storage system. Data deduplication can be adopted to improve communication efficiency and minimize storage space. However, in edge computing, data deduplication brings security and functionality requirements that are still unsatisfied. Most existing schemes are vulnerable to brute-force attacks and single-point attacks. Moreover, they impose a heavy burden on resource-constrained edge nodes and do not support cross-domain deduplication. Blockchain is a promising technology because the programmable smart contract can be utilized to perform cross-domain deduplication and guarantee the traceability of data. In this article, an efficient dynamic cross-domain deduplication scheme in blockchain-enabled edge computing is proposed to solve the above problems. Specifically, the smart contract is employed to assist cross-domain deduplication, which also can reduce the storage pressure of edge nodes. Meanwhile, a hash proof system-based oblivious pseudorandom function is created to reduce the time cost of key generation and achieve the security requirements of resistance to brute-force attacks and single-point attacks. The technology of accumulators is adopted to achieve Proofs of Ownership (PoO), which can prevent duplicate-faking attacks. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme has a higher security level. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme significantly reduces computation cost and communication overhead, compared with other existing schemes. The smart contract is implemented in the Ethereum test network (i.e., Rinkeby), which shows acceptable gas cost even the functions are called frequently.