Blockchain is a disruptive technology for shaping the next era of a healthcare system striving for efficient and effective patient care. This is thanks to its peer-to-peer, secure, and transparent characteristics. On the other hand, cloud computing made its way into the healthcare system thanks to its elasticity and cost-efficiency nature. However, cloud-based systems fail to provide a secured and private patient-centric cohesive view to multiple healthcare stakeholders. In this situation, blockchain provides solutions to address security and privacy concerns of the cloud because of its decentralization feature combined with data security and privacy, while cloud provides solutions to the blockchain scalability and efficiency challenges. Therefore a novel paradigm of blockchain-cloud integration (BcC) emerges for the domain of healthcare. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the BcC integration for the healthcare system to give the readers the motivations behind the emergence of this new paradigm, introduce a classification of existing architectures and their applications for better healthcare. We then review the development platforms and services and highlight the research challenges for the integrated BcC architecture, possible solutions, and future research directions. The results of this paper will be useful for the healthcare industry to design and develop a data management system for better patient care.
Juliana Bowles, Thais Webber, Euan Blackledge, Andreas François Vermeulen
To facilitate personalised healthcare provision across Europe, we envision solutions that enable the secure integration and sharing of medical health records. These solutions should address privacy concerns, such as granular access control to personal data, establishing what should be accessible when and by whom, whilst complying with collective regulatory frameworks such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and adhering to international standards on how to manage information security. The proposed healthcare system design integrates technologies such as blockchain and scalable data lakes with adequate system routines to guarantee the secure access of confidential data. In this paper, we present the essential architectural components for the secure integration of medical records in a blockchain-based platform. We present a patient-centric data retrieval approach which incorporates a structured format to compose access rules.
Mar Gimenez-Aguilar, JosĂŠ M. de Fuentes, Lorena GonzĂĄlezâManzano, David Arroyo
With the increase in connectivity, the popularization of cloud services, and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), decentralized approaches for trust management are gaining momentum. Since blockchain technologies provide a distributed ledger, they are receiving massive attention from the research community in different application fields. However, this technology does not provide with cybersecurity by itself. Thus, this survey aims to provide with a comprehensive review of techniques and elements that have been proposed to achieve cybersecurity in blockchain-based systems. The analysis is intended to target area researchers, cybersecurity specialists and blockchain developers. For this purpose, we analyze 272 papers from 2013 to 2020 and 128 industrial applications. We summarize the lessons learned and identify several matters to foster further research in this area.
Cloud computing technologies have dominated more that a decade. Wider adoption of cloud based processing has given rise to different architectural patterns. Cloud native applications have emerged out ensuring application agility and scalability. But they have their own challenges in terms of security. In the last few years, blockchain technology has found its applicability in non-cryptocurrency areas as well. This paper illustrates how blockchain can be used to address security challenges for the cloud native applications. This work focuses challenges and possible blockchain based solution in the areas of network security, identity management, authentication, container security and audit log for forensics.
Yanxue Jia, Shi-Feng Sun, Yi Zhang, Zhiqiang Liu ¡ 5 authors
The immutability of blockchain is crucial to the security of many blockchain applications, while it is still desired or even legally obliged to allow for redacting the contents of blockchain for some scenarios. In this work, we revisit the conflict between the immutability and redaction of blockchain, and put forward a new fine-grained redactable blockchain with a semi-trusted regulator, who follows our protocol but has a tendency to abuse his power. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first blockchain that not only supports the supervision of blockchain content, but also allows users themselves to manage their own data. To this end, we introduce a new variant of chameleon-hash function, named stateful Chameleon Hash with Revocable Subkey, which is important for building our redactable blockchain and may be of independent interest. We also propose a black-box construction from standard chameleon-hash functions, and prove its security properties under our proposed security notions. At last, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation. The evaluation results demonstrate that our redactable blockchain is practical and can be adopted with small additional overhead compared to the immutable blockchain.
The emergence of quantum computers has threatened all the areas of internet security and privacy by providing an efficient solution to the underlying mathematical assumptions of the present cryptographic paradigms. The security of current internet applications utilizes this inefficiency in solving the above mathematical problems as a tool for security. One such prominent area where these security paradigms are at utmost core are Block-chains. They build a tamperproof network among trustless peers using these mathematical problems. Quantum attacks to applications utilizing blockchains pose a threat to a market worth 700 million USD. Therefore studies towards quantum secure blockchain are of utmost priority. Crystals Dilithium seems to be promising candidate for post-quantum blockchain security. This article reviews work done on this frontier and conclude Crystals-Dilithium relevance for quantum secure blockchains.
Summary Medical records contain vital, critical, and confidential information of any person. Paperâbased medical records are being used by many hospitals that suffer from various issues like large physical storage requirements, limited security, and life. Electronic health records (EHRs) can transform this entire system but faces various security threats like unintentional disclosure, tampering, data leaks, lack of security mechanisms, and data access policies. Thus, there arises a need for a decentralized, tamperâproof, and transparent healthcare network. In this article, a permissioned blockchainâbased framework using Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is proposed, which provides secure storage, sharing, and querying of EHRs. For better data accessibility and security, algorithms have been designed to define the functionality of patients, doctors, and thirdâparty administrator using smartâcontracts. In the existing approaches, LevelDB (key store database) is used as a state database that is not suitable for handling complex queries. To overcome this issue, we have used CouchDB (document store database) as a state database where the search is based on keys and data values both rather than only keys. To measure the various performance indicators for this framework, a blockchain benchmark tool âHyperledger Caliperâ is used. The experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework.
Yuefeng Du, Huayi Duan, Anxin Zhou, Cong Wang ¡ 6 authors
As a promising alternative solution to cloud storage, decentralized storage networks (DSN) are widely anticipated to develop continuously and reshape the storage market share in the foreseeable future. In particular, one of the most important research problems is how to enforce the quality of service (QoS) in the context of storage solutions. Despite plenty of auditing-related works in the context of cloud storage, none of them can be directly applied to the decentralized storage paradigm. The challenges of designing a feasible storage auditing framework emanate from two aspects: 1) security problems unique to the decentralized settings and 2) performance overhead due to on-chain operations. In this article, we first put forward a basic storage auditing framework that satisfies the security and efficiency requirements, and outperforms the existing approaches. We also identify a critical and overlooked security problem that would compromise the integrity of storage auditing solutions in the blockchain paradigm. With our refined storage auditing design based on customized zero knowledge protocols, we propose a convenient mitigation solution in our revised security model. The evaluation results confirm that our solution would only incur a 10â15 percent increase in the overall auditing costs for common usage scenarios, compared to the basic design.
Christian DelgadoâvonâEitzen, Luis Anido, Manuel J. FernĂĄndez Iglesias
Blockchain technologies are awakening in recent years the interest of different actors in various sectors and, among them, the education field, which is studying the application of these technologies to improve information traceability, accountability, and integrity, while guaranteeing its privacy, transparency, robustness, trustworthiness, and authenticity. Different interesting proposals and projects were launched and are currently being developed. Nevertheless, there are still issues not adequately addressed, such as scalability, privacy, and compliance with international regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe. This paper analyzes the application of blockchain technologies and related challenges to issue and verify educational data and proposes an innovative solution to tackle them. The proposed model supports the issuance, storage, and verification of different types of academic information, both formal and informal, and complies with applicable regulations, protecting the privacy of usersâ personal data. This proposal also addresses the scalability challenges and paves the way for a global academic certification system.
The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market is mushrooming in recent years. The concept of NFT originally comes from a token standard of Ethereum, aiming to distinguish each token with distinguishable signs. This type of token can be bound with virtual/digital properties as their unique identifications. With NFTs, all marked properties can be freely traded with customized values according to their ages, rarity, liquidity, etc. It has greatly stimulated the prosperity of the decentralized application (DApp) market. At the time of writing (May 2021), the total money used on completed NFT sales has reached $34,530,649.86$ USD. The thousandfold return on its increasing market draws huge attention worldwide. However, the development of the NFT ecosystem is still in its early stage, and the technologies of NFTs are pre-mature. Newcomers may get lost in their frenetic evolution due to the lack of systematic summaries. In this technical report, we explore the NFT ecosystems in several aspects. We start with an overview of state-of-the-art NFT solutions, then provide their technical components, protocols, standards, and desired proprieties. Afterward, we give a security evolution, with discussions on the perspectives of their design models, opportunities, and challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study on the current NFT ecosystems.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Ahmad Ali, Mansoor Ahmed, Abid Khan, Adeel Anjum ¡ 6 authors
The information security domain focuses on security needs at all levels in a computing environment in either the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Cloud of Things, or any other implementation. Data, devices, services, or applications and communication are required to be protected and provided by information security shields at all levels and in all working states. Remote authentication is required to perform different administrative operations in an information system, and Administrators have full access to the system and may pose insider threats. Superusers and administrators are the most trusted persons in an organisation. "Trust but verify" is an approach to have an eye on the superusers and administrators. Distributed ledger technology (Blockchain-based data storage) is an immutable data storage scheme and provides a built-in facility to share statistics among peers. Distributed ledgers are proposed to provide visible security and non-repudiation, which securely records administrators' authentications requests. The presence of security, privacy, and accountability measures establish trust among its stakeholders. Securing information in an electronic data processing system is challenging, i.e., providing services and access control for the resources to only legitimate users. Authentication plays a vital role in systems' security; therefore, authentication and identity management are the key subjects to provide information security services. The leading cause of information security breaches is the failure of identity management/authentication systems and insider threats. In this regard, visible security measures have more deterrence than other schemes. In this paper, an authentication scheme, "VisTAS," has been introduced, which provides visible security and trusted authentication services to the tenants and keeps the records in the blockchain.
TzungâHer Chen, WeiâBin Lee, HsingâBai Chen, Chien-Lung Wang
Although digital signature has been a fundamental technology for cryptosystems, it still draws considerable attention from both academia and industry due to the recent raising interest in blockchains. This article revisits the subliminal channel existing digital signature and reviews its abuse risk of the constructorâs private key. From a different perspective on the subliminal channel, we find the new concept named the chamber of secrets in blockchains. The found concept, whereby the secret is hidden and later recovered by the constructor from the common transactions in a blockchain, highlights a new way to encourage implementing various applications to benefit efficiency and security. Thus, the proposed scheme benefits from the following advantages: (1) avoiding the high maintenance cost of certificate chain of certificate authority, or public key infrastructure, and (2) seamlessly integrating with blockchains using the property of chamber of secrets. In order to easily understand the superiority of this new concept, a remote authentication scenario is taken as a paradigm of IoT to demonstrate that the further advantages are achieved: (1) avoiding high demand for storage space in IoT devices, and (2) avoiding maintaining a sensitive table in IoT server.
SUMMARY This article summarizes âAuditing the Blockchain Oracle Problemâ (Sheldon 2021), which introduces auditors to the risks of having an irreversible business agreement codified on a blockchain using a short software program called a smart contract that relies on an oracle to provide information from outside the blockchain in order to execute correctly. The article begins with an explanation of the role that oracles play in the blockchain ecosystem and proposes a working definition of oracles. Next, the article highlights how the auditing standards from both the AICPA and PCAOB can be interpreted to classify an oracle as part of smart contract users' information systems, and that the oracle provides a robust set of services that qualify it as a service organization. Finally, the article describes the process used by an oracle to collect, store, transform, and transmit data, and highlights relevant risks and illustrative control objectives related to this process.
${\mathsf Web3.0}$, often cited to drastically shape our lives, is ubiquitous. However, few literatures have discussed the crucial differentiators that separate${\mathsf Web3.0}$from the era we are currently living in. Via a thorough analysis of the recent blockchain infrastructure evolution, we capture a key invariant featuring the evolution, based on which we provide the first academic definition for${\mathsf Web3.0}$. Our definition is not the only way of understanding${\mathsf Web3.0}$, yet, it captures the fundamental and defining trait of${\mathsf Web3.0}$, and meanwhile it is has two desirable properties. Under this definition, we articulate three key categories of infrastructural enablers for${\mathsf Web3.0}$: individual smart-contract capable blockchains, federated or centralized platforms capable of publishing verifiable states, and an interoperability platform to hyperconnect those state publishers to provide a unified and connected computing platform for${\mathsf Web3.0}$applications. While innovations in all categories are necessary to fully enable${\mathsf Web3.0}$, in this article, we present a design for the third enabler, i.e., the first interoperability platform, namely${\mathsf HyperService}$, that advances the state-of-the-art by simultaneously deliversinteroperabilityandprogrammabilityacrossheterogeneousblockchains and state publishers.${\mathsf HyperService}$is powered by two innovative designs:${\mathsf (i)}$a developer-facing programming framework that allows developers to build cross-chain applications in a unified programming model; and${\mathsf (ii)}$a secure blockchain-facing cryptography protocol that provably realizes those applications on blockchains. We implement a prototype of${\mathsf HyperService}$in approximately 62,000 lines of code to demonstrate its practicality, usability and scalability.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cloud Data Security Solutions
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Huajun Chen, Ning Hu, Guilin Qi, Haofen Wang ¡ 7 authors
Abstract The early concept of knowledge graph originates from the idea of the Semantic Web, which aims at using structured graphs to model the knowledge of the world and record the relationships that exist between things. Currently publishing knowledge bases as open data on the Web has gained significant attention. In China, CIPS(Chinese Information Processing Society) launched the OpenKG in 2015 to foster the development of Chinese Open Knowledge Graphs. Unlike existing open knowledge-based programs, OpenKG chain is envisioned as a blockchain-based open knowledge infrastructure. This article introduces the first attempt at the implementation of sharing knowledge graphs on OpenKG chain, a blockchain-based trust network. We have completed the test of the underlying blockchain platform, as well as the on-chain test of OpenKG's dataset and toolset sharing as well as fine-grained knowledge crowdsourcing at the triple level. We have also proposed novel definitions: K-Point and OpenKG Token, which can be considered as a measurement of knowledge value and user value. 1033 knowledge contributors have been involved in two months of testing on the blockchain, and the cumulative number of on-chain recordings triggered by real knowledge consumers has reached 550,000 with an average daily peak value of more than 10,000. For the first time, We have tested and realized on-chain sharing of knowledge at entity/triple granularity level. At present, all operations on the datasets and toolset in OpenKG.CN, as well as the triplets in OpenBase, are recorded on the chain, and corresponding value will also be generated and assigned in a trusted mode. Via this effort, OpenKG chain looks to provide a more credible and traceable knowledge-sharing platform for the knowledge graph community.
Blockchain technology is known for its large-scale digitisation trends that play an important role in various organisations. Because it is distributed and decentralized from blockchain, this feature makes the role of blockchain technologies based on products and services significantly different from previous technology offerings. The value proposition offered by this blockchain is very suitable to be applied in education. After a few years this caused disruption from various industry circles, current educational areas including those that are very perceived by the Indonesian people there is no progress and road in place. It is possible that in the next ten years, the educational actors who are less sensitive will one by one fall because of the storm-cast disruption technology. The educational institution is one of which is aware of the advantages and extraordinary potential of blockchain technology. Among other things, a digital signature certificate is important in the context of digital archiving to verify the authenticity of a document in an educational institution. But the lack of education from the community makes ignorance about the point of the advantage of blockchain technology that can be applied in the field of education. Therefore, a public understanding of the blockchain is packaged in the form of ontology on the education shutter. This research in particular is exploring the ontology approach of using root merkle methods in providing solutions to the application of blockchain, including slow process and small storage space. This issue causes it to be very difficult for educational institutions to store processes and stages of learning into the blockchain. This research can be the cornerstone of identifying solutions from certificates of digital signatures in terms of archiving, authentication and digital verification on the design of a new breakthrough framework with an ontology approach to blockchain educational design.
Ifteher Alom, Romana Mahjabin Eshita, Anam Ibna Harun, Md Sadek Ferdous ¡ 7 authors
Federated Identity Management (FIM) is a model of identity management in which different trusted organizations can provide secure online services to their uses. Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is one of the widely-used technologies for FIM. However, a SAML-based FIM has two significant issues: the metadata (a crucial component in SAML) has security issues, and federation management is hard to scale. The concept of dynamic identity federation has been introduced, enabling previously unknown entities to join in a new federation facilitating inter-organization service provisioning to address federation management's scalability issue. However, the existing dynamic federation approaches have security issues concerning confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and transparency. In this paper, we present the idea of facilitating dynamic identity federations utilizing blockchain technology to improve the existing approaches' security issues. We demonstrate its architecture based on a rigorous threat model and requirement analysis. We also discuss its implementation details, current protocol flows and analyze its performance to underline its applicability.
Huanyu Wu, Lunjie Li, Hye-Young Paik, Salil S. Kanhere
Although Electronic Health Records (EHR) are widely used by healthcare organisations, many EHR systems still face security and privacy problems. Blockchains can provide solutions for many of these problems and there have been attempts to incorporate blockchains in EHR systems; however, inappropriate software architectural structure hinder the the adoption of blockchain in EHR systems. MB-EHR (Multilayer Blockchain-based EHR) aims to solve the aforementioned research gap and proposes a layered blockchain structure to better support the operational hierarchy in health organisations. Furthermore, MB-EHR implements a PDP-like data verification mechanisms to protect data integrity. Experiments results show that MB-EHR achieved good throughput performance.
The security of distributed applications backed by blockchain technology relies mainly on keeping the associated cryptographic keys (i.e. private keys) in well-protected storage. Since they are the unique proof of ownership of the underlying digital assets. If the keys are stolen or lost, there is no way to recover the assets. The cold wallet is a good candidate for basic use cases, but it has a substantial challenge for more complex applications as it does not scale. Warm and hot wallets are more convenient options for blockchain-based solutions that aim to transact in a cloud environment. In this work, we focus on Hardware Security Module (HSM) based wallet. The HSM is the de-facto standard device designed to manage high-value cryptographic keys and to protect them against hacks. In this demonstration, we present an HSM-based working prototype that secures the entire life cycle of Ethereum public and private keys.
Cyril Naves Samuel, Severine Glock, François Verdier, Patricia Guitton-Ouhamou
Enterprises are realizing their distributed ledger use-cases with private blockchains as it is more secure, efficient, and reliable compared to the public networks. Due to this reason we evaluate the behavior and performance of Ethereum clients namely Geth, OpenEthereum (Parity), and Hyperledger Besu along with their Proof of Authority consensus algorithms from an enterprise perspective. We propose a testing methodology adapted to Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure overcoming the drawbacks of existing works. We analyze the behavior in each of the clients from different Ethereum focused parameters. We propose a novel load-balancer middleware specific to Ethereum and integrate in our test tool for uniform and reliable distribution of transactions. We analyze the bottlenecks and their root causes in each of the clients and report it to the community.
May 1, 2021¡2021 7th IEEE Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
Contemporarily, DPoS is the fastest, most effective, decentralized and flexible consensus mechanism among all consensus mechanisms. Similar to the vote of the board, the holders cast a certain number of delegates to perform verification and accounting on their behalf in DPoS. In order to select the most appropriate delegates to implement the operations in blockchain, the DPoS consensus mechanism needs to be improved. Therefore, an improved DPoS consensus mechanism based on Probabilistic Linguistic Term Set (PLTS) is proposed in this paper. Just like human elections, this method allows each node to vote âsupportâ and âopposeâ for the delegate node. The efficient and flexible method reduces the probability of malicious nodes becoming delegates and guarantees the security of block generation in the blockchain. The effectiveness of the improved DPoS was verified by examples.
In cryptography, many different data structures are used to store and encrypt data. Merkle Tree is such a data structure that provides a way to prove data integrity and validity. It requires less memory or disk space than other data structures, resulting in simple and fast computation. This paper first explains the detailed principles and then introduces the application fields of Merkle Tree. Merkle Tree uses the hash value of the data block as leaf node tags and the encrypted hash of the child node tags as other node tags. As data structures evolve and innovate, Merkle Tree provides help and inspiration for the future new data structures. Furthermore, we investigate various applications using Merkle Tree technology, including Smart Grid, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Interplanetary File System, Image Authentication, Public Security Audit of Cloud Computing, SIMulator for Blockchain Applications, Hardware Memory Integrity, and Certificate Transparency. These researches show that Merkle Tree applies to a wide range of fields and has great potential. In brief, the paper aims to help researchers better understand the Merkle Tree features and various roles and effects in different environments, contributing to the development of cryptography.
Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption
Cloud Data Security Solutions
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques