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A Secure Data-Sharing Framework Based on Blockchain: Teleconsultation Use-Case
Abstract
IoT technology is rapidly growing in all fields of modern industries. Billions of IoT devices contribute to facilitating life in various contexts. A centralized system can hardly handle the extensive volume of IoT networks. Blockchain technology provides an immutable decentralized platform for communication in IoT applications. However, blockchain does not provide a solution for the confidentiality of data, which can be vital in many IoT applications. To this end, in this paper, we define the security concerns of data sharing in the IoT application. On that basis, we propose a secure data-sharing framework based on blockchain. In this framework, broadcast encryption is used to provide confidentiality of data with minimum data overhead. Moreover, with homomorphic encryption, the proposed framework enables secure data queries without leaking any information about the data. In the security analysis of the proposed framework, we have formally proved that this framework meets the security requirements. Moreover, the proposed framework is evaluated in the teleconsultation use case. The evaluation results show the proposed framework’s strength in providing a secure and robust framework for data-sharing in the context of e-health.KeywordsIoTBlockchainSecureBroadcast encryptionHomomorphic encryption
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COVID-19 has emerged as a highly contagious disease which has caused a devastating impact across the world with a very large number of infections and deaths. Timely and accurate testing is paramount to an effective response to this pandemic as it helps identify infections and therefore mitigate (isolate/cure) them. In this paper, we investigate this challenge and contribute by presenting a blockchain-based solution that incorporates self-sovereign identity, re-encryption proxies, and decentralized storage, such as the interplanetary file systems (IPFS). Our solution implements digital medical passports (DMP) and immunity certificates for COVID-19 test-takers. We present smart contracts based on the Ethereum blockchain written and tested successfully to maintain a digital medical identity for test-takers that help in a prompt trusted response directly by the relevant medical authorities. We reduce the response time of the medical facilities, alleviate the spread of false information by using immutable trusted blockchain, and curb the spread of the disease through DMP. We present a detailed description of the system design, development, and evaluation (cost and security analysis) for the proposed solution. Since our code leverages the use of the on-chain events, the cost of our design is almost negligible. We have made our smart contract codes publicly available on Github.
We report our experience in the formal verification of the deposit smart contract, whose correctness is critical for the security of Ethereum 2.0, a new Proof-of-Stake protocol for the Ethereum blockchain. The deposit contract implements an incremental Merkle tree algorithm whose correctness is highly nontrivial, and had not been proved before. We have verified the correctness of the compiled bytecode of the deposit contract to avoid the need to trust the underlying compiler. We found several critical issues of the deposit contract during the verification process, some of which were due to subtle hidden bugs of the compiler.
Constructing globally distributed file systems (DFS) has received great attention. Traditional Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distributed file systems have inevitable drawbacks such as instability, lacking auditing and incentive mechanisms. Thus, Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) and Swarm, as the representative DFSs which integrate with blockchain technologies, are proposed and becoming a new generation of distributed file systems. Although the blockchain-based DFSs successfully provide adequate incentives and security guarantees by exploiting the advantages of blockchain, a series of challenges, such as scalability and privacy issues, are also constraining the development of the new generation of DFSs. Mainly focusing on IPFS and Swarm, this paper conducts an overview of the rationale, layered structure and cutting-edge studies of the blockchain-based DFSs. Furthermore, we also identify their challenges, open issues and future directions. We anticipate that this survey can shed new light on the subsequent studies related to blockchain-based
distributed file systems.
Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping the incumbent industry to smart industry featured with data-driven decision-making. However, intrinsic features of IoT result in a number of challenges such as decentralization, poor interoperability, privacy and security vulnerabilities. Blockchain technology brings the opportunities in addressing the challenges of IoT. In this paper, we investigate the integration of blockchain technology with IoT. We name such synthesis of blockchain and IoT as Blockchain of Things (BCoT). This paper presents an in-depth survey of BCoT and discusses the insights of this new paradigm. In particular, we first briefly introduce IoT and discuss the challenges of IoT. Then we give an overview of blockchain technology. We next concentrate on introducing the convergence of blockchain and IoT and presenting the proposal of BCoT architecture. We further discuss the issues about using blockchain for 5G beyond in IoT as well as industrial applications of BCoT. Finally, we outline the open research directions in this promising area.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8731639
Medical care has become one of the most indispensable parts of human lives, leading to a dramatic increase in medical big data. To streamline the diagnosis and treatment process, healthcare professionals are now adopting Internet of Things (IoT)-based wearable technology. Recent years have witnessed billions of sensors, devices, and vehicles being connected through the Internet. One such technology—remote patient monitoring—is common nowadays for the treatment and care of patients. However, these technologies also pose grave privacy risks and security concerns about the data transfer and the logging of data transactions. These security and privacy problems of medical data could result from a delay in treatment progress, even endangering the patient’s life. We propose the use of a blockchain to provide secure management and analysis of healthcare big data. However, blockchains are computationally expensive, demand high bandwidth and extra computational power, and are therefore not completely suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices meant for smart cities. In this work, we try to resolve the above-mentioned issues of using blockchain with IoT devices. We propose a novel framework of modified blockchain models suitable for IoT devices that rely on their distributed nature and other additional privacy and security properties of the network. These additional privacy and security properties in our model are based on advanced cryptographic primitives. The solutions given here make IoT application data and transactions more secure and anonymous over a blockchain-based network.
Telemedicine and blockchain technology share a core philosophy of empowering the individual. Blockchain solutions that focus on empowering patients and enhancing the workflows for the providers who treat them continue to make big headlines, as does enterprise investment and adoption of telehealth. Both models focus on direct-to-consumer health services, with a personalized care experience designed from the ground up to save time and money for everyone involved. The typical binding factor between the telehealth and HIT (health information technology) blockchain adoption is a patient centric, value-based care model. Therefore, it is as no coincidence that value-based care is at the center of the fastest growing (and operational) part of HIT blockchain adoption. For this reason, telehealth can demonstrate adoption synergies than most other lines of business in healthcare cannot.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is stepping out of its infancy into full maturity and establishing itself as part of the future Internet. One of the technical challenges of having billions of devices deployed worldwide is the ability to manage them. Although access management technologies exist in IoT, they are based on centralized models which introduce a new variety of technical limitations to manage them globally. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for arbitrating roles and permissions in IoT. The new architecture is a fully distributed access control system for IoT based on blockchain technology. The architecture is backed by a proof of concept implementation and evaluated in realistic IoT scenarios. The results show that the blockchain technology could be used as access management technology in specific scalable IoT scenarios.
Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that do not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is the forensic analysis for traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrumental in post-accident scenarios to find out the faulty party, particularly for self-driving vehicles. With the opportunity of being able to access various information on the cars, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework among the various elements involved to manage the collected vehicle-related data. Specifically, we first integrate Vehicular Public Key Management (VPKI) to the proposed blockchain to provide membership establishment and privacy. Next, we design a fragmented ledger that will store detailed data related to vehicle such as maintenance information/history, car diagnosis reports, etc. The proposed forensic framework enables trustless, traceable and privacy-aware post-accident analysis with minimal storage and processing overhead.
BlockChain (BC) has attracted tremendous attention due to its immutable nature and the associated security and privacy benefits. BC has the potential to overcome security and privacy challenges of Internet of Things (IoT). However, BC is computationally expensive, has limited scalability and incurs significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited to the IoT context. We propose a tiered Lightweight Scalable BC (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements. We explore LSB in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Low resource devices in a smart home benefit from a centralized manager that establishes shared keys for communication and processes all incoming and outgoing requests. LSB achieves decentralization by forming an overlay network where high resource devices jointly manage a public BC that ensures end-to-end privacy and security. The overlay is organized as distinct clusters to reduce overheads and the cluster heads are responsible for managing the public BC. LSB incorporates several optimizations which include algorithms for lightweight consensus, distributed trust and throughput management. Qualitative arguments demonstrate that LSB is resilient to several security attacks. Extensive simulations show that LSB decreases packet overhead and delay and increases BC scalability compared to relevant baselines.
Figure 1 A future smart vehicle utilizing a wireless vehicle interface (WVI) to interconnect the vehicle and its vehicular bus systems to the Internet. Future smart vehicles will be part of the Internet of Things to offer beneficial development opportunities for both end users as well as the automotive industry. This will potentially expose smart vehicles to a range of security and privacy threats such as tracking or hijacking a vehicle while driving. A comprehensive security architecture for automotive systems is required to allow the development of new services while protecting the vehicles from attacks and ensuring the privacy of the end users. In this paper we argue that BlockChain (BC), a disruptive technology that has found many applications from cryptocurrency to smart contracts, is a potential solution to automotive security and privacy challenges. We propose a BC-based architecture to protect the privacy of the users and to increase the security of the vehicular ecosystem. Wireless remote software updates and other emerging services in the automotive world such as dynamic vehicle insurance fees, are used to illustrate the utilization of the proposed security architecture. We also provide discussions on the security of the architecture against important attacks.
The combination of cloud computing and telemedicine introduces new opportunities for transforming healthcare delivery in a more effective and sustainable manner. A number of telemedicine applications have been investigated and developed on the cloud, such as telemonitoring and teleconsultation, all of which fully demonstrate the potential of telemedicine in promoting more affordable and higher quality healthcare through the adoption of emerging cloud and mobile technologies. The need to deploy cloud-based telemedicine has also presented numerous challenges, including how to achieve high assurance, interoperability, security and privacy, and storage adaptability. This article discusses these challenges and several open research issues, with the goal of inspiring research and development in this rising area.
We introduce new theoretical measures for the qualitative and quantitative assessment of encryption schemes designed for broadcast transmissions. The goal is to allow a central broadcast site to broadcast secure transmissions to an arbitrary set of recipients while minimizing key management related transmissions. We present several schemes that allow a center to broadcast a secret to any subset of privileged users out of a universe of size n so that coalitions of k users not in the privileged set cannot learn the secret. The most interesting scheme requires every user to store O(klog klog n) keys and the center to broadcast O(k2 log2k log n) messages regardless of the size of the privileged set. This scheme is resilient to any coalition of k users. We also present a scheme that is resilient with probability p against a random subset of k users. This scheme requires every user to store O(log k log(l/p)) keys and the center to broadcast O(klog2 fclog(l/p)) messages.
This paper investigates a novel computational problem, na- mely the Composite Residuosity Class Problem, and its applications to public-key cryptography. We propose a new trapdoor mechanism and derive from this technique three encryption schemes : a trapdoor permu- tation and two homomorphic probabilistic encryption schemes computa- tionally comparable to RSA. Our cryptosystems, based on usual modular arithmetics, are provably secure under appropriate assumptions in the standard model.
Abnormal human behaviors can be signs of a health issue or the occurrence of a hazardous incident. Detecting such behaviors is essential in Ambient Intelligent (AmI) systems to enhance the safety of people. While detecting abnormalities has been extensively explored in different domains, there are still some challenges for developing efficient approaches dealing with the limitations of data-driven approaches to detect abnormal human behaviors in AmI systems. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to detect such behaviors exploiting the contextual information of human behaviors. Machine-learning models are firstly used to recognize human activities, locations, and objects. Different contexts of human behaviors are then extracted in terms of the duration, frequency, time of the day, locations, used objects, and sequences of the frequent recognized activities. An ontology, called Human ACtivity ONtology (HACON), is proposed to conceptualize the contexts of human behaviors. Finally, a probabilistic version of ASP, a high-level expressive logic-based formalism, is proposed to detect abnormal behaviors through a set of rules based on the HACON ontology. The proposed approach is evaluated in terms of precision, recall, F-measure, and accuracy using two datasets, namely Orange4Home dataset and HAR dataset using smartphones. The evaluation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to detect abnormal human behaviors.
Blockchain technology has received significant popularity, with a growing interest in various domains, including data processing, financial services, information security, and IoT to the healthcare and medical research industries. There has also been a tremendous trend in using blockchain technologies to provide efficient data protection in health care. However, through secure and efficient data storage, blockchain turns traditional healthcare approaches into a more robust means of effective treatment and cure. In this chapter, we examine both current and latest innovations in the healthcare sector through the application of blockchain as a platform. We propose a secure distributed application called Healthify, a wide-range healthcare data protection approach focused on distributed ledger technology where medical data is encoded to provide a safer environment. The objective of this approach is to provide a practical application that offers a permanent database and offers simple accessibility to the gadgets. The application’s basis is specified by the smart contract, which provides rules and regulations for the users. Also, the architecture of the distributed application promotes the delivery of secure healthcare services within the medical system.
Given the exploding number of the elderly and patients with chronic diseases and the uneven distribution of clinicians, it is economically impossible to continue traditional medicine. Hence, the healthcare sector has been gradually gravitating towards telemedicine, which applies intelligent systems for more comprehensive medical services with minimum costs. The criticality of data and process involved in telemedicine raise various concerns in terms of reliability and security. To this end, in this paper, we propose HapiChain, a blockchain-based framework for patient-centric telemedicine. HapiChain exploits blockchain technology to improve security, scalability, and reliability of medical workflows. Although HapiChain is patient-centric, it also helps the clinicians to save time and prevent unnecessary trips without improvising the level of treatment. In HapiChain, we embed two primary telemedicine services, namely telemonitoring and teleconsultation. For the former service, Hapicare, an existing healthcare monitoring system with self-adaptive coaching using probabilistic reasoning, is used. HapiChain then completes this service by adding teleconsultation services exploiting blockchain technology. The HapiChain framework includes three main layers: (i) interface layer, (ii) DApp layer, and (iii) blockchain layer. In the first layer, Hapicare is used to communicates with the users, i.e., patients and doctors. DApp layer includes the required procedures for security and scalability of HapiChain, namely smart contracts and distributed storage. The latter is achieved using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In the blockchain layer, Ethereum blockchain is used as a platform of DApps. We evaluate the HapiChain framework and the proposed teleconsultation services in a use-case.
Patients with chronic conditions require medical care at their home. To this end, a smart follow-up and monitoring system is proposed, called Hapicare; which applies ontology-based uncertain reasoning over IoT sensors data and self-assessment. While similar approaches rely on certain events and rules, the proposed monitoring system is based on probabilistic reasoning that interleaves Bayesian and non-monotonic inference. The latter is defined by using rule-based on concepts of the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) and the SNOMED-CT ontologies. This system also considers uncertain contextual information captured from sensors and the history of patients in order to better diagnose the current situation and trigger suitable reactions. It allows also handling overlaps between symptoms, the possibility of errors and hidden facts. Hapicare is developed in the context of Medolution EU project.
One of the main objectives of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems is to proactively provide intelligent services to improve the quality of people's lives in terms of autonomy, safety, and well-being. Designing AAL systems that can autonomously monitor human's activities and provide assistance services poses several challenges of which Human Activity Recognition (HAR) which is critically important to adapt the assistance services to the user. In this letter, a robust multi-label HAR framework is proposed. The proposed framework is composed of two main modules: (i) activity classification module and (ii) classification error detection and correction module. In the first module, machine-learning models are used to predict human activities. Since these models may produce predictions with errors, there is a requirement to detect and correct these errors. The classification error detection and correction module is based on two acyclic directed graphical models and operates in two phases: (i) classification error detection and (ii) classification error correction. The proposed framework is evaluated on the
Opportunity dataset
, a benchmark and a unique dataset for multi-label human daily living activity recognition. The obtained results demonstrate the ability of the proposed framework to improve the performances of HAR.
With the dramatically increasing deployment of IoT devices, storing and protecting the large volume of IoT data has become a significant issue. Traditional cloud-based IoT structures impose extremely high computation and storage demands on the cloud servers. Meanwhile, the strong dependencies on the centralized servers bring significant trust issues. To mitigate these problems, we propose a distributed data storage scheme employing blockchain and cetrificateless cryptography. Our scheme eliminates the traditional centralized servers by leveraging the blockchain miners who perform "transaction" verifications and records audit with the help of certificateless cryptography. We present a clear definition of the transactions in a non-cryptocurrency system and illustrate how the transactions are processed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work designing a secure and accountable IoT storage system using blockchain. Additionally, we extend our scheme to enable data trading and elaborate how data trading can be efficiently and effectively achieved.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file
system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of
files. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a
single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other
words, IPFS provides a high throughput content-addressed block storage model,
with content-addressed hyper links. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data
structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and
even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized
block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of
failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.
As more sensitive data is shared and stored by third-party sites on the Internet, there will be a need to encrypt data stored at these sites. One drawback of encrypting data, is that it can be selectively shared only at a coarse-grained level (i.e., giving another party your private key). We develop a new cryptosystem for flne-grained sharing of encrypted data that we call Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE). In our cryptosystem, ciphertexts are labeled with sets of attributes and private keys are associated with access structures that control which ciphertexts a user is able to decrypt. We demonstrate the applicability of our construction to sharing of audit-log information and broadcast encryption. Our construction supports delegation of private keys which subsumes Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE).
An encryption method is presented with the novel property that publicly re- vealing an encryption key does not thereby reveal the corresponding decryption key. This has two important consequences: 1. Couriers or other secure means are not needed to transmit keys, since a message can be enciphered using an encryption key publicly revealed by the intended recipient. Only he can decipher the message, since only he knows the corresponding decryption key. 2. A message can be \signed" using a privately held decryption key. Anyone can verify this signature using the corresponding publicly revealed en- cryption key. Signatures cannot be forged, and a signer cannot later deny the validity of his signature. This has obvious applications in \electronic mail" and \electronic funds transfer" systems. A message is encrypted by representing it as a number M, raising M to a publicly specied
We study the problem of finding efficiently computable non-degenerate multilinear maps from G 1 to G 2 , where G 1 and G 2 are groups of the same prime order, and where computing discrete logarithms in G 1 is hard.
On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms. Foundations of Secure Computation
- R L Rivest
- L Adleman
- M L Dertouzos
Rivest, R.L., Adleman, L., Dertouzos, M.L.: On Data Banks and Privacy Homomorphisms.
Foundations of Secure Computation, Academia Press pp. 169-179 (1978)
A Context-based Approach to Detect Abnormal Human Behaviors in Ambient Intelligent Systems
- R Mojarad
- F Attal
- A Chibani
- Y Amirat
Mojarad, R., Attal, F., Chibani, A., Amirat, Y.: A Context-based Approach to Detect Abnormal
Human Behaviors in Ambient Intelligent Systems. In: Proceedings of the European Conference
on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases
(ECML-PKDD) (2020)