The design of access control mechanisms for healthcare systems is challenging: it must strike the right balance between permissions and restrictions. In this work, we propose a novel approach that is based on the Blockchain technology for storage patient medical data and create an audit logging system able to protect health data from unauthorized modification and access. The proposed method consists of a tree structure: a main chain linked with the patient's identity and one or several Subchains which are used for storing additional critical data (e.g., medical diagnoses or access logs).
The development of eHealth systems has brought great convenience to people's life. Researchers have been combining new technologies to make eHealth systems work better for patients. The Blockchain-based eHealth system becomes popular because of its unique distributed tamper-resistant and privacy-preserving features. However, due to the security issues of the blockchain system, there are many security risks in eHealth systems utilizing the blockchain technology. i.e. 51% attacks can destroy blockchain-based systems. Besides, trivial transactions and frequent calls of smart contracts in the bloc…
As electronic data becomes the lifeline of modern society, privacy concerns increase. These concerns are reflected by the European Union's enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), one of the most comprehensive and robust privacy regulations globally. This project aims to evaluate and highlight associations between eHealth systems' policies and personal data privacy regulations. Using bias-corrected Cramer's V and Thiel's U tests, we found weak and zero associations between e-health systems' rules and protections for data privacy. A simple decision tree model is trained, whic…
This paper introduces a new method of Blockchain formation for reliable storage of personal data of ID-card holders. In particular, the model of the information system is presented, the new structure of smart ID-cards and information on these cards are proposed. The new structure of Blockchain - "Blockchain Tree" allows not only to store information from ID-cards but also to increase the level of security and access control to this information. The proposed Subchains system allows to integrate Blockchain of the lower level to Blockchain of the higher level, allowing to create a multilevel prot…
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most signific…
A Merkle tree is an information construction that is used in Blockchain to verify data or transactions in a large content pool in a safe manner. The role of the Merkle tree is crucial in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in a Blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a bright and enhanced verification method, Merkle Trim Tree-based Blockchain Authentication (MTTBA) for the hash node traversal to reach the Merkle Root in a minimum time. MTTBA is a unique mechanism for verifying the Merkle Tree's accumulated transactions specifically for an odd number of transactions. The future impact of c…
The Bitcoin network has offered a new way of securely performing financial transactions over the insecure network. Nevertheless, this ability comes with the cost of storing a large (distributed) ledger, which has become unsuitable for personal devices of any kind. Although the simplified payment verification (SPV) clients can address this storage issue, a Bitcoin SPV client has to rely on other Bitcoin nodes to obtain its transaction history and the current approaches offer no privacy guarantees to the SPV clients. This work presents $T^3$, a trusted hardware-secured Bitcoin full client that s…
Blockchain systems and cryptocurrencies have exploded in popularity over the past decade, and with this growing user base, the number of cryptocurrency scams has also surged. Given the graphical structure of blockchain networks and the abundance of data generated on these networks, we use graph mining techniques to extract essential information on transactions and apply Benford's Law to extract distributional information on address transactions. We then apply a gradient-boosting tree model to predict fraudulent addresses. Our results show that our method can detect scams with reasonable accura…
Light nodes in blockchain systems are known to be vulnerable to data availability (DA) attacks where they accept an invalid block with unavailable portions. Previous works have used LDPC and 2-D Reed Solomon (2D-RS) codes with Merkle Trees to mitigate DA attacks. While these codes have demonstrated improved performance across a variety of metrics such as DA detection probability, they are difficult to apply to blockchains with large blocks due to generally intractable code guarantees for large codelengths (LDPC), large decoding complexity (2D-RS), or large coding fraud proof sizes (2D-RS). We …
To achieve lightweight selective disclosure for protecting privacy of document holders, we propose an XML format for documents that can hide arbitrary elements using a cryptographic hash function and salts, which allows to be partially digitally signed and efficiently verified, as well as a JSON format that can be converted to such XML. The documents can be efficiently proven to exist by representing multiple such structures as a Merkle tree and storing its root in blockchain. We show that our proposal has advantages over known methods that represent the document itself as a Merkle tree and pa…
Data availability (DA) attack is a well-known problem in certain blockchains where users accept an invalid block with unavailable portions. Previous works have used LDPC and 2-D Reed Solomon (2DRS) codes with Merkle trees to mitigate DA attacks. These codes perform well across various metrics such as DA detection probability and communication cost. However, these codes are difficult to apply to blockchains with large blocks due to large decoding complexity and coding fraud proof size (2D-RS codes), and intractable code guarantees for large code lengths (LDPC codes). In this paper, we focus on …
The blockchain technology has been changing our daily lives since Bitcoin - i.e., the first decentralized cryptocurrency - was invented and released as open-source software by an unidentified person or a group called Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Of many applications which can be implemented based on the blockchain, storage is an important one, a notable example of which is the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS is a distributed web based on a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open and focuses on public accessible files. To provide a solution for private…
In this paper, we propose coded Merkle tree (CMT), a novel hash accumulator that offers a constant-cost protection against data availability attacks in blockchains, even if the majority of the network nodes are malicious. A CMT is constructed using a family of sparse erasure codes on each layer, and is recovered by iteratively applying a peeling-decoding technique that enables a compact proof for data availability attack on any layer. Our algorithm enables any node to verify the full availability of any data block generated by the system by just downloading a $Θ(1)$ byte block hash commitment …
Light nodes are clients in blockchain systems that only store a small portion of the blockchain ledger. In certain blockchains, light nodes are vulnerable to a data availability (DA) attack where a malicious node makes the light nodes accept an invalid block by hiding the invalid portion of the block from the nodes in the system. Recently, a technique based on LDPC codes called Coded Merkle Tree was proposed by Yu et al. that enables light nodes to detect a DA attack by randomly requesting/sampling portions of the block from the malicious node. However, light nodes fail to detect a DA attack w…
QAE-BAC: Achieving Quantifiable Anonymity and Efficiency in Blockchain-Based Access Control with Attribute
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）；Faculty of Science and Engineering, Southern Cross University（南十字星大学科学与工程学院）；School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University（华东师范大学地理科学学院）；School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University（格里菲斯大学信息与通信技术学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
In certain blockchain systems, light nodes are clients that download only a small portion of the block. Light nodes are vulnerable to data availability (DA) attacks where a malicious node hides an invalid portion of the block from the light nodes. Recently, a technique based on erasure codes called Coded Merkle Tree (CMT) was proposed by Yu et al. that enables light nodes to detect a DA attack with high probability. The CMT is constructed using LDPC codes for fast decoding but can fail to detect a DA attack if a malicious node hides a small stopping set of the code. To combat this, Yu et al. u…
Detecting Anomalies in Blockchain Transactions using Machine Learning Classifiers and Explainability Analysis
Premier University（总理大学）；United International University（联合国际大学）；Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre（网络安全合作研究中心）；Edith Cowan University（埃迪斯科文大学）
It is interesting but difficult and challenging to study Ethereum with multiple mining pools. One of the main difficulties comes from not only how to represent such a general tree with multiple block branches (or sub-chains) related to the multiple mining pools, but also how to analyze a multi-dimensional stochastic system due to the mining competition among the multiple mining pools. In this paper, we first set up a mathematical representation for the tree with multiple block branches. Then we provide a block classification of Ethereum: Regular blocks (in the main chain), orphan blocks, uncle…
Blockchains have recently been under the spotlight due to the boom of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. There is an increasing demand for querying the data stored in a blockchain database. To ensure query integrity, the user can maintain the entire blockchain database and query the data locally. However, this approach is not economic, if not infeasible, because of the blockchain's huge data size and considerable maintenance costs. In this paper, we take the first step toward investigating the problem of verifiable query processing over blockchain databases. We propose a novel fr…
Conventional blockchain implementations with append-only semantics do not support deleting or overwriting data in confirmed blocks. However, many industry-relevant use cases require the ability to delete data, especially when personally identifiable information is stored or when data growth has to be constrained. Existing attempts to reconcile these contradictions compromise on core qualities of the blockchain paradigm, as they include backdoor-like approaches such as central authorities with elevated rights or usage of specialized chameleon hash algorithms in chaining of the blocks. In this t…
A Merkle tree is a data structure for representing a key-value store as a tree. Each node of a Merkle tree is equipped with a hash value computed from those of their descendants. A Merkle tree is often used for representing a state of a blockchain system since it can be used for efficiently auditing the state in a trustless manner. Due to the safety-critical nature of blockchains, ensuring the correctness of their implementation is paramount. We show our formally verified implementation of the core part of Plebeia using F*. Plebeia is a library to manipulate an extension of Merkle trees (calle…
Device failure detection is one of most essential problems in industrial internet of things (IIoT). However, in conventional IIoT device failure detection, client devices need to upload raw data to the central server for model training, which might lead to disclosure of sensitive business data. Therefore, in this paper, to ensure client data privacy, we propose a blockchain-based federated learning approach for device failure detection in IIoT. First, we present a platform architecture of blockchain-based federated learning systems for failure detection in IIoT, which enables verifiable integr…
A popular method in practice offloads computation and storage in blockchains by relying on committing only hashes of off-chain data into the blockchain. This mechanism is acknowledged to be vulnerable to a stalling attack: the blocks corresponding to the committed hashes may be unavailable at any honest node. The straightforward solution of broadcasting all blocks to the entire network sidesteps this data availability attack, but it is not scalable. In this paper, we propose ACeD, a scalable solution to this data availability problem with $O(1)$ communication efficiency, the first to the best …
In view of the security issues of the Internet of Things (IoT), considered better combining edge computing and blockchain with the IoT, integrating attribute-based encryption (ABE) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) models with attributes as the entry point, an attribute-based encryption and access control scheme (ABE-ACS) has been proposed. Facing Edge-Iot, which is a heterogeneous network composed of most resource-limited IoT devices and some nodes with higher computing power. For the problems of high resource consumption and difficult deployment of existing blockchain platforms, we d…
In a blockchain Data Availability Attack (DAA), a malicious node publishes a block header but withholds part of the block, which contains invalid transactions. Honest full nodes, which can download and store the full blockchain, are aware that some data are not available but they have no formal way to prove it to light nodes, i.e., nodes that have limited resources and are not able to access the whole blockchain data. A common solution to counter these attacks exploits linear error correcting codes to encode the block content. A recent protocol, called SPAR, employs coded Merkle trees and low-…
Initiated from Nakamoto's Bitcoin system, blockchain technology has demonstrated great capability of building secure consensus among decentralized parties at Internet-scale, i.e., without relying on any centralized trusted party. Nowadays, blockchain systems find applications in various fields. But the performance is increasingly becoming a bottleneck, especially when permissionless participation is retained for full decentralization. In this work, we present a new consensus protocol named GHAST (Greedy Heaviest Adaptive Sub-Tree) which organizes blocks in a Tree-Graph structure (i.e., a direc…
The most fundamental purpose of blockchain technology is to enable persistent, consistent, distributed storage of information. Increasingly common are authentication systems that leverage this property to allow users to carry their personal data on a device while a hash of this data is signed by a trusted authority and then put on a blockchain to be compared against. For instance, in 2015, MIT introduced a schema for the publication of their academic certificates based on this principle. In this work, we propose a way for users to obtain assured identities based on face-to-face proofing that c…
IoT devices have been adopted widely in the last decade which enabled collection of various data from different environments. The collected data is crucial in certain applications where IoT devices generate data for critical infrastructure or systems whose failure may result in catastrophic results. Specifically, for such critical applications, data storage poses challenges since the data may be compromised during the storage and the integrity might be violated without being noticed. In such cases, integrity and data provenance are required in order to be able to detect the source of any incid…
