In modern healthcare systems, being able to share electronic health records is crucial for providing quality care and for enabling a larger spectrum of health services. Health data sharing is dependent on obtaining individual consent which, in turn, is hindered by a lack of resources. To this extend, blockchain-based platforms facilitate data sharing by inherently creating a trusted distributed network of users. These users are enabled to share their data without depending on the time and resources of specific players (such as the health services). In blockchain-based platforms, data governance mechanisms become very important due to the need to specify and monitor data sharing and data use conditions. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based data sharing consent model for access control over individual health data. We use smart contracts to dynamically represent the individual consent over health data and to enable data requesters to search and access them. The dynamic consent model extends upon two ontologies: the Data Use Ontology (DUO) which models the individual consent of users and the Automatable Discovery and Access Matrix (ADA-M) which describes queries from data requesters. We deploy the model on Ethereum blockchain and evaluate different data sharing scenarios. The contribution of this paper is to create an individual consent model for health data sharing platforms. Such a model guarantees that individual consent is respected and that there is accountability for all the participants in the data sharing platform. The evaluation of our solution indicates that such a data sharing model provides a flexible approach to decide how the data is used by data requesters. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed model is efficient and adapts to personalized access control policies in data sharing.
The increasing amount of personal data is raising serious issues in the context of privacy, security, and data ownership. Entities whose data are being collected can benefit from mechanisms to manage the parties that can access their data and to audit who has accessed their data. Consent management systems address these issues. We present Consentio, a scalable consent management system based on the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain. The data management challenge we address is to ensure high throughput and low latency of endorsing data access requests and granting or revoking consent. …
Wearable fitness devices are widely used to track an individual's health and physical activities to improve the quality of health services. These devices sense a considerable amount of sensitive data processed by a centralized third party. While many researchers have thoroughly evaluated privacy issues surrounding wearable fitness trackers, no study has addressed privacy issues in trackers by giving control of the data to the user. Blockchain is an emerging technology with outstanding advantages in resolving consent management privacy concerns. As there are no fully transparent, legally compli…
Data sharing is very important for accelerating scientific research, business innovations, and for informing individuals. Yet, concerns over data privacy, cost, and lack of secure data-sharing solutions have prevented data owners from sharing data. To overcome these issues, several research works have proposed blockchain-based data-sharing solutions for their ability to add transparency and control to the data-sharing process. Yet, while models for decentralized data sharing exist, how to incentivize these structures to enable data sharing at scale remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we…
Edge computing is a novel paradigm designed toimprove the quality of service for latency sensitive cloud applications. However, the state-of-the-art edge services are designedfor specific applications, which are isolated from each other.To better improve the utilization level of edge nodes, publicresource sharing among edges from distinct service providersshould be encouraged economically. In this work, we employ thepayment channel techniques to design and implement EdgeToll,a blockchain-based toll collection system for heterogeneous public edge sharing. Test-bed has been developed to validate…
Easy access to data is one of the main avenues to accelerate scientific research. As a key element of scientific innovations, data sharing allows the reproduction of results, helps prevent data fabrication, falsification, and misuse. Although the research benefits from data reuse are widely acknowledged, the data collections existing today are still kept in silos. Indeed, monitoring what happens to data once they have been handed to a third party is currently not feasible within the current data-sharing practices. We propose a blockchain-based system to trace data collections, and potentially …
Today the cloud plays a central role in storing, processing, and distributing data. Despite contributing to the rapid development of IoT applications, the current IoT cloud-centric architecture has led into a myriad of isolated data silos that hinders the full potential of holistic data-driven analytics within the IoT. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based design for the IoT that brings a distributed access control and data management. We depart from the current trust model that delegates access control of our data to a centralized trusted authority and instead empower the users with da…
Although Metaverse has recently been widely studied, its practical application still faces many challenges. One of the severe challenges is the lack of sufficient resources for computing and communication on local devices, resulting in the inability to access the Metaverse services. To address this issue, this paper proposes a practical blockchain-based mobile edge computing (MEC) platform for resource sharing and optimal utilization to complete the requested offloading tasks, given the heterogeneity of servers' available resources and that of users' task requests. To be specific, we first ela…
The Covid-19 pandemic has made individuals and organizations to rethink the way of handling identity verification and credentials sharing particularly in quarantined situations. In this study, we investigate the inefficiencies of traditional identity systems, and discuss how a proper implementation of Blockchain technology would result in safer, more secure, privacy respecting and remote friendly identity systems. As a result, we propose a Blockchain based framework for digital identity verification, record attestation and record sharing, and we explain the framework in details with certain us…
The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has caused a powerful transition in the cyber threat landscape. As a result, organisations have had to find new ways to better manage the risks associated with their infrastructure. In response, a significant amount of research has focused on developing efficient Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing platforms. However, most existing solutions are highly centralised and do not provide a way to exchange information in a distributed way. In this chapter, we subsequently seek to evaluate how blockchain technology can be used to address a …
In this letter we propose Meta-key, a data-sharing mechanism that enables users share their encrypted data under a blockchain-based decentralized storage architecture. All the data-encryption keys are encrypted by the owner's public key and put onto the blockchain for safe and secure storage and easy key-management. Encrypted data are stored in dedicated storage nodes and proxy re-encryption mechanism is used to ensure secure data-sharing in the untrusted environment. Security analysis of our model shows that the proxy re-encryption adopted in our system is naturally free from collusion-attack…
At present, more than a billion closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are watching the world. These cameras garner a lot of visual information that is often processed and stored in remote and centralized cloud servers. Multiple occasions have revealed that this traditional approach is plagued with security and privacy breaches. The breaches could be the interception of raw videos while in transit to distant surveillance analytics centers (SAC), infiltration to cameras and network video records (NVR), or abuse of cameras and stored videos. Hence, the traditional video surveillance system (VS…
Blokchain is a promising technology to enable distributed and reliable data sharing at the network edge. The high security in blockchain is undoubtedly a critical factor for the network to handle important data item. On the other hand, according to the dilemma in blockchain, an overemphasis on distributed security will lead to poor transaction-processing capability, which limits the application of blockchain in data sharing scenarios with high-throughput and low-latency requirements. To enable demand-oriented distributed services, this paper investigates the relationship between capability and…
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) is the knowledge of cyber and physical threats that help mitigate potential cyber attacks. The rapid evolution of the current threat landscape has seen many organisations share CTI to strengthen their security posture for mutual benefit. However, in many cases, CTI data contains attributes (e.g., software versions) that have the potential to leak sensitive information or cause reputational damage to the sharing organisation. While current approaches allow restricting CTI sharing to trusted organisations, they lack solutions where the shared data can be verified …
Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with little transparency and fairness in terms of number of views or revenue. On the other hand, consumers are distanced from the publishers and cannot authenticate originality of the content. In this paper, we develop a reliable and fair platform for content sharing without a central facilitator. The platform is built as a decentralized data storage layer to store a…
Off-grid networks are recently emerging as a solution to connect the unconnected or provide alternative services to networks of possibly untrusted participants. The systems currently used, however, exhibit limitations due to their centralized nature and thus prove inadequate to secure trust. Blockchain technology can be the tool that will enable trust and transparency in such networks. In this paper, we introduce a platform for secure and privacy-respecting decentralized data sharing among untrusted participants in off-grid networks. The proposed architecture realizes this goal via the integra…
The intelligent vehicle (IV) has become a promising technology that could revolutionize our life in smart cities sooner or later. However, it yet suffers from many security vulnerabilities. Traditional security methods are incapable to secure the IV data sharing against malicious attacks. Blockchain, as expected by both research and industry communities, has emerged as a good solution to address these issues. The major issues in IV data sharing are trust, data accuracy and reliability of data sharing in the communication channel. Blockchain technology, previously working for the cryptocurrency…
In recent years Industrial Control Systems (ICS) have been targeted increasingly by sophisticated cyberattacks. Improving ICS security has drawn significant attention in the literature that emphasises the importance of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) sharing in accelerating detection, mitigation, and prevention of cyberattacks. However, organisations are reluctant to exchange CTI due to fear of exposure, reputational damage, and lack of incentives. Furthermore, there has been limited discussion about the factors influencing participation in sharing CTI about ICS. The existing CTI-sharing platf…
The sixth generation (6G) network must provide performance superior to previous generations in order to meet the requirements of emerging services and applications, such as multi-gigabit transmission rate, even higher reliability, sub 1 millisecond latency and ubiquitous connection for Internet of Everything. However, with the scarcity of spectrum resources, efficient resource management and sharing is crucial to achieve all these ambitious requirements. One possible technology to enable all of this is blockchain, which has recently gained significance and will be of paramount importance to 6G…
Internet censorship has been implemented in several countries to prevent citizens from accessing information and to suppress discussion of specific topics. This paper presents Infnote, a platform that helps eliminate the problem of sharing content in these censorship regimes. Infnote is a decentralized information sharing system based on blockchain and peer-to-peer network, aiming to provide an easy-to-use medium for users to share their thoughts, insights and views freely without worrying about data tampering and data loss. Infnote provides a solution that is able to work on any level of Inte…
The Internet of Things (IoT) bears unprecedented security and scalability challenges due to the magnitude of data produced and exchanged by IoT devices and platforms. Some of those challenges are currently being addressed by coupling IoT applications with blockchains. However, current blockchain-backed IoT systems simply use the blockchain to store access control policies, thereby underutilizing the power of blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose a new framework named Sash that couples IoT platforms with blockchain that provides a number of advantages compared to state of the art. In…
Existing education systems are facing a threat of question paper leaking (QPL) in the exam which jeopardizes the quality of education. Therefore, it is high time to think about a more secure and flexible question sharing system which can prevent QPL issue in the future education system. Blockchain enables a way of creating and storing transactions, contracts or anything that requires protection against tampering, accessing etc. This paper presents a new scheme for smart education, by utilizing the concept of blockchain, for question sharing. A two-phase encryption technique for encrypting ques…
For the modern world where data is becoming one of the most valuable assets, robust data privacy policies rooted in the fundamental infrastructure of networks and applications are becoming an even bigger necessity to secure sensitive user data. In due course with the ever-evolving nature of newer statistical techniques infringing user privacy, machine learning models with algorithms built with respect for user privacy can offer a dynamically adaptive solution to preserve user privacy against the exponentially increasing multidimensional relationships that datasets create. Using these privacy a…
The surging interest in blockchain technology has revitalized the search for effective Byzantine consensus schemes. In particular, the blockchain community has been looking for ways to effectively integrate traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocols into a blockchain consensus layer allowing various financial institutions to securely agree on the order of transactions. However, existing BFT protocols can only scale to tens of nodes due to their $O(n^2)$ message complexity. In this paper, we propose FastBFT, a fast and scalable BFT protocol. At the heart of FastBFT is a novel message …
In teleradiology, medical images are transmitted to offsite radiologists for interpretation and the dictation report is sent back to the original site to aid timely diagnosis and proper patient care. Although teleradiology offers great benefits including time and cost efficiency, after-hour coverages, and staffing shortage management, there are some technical and operational limitations to overcome in reaching its full potential. We analyzed the current teleradiology workflow to identify inefficiencies. Image unavailability and delayed critical result communication stemmed from lack of system …
The adoption of permissioned blockchain networks in enterprise settings has seen an increase in growth over the past few years. While encouraging, this is leading to the emergence of new data, asset and process silos limiting the potential value these networks bring to the broader ecosystem. Mechanisms for enabling network interoperability help preserve the benefits of independent sovereign networks, while allowing for the transfer or sharing of data, assets and processes across network boundaries. However, a naive approach to interoperability based on traditional point-to-point integration is…
Soteria is a user right management system designed to safeguard user-data privacy in a transparent and provable manner in compliance to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Soteria represents user data rights as formal executable sharing agreements, which can automatically be translated into a human readable form and enforced as data are queried. To support revocation and to prove compliance, an indelible, audited trail of the hash of data access and sharing agreements are stored on a two-layer distributed ledger. The main chain ensures partition tolerance and availability (PA) properties while …
In this paper we present our preliminary work on monitoring data License accoUntability and CompliancE (LUCE). LUCE is a blockchain platform solution designed to stimulate data sharing and reuse, by facilitating compliance with licensing terms. The platform enables data accountability by recording the use of data and their purpose on a blockchain-supported platform. LUCE allows for individual data to be rectified and erased. In doing so LUCE can ensure subjects' General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) rights to access, rectification and erasure. Our contribution is to provide a distributed…
Interoperation for data sharing between permissioned blockchain networks relies on networks' abilities to independently authenticate requests and validate proofs accompanying the data; these typically contain digital signatures. This requires counterparty networks to know the identities and certification chains of each other's members, establishing a common trust basis rooted in identity. But permissioned networks are ad hoc consortia of existing organizations, whose network affiliations may not be well-known or well-established even though their individual identities are. In this paper, we de…
Large scale power systems are comprised of regional utilities with assets that stream sensor readings in real time. In order to detect cyberattacks, the globally acquired, real time sensor data needs to be analyzed in a centralized fashion. However, owing to operational constraints, such a centralized sharing mechanism turns out to be a major obstacle. In this paper, we propose a blockchain based decentralized framework for detecting coordinated replay attacks with full privacy of sensor data. We develop a Bayesian inference mechanism employing locally reported attack probabilities that is tai…
With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks, smart devices, and traditional information and communication technologies, there is tremendous growth in the use of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services in our everyday life. IoT systems deal with high volumes of data. This data can be particularly sensitive, as it may include health, financial, location, and other highly personal information. Fine-grained security management in IoT demands effective access control. Several proposals discuss access control for the IoT, however, a limited focus is given to the emerging blockc…
Timely sharing of electronic health records (EHR) across providers is essential and significance in facilitating medical researches and prompt patients' care. With sharing, it is crucial that patients can control who can access their data and when, and guarantee the security and privacy of their data. In current literature, various system models, cryptographic techniques and access control mechanisms are proposed which requires patient's consent before sharing. However, they mostly focus on patient is available to authorize the access of the EHR upon requested. This is impractical given that t…
Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the way we store, use, and process data. Information on most blockchains can be viewed by every node hosting the blockchain, which means that most blockchains cannot handle private data. Decentralized databases exist that guarantee privacy by encrypting user data with the user's private key, but this prevents easy data sharing. However, in many real world applications, from student data to medical records, it is desirable that user data is anonymously searchable. In this paper we present a novel system that gives users ownership over their data whi…
