The modern society, economy and industry have been changed remarkably by many cutting-edge technologies over the last years, and many more are in development and early implementation that will in turn led even wider spread of adoptions and greater alteration. Blockchain technology along with other rising ones is expected to transform virtually every aspect of global business and individuals' lifestyle in some areas. It has been spreading with multi-sector applications from financial services to healthcare, supply chain, and cybersecurity emerging every passing day. Simultaneously, in the digital world, data protection and privacy are the most enormous issues which customers, companies and policymakers also take seriously into consideration due to the recent increase of security breaches and surveillance in reported incidents. In this case, blockchain has the capability and potential to revolutionize trust, security and privacy of individual data in the online world. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to study the actual cases of Blockchain applied in the reformation of privacy and security field by discussing its impacts as well as the opportunities and challenges.
The proportion of Energy consumption in the building industry is great, as well as the amount of cooling and heating system. Scholars have been working on energy conservation of Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning and other systems in buildings. The application of occupant behavior data for building energy optimization has started gaining attention from scholars. However, occupant behavior data concerns many aspects of occupants' privacy. Different types of occupant behavior data contain occupants' private information to different levels. It is crucial to conduct privacy protection of o…
Real-world applications in healthcare and supply chain domains produce, exchange, and share data in a multi-stakeholder environment. Data owners want to control their data and privacy in such settings. On the other hand, data consumers demand methods to understand when, how, and who produced the data. These requirements necessitate data governance frameworks that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, and consent management. We introduce a decentralized data governance framework based on blockchain technology and proxy re-encryption to let data owners control and track their data throu…
Today, the entire world is facing incredible health and economic challenges due to the rapid spread of the life threatening novel Coronavirus Disease - 2019 (COVID-19). In the prevailing situation when a vaccine is many months away, the way forward seems to be a controlled exit from the lockdown - where, infected/exposed people are strictly quarantined and recovered/unexposed people are allowed to carry on with their day to day business activities. However, appropriate physical distancing norms will have to be strictly followed for such relaxations. Therefore, mechanisms are required that will…
Blockchain technologies provide excellent architectures and practical tools for securing and managing the sensitive and private data stored in biometric templates, but at a cost. We discuss opportunities and challenges in the integration of blockchain and biometrics, with emphasis in biometric template storage and protection, a key problem in biometrics still largely unsolved. Key tradeoffs involved in that integration, namely, latency, processing time, economic cost, and biometric performance are experimentally studied through the implementation of a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain …
The Semantic Web, an extension of the current web, provides a common framework that makes data machine understandable and also allows data to be shared and reused across various applications. Resource Description Framework (RDF), a graph-based data model for describing things (entities), facilitates data integration. Due to the explosion of the amount of RDF data, developing tools to support processing and answering of complex queries over the integrated data has become challenging. To overcome this challenge in query processing in semantic data integration frameworks, we provide a view layer …
Industry 4.0 is all about doing things in a concurrent, secure, and fine-grained manner. IoT edge-sensors and their associated data play a predominant role in today's industry ecosystem. Breaching data or forging source devices after injecting advanced persistent threats (APT) damages the industry owners' money and loss of operators' lives. The existing challenges include APT injection attacks targeting vulnerable edge devices, insecure data transportation, trust inconsistencies among stakeholders, incompliant data storing mechanisms, etc. Edge-servers often suffer because of their lightweight…
With the large-scale deployment of industrial internet of things (IIoT) devices, the number of vulnerabilities that threaten IIoT security is also growing dramatically, including a mass of undisclosed IIoT vulnerabilities that lack mitigation measures. Coordination Vulnerabilities Disclosure (CVD) is one of the most popular vulnerabilities sharing solutions, in which some security workers (SWs) can develop undisclosed vulnerabilities patches together. However, CVD assumes that sharing participants (SWs) are all honest, and thus offering chances for dishonest SWs to leak undisclosed IIoT vulner…
HTW Berlin University of Applied Sciences（柏林工程与应用科学大学）；HTW Dresden University of Applied Sciences（德累斯顿工程与应用科学大学）
In the next few years, Blockchain will play a central role in IoT as a technology. It enables the traceability of processes between multiple parties independent of a central instance. Blockchain allows to make the processes more transparent, cheaper, and safer. This research paper was conducted as systematic literature search. Our aim is to understand current state of implementation in context of Blockchain Technology for digital protection of communication in industrial cyber-physical systems. We have extracted 28 primary papers from scientific databases and classified into different categori…
Increased collaborative production and dynamic selection of production partners within industry 4.0 manufacturing leads to ever-increasing automatic data exchange between companies. Automatic and unsupervised data exchange creates new attack vectors, which could be used by a malicious insider to leak secrets via an otherwise considered secure channel without anyone noticing. In this paper we reflect upon approaches to prevent the exposure of secret data via blockchain technology, while also providing auditable proof of data exchange. We show that previous blockchain based privacy protection ap…
In blockchain systems, the scarcity of a resource is used as a Sybil protection mechanism. In Proof-of-Work blockchains, that resource is computing power. In the event of a fork, the scarcity of this resource theoretically prevents miners from producing blocks on both branches of a fork. In Proof-of-Stake blockchains, because that resource is token stake, the computational cost of creating a block is negligible. In the event of a fork, and if no specific measures have been taken, rational block producers should extend both branches of the fork. In blockchains with sequential block production, …
Automated and industrial Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasing daily. As the number of IoT devices grows, the volume of data generated by them will also grow. Managing these rapidly expanding IoT devices and enormous data efficiently to be available to all authorized users without compromising its integrity will become essential in the near future. On the other side, many information security incidents have been recorded, increasing the requirement for countermeasures. While safeguards against hostile third parties have been commonplace until now, operators and parties have seen an i…
Blockchain technology has become a thriving topic in the last years, making possible to transform old-fashioned operations to more fast, secured, and cheap approaches. In this study we explore the potential of blockchain for biometrics, analyzing how both technologies can mutually benefit each other. The contribution of this study is twofold: 1) we provide a short overview of both blockchain and biometrics, focusing on the opportunities and challenges that arise when combining them, and 2) we discuss in more detail blockchain for biometric template protection.
The recent approval of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes new data protection requirements on data controllers and processors with respect to the processing of European Union (EU) residents' data. These requirements consist of a single set of rules that have binding legal status and should be enforced in all EU member states. In light of these requirements, we propose in this paper the use of a blockchain-based approach to support data accountability and provenance tracking. Our approach relies on the use of publicly auditable contracts deployed in a blockchain that increase…
FIDELIS: Blockchain-Enabled Protection Against Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning
Department of Computer Science Saint Mary's College of California（计算机科学系圣玛丽学院）；Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University（计算机科学系北卡罗来纳州立大学）；Department of Computer Science Boise State University（计算机科学系博伊州立大学）
Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has been characterised to be the next big thing and has already gained a broad recognition by experts in diverse fields. In this paper, we consider possible use cases and applications of the blockchain for the consumer electronics (CE) industry and its interplay with the Internet of things. Instead of discussing how the blockchain can revolutionise the supply chain, we focus on how it could be employed for enhancing the security of networked CE devices. This work is motivated by the large number of recent attacks that use easily hackable devices as a …
The choice of the consensus method ultimately determines throughput, scalability, tamper resistance, and consistency of a blockchain system. However, across all the types of blockchain (private, semi-private, consortium, or public), there is no consensus method that uniformly addresses all these traits. Verifiable lottery algorithms (Proof of ...) increase tamper resistance but show weakness in throughput and scalability, while established methods like PAXOS and RAFT provide no additional protection against tampering. In this paper, we introduce Right to Sign which aims to provide additional t…
Blockchain is an incipient technology that offers many strengths compared to traditional systems, such as decentralization, transparency and traceability. However, if the technology is to be used for processing personal data, complementary mechanisms must be identified that provide support for building systems that meet security and data protection requirements. We study the integration of off-chain capabilities in blockchain-based solutions moving data or computational operations outside the core blockchain network. We develop a thorough analysis of the European data protection regulation and…
In recent years, the advancement in modern technologies has experienced an explosion of huge data sets being captured and recorded in different fields, but also given rise to concerns the security and protection of data storage, transmission, processing, and access to data. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions in a secure, flexible, verifiable and permanent way. Transactions in a blockchain can be an exchange of an asset, the execution of the terms of a smart contract, or an update to a record. In this paper, we have developed a blockchain access control ecosystem t…
The distributed ledger technology has been widely hailed as the break-through technology. It has realised a great number of application scenarios, and improved workflow of many domains. Nonetheless, there remain a few major concerns in adopting and deploying the distributed ledger technology at scale. In this white paper, we tackle two of them, namely the throughput scalability and confidentiality protection for transactions. We learn from the existing body of research, and build a scale-out blockchain platform that champions privacy called RVChain. RVChain takes advantage of trusted execution…
Utilities around the world are reported to invest a total of around 30 billion over the next few years for installation of more than 300 million smart meters, replacing traditional analog meters [1]. By mid-decade, with full country wide deployment, there will be almost 1.3 billion smart meters in place [1]. Collection of fine grained energy usage data by these smart meters provides numerous advantages such as energy savings for customers with use of demand optimization, a billing system of higher accuracy with dynamic pricing programs, bidirectional information exchange ability between end-us…
Recent research in Internet of things has been widely applied for industrial practices, fostering the exponential growth of data and connected devices. Henceforth, data-driven AI models would be accessed by different parties through certain data-sharing policies. However, most of the current training procedures rely on the centralized data-collection strategy and a single computational server. However, such a centralized scheme may lead to many issues. Customer data stored in a centralized database may be tampered with so the provenance and authenticity of data cannot be justified. Once the af…
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the blockchain technology, and many blockchain-based applications have been developed to take advantage of its decentralization, transparency, fault tolerance, and strong security. In the field of smart grids, a plethora of proposals have emerged to utilize blockchain for augmenting intelligent energy management, energy trading, security and privacy protection, microgrid management, and energy vehicles. Compared with traditional centralized approaches, blockchain-based solutions are able to exploit the advantages of blockchain to realize be…
Zoom Meeting is an enterprise online video conferencing solution with real-time messaging and content sharing. However, it's lack of privacy protection since centralized Zoom servers are capable of monitoring user's messages. Thereby, to solve the privacy problem, in May 2020, Zoom acquired Keybase so that Keybase's team can help it to build end-to-end encryption meeting while remaining Zoom's current scalability and high-performance. Nonetheless, according to the latest released Zoom's whitepaper, even with the new design of E2E (end to end) encryption meeting, the security threats can't be e…
Although blockchain-based digital services promise trust, accountability, and transparency, multiple paradoxes between blockchains and GDPR have been highlighted in the recent literature. Some of the recent literature also proposed possible solutions to these paradoxes. This article aims to conduct a systematic literature review on GDPR compliant blockchains and synthesize the findings. In particular, the goal was to identify 1) the GDPR articles that have been explored in prior literature; 2) the relevant research domains that have been explored, and 3) the research gaps. Our findings synthes…
Blockchain offers traceability and transparency to supply chain event data and hence can help overcome many challenges in supply chain management such as: data integrity, provenance and traceability. However, data privacy concerns such as the protection of trade secrets have hindered adoption of blockchain technology. Although consortium blockchains only allow authorised supply chain entities to read/write to the ledger, privacy preservation of trade secrets cannot be ascertained. In this work, we propose a privacy-preservation framework, PrivChain, to protect sensitive data on blockchain usin…
The Internet of Things is progressively getting broader, evol-ving its scope while creating new markets and adding more to the existing ones. However, both generation and analysis of large amounts of data, which are integral to this concept, may require the proper protection and privacy-awareness of some sensitive information. In order to control the access to this data, allowing devices to verify the reliability of their own interactions with other endpoints of the network is a crucial step to ensure this required safeness. Through the implementation of a blockchain-based Public Key Infrastru…
The advancement in the healthcare sector is entering into a new era in the form of Health 4.0. The integration of innovative technologies like Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Big Data, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, and Blockchain with Healthcare services has led to improved performance and efficiency through data-based learning and interconnection of systems. On the other hand, it has also increased complexities and has brought its own share of vulnerabilities due to the heavy influx, sharing, and storage of healthcare data. The protection of the same from cyber-attacks along with privacy p…
Blockchains have received much attention recently since they provide decentralized approaches to the creation and management of value. Many banks, Internet companies, car manufacturers, and even governments worldwide have incorporated or started considering blockchains to improve the security, scalability, and efficiency of their services. In this paper, we survey blockchain applications in different areas. These areas include cryptocurrency, healthcare, advertising, insurance, copyright protection, energy, and societal applications. Our work provides a timely summary for individuals and organ…
Blockchains are turning into decentralized computing platforms and are getting worldwide recognition for their unique advantages. There is an emerging trend beyond payments that blockchains could enable a new breed of decentralized applications, and serve as the foundation for Internet's security infrastructure. The immutable nature of the blockchain makes it a winner on security and transparency; it is nearly inconceivable for ledgers to be altered in a way not instantly clear to every single user involved. However, most blockchains fall short in privacy aspects, particularly in data protecti…
There has been an intense concern for security alternatives because of the recent rise of cyber attacks, mainly targeting critical systems such as industry, medical, or energy ecosystem. Though the latest industry infrastructures largely depend on AI-driven maintenance, the prediction based on corrupted data undoubtedly results in loss of life and capital. Admittedly, an inadequate data-protection mechanism can readily challenge the security and reliability of the network. The shortcomings of the conventional cloud or trusted certificate-driven techniques have motivated us to exhibit a unique …
Permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger fabric enables a secure supply chain model in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) through multichannel and private data collection mechanisms. Sharing of Industrial data including private data exchange at every stage between supply chain partners helps to improve product quality, enable future forecast, and enhance management activities. However, the existing data sharing and querying mechanism in Hyperledger fabric is not suitable for supply chain environment in IIoT because the queries are evaluated on actual data stored on ledger which consists o…
Temporary work is an employment situation useful and suitable in all occasions in which business needs to adjust more easily and quickly to workload fluctuations or maintain staffing flexibility. Temporary workers play therefore an important role in many companies, but this kind of activity is subject to a special form of legal protections and many aspects and risks must be taken into account both employers and employees. In this work we propose a blockchain-based system that aims to ensure respect for the rights for all actors involved in a temporary employment, in order to provide employees …
The cloud changed the way we manage and store data. Today, cloud storage services offer clients an infrastructure that allows them a convenient source to store, replicate, and secure data online. However, with these new capabilities also come limitations, such as lack of transparency, limited decentralization, and challenges with privacy and security. And, as the need for more agile, private and secure data solutions continues to grow exponentially, rethinking the current structure of cloud storage is mission-critical for enterprises. By leveraging and building upon blockchain's unique attribu…
Sharding has emerged as one of the common techniques to address the scalability problems of blockchain systems. To this end, various sharding techniques for blockchain systems have been proposed in the literature. When sharded blockchains process personal data, the data controllers and the data processors associated with the sharded blockchains need to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To this end, this article makes the first attempt to address the following key question: to what extent the existing techniques developed by different communities such as the distr…
The digital transformation of the medical sector requires solutions that are convenient and efficient for all stakeholders while protecting patients' sensitive data. One example that has already attracted design-oriented research are medical prescriptions. However, current implementations of electronic prescription management systems typically create centralized data silos, leaving user data vulnerable to cybersecurity incidents and impeding interoperability. Research has also proposed decentralized solutions based on blockchain technology, but privacy-related challenges have often been ignore…
Data tampering is often considered a severe problem in industrial applications as it can lead to inaccurate financial reports or even a corporate security crisis. A correct representation of data is essential for companies' core business processes and is demanded by investors and customers. Traditional data audits are performed through third-party auditing services; however, these services are expensive and can be untrustworthy in some cases. Blockchain and smart contracts provide a decentralized mechanism to achieve secure and trustworthy data integrity verification; however, existing solutio…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives control of personal data back to the owners by appointing higher requirements and obligations on service providers who manage and process personal data. As the verification of GDPR-compliance, handled by a supervisory authority, is irregularly conducted; it is challenging to be certified that a service provider has been continuously adhering to the GDPR. Furthermore, it is beyond the data owner's capability to perceive whether a service provider complies with the GDPR and effectively protects her personal data. This motivates us to envision a…
