Blockchain-based Cloud Research Articles

Blockchain-Based Secure Data Storage Protocol for Sensors in the Industrial Internet of Things

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that introduces Internet of Things (IoT) technology into industrial environments is beneficial to construct smart factories. It utilizes various sensors to collect the data of industrial devices. These data are analyzed to improve the manufacturing efficiency and product quality. Cloud storage provides a solution for storing data outsourced, especially for sensors that have limited local storage and computational capacity. To ensure the privacy preserving of devices, the collected data should be stored in the formal ciphertext. Therefore, encrypted data sharing should be implemented to analyze the devices’ data. In this article, the cloud storage solution for sensors is considered. To achieve a secure and efficient data storage and sharing, a novel group signature scheme, which has less computation overhead and communication overhead, is designed to realize anonymous authentication first. And then, a novel blockchain-based cloud storage protocol for sensors in IIoT is constructed on basis of the proposed group signature scheme. Smart contract and proxy re-encryption are utilized in this protocol to realize secure data sharing with a less computational overhead. Furthermore, security proofs and performance evaluations demonstrate that this protocol is secure, privacy-preserving, and has at least 40% and 20% performance improvement in data storage and sharing phase, respectively.

SRE_BBC: A Self-Adaptive Security Enabled Requirements Engineering Approach for SLA Smart Contracts in Blockchain-Based Cloud Systems.

Current blockchain-based cloud (BBC) systems have several security vulnerabilities regarding smart contracts (SC), and several attacks have been reported recently. The SC development lacks standard design processes that follow software lifecycle principles to model secure SC. Secondly, the security mechanisms in the SC are not constantly evolved to resist evolving adversary attacks. BBC systems lack self-adaptive security capability to make spontaneous decisions when adversarial attacks are encountered. To build a self-adaptive secure BBC system that follows standard software development lifecycle principles to model secure SC, we propose the so-called self-adaptive security RE_BBC framework. The framework would utilize the MAPE-BBC adaptation loop to make decisions internally based on the threat models, goal models, and service level agreement (SLA) SC security specifications. The framework identifies vulnerabilities and threats and takes precautionary measures using self-adaptive SC agents. We validated the proposed methodology theoretically and empirically, and statistically proved the research questions and hypothesis using the t-test and Mann–Whitney U test. Subsequently, we compare our proposed approach with the Security Quality Requirements Engineering approach (SQUARE). The feasibility results and the replicated study results indicate that the proposed approach outperformed the SQUARE approach in terms of artifacts quality, self-adaptive security evaluation quality, efficiency in response time, complexity, and usefulness of the proposed approach for the Healthcare Data Management (HDM) system. SC security developers can immensely benefit from our proposed methodology. They need not reengineer SC from scratch; depending on their security needs and plan, the contract can be adapted to execute a new plan.

Improving the Financial Security of National Health Insurance using Cloud-Based Blockchain Technology Application

Since Bitcoin's success, there has been a greater emphasis on researching the use of blockchain in a wide range of applications, such as agriculture, education, government, voting systems, etc. This generation of Blockchain applications is termed blockchain 3.0. Blockchain technology provides enhanced security, auditability, privacy, accountability, and many more features over a centralized system. Fraud in insurance is an international problem affecting all insurance subdomains in both developed and developing countries. Fraud, corruption, and many other data-related problems are threatening the financial security of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in Ghana and if not attended to, the core aims of the scheme to provide universal healthcare services will not be realized. Consequently, the objective of this work is to design and implement a blockchain-based solution to protect the NHIS from plummeting financially. This paper presents the conceptual view of the proposed system, sequence and use case diagrams, data management framework, smart notification system, and smart claim processing system. The system was evaluated using the DeLone & McLean Information Systems Success Model. It was used to validate the behavioural aspect of the system. The study discovered a significant influence of information quality and user satisfaction. On the contrary, system quality seems to have an almost significant influence on the use and user satisfaction of the proposed system.

Rules of Smart IoT Networks within Smart Cities towards Blockchain Standardization

Motivation. Standardization in smart city applications is restricted by the competitive pressures of proprietary innovation and technological compartmentalization. Interoperability across networks, databases, and APIs is essential to achieving the smart objectives of technology-supported urban environments. Methodology. The issues that smart cities face, as well as the usage of blockchain in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, are discussed in this research paper. Problem Statement. The study shows the obstacles to the establishment of an IoT-driven smart city agenda, including system security, dispersed node interoperability, data resource management, and scalability of a diverse IoT network. Results. To resolve these challenges, this research proposes a working infinite loop model for establishing a standardized, intermediary cloud-based blockchain for IoT networking within smart cities. The blockchain intermediary function will resolve critical gaps in the existing, distributed IoT-based smart cities’ standards, drawing connections between nodes, users, and service providers that are enabled through autonomous, immutable, and nonrepudiated transactions.

Blockchain-based cloud storage system with CP-ABE-based access control and revocation process

Blockchain-based cloud storage system with CP-ABE-based access control and revocation process

An Authorization Framework for Preserving Privacy of Big Medical Data via Blockchain in Cloud Server

In recent years, cloud-based medical record sharing has greatly improved the process of researching the disease and patient diagnosis. However, since cloud systems are centralized, there is serious concern about data security and privacy. Blockchain technology is viewed as a promising method of dealing with privacy issues and data security because of its exclusive features of distributed ledgers, secrecy, verifiability, and enhanced security. The literature review has shown significant works on integrating blockchain technology with cloud system for managing and sharing healthcare data. It has been analyzed that previous works are primarily dependent on the centralized data storage approach, which raises privacy concerns. The previous works also do not emphasize handling big medical data and lack the reliability of the end-to-end security features system. This paper has presented an authorization framework for ensuring data security and privacy preservation using blockchain technology with IPFS as decentralized file storage and sharing system. The proposed study devises a proof of replication algorithm using smart contracts to provide a better access control mechanism. The implementation of the proposed framework is based on the symmetric encryption and Ethereum blockchain platform. The study outcome illustrates the efficiency and availability of the proposed scheme compared to the typical cloud-based blockchain method.

Cloud-based blockchain technology to identify counterfeits

Multi-stakeholder and organizational involvement is an integral part of the medicine supply chain. Keeping track of the activities associated with medical products is difficult when the system is complex. Their complexity limits transparency and data provenance. Deficiencies within existing supply chains result in the counterfeiting of drugs, illegal imports, and inefficient operations. Due to these limitations, product integrity is compromised, resulting in product wastage. Visibility of the entire product supply chain is crucial for the pharmaceutical industry in terms of product safety and reduction of manufacturing costs. The Cloud-based Blockchain-powered architecture of the system provides a platform for addressing the need of pharma-material traceability, data storage, privacy of data, and quality assurance. This framework comprises of the identification of activities through tagging, information sharing in a secure environment; cloud-based storage using an off-chain Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and an on-chain couch DB; and access to this information that is controlled by the system's regulator. Electronic drug records will be accessed via a smart contract in Hyperledger Blockchain. The system assists in identifying false and cross-border products through the manufacturer and country of origin. A scan will identify counterfeit medications, showing that they are unauthorized products which may pose a risk to patients. Our experiments demonstrated the efficiency and usability of the design platform. Finally, we benchmarked the system using Hyperledger Caliper.

Blockchain-based cloud manufacturing platforms: A novel idea for service composition in XaaS paradigm.

Cloud manufacturing is a new globalized manufacturing framework which has improved the performance of manufacturing systems. The service-oriented architecture as the main idea behind this framework means that all resources and capabilities are considered as services. The agents interact by way of service exchanging, which has been a part of service composition research topics. Service allocations to demanders in a cloud manufacturing system have a dynamic behavior. However, the current research studies on cloud-based service composition are mainly based on centralized global optimization models. Therefore, a distributed deployment and real-time synchronization platform, which enables the globalized collaboration in service composition, is required. This paper proposes a method of using blockchain to solve these issues. Each service composition is considered as a transaction in the blockchain concept. A block includes a set of service compositions and its validity is confirmed by a predefined consensus mechanism. In the suggested platform, the mining role in blockchain is interpreted as an endeavor for proposing the proper service composition in the manufacturing paradigm. The proposed platform has interesting capabilities as it can increase the response time using the blockchain technology and improve the overall optimality of supply-demand matching in cloud manufacturing. The efficiency of the proposed model was evaluated by investigating a service allocation problem in a cloud manufacturing system in four large scale problems. Each problem is examined in four centralized modes, two, three and four solvers in blockchain-based model. The simulation results indicate the high quality of the proposed solution. The proposed solution will lead to at least 15.14% and a maximum of 34.8 percent reduction in costs and 20 to 68.4 percent at the solving time of the problem. It is also observed that with increasing the number of solvers (especially in problems with larger dimensions) the solution speed increases sharply (more than 68% improvement in some problems), which indicates the positive effect of distribution on reducing the problem-solving time.

Developing a Blockchain-based Data Storage System Model to Improve Government Agencies’ Organizational Performance

Confidential documents in possession of government agencies are considered as assets that must be protected. Government agencies have started implementing cloud data storage systems to document data in a centralized network. However, this data storage system has been well-known as being threatened by data security, integrity, and data availability risks. On the other hand, blockchain technology, a decentralized, fast, secure, transparent, and recorded data storage system, is considered as the solution for mitigating these risks. Therefore, this study aims to identify the dominant risk factors of implementing the cloud computing storage system in government agencies potentially impacting its organizational performance and developing a risk-based data storage system that considers blockchain technology. This research used questionnaire surveys, case studies, and expert interviews to obtain its research objectives. The results demonstrated that six dominant risks included data theft and breaches, data corruption caused by virus attacks, limited storage space, data loss caused by system damage, data being accessed without particular access rights, and lack of guarantees from the system when a security threat occurred. A model for the blockchain-based cloud data storage system is proposed to address these risks and to improve the organizational performance of government agencies.

Technical Sustainability of Cloud-Based Blockchain Integrated with Machine Learning for Supply Chain Management

Knowing the challenges of keeping and manipulating more and more immutable transaction records in a blockchain network of various supply chain parties and the opportunities of leveraging sophisticated analyses on the big data generated from these records, design of a robust blockchain architecture based on a cloud infrastructure is proposed. This paper presents this technical design with consideration of the technical sustainability in terms of scalability and big data processing and analytics. A case study was used to illustrate how the technical sustainability is achieved by applying the proposed technical design to the real-time detection of the maritime risk management. This case also illustrates how machine learning mechanism helps to reduce maritime risk by guiding a cargo ship to adjust to the planned or safe route from a detour to a danger zone. This paper also discusses the implications for further research direction.

Blockchain-Based Cloud Data Integrity Verification Scheme with High Efficiency

With the large-scale application of cloud storage, how to ensure cloud data integrity has become an important issue. Although many methods have been proposed, they still have their limitations. This paper improves some defects of the previous methods and proposes an efficient cloud data integrity verification scheme based on blockchain. In this paper, we proposed a lattice signature algorithm to resist quantum computing and introduced cuckoo filter to simplify the computational overhead of the user verification phase. Finally, the decentralized blockchain network is introduced to replace traditional centralized audit to publicize and authenticate the verification results, which improves the transparency and the security of this scheme. Security analysis shows that our scheme can resist malicious attacks and experimental results show that our scheme has high efficiency, especially in the user verification phase.

Cloud-based Blockchain Technology for Personal Health

Cloud-based Blockchain Technology for Personal Health

RE_BBC: Requirements Engineering in a Blockchain-Based Cloud System: Its Role in Service-Level Agreement Specification

The cloud has several security and trust issues with the third-party provider. The blockchain-based cloud (BBC) system is an emerging technology that promises safe storage of big data on a cloud. The development of such a system needs requirements engineering (RE) in determining the requirements based on service-level agreements (SLAs). RE can provide a functional process to model and specify a SLA-based smart contract. The RE process for BBC ensures that the resulting SLA specifications are consistent, accurate, complete, verified, and validated. The RE process responds to the many challenges of the BBC and determines a novel direction to provide efficient and quality development of blockchainbased applications.

An efficient management scheme of blockchain-based cloud user information using probabilistic weighting

As the number of users using cloud services has increased in recent years, the number of users leaving the group or changing their personal information is often the case. In this paper, a blockchain-based cloud user information management scheme is proposed using stochastic weights to confirm that the information of users receiving cloud services has not been tampered with. The proposed scheme uses color keys to reliably distinguish blockchains of user information in a cloud environment. The quality of service is improved by pasting user attribute information generated using color keys to the front of the blockchain. The proposed scheme uses different color key information and attribute information, so they have the advantage of effectively processing user information in different cloud environments. It also supports lower overhead and higher efficiency compared to traditional techniques that individually add authentication keys to users by authenticating information from multiple users who receive cloud services with color keys. In addition, the proposed scheme allows the provision of reliable real-time cloud services by creating a stochastic sum of weights for the first and last users that make up the cloud. As a result of the performance analysis, the proposed scheme reduced the time of blockchain generation by $$7.9\%$$ on average by linking user information to the probability value of user information. Efficiency in managing blockchain-based user information over overlay networks was up to $$11.5\%$$ better than using RSA alone, with an average $$7.7\%$$ lower overhead.

Merkle Tree and Blockchain-Based Cloud Data Auditing

Cloud computing is the fastest growing and most promising field in the service provisioning segment. It has become a challenging task to provide security in the cloud. The purpose of this article is to suggest a better and efficient integrity verification technique for data referred to as cloud audit. The deployment of cloud storage services has significant benefits in the management of data for users. However, this raises many security concerns, and one of them is data integrity. Though public verification techniques serve the purpose they are vulnerable to procrastinating auditors who may not perform verifications on time. In this article, a cloud data auditing system is proposed. The proposed cloud data auditing system integrates Merkle Tree-based Cloud audit and the blockchain-based audit recording system, thus the core idea is to record each verification result into a blockchain as a transaction. Utilizing the time-sensitive nature of blockchain, the verifications are time-stamped after the corresponding transaction is recorded into the blockchain, which enables users to check whether auditors have performed the verifications at the prescribed time. The proposed cloud data auditing system is experimentally validated. The investigations with varied dataset size revealed less time taken, on an average of 0.25 milliseconds with the use of Merkle Tree. Further results reveal consistency of the data integrity checking.

Studying gas exceptions in blockchain-based cloud applications

Blockchain-based cloud application (BCP) is an emerging cloud application architecture. By moving trust-critical functions onto blockchain, BCP offers unprecedented function transparency and data integrity. Ethereum is by far the most popular blockchain platform chosen for BCP. In Ethereum, special programs named smart contracts are often used to implement key components for BCP. By design, users can send transactions to smart contracts, which will automatically lead to code execution and state modification. However, unlike regular programs, smart contracts are restricted in execution by gas limit, i.e., a form of runtime resource. If a transaction uses up all available gas, an out of gas exception (OG) will trigger, reverting state until right before that transaction.In this work, we study the out of gas exceptions (or gas exceptions in short) on Ethereum empirically for the very first time. In particular, we collect exception transactions using an instrumented Ethereum client. By investigation, we found gas exceptions stand out in terms of both occurrences and losses. Moreover, we focused on individual contracts and transactions, aiming at discovering and identifying common causing factors triggering these exceptions. At last, we also investigate existing tools in preventing gas exceptions. Our results suggest further research and study in this direction.

Decentralised provenance for healthcare data

ObjectiveThe creation and exchange of patients’ Electronic Healthcare Records have developed significantly in the last decade. Patients’ records are however distributed in data silos across multiple healthcare facilities, posing technical and clinical challenges that may endanger patients’ safety. Current healthcare sharing systems ensure interoperability of patients’ records across facilities, but they have limits in presenting doctors with the clinical context of the data in the records. We design and implement a platform for managing provenance tracking of Electronic Healthcare Records based on blockchain technology, compliant with the latest healthcare standards and following the patient-informed consent preferences. MethodsThe platform leverages two pillars: the use of international standards such as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), Health Level Seven International (HL7) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to achieve interoperability, and the use of a provenance creation process that by-design, avoids personal data storage within the blockchain. The platform consists of: (1) a smart contract implemented within the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain that manages provenance according to the W3C PROV for medical document in standardised formats (e.g. a CDA document, a FHIR resource, a DICOM study, etc.); (2) a Java Proxy that intercepts all the document submissions and retrievals for which provenance shall be evaluated; (3) a service used to retrieve the PROV document. ResultsWe integrated our decentralised platform with the SpiritEHR engine, an enterprise-grade healthcare system, and we stored and retrieved the available documents in the Mandel's sample CDA repository,11See https://github.com/jmandel/sample_ccdas. which contained no protected health information. Using a cloud-based blockchain solution, we observed that the overhead added to the typical processing time of reading and writing medical data is in the order of milliseconds. Moreover, the integration of the Proxy at the level of exchanged messages in EHR systems allows transparent usage of provenance data in multiple health computing domains such as decision making, data reconciliation, and patient consent auditing. ConclusionsBy using international healthcare standards and a cloud-based blockchain deployment, we delivered a solution that can manage provenance of patients’ records via transparent integration within the routine operations on healthcare data.

Data Allocation Mechanism for Internet-of-Things Systems With Blockchain

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced genuine concerns regarding data security and its privacy when data are in collection, exchange, and use. Meanwhile, blockchain offers a distributed and encrypted ledger designed to allow the creation of immutable and tamper-proof records of data at different locations. While blockchain may enhance IoT with innate security, data integrity, and autonomous governance, IoT data management and its allocation in blockchain still remain an architectural concern. In this article, we propose a novel context-aware mechanism for on-chain data allocation in IoT-blockchain systems. Specifically, we design a data controller based on fuzzy logic to calculate the Rating of Allocation (RoA) value of each data request considering multiple context parameters, i.e., data, network, and quality and decide its on-chain allocation. Furthermore, we illustrate how the design and realization of the mechanism lead to refinements of two commonly used IoT-blockchain architectural styles (i.e., blockchain-based cloud and fog). To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we instantiate the data allocation mechanism in the blockchain-based cloud and fog architectures and evaluate their performance using FogBus. We also compare the efficacy of our approach to the existing decision-making mechanisms through the deployment of a real-world healthcare application. The experimental results suggest that the realization of the data allocation mechanism improves network usage, latency, and blockchain storage and reduces energy consumption.

A Review of Intrusion Detection and Blockchain Applications in the Cloud: Approaches, Challenges and Solutions

This paper reviews the background and related studies in the areas of cloud systems, intrusion detection and blockchain applications against cyber attacks. This work aims to discuss collaborative anomaly detection systems for discovering insider and outsider attacks from cloud centres, including the technologies of virtualisation and containerisation, along with trusting intrusion detection and cloud systems using blockchain. Moreover, the ability to detect such malicious attacks is critical for conducting necessary mitigation, at an early stage, to minimise the impact of disruption and restore cloud operations and their live migration processes. This paper presents an overview of cloud architecture and categorises potential state-of-the-art security events based on their occurrence at different cloud deployment models. Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) in the cloud, involving types of classification and common detection approaches, are also described. Collaborative NIDSs for cloud-based blockchain applications are also explained to demonstrate how blockchain can address challenges related to data privacy and trust management. A summary of the research challenges and future research directions in these fields is also explained.

Blockchain data-based cloud data integrity protection mechanism

Despite the rapid development of cloud computing for many years, data security and trusted computing are still the main challenges in current cloud computing applications. In order to solve this problem, many scholars have carried out a lot of research on this, and proposed many models including data integrity test and secure multi-party calculation. However, most of these solutions face problems such as excessive computational complexity or lack of scalability. This paper studies the use of blockchain techniques to improve this situation. Blockchain is a decentralized new distributed computing paradigm. Applying blockchain technology to cloud computing, using the security mechanism of the former to improve the performance of the latter’s secure storage and secure computing is a promising research topic. In this paper, the distributed virtual machine agent model is deployed in the cloud by using mobile agent technology. The virtual machine agent enables multi-tenants to cooperate with each other to ensure data trust verification. The tasks of reliable data storage, monitoring and verification are completed by virtual machine agent mechanism. This is also a necessary condition for building a blockchain integrity protection mechanism. The blockchain-based integrity protection framework is built by the virtual machine proxy model, and the unique hash value corresponding to the file generated by the Merkel hash tree is used to monitor the data change by means of the smart contract on the blockchain, and the data is owned in time. The user issues a warning message for data tampering; in addition, a “block-and-response” mode is used to construct a blockchain-based cloud data integrity verification scheme.