Blockchain Scheme Research Articles

Leveraging lightweight blockchain for secure collaborative computing in UAV Ad-Hoc Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Ad-Hoc Networks (UANET) enable collaborative work among UAVs for versatile task execution, but they face security challenges due to physical vulnerabilities, software issues, and dynamic wireless networks. This paper proposes a secure collaborative computing framework based on blockchain technology. Specifically, we first design a lightweight blockchain scheme suitable for UANET and present an improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm based on trust evaluation, aiming to reduce consensus overhead and establish trust relationships among UAVs. Furthermore, we devise a smart contract-based UAV task allocation strategy that considers both task execution efficiency and offloading security. This strategy enables UAVs to make optimal task-offloading decisions and facilitates collaborative computing according to smart contract rules. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed consensus algorithm reduces average consensus latency by 47% and message count by 76% compared to PBFT-based algorithms. Additionally, the task allocation strategy decreases task costs by 48% compared to local computing strategies, achieving efficient and secure collaboration among UAVs in UANET. The real-world experiments with a UAV swarm further validate the efficiency and security of our framework, confirming its practical applicability in UANET.

Privacy-preserving and scalable federated blockchain scheme for healthcare 4.0

IoT plays a significant role in the growth of clinical data for identifying hazardous diseases and building drugs for patient diagnosis and medical care. Blockchain and federated learning are widely proposed in existing studies for localized data training and storage in a secure, decentralized environment. However, several studies rely on the federated averaging method in federated learning, which introduces high energy consumption during several training rounds. Frequent transactions for storing patient records in blockchain and smart contract processing present network congestion challenges. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving federated learning and scalable blockchain scheme. First, we present a satisfaction scoring method for model aggregation to improve energy efficiency during the federated learning process. Secondly, we design an Ethereum-based blockchain network with sidechains to process smart contract transactions separately and reduce computation overload in the blockchain mainchain. Evaluation of the proposed scheme is compared with the baseline federated average method and transaction processing of smart contracts with the Ethereum main chain. Results demonstrate reduced CPU consumption using the proposed model aggregation method, an improvement over the federated average method, and an improvement of 43.65 % in transaction processing speed using two sidechains ensuring side.

A reputation-based blockchain scheme for sustained carbon emission reduction

A reputation-based blockchain scheme for sustained carbon emission reduction

A Review on State-of-Art Blockchain Schemes for Electronic Health Records Management

Abstract In today’s world, Electronic Health Records (EHR) are highly segregated and available only within the organization with which the patient is associated. If a patient has to visit another hospital there is no secure way for hospitals to communicate and share medical records. Hence, people are always asked to redo tests that have been done earlier in different hospitals. This leads to monetary, time, and resource loss. Even if the organizations are ready to share data, there are no secure methods for sharing without disturbing data privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. When health data are stored or transferred via unsecured means there are always possibilities for adversaries to initiate an attack and modify them. To overcome these hurdles and secure the storage and sharing of health records, blockchain, a very disruptive technology can be integrated with the healthcare system for EHR management. This paper surveys recent works on the distributed, decentralized systems for EHR storage in healthcare organizations.

Auditable Blockchain Rewriting in Permissioned Setting With Mandatory Revocability for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects everyday devices and generates real-time data that have greatly prompted business and life efficiency. The integration of IoT and blockchain has made IoT data management and storage more trustworthy. However, despite that the immutability property contributes a lot to the trustable reputation of blockchain-based IoT systems, from a data processing perspective, it is desired to achieve skillful and secure blockchain rewriting for scenarios such as device data sharing. Existing blockchain rewriting solutions usually rely on centralized modifiers where the rewriting power is difficult to control or withdraw. In this paper, we propose a new auditable redactable blockchain scheme named ACHR that supports self-management and mandatory revocation of the rewriting privilege. The scheme allows user devices to rewrite their blockchain transactions under strict auditing to ensure content security. To prevent centralization or rewriting power abuses, the revocation trapdoor can be computed compulsorily by an auditor when a redaction is published to the blockchain. We introduce a generic construction and an instantiation of the ACHR scheme for building the redactable blockchain and prove its security. We provide a prototype implementation to demonstrate that our scheme is effective and efficient compared to the traditional blockchain-IoT system with immutability.

ICRB: An improved consensus‐based redactable blockchain considering contextual consistency

AbstractBlockchain is a distributed ledger proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto. It has become one of the most important networks for humans in the world. With the rapid development of blockchain technology, an increasing number of criminals are engaging in fraudulent activities, extortion and other financial crimes on the blockchain. Due to the immutability of blockchain, it is difficult for users to recover their losses. Some scholars have proposed the concept of the redactable blockchain. However, most redactable blockchain schemes fail to consider the impact of modification on the contextual economic relationships of the blockchain. We propose an improved redactable blockchain considering contextual consistency. Additionally, we utilize a security deposit mechanism to guarantee financial contextual consistency for the modified blockchain. We distribute users' security deposit account private keys to random users on the blockchain using Verifiable Secret Sharing, Verifiable Random Functions and other cryptographic primitives to achieve decentralized key management and modification. Experiments show that the performance of our scheme is acceptable in realistic situations.

Selection of node with editing rights and privacy protection mechanisms based on dual-blockchain

The inability to edit and modify the data on the blockchain limits its practical applications. Current editable blockchain schemes with little regard for security in the editing process, and there is a lack of effective monitoring and auditing measures. These are also susceptible to the formation of a centralized trend of editing rights and bring privacy protection problems. Aiming at editable application requirements, to solve the problems of “who will edit” and “the security of editable”, selection of node with editing rights and privacy protection mechanisms based on dual-blockchain are proposed, including data chain and audit chain. In the data chain, to avoid some nodes being in the chain for a long time, being used by attackers and editing rights tending to be centralized, heterogeneity among nodes is used as one of the decisions. An Execution Node Authority Confirmation Mechanism (ENACM) based on confidence, reliability, and heterogeneity is proposed. The performance of nodes at different stages can be effectively used. Node with editing rights is ensured to be unpredictable and protected from targeted attacks. In the audit chain, the Parameter Audit Mechanism (PAM) is proposed. To anonymously update and verify the parameters used in the ENACM, Concise Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group signature, Pedersen commitment, and Schnorr signature are employed. Privacy protection is ensured for associated information of the node. A prototype system of the proposed scheme based on Hyperledger Fabric has been implemented. System performance, security, parameter settings, and comparison with related schemes are analyzed. Experimental and test results show that the proposed scheme is feasible, effective, and reliable.

Redact-Chain for Health: A Scheme Based on Redactable Blockchain for Managing Shared Healthcare Data

As blockchain technology evolves, it has become a crucial component in medical data sharing. However, current needs reveal that healthcare-focused blockchain schemes increasingly require the capabilities of modification and deletion. Moreover, traditional blockchain-based systems for medical data sharing often need help with a single point of failure, which undermines the system’s robustness. To address these challenges, we propose Redact-Chain for Health, a scheme based on the redactable blockchain for managing shared healthcare data. This scheme allows users to encrypt data for privacy protection and decrypt data when sharing medical information. By substituting the SHA-256 with the chameleon hash, Redact-Chain for Health introduces a fine-grained data editing scheme, facilitating medical institutions in effectively editing and managing data on the blockchain. Moreover, Redact-Chain for Health integrates a distributed trapdoor management scheme. This scheme empowers medical institutions to manage the trapdoor of the chameleon hash effectively, thereby circumventing the issue of a single point of failure. Our scheme also incorporates a symmetric encryption-based authentication algorithm to deter potential cyberattacks. Lastly, the security analysis of our proposed system demonstrates its effectiveness in preserving patients’ privacy, while performance analysis confirms Redact-Chain for Health’s efficiency.

Strongly Synchronized Redactable Blockchain Based on Verifiable Delay Functions

As one of the crucial features of the blockchain technique, immutability plays the most important role in winning the so-called praise of the "trust machine" for blockchain. However, there are two sides to everything. The property of immutability of blockchain is applied maliciously sometimes, say publishing harmful or even dangerous data and hindering authorities’ law enforcement. To address this issue, authorized redactability of blockchain was introduced to support block modification without lowering the fundamental basis of security and trust that is cherished on the blockchain. During the past years, several techniques of redactable blockchain were proposed, mainly based on the well-known chameleon hashing. Different from existing methodologies, we propose a new redactable blockchain scheme for permissioned settings in this paper. We first employ the trapdoor verifiable delay function to attach a time-lapse proof to each block. Moreover, the trapdoor is used to quickly construct a chain fork to redact blocks that are authorized to alter. Our proposal does not need to rollback irrelevant blocks. As a remarkable and unique feature, our proposal realizes the property of strong synchronization of redaction, which means that all nodes in the blockchain will have identical views on the chain even after some blocks are altered. Security analysis shows that the consistency of the chain is guaranteed, and the long-range attack can be resisted effectively. The performance comparison shows that our method is feasible and practical.

Blockchain-Enabled Cybersecurity Efficient IIOHT Cyber-Physical System for Medical Applications

Cybersecurity issues such as malware, denial of service attacks, and unauthorized access to data for different applications are growing daily. The Industrial Internet of Healthcare Things (IIoHT) has recently been a new healthcare mechanism where many healthcare applications can run on hospital servers for remote medical services. For instance, cloud medical applications offer different services remotely from home. However, the existing IIoHT mechanisms can not handle critical cybersecurity issues and incur many medical care application processing and data security costs. The processing costs associated with security and deadline are the main findings of this proposed work. This work devises a cost-efficient blockchain task scheduling (CBTS) cyber-physical system (CPS) with different heuristics. All tasks are sorted, scheduled, and stored in a secure form in the IIoHT network. The performance evaluation proves that the CBTS framework outperforms the simulation results for the IIoHT application and reduces the cost by 50% of security execution and 33% of cybersecurity data validation blockchain costs compared to existing scheduling and blockchain schemes.

High Transaction Rates Performance Evaluation for Secure E-government Based on Private Blockchain Scheme

The implementation of technology in the provision of public services and communication to citizens, which is commonly referred to as e-government, has brought multitude of benefits, including enhanced efficiency, accessibility, and transparency. Nevertheless, this approach also presents particular security concerns, such as cyber threats, data breaches, and access control. One technology that can aid in mitigating the effects of security vulnerabilities within e-government is permissioned blockchain. This work examines the performance of the hyperledger fabric private blockchain under high transaction loads by analyzing two scenarios that involve six organizations as case studies. Several parameters, such as transaction send rate, blockchain size, batch timeout, organization number, and the number of clients, were modified in the two scenarios. The gradual addition of organizations was also observed to determine the impact of multi-organization on the throughput, latency, and scalability of the system. By increasing the block size to approximately 100 transactions per block, acceptable performance and latency results are attained. The throughput and latency findings are accepted for three or four organizations, but when many organizations are added, throughput and latency begin to suffer from poor performance. Also, many tests show that increased block timeout for high sending rates positively affects the throughput and latency.

An Optimization Framework Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning Approaches for Prism Blockchain

Blockchains have proven to provide a high level of performance in terms of security and reliability for various applications like cryptocurrencies and Internet-of-Things (IoT). Prism is a recent blockchain algorithm that achieves the physical limit on throughput and latency without compromising security. In recent days, reinforcement learning approaches are investigated in traditional blockchains, to improve performance. In this work, we apply Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to one of the promising blockchain protocols, Prism, to optimize its performance. We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Prism Blockchain (DRLPB) scheme which dynamically optimizes the parameters of the Prism blockchain and helps in achieving a better performance. In DRLPB, we apply two widely used DRL algorithms, Dueling Deep Q Networks (DDQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). This work presents a novel approach to applying DDQN and PPO to a blockchain protocol and comparing the performance. The DRLPB scheme adapts the Prism blockchain parameters to enhance the number of votes upto 84% more than Prism, while still preserving the security and latency performance guarantees of Prism.

A Secure Scheme Based on a Hybrid of Classical-Quantum Communications Protocols for Managing Classical Blockchains.

Blockchain technology affords data integrity protection and building trust mechanisms in transactions for distributed networks, and, therefore, is seen as a promising revolutionary information technology. At the same time, the ongoing breakthrough in quantum computation technology contributes toward large-scale quantum computers, which might attack classic cryptography, seriously threatening the classic cryptography security currently employed in the blockchain. As a better alternative, a quantum blockchain has high expectations of being immune to quantum computing attacks perpetrated by quantum adversaries. Although several works have been presented, the problems of impracticality and inefficiency in quantum blockchain systems remain prominent and need to be addressed. First, this paper develops a quantum-secure blockchain (QSB) scheme by introducing a consensus mechanism-quantum proof of authority (QPoA) and an identity-based quantum signature (IQS)-wherein QPoA is used for new block generation and IQS is used for transaction signing and verification. Second, QPoA is developed by adopting a quantum voting protocol to achieve secure and efficient decentralization for the blockchain system, and a quantum random number generator (QRNG) is deployed for randomized leader node election to protect the blockchain system from centralized attacks like distributed denial of service (DDoS). Compared to previous work, our scheme is more practical and efficient without sacrificing security, greatly contributing to better addressing the challenges in the quantum era. Extensive security analysis demonstrates that our scheme provides better protection against quantum computing attacks than classic blockchains. Overall, our scheme presents a feasible solution for blockchain systems against quantum computing attacks through a quantum strategy, contributing toward quantum-secured blockchain in the quantum era.

A Caching-Enabled Permissioned Blockchain Scheme for Industrial Internet of Things Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

The integration of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) and blockchain has become a popular concept that provides IIoT with a trustworthy computing environment. Numerous IIoT nodes together form a decentralized network with rich location-aware computation resources, which can offer great data processing capabilities and low-latency services. However, we still face the challenges of how to efficiently process the massive IIoT data on resource-constrained IIoT nodes by blockchain smart contracts, as their storage capacity only allows them to store limited blockchain data. This work is aimed at improving the smart contract execution efficiency on these IIoT nodes by caching based on deep reinforcement learning. On the one hand, focusing on the characteristics of IIoT, the ledger structure, network architecture, and transaction flow are optimized. IIoT nodes are enabled to store and cache part of block data without affecting global data consistency. On the other hand, we formulated the blockchain caching problem as a Markov decision process and implemented a lightweight caching agent based on deep Q-learning. Proper features and a reward function are defined to minimize the execution delay of smart contracts. The extensive experimental results show that our proposed scheme can effectively reduce the data dissemination costs and smart contract execution delays of IIoT nodes that hold limited blockchain data.

SecureMed: A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Framework for Internet of Medical Things

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) connects a huge amount of smart sensors with the Internet for healthcare service provisioning. IoMT’s privacy-preserving becomes a challenge considering the life-saving data collected and transferred through IoMT. Traditional privacy protection techniques use centralized management strategies, which lead to a single point of failure, lack of trust, state modification, information disclosure, and identity theft. Edge computing enables local computation of IoMT data, which reduces traffic to the cloud and also helps in accomplishing latency-sensitive healthcare applications and services. This paper proposes a novel framework (i.e., SecureMed) that uses blockchain-based distributed authentication implemented at the edge cloudlets to enforce privacy protection. In SecureMed, IoMT devices interact with edge cloudlets using smart contracts. It uses trusted edge nodes to implement an authentication algorithm that uses public/private key matching to authenticate IoMT. Experimental evaluation performed using the Pythereum blockchain shows that SecureMed outperforms the traditional blockchain scheme based on latency, bandwidth consumption, deployment time, scalability, and accuracy. Therefore, it can be used to protect the edge-enabled IoMT from privacy attacks and to ensure end-to-end healthcare service provisioning.

TempChain: a blockchain scheme for telehealth data sharing between two blockchains using property mapping function

TempChain: a blockchain scheme for telehealth data sharing between two blockchains using property mapping function

Data Verification in the Agent, Combining Blockchain and Quantum Keys by Means of Multiple-Valued Logic

Network control of autonomous robotic devices involves a vast number of secured data coding, verification, and identification procedures to provide reliable work of distant agents. Blockchain scheme provides here the model of the extended linked list for the verification of critical data, approved by quasi-random hash values assigned by external network nodes. And quantum lines are the source of high-quality quasi-random keys used as hash values. Discrete multiple-valued logic in such procedures is a simple and flexible tool to form the logic linked list, combining critical internal parameters of agents with data taken from external nodes. Such combination enlarges the set of possible schemes for data protection from illegal modifications and for data restoration.

Security Establishment in ADS-B by Format-Preserving Encryption and Blockchain Schemes

In the next generation modernization plan, the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system plays a pivotal role. However, the ADS-B’s low level of security and its vulnerabilities have raised valid concerns. The main objectives of this paper are to highlight the limitations of legacy ADS-B systems and to assess the feasibility of using Format-preserving (F), Feistel-based encryption (F), with multiple implementation variances (X) (FFX) algorithms, for enhancing ADS-B’s security. The offered solution is implemented in a standard software-defined radio (SDR) ADS-B to be utilized in real-time applications. Furthermore, a new proposed blockchain scheme is used as a secured database to manage the cipher key. The metric of message entropy is used to assess an algorithm’s ability to confuse and diffuse predictable ADS-B messages; correlation and serial correlation of plain data and cipher data are deployed to evaluate the proposed method’s security level. The authors provide both MATLAB simulations and flight test outcomes to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. Based on our security analysis, ADS-B information can be kept confidential through our scheme. The performance evaluation results reveal that the proposed scheme is achievable, compatible, and efficient for the avionics industry.

Post quantum blockchain architecture for internet of things over NTRU lattice.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, the hottest frontier technologies in recent years, are expected to lead the next technological revolution. Blockchain promises to solve the current challenges encountered by the IoT. However, most of the proposed blockchain-based IoT architectures, which are based on discrete logarithm or large integer factorization problems, are susceptible to quantum attacks. Several quantum-resistant blockchain schemes have recently been proposed. However, the efficiency of their construction or the equipment required is not satisfactory. In this paper, to construct a more efficient postquantum blockchain infrastructure, we propose blockchain architecture for the IoT over the NTRU lattice and provide a cryptographic security proof of the scheme. Attributed to the more efficient underlying lattice structure, our scheme has excellent performance when compared to the existing quantum-resistant blockchain scheme, and we reduce the transaction size from hundreds of megabytes to several kilobytes. To further improve the blockchain's performance, we present the general framework of segregated witnesses and aggregate signatures over the NTRU lattice. Our scheme promises a blockchain solution for resource-constrained environments.

AeRChain: An Anonymous and Efficient Redactable Blockchain Scheme Based on Proof-of-Work

Redactable Blockchain aims to ensure the immutability of the data of most applications and provide authorized mutability for some specific applications, such as for removing illegal content from blockchains. However, the existing Redactable Blockchains lack redacting efficiency and protection of the identity information of voters participating in the redacting consensus. To fill this gap, this paper presents an anonymous and efficient redactable blockchain scheme based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) in the permissionless setting, called "AeRChain". Specifically, the paper first presents an improved Back's Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group (bLSAG) signatures scheme and uses the improved scheme to hide the identity of blockchain voters. Then, in order to accelerate the achievement of redacting consensus, it introduces a moderate puzzle with variable target values for selecting voters and a voting weight function for assigning different weights to puzzles with different target values. The experimental results show that the present scheme can achieve efficient anonymous redacting consensus with low overhead and reduce communication traffic.