Consortium Blockchain Technology Research Articles

A 3C Authentication: A Cross-Domain, Certificateless, and Consortium-Blockchain-Based Authentication Method for Vehicle-to-Grid Networks in a Smart Grid

As an important component of the smart grid, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks can deliver diverse auxiliary services and enhance the overall resilience of electrical power systems. However, V2G networks face two main challenges due to a large number of devices that connect to it. First, V2G networks suffer from serious security threats, such as doubtful authenticity and privacy leakage. Second, the efficiency will decrease significantly due to the massive requirements of authentication. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes a cross-domain authentication scheme for V2G networks based on consortium blockchain and certificateless signature technology. Featuring decentralized, open, and transparent transactions that cannot be tampered with, this scheme achieves good performance on both security and efficiency, which proves to be suitable for V2G scenarios in the smart grid.

Budgetary control and the adoption of consortium blockchain monitoring system in the Ghanaian local government

PurposeThis study aimed to examine the adoption of consortium blockchain technology to ensure interoperability for the transparency of budgetary control in Ghanaian local government.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on the design science research (DSR) observational technique for developing a consortium blockchain budgetary control system for Ghana's local government.FindingsThe study resulted in the design of a consortium blockchain monitoring and evaluation system to set up a mechanism to monitor various budget projects, processes and transactions for Ghana's local government. The findings also proved Ghana is ideally positioned to gain an advantage from designed artefacts such as ours, given its digital financial service (DFS) policy. In addition, the evaluation of the designed artefact proves there will be a positive impact on budgetary processes by addressing transparency concerns; however, the success of this concern depends on how the local government organisation embraces the artefact.Research limitations/implicationsThe study sheds light on budget monitoring and evaluation tied to peer-to-peer (P2P) participation in the public sector via an advanced administrative digitalised networking and communication algorithm (A Distributed Ledger Technology - blockchain). The difference between the designed artefact and the traditional M&E system is argued. The study is limited by the paradoxes and inefficiencies of the integration of blockchain into the Ghanaian local government but, at the same time, presents a high level of certainty and possibility.Practical implicationsThe proposed artefact has presented relevance because it is a new solution to existing concerns like trust, transparency, accountability and compliance, thereby improving local government budget administration.Originality/valueThe study has offered unique and new methods, guidelines and designs for tracking various budget projects and processes beyond the conventional technology-driven approach via DSR, exhibiting a unique solution for solving budget transparency, trust, accountability, compliance and data accessibility concerns.

Enhancing the Security and Privacy in the IoT Supply Chain Using Blockchain and Federated Learning with Trusted Execution Environment

Federated learning has emerged as a promising technique for the Internet of Things (IoT) in various domains, including supply chain management. It enables IoT devices to collaboratively learn without exposing their raw data, ensuring data privacy. However, federated learning faces the threats of local data tampering and upload process attacks. This paper proposes an innovative framework that leverages Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and blockchain technology to address the data security and privacy challenges in federated learning for IoT supply chain management. Our framework achieves the security of local data computation and the tampering resistance of data update uploads using TEE and the blockchain. We adopt Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGXs) as the specific implementation of TEE, which can guarantee the secure execution of local models on SGX-enabled processors. We also use consortium blockchain technology to build a verification network and consensus mechanism, ensuring the security and tamper resistance of the data upload and aggregation process. Finally, each cluster can obtain the aggregated parameters from the blockchain. To evaluate the performance of our proposed framework, we conducted several experiments with different numbers of participants and different datasets and validated the effectiveness of our scheme. We tested the final global model obtained from federated training on a test dataset and found that increasing both the number of iterations and the number of participants improves its accuracy. For instance, it reaches 94% accuracy with one participant and five iterations and 98.5% accuracy with ten participants and thirty iterations.

Securing Secrets in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Cutting-Edge Privacy Approach with Consortium Blockchain.

In the era of interconnected and intelligent cyber-physical systems, preserving privacy has become a paramount concern. This paper aims a groundbreaking proof-of-concept (PoC) design that leverages consortium blockchain technology to address privacy challenges in cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The proposed design introduces a novel approach to safeguarding sensitive information and ensuring data integrity while maintaining a high level of trust among stakeholders. By harnessing the power of consortium blockchain, the design establishes a decentralized and tamper-resistant framework for privacy preservation. However, ensuring the security and privacy of sensitive information within CPSs poses significant challenges. This paper proposes a cutting-edge privacy approach that leverages consortium blockchain technology to secure secrets in CPSs. Consortium blockchain, with its permissioned nature, provides a trusted framework for governing the network and validating transactions. By employing consortium blockchain, secrets in CPSs can be securely stored, shared, and accessed by authorized entities only, mitigating the risks of unauthorized access and data breaches. The proposed approach offers enhanced security, privacy preservation, increased trust and accountability, as well as interoperability and scalability. This paper aims to address the limitations of traditional security mechanisms in CPSs and harness the potential of consortium blockchain to revolutionize the management of secrets, contributing to the advancement of CPS security and privacy. The effectiveness of the design is demonstrated through extensive simulations and performance evaluations. The results indicate that the proposed approach offers significant advancements in privacy protection, paving the way for secure and trustworthy cyber-physical systems in various domains.

A Flexible and Efficient Privacy-Preserving Range Query Scheme for Blockchain-Enhanced IoT

With the increasing deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in recent years, blockchain-enhanced IoT has become a new research hotspot. Due to its excellent openness, traceability and other performance, it has immensely promoted the development of this field. However, the traditional “edge-fog-cloud” three-tier architecture model for IoT still faces the threats of privacy disclosure, collusion attack, and low efficiency. To solve these problems, in this article, we creatively design a new consortium blockchain-enhanced IoT architecture, which can enable the permissioned users or participants to enjoy high-quality data services with the assistance of consortium blockchain by taking advantage of its high credibility. Based on this architecture, we propose a novel consortium blockchain-based privacy-preserving range query scheme in the decentralized IoT system, named CBCPRQ. This scheme combines consortium blockchain and inner product function encryption technology to realize flexible, safe, and batch range query of data service in edge computing. Analysis of security shows that our proposed scheme can not only protect the privacy but also perfectly resist the collusion query inference attack and the replay attack. Extensive performance evaluation is implemented by using Hyperledger Fabric platform and demonstrates that our scheme is efficient, scalable, and flexible.

BC-PC-Share: Blockchain-Based Patient-Centric Data Sharing Scheme for PHRs in Cloud Computing

Sharing of personal health records (PHR) in cloud computing is an essential functionality in the healthcare system. However, how to securely, efficiently and flexibly share PHRs data of the patient in a multi-receiver setting has not been well addressed. For instance, since the trust domain of the cloud server is not identical to the data owner or data user, the semi-trust cloud service provider may intentionally destroy or tamper shared PHRs data of user or only transform partial ciphertext of the shared PHRs or even return wrong computation results to save its storage and computation resource, to pursue maximum economic interest or other malicious purposes. Thus, the PHRs data storing or sharing via the cloud server should be performed with consistency and integrity verification. Fortunately, the emergence of blockchain technology provides new ideas and prospects for ensuring the consistency and integrity of shared PHRs data. To this end, in this work, we leverage the consortium blockchain technology to enhance the trustworthiness of each participant and propose a blockchain-based patient-centric data sharing scheme for PHRs in cloud computing (BC-PC-Share). Different from the state-of-art schemes, our proposal can achieve the following desired properties: (1) Realizing patient-centric PHRs sharing with a public verification function, i.e., which can ensure that the returned shared data is consistent with the requested shared data and the integrity of the shared data is not compromised. (2) Supporting scalable and fine-grained access control and sharing of PHRs data with multiple domain users, such as hospitals, medical research institutes, and medical insurance companies. (3) Achieving efficient user decryption by leveraging the transformation key technique and efficient user revocation by introducing time-controlled access. The security analysis and simulation experiment demonstrate that the proposed BC-PC-Share scheme is a feasible and promising solution for PHRs data sharing via consortium blockchain.

Secure Decentralized IoT Service Platform Using Consortium Blockchain.

Although many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy, blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is still much less studied. Blockchain has great potential in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. In this paper, we propose an innovative IoT service platform powered by the consortium blockchain technology. The proposed platform abstracts machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) communications into services provided by IoT devices. Then, it materializes the data exchange of the IoT network through smart contracts and blockchain transactions. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary storage layer to the proposed platform to address various off-chain data storage needs. Our proof-of-concept implementation was tested against various workloads and connection sizes under different block configurations to evaluate the platform's transaction throughput, latency, and hardware utilization. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution can maintain high performance with a throughput of approximately 800 reads per second (RPS), 50-80 transactions per second (TPS), and a latency of 50 ms-2 s under light to moderate workloads. Our extensive evaluation of the performance impact of batch size, batch timeout, and connection size also provides valuable insights into the optimization of blockchain configuration for achieving high performance.

An Industrial Blockchain-Based Multi-Criteria Decision Framework for Global Freight Management in Agricultural Supply Chains

In view of increasing supply chain disruption events, for example the China–United States trade war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russia–Ukraine war, the complexity and dynamicity of global freight management keeps increasing. To build a resilient and sustainable supply chain, industrial practitioners are eager to systematically revamp the freight management decision process related to the selection of carriers, shipping lanes, and third-party logistics service providers. Therefore, this study aims at strengthening decision-making capabilities for global freight management, in which an industrial blockchain-based global freight decision framework (IB-GFDF) is proposed to incorporate consortium blockchain technology with the Bayesian best-worst method. Through the blockchain technology, pairwise comparisons can be conducted over the international freight network in a decentralized and immutable manner, and thus, a secure and commonly agreed-on pairwise comparison dataset is acquired. Subsequently, the pairwise comparison dataset with multi-stakeholder opinions is analyzed using the Bayesian best-worst method in order to prioritize the selection decision criteria related to carriers, shipping lanes, and 3PL service providers for global freight management. To verify the methodological feasibility, a case study of an Australian agricultural supply chain firm was conducted to support the development end-to-end (E2E) supply chain solutions originated from Australia. It was found that port infrastructure, ports of call and communication effectiveness were the major criteria for the selection decision, which can be emphasized in future global freight collaboration. In addition, an immutable and append-only record of pairwise comparisons can be established to support the visibility of time-varying stakeholders’ preferences.

Centralization vs. Decentralization - supply chain networks and blockchain in the agri-food business

Hierarchically organized businesses have been dominating our economy for centuries. We follow this structure for so long now because it is very efficient to allocating resources, performing coordination activities, and building relationships. However, potentially disruptive technologies such as Blockchain Technology (BCT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) have the potential to transform the centralized agri-food supply chain networks (SCN) into decentralized digital ecosystems, which will impact business processes and workflows alike. Still today the traditional agri-food SCN is characterized by a pyramid-hierarchic structure where decisions are being made by a central authority. It is typically headed by a focal firm which is responsible for the coordination of the network while determining the strategy and goals of the SCN. We investigated BCT use cases both in the agri-food industry and across several industries. Our literature- and use case-based research unveiled that supply chain use cases which have significantly higher operational implementations compared to their peers exhibit predominantly the following characteristics: they operate in a vertically coordinated ecosystem, they are dominated by a focal firm, and participation of suppliers is mandated by a central authority. The use cases displaying the mentioned characteristics have been found predominantly with consortium type of BCT platform implementations. As agri-food SCNs operate in vertically coordinated ecosystems we suggest that solutions such as provenance or traceability in agri-food SCNs should be implemented based on consortium BCTs as those seem to support best the traditional agri-food SCN structure.

Secure and Efficient Data Sharing Among Vehicles Based on Consortium Blockchain

The large amount of driving data can help intelligent vehicles make decisions to drive safely, improve vehicular services and enhance driving experience. In traditional vehicular networks, data sharing needs to be done with roadside units (RSUs). However, RSUs cannot be entirely trusted and the data stored in the RSUs may be tampered with. In addition, the deployment of RSUs along roads consumes a large amount of social resources. Further, data sharing between vehicles lacks a trusted environment, and vehicles may be unwilling to share data with others because of data security and privacy concerns. Moreover, in the event of unauthorized data sharing, the source of the leaked data is difficult to trace. In this study, we exploit consortium blockchain technology to achieve traceable and anonymous vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data sharing, effectively preventing second-hand sharing of data. The combination of 5G and blockchain makes it possible to share data without using RSUs. We design an enhanced delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithm to make it more suitable for applications in the distributed Internet of Vehicles (IoV). A comprehensive analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.

A Trustworthy Safety Inspection Framework Using Performance-Security Balanced Blockchain

Regular safety inspection is critical to reduce safety risk in industry. Applying consortium blockchain technology to safety inspection can ensure the effectiveness of inspection process and tracing of problems. However, there are two major issues when using conventional consortium blockchain. It is challenging to guarantee the authenticity of the retrieved data source, and meanwhile, achieving a balance between performance and security is not easy. Hence, this paper proposes a blockchain based performance-security balanced safety inspection framework (PSB-SIF), in which a safety inspection box is designed to ensure the authenticity of the inspector’s identity while inspection logic is executed automatically via smart contracts. In addition, this paper also proposes a novel credit scoring based Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm, named Safety Inspection Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm (SIBFT), which is used to balance the performance and security of consensus network in safety inspection. We evaluate the proposed approach by comparing with the solutions using RAFT, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and SIBFT consensus algorithms in terms of throughput, transaction latency, scalability and security of PSB-SIF. The evaluation results show that PSB-SIF is efficient for all these quality metrics.

(Retracted) Blockchain enabled secure image transmission and diagnosis scheme in medical cyber-physical systems

Medical cyber-physical systems (MCPSs) are life critical, context aware, networked systems of medical devices that are increasingly used in hospitals to achieve seamless high-quality healthcare. The design of the MCPS for the healthcare sector necessitates significant attention to achieving security. As the medical images need to be communicated regularly for timely and accurate diagnosis, medical images need to be secured by encryption and blockchain technologies. In this aspect, we present a blockchain enabled secure image transmission and diagnosis (BESITD) for the MCPS environment. The BESITD technique encompasses an image acquisition process that enables the wearable devices to capture the medical images. Then, the presented model executes an intrusion detection system using recurrent neural network to determine the presence of intruders in the MCPS. In addition, the block-wise encryption process takes place in which the medical image is partitioned into n blocks, each of which is individually encrypted using the signcryption technique. Moreover, a consortium blockchain technology is used to store the encrypted image along with the hash value of the original medical image to accomplish integrity and traceability. At the cloud server side, the disease diagnosis process takes place in different stages, namely, multilevel thresholding-based segmentation, MobileNet-based feature extraction, and optimal kernel extreme learning machine (OKELM)-based classification. Furthermore, a multiobjective political optimizer is designed for effective selection of threshold values and KELM parameters. A wide range of simulations was performed on two benchmark medical image datasets, and the experimentation results highlighted the promising performance of the BESITD technique over the recent techniques with the maximum accuracy of 0.9816.

Secured Different Disciplinaries in Electronic Medical Record based on Watermarking and Consortium Blockchain Technology

Secured Different Disciplinaries in Electronic Medical Record based on Watermarking and Consortium Blockchain Technology

Based on Consortium Blockchain to Design a Credit Verifiable Cross University Course Learning System

In recent years, the attention of online cross-university courses has been increasing, and students in universities want to increase their knowledge and professional skills by taking online courses from different universities, which raises the issue of course credit verification. In the past, the credits obtained by students in online courses lack endorsement from the education department, and the students’ learning process could not be verified. Therefore, the credits of online courses in one university could not be recognized by other universities. The education departments of some countries and regions implement credit conversion rules to convert the credits obtained by students in online courses into university credits or certificates endorsed by the education department. However, these schemes rely too much on the authority of the education department, and the process of students obtaining credits cannot be verified. In addition, the centralized storage method makes the data of education departments at risk of leakage or tampering. With the emergence of blockchain technology, some researchers have proposed the use of blockchain to store students’ credits, making it possible to reach consensus among multiple parties on the blockchain while ensuring that credits are not tampered with, but these schemes cannot test the learning process of students and the recognition of credits still relies on the authority of the education department. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a cross-university course learning system with verifiable credits based on Hyperledger Fabric consortium blockchain technology, and the consortium includes many universities. The credits obtained by students in the course and the hash value of the learning records are stored on the blockchain, and the data on the blockchain is jointly maintained by the universities in the system. One university can verify the homework and final examination of students to check the real ability of students, thus recognizing the credits from other universities, and at the same time, to protect the privacy of students, the important data of students are encrypted for transmission.

Electricity trade strategy of regional electric vehicle coalitions based on blockchain

As the currently popular energy-saving vehicles, EVs are widely used in urban commuter. However, its driving range is not long and the problems of charging difficulties in public areas have not been well solved. Aiming at the range anxiety encountered while EVs during driving, this paper proposes a blockchain-based V2V(vehicle-to-vehicle) electricity trading strategy. First, we establish the cost model and revenue model of EVs, and put forward the EVs’ coalition joining strategy and matching mechanism. Then, the consortium blockchain technology is used to build the V2V trading platform. Moreover, through PoS(proof-of-stake) consensus mechanism, the incentive allocation method considering the reputation value is designed. Finally, taking an area as example, the coalition transaction matching of regional EVs under different transaction conditions is calculated. The results show that, for trading platform, the profit from its operation is greater than its operating cost; For EVs participating in V2V, after the number of matching vehicles becoming saturated, the charging cost of charging EVs has reduced by more than 36% and the revenue of discharging EVs has increased by more than 33% compared to trade with the grid. The simulation results have verified the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

A Data-sharing Model Based on Blockchain for Power Grid Big Data

In the existing smart grid, wireless sensor networks are widely deployed to monitor the entire grid’s status to ensure the safe, reliable, and efficient operation of the grid. However, due to the storage mode of the infinite sensor network perception data based on the trusted central node in the smart grid, the smart grid exists information security issues such as the central node’s vulnerability to malicious attacks and deliberate data tampering. In response to these information security issues, this paper proposes a data-sharing model based on blockchain technology and digital digest matching algorithm, which has the characteristics of decentralization, security and credibility, non-tampering, and protection of private data. The model uses the consortium blockchain technology to build a smart grid Data Storage Consortium Blockchain (DSCB). The data capability is taken as a unique token through the method of data capability to control the data access to achieve fine-grained access control with a resource as the unit. The capability update is convenient, and the capability withdrawal is supported to ensure the data security sharing between sensor nodes. Security analysis shows that the model can realize safe, effective, and privacy-protected data storage and sharing.

The HealthChain Blockchain for Electronic Health Records: Development Study.

BackgroundHealth care professionals are required to maintain accurate health records of patients. Furthermore, these records should be shared across different health care organizations for professionals to have a complete review of medical history and avoid missing important information. Nowadays, health care providers use electronic health records (EHRs) as a key to the implementation of these goals and delivery of quality care. However, there are technical and legal hurdles that prevent the adoption of these systems, such as concerns about performance and privacy issues.ObjectiveThis study aimed to build and evaluate an experimental blockchain for EHRs, named HealthChain, which overcomes the disadvantages of traditional EHR systems.MethodsHealthChain is built based on consortium blockchain technology. Specifically, three organizations, namely hospitals, insurance providers, and governmental agencies, form a consortium that operates under a governance model, which enforces the business logic agreed by all participants. Every peer node hosts an instance of the distributed ledger consisting of EHRs and an instance of chaincode regulating the permissions of participants. Designated orderers establish consensus on the order of EHRs and then disseminate blocks to peers.ResultsHealthChain achieves functional and nonfunctional requirements. It can store EHRs in a distributed ledger and share them among different participants. Moreover, it demonstrates superior features, such as privacy preservation, security, and high throughput. These are the main reasons why HealthChain is proposed.ConclusionsConsortium blockchain technology can help to build new EHR systems and solve the problems that prevent the adoption of traditional systems.

A double-blockchain solution for agricultural sampled data security in Internet of Things network

The security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices’ sampled data in Agriculture is important as any malicious tampering or destroy may lead to wrong decision making and causes immeasurable losses. On the other hand, the emerging blockchain technology provides safer solutions in data protection and retracing. Yet when blockchain technology applied in agricultural data tracking and storage, the identity based searching is long and difficult. Also, public blockchain or consortium blockchain technology along cannot provide satisfactory solutions balancing between safety and high system performance. In this paper, we propose an Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) storage based double-blockchain solution for agricultural sampled data protection in IoT network. We use IPFS network to store the content of sampled data; the proposed system can retrieve the complete data segment by oracle mechanism. Then we design a consortium blockchain, Agricultural Sample Data Chain (ASDC), based on Ethereum technology and improve Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT) based account for every category of sampled data. Finally, after the data are stored in blocks in ASDC, block hash will be generated and upload on main chain of Ethereum to keep a public record in case malicious attacks occurs. Simulated results show that our proposed method has smaller time consumption than cloud storage and blockchain only storage; as well as our system is more robust than other two systems.

Healthchain: Secure EMRs Management and Trading in Distributed Healthcare Service System

Electronic medical records (EMRs) are the most critical data in human health management. As in traditional centralized healthcare service systems (HSSs), user privacy security, EMRs data leakage, tampering, and island are some significant problems. However, blockchain is a promising technology to protect the privacy and realize cross-institutional data sharing for solving these problems. In this article, a novel peer-to-peer EMRs data management and trading system called healthchain has been proposed based on consortium blockchain technology. Through this distributed system, the patient can access their EMRs in different institutions freely, and the EMRs can be traded among different users conveniently. Then, to balance EMRs data supply and demand, we establish a Stackelberg pricing model to evaluate EMRs data providers and consumers’ interactions. The optimal unit price and data amounts can be found by applying the backward induction method, and the maximizing benefits of the participants can be obtained by achieving the Nash equilibrium in the proposed game. Moreover, security analysis shows the healthchain can provide secure EMRs management and trading, and the simulation results show that the proposed pricing model can help the healthchain achieve social welfare maximization.

A Privacy protection scheme for carpooling service using fog computing

As the traffic environment becomes more and more crowded, an increasing number of people are willing to carpool. Carpooling services provide convenience for drivers and passengers to share their journeys. But carpooling requests are uploaded to cloud server for processing and analysis in most existing schemes, resulting in communication delays and leakage of user privacy. To solve this problem, we propose a privacy protection scheme for carpooling service using fog computing. First, identity-based digital signature technology is used to achieve anonymous authentication. Second, location tags, bloom filters and fuzzy extractors are utilized to match passengers and drivers without disclosing the users’ location; Consortium blockchain technology is adopted to store carpooling records. Finally, security analysis and experiments results show that our scheme offers privacy preservation and security, while maintaining low computational cost.