Permissioned Blockchain Research Articles

Fog‐Sec: Secure end‐to‐end communication in fog‐enabled IoT network using permissioned blockchain system

AbstractThe technological integration of the Internet of Things (IoT)‐Cloud paradigm has enabled intelligent linkages of things, data, processes, and people for efficient decision making without human intervention. However, it poses various challenges for IoT networks that cannot handle large amounts of operation technology (OT) data due to physical storage shortages, excessive latency, higher transfer costs, a lack of context awareness, impractical resiliency, and so on. As a result, the fog network emerged as a new computing model for providing computing capacity closer to IoT edge devices. The IoT‐Fog‐Cloud network, on the other hand, is more vulnerable to multiple security flaws, such as missing key management problems, inappropriate access control, inadequate software update mechanism, insecure configuration files and default passwords, missing communication security, and secure key exchange algorithms over unsecured channels. Therefore, these networks cannot make good security decisions, which are significantly easier to hack than to defend the fog‐enabled IoT environment. This paper proposes the cooperative flow for securing edge devices in fog‐enabled IoT networks using a permissioned blockchain system (pBCS). The proposed fog‐enabled IoT network provides efficient security solutions for key management issues, communication security, and secure key exchange mechanism using a blockchain system. To secure the fog‐based IoT network, we proposed a mechanism for identification and authentication among fog, gateway, and edge nodes that should register with the blockchain network. The fog nodes maintain the blockchain system and hold a shared smart contract for validating edge devices. The participating fog nodes serve as validators and maintain a distributed ledger/blockchain to authenticate and validate the request of the edge nodes. The network services can only be accessed by nodes that have been authenticated against the blockchain system. We implemented the proposed pBCS network using the private Ethereum 2.0 that enables secure device‐to‐device communication and demonstrated performance metrics such as throughput, transaction delay, block creation response time, communication, and computation overhead using state‐of‐the‐art techniques. Finally, we conducted a security analysis of the communication network to protect the IoT edge devices from unauthorized malicious nodes without data loss.

One for all: Efficient verifiable dynamic multi-user searchable encryption in the presence of corrupted users

Dynamic multi-user searchable symmetric encryption (DMUSSE) enables the data owner to dynamically outsource encrypted database to the cloud server and selectively share the search capability with data users. However, inter-user state synchronization is expensive but often necessary in multi-user setting. In addition, only a few works are proposed against the malicious servers that achieve verifiability (guarantee the integrity of query results) by deploying a Merkle tree for all database entries in a straightforward way, which is inevitably subject to logarithmic communication overhead. In this work, we propose a new verifiable DMUSSE scheme with improved performance, while maintaining user-server collusion resistance. Concretely, we first design an efficient and forward-and-backward-secure DMUSSE scheme with the aid of Hyperledger Fabric (a permissioned blockchain), greatly reducing synchronous communication and computation. In particular, our scheme does not reveal any information about uncorrupted users when corrupted users collude with an adversarial server. Then, we achieve efficient verifiability of query results based on multiset hash functions with O(1) communication cost. Finally, we compare our scheme with the state-of-the-art solutions O-μSE and Q-μSE (Chamani et al. TDSC 2021). Experimental results show that our scheme brings at least 90.9% communication savings, 2.75×, 109.2×, and 11.67× speedup in search, update, and verify time, respectively.

A Privacy-Preserving Framework Using Hyperledger Fabric for EHR Sharing Applications

Electronic Health Records, or EHRs, include private and sensitive information of a patient. The privacy of personal healthcare data can be protected through Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain framework. A few Hyperledger Fabric- integrated EHR solutions have emerged in recent years. However, none of them implements the privacy-preserving techniques of Hyperledger Fabric to make transactions anonymous or preserve the transaction data privacy during the consensus. Our proposed architecture is built on Hyperledger Fabric and its privacy-preserving mechanisms, such as Identity Mixer, Private Data Collections, Channels and Transient Fields to securely store and transfer patient-sensitive data while providing anonymity and unlinkability of transactions.

Optimizing Performance in Federated Person Re-Identification through Benchmark Evaluation for Blockchain-Integrated Smart UAV Delivery Systems

In recent years, edge-based intelligent UAV delivery systems have attracted significant interest from both the academic and industrial sectors. One key obstacle faced by these smart UAV delivery systems is data privacy, as they rely on vast amounts of data from users and UAVs for training machine learning models for person re-identification (ReID) purposes. To tackle this issue, federated learning (FL) has been extensively adopted as a promising solution since it only involves sharing and updating model parameters with a central server, without transferring raw data. However, traditional FL still suffers from the problem of having a single point of failure. In this study, we present a performance optimization method for federated person re-identification using benchmark analysis in blockchain-powered edge-based smart UAV delivery systems. Our method integrates a decentralized FL mechanism enabled by blockchain, which eliminates the necessity for a central server and stores private data on a decentralized permissioned blockchain, thus preventing a single point of failure. We employ the person ReID application in intelligent UAV delivery systems as a representative example to drive our research and examine privacy concerns. Additionally, we introduce the Federated Re-identification Consensus (FRC) protocol to address the scalability issue of the blockchain in supporting UAV delivery systems. The efficiency of our proposed method is illustrated through experiments on energy efficiency, confirmation time, and throughput. We also explore the effects of the incentive mechanism and analyze the system’s resilience under various security attacks. This study offers valuable insights and potential solutions for addressing data privacy and security challenges in the fast-growing domain of smart UAV delivery systems.

Anti-corruption system 4.0: The adoption of blockchain technology in the public sector

Countries are using various sophisticated information technologies to help provide quality and transparent services. This research aims to explore the potential and models of using blockchain technology to overcome corruption problems in Indonesia. Proper utilisation of blockchain technology can increase accountability and reduce loopholes in corrupt practices. Blockchain is a distributed database with records (ledgers) shared by all network participants. Smart contract as a form of blockchain can help make the process more transparent and trackable. Since blockchain is a relatively new technology, very few studies have been done to explain its potential in the public sector, particularly with regards to issues of corruption. This study develops a model for the application of blockchain technology and conducts an in-depth analysis of its possibilities using a qualitative method and an exploratory approach. In-depth interviews, designed to get a big picture view of the blockchain development model in the public sector were conducted with several sources, namely the Director General of Asset Tracing KPK (Indonesian Anti-Corruption Commission), KPK Public Prosecutors, the KPK IT department, WIr Group, Financial and Development Oversight Agency (BPKP), and blockchain practitioners. The research was conducted between August and December 2022. The study's findings demonstrate how promising it is to use blockchain technology to lessen corruption. Distributed ledgers give governments new ways to improve transparency. The model that can be applied is ‘permissioned blockchain’ because it has a private nature. Blockchain application requires top management support, organisational readiness, and organisational support. To deepen understanding, further experimental research is needed to test the model.

Permissioned Blockchain-Based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing Protocol

In this Internet of Things era, privacy-preserving are one of the most vital barriers for personal data sharing. In this paper, we present a secure and privacy-preserving data sharing protocol over the permissioned blockchains which require to certificate the users before they submit the transactions. We use the structure-preserving Groth signature to construct the anonymous credentials for satisfying the requirement of permissioned blockchains, and the anonymous credentials does not disclose the real identities of data owners. We prove that the anonymous credential in our protocol achieves the ideal functionality. For the secure access control and privacy-protection of the data accessors, we propose an efficiently anonymous authentication scheme which utilizes the ElGamal commitment and the one-out-of-many proof to ensure a data accessor is authorized, but any unauthorized entities cannot learn the real identity of the data accessor, and even the data owner does not know who (although in the access control list) and when downloads his/her data. The blockchain platform is used to record the data storing, access control list, and the storage addresses, which helps to enhance the security level of the protocol. We implement our protocol over the ThinkPad, the RaspBerry Pi, the Huawei cloud and the Hyperledger Fabric, and the experiments show the good performances.

Building the foundation for a modern patient-partnered infrastructure to study temporomandibular disorders.

Conflicting reports from varying stakeholders related to prognosis and outcomes following placement of temporomandibular joint (TMJ) implants gave rise to the development of the TMJ Patient-Led RoundTable initiative. Following an assessment of the current availability of data, the RoundTable concluded that a strategically Coordinated Registry Network (CRN) is needed to collect and generate accessible data on temporomandibular disorder (TMD) and its care. The aim of this study was therefore to advance the clinical understanding, usage, and adoption of a core minimum dataset for TMD patients as the first foundational step toward building the CRN. Candidate data elements were extracted from existing data sources and included in a Delphi survey administered to 92 participants. Data elements receiving less than 75% consensus were dropped. A purposive multi-stakeholder sub-group triangulated the items across patient and clinician-based experience to remove redundancies or duplicate items and reduce the response burden for both patients and clinicians. To reliably collect the identified data elements, the identified core minimum data elements were defined in the context of technical implementation within High-performance Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) web-application framework. HIVE was integrated with CHIOS™, an innovative permissioned blockchain platform, to strengthen the provenance of data captured in the registry and drive metadata to record all registry transaction and create a robust consent network. A total of 59 multi-stakeholder participants responded to the Delphi survey. The completion of the Delphi surveys followed by the application of the required group consensus threshold resulted in the selection of 397 data elements (254 for patient-generated data elements and 143 for clinician generated data elements). The infrastructure development and integration of HIVE and CHIOS™ was completed showing the maintenance of all data transaction information in blockchain, flexible recording of patient consent, data cataloging, and consent validation through smart contracts. The identified data elements and development of the technological platform establishes a data infrastructure that facilitates the standardization and harmonization of data as well as perform high performance analytics needed to fully leverage the captured patient-generated data, clinical evidence, and other healthcare ecosystem data within the TMJ/TMD-CRN.

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.

A Blockchain Based Energy Management System for Microgrids

Abstract: The use of renewable energy sources is increasing, but their volatility makes it difficult to maintain a balance between energy generation and consumption. To address this issue, we propose a peer-to-peer microgrid energy market where consumers and prosumers can trade self-produced energy and keep the profits. This encourages investment in renewable energy plants and local balancing of supply and demand. To make this possible, we propose a blockchain-based microgrid energy market without central intermediaries. The permissioned blockchain framework ensures that only eligible participants can join, and each entity maintains its own transaction information while being able to retrieve information from other entities with permission. This model is distributed and promotes plug-and-play. We have developed a WebApp SET, which uses a blockchain wallet to sign in users and allow them to share their energy needs anonymously. The simulation results show that this method is feasible and suitable for privacy protection and P2P energy management in a decentralized energy system.

A Framework To Make Voting System Transparent Using Blockhain Technology

Generally, governments release schemes or plans like roadways or industries to some area as different projects. During this process, different types of peoples will be there as supportive or opponent for the schemes. In this project, we presented a secure and transparent framework for government schemes using blockchain. Blockchain is used as a secure and immutable data structure to store the government records that are highly susceptible to tampering. Here, we aim to address these issues to build a transparent and secure edge computing infrastructure for the allocation of government schemes which not only eliminates the need for human supervision or intervention but also makes it easy for the government to keep track and update its policies as time progresses. To solve this issue, we propose the framework to use blockchain technology for creating a decentralized system to perform government scheme processes with ease, transparent, auditable, and immutable. The proposed model consists of a decentralized consortium architecture that combines both the security and privacy of a Permissioned Blockchain and the openness and transparency of a Permission-less Blockchain. The target of the model is to efficiently handle the government tender process securely. The system mainly consists of three types of entities: government officials, citizens and schemes.

A Novel Approach for Electronic Medical Records Based on NFT-EMR

saving the patient medical record electronically is done via electronic medical records (EMRs) where all the patient-related information that consider private and sensitive is usually related to the treatment process, as well as the diagnoses process of a specific patient usually this information needs to be shared and re-submit by many peers doctors with each, In this paper, propose a novel approach for electronic medical records system using a non-fungible token (NFT) based on a customized permission blockchain built with secret sharing technology to reduce the key management overhead as well as provide a readable extension of the ledger to ensure it is easy to read and easy access from any type of computer. The system that uses NFT for electronic medical records (NFT-EMR) ensures easy access and guarantees availability, privacy, and security providing authority to the patient over his data as well as proof of ownership which is done using proof of secret shares and consistency this system can be used in real-world between hospitals and medical centers and within metaverse world. The NFT-ERM system was evaluated using the main evaluation factors used to evaluate blockchain and compared to the standard ERM system.

Decentralized Payment System by using Blockchain

Existing interbank payment systems are unable to offer cost-effective cross-border transactions because the correspondent banking process involves a large number of intermediaries operating in various time zones. They also experience lengthy transaction delays and a lack of transparency. These problems can be resolved by creating an auditable coin on a permissioned blockchain, which allows a set of administrators to control the network. Using an auditable cryptocurrency that supports unspent transaction output-based transactions in a consortium blockchain network, we suggest a low-cost, seamless cross-border payment system in this research. Participating nations perform the power-efficient proof of authority consensus method on the blockchain with equal privileges. Dynamic decentralized identifiers (DIDs), as opposed to traditional cryptocurrencies, are utilized as transacting addresses to enable self-manageable authentication.

Blockchain-based digital rights management systems: Design principles for the music industry

Initially designed to protect intellectual property (IP) of digitalized information goods such as music, games, or books, existing centralized digital rights management (DRM) systems mostly serve the interests of major publishers, with scant inclusion of rights owners, creators, and consumers. Although various blockchain-based DRM systems have been proposed, most of them mirror existing counterproductive IP restrictions. Analyzing the music industry as a case in point, this paper proposes design principles for blockchain-based DRM systems that provide an integrated and flexible solution by enabling transparent music licensing structures, consistent and complete rights metadata, and efficient and transparent royalty payout. The solution can be achieved by storing rights metadata on a public distributed ledger, by validating metadata through a consensus mechanism on a permissioned blockchain, and by algorithmically enforcing royalty payout via stablecoin through a smart contract. The design principles were evaluated by industry experts, validating their benefit for the music industry by increasing surplus value that is currently destroyed through previous suboptimal designs.

Blockchain-Based Security Configuration Management for ICT Systems

The world has become increasingly dependent on large-scale and distributed information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures and systems in sectors such as energy, transport, banking, healthcare, water supply, and digital services, while their protection is considered of paramount importance and has already drawn remarkable attention from governments and key industry players. Establishing common approaches by leveraging existing frameworks and cyber security practices for improving the security postures of those systems is one of the major objectives for ensuring an adequate level of protection and avoiding the detrimental effects of disruptions on society and citizens. Configuration management (CM) is one of those common practices for establishing and maintaining the integrity and consistency of a system and its elements with regard to the function, performance, and status of technical and physical attributes, and it contributes to a desirable security posture throughout the lifecycle of a system. This study addresses the importance of CM, and while considering the corresponding frameworks, standards, and best practices, it proposes a permissioned blockchain-based approach, that inherits the benefits of the blockchain technology and ensures the integrity of the systems’ configuration across the complete lifecycle management of its products and services as an underlying model for mapping and integrating CM functions. Furthermore, this study briefly presents the benefits and challenges of the application of permissioned blockchain models and proposes a smart-contract-based role-based access control mechanism, in addition to presenting an operating concept based on brief but real-life lifecycle requirements of organizational configuration management.

PbDinEHR: A Novel Privacy by Design Developed Framework Using Distributed Data Storage and Sharing for Secure and Scalable Electronic Health Records Management

Privacy in Electronic Health Records (EHR) has become a significant concern in today’s rapidly changing world, particularly for personal and sensitive user data. The sheer volume and sensitive nature of patient records require healthcare providers to exercise an intense quantity of caution during EHR implementation. In recent years, various healthcare providers have been hit by ransomware and distributed denial of service attacks, halting many emergency services during COVID-19. Personal data breaches are becoming more common day by day, and privacy concerns are often raised when sharing data across a network, mainly due to transparency and security issues. To tackle this problem, various researchers have proposed privacy-preserving solutions for EHR. However, most solutions do not extensively use Privacy by Design (PbD) mechanisms, distributed data storage and sharing when designing their frameworks, which is the emphasis of this study. To design a framework for Privacy by Design in Electronic Health Records (PbDinEHR) that can preserve the privacy of patients during data collection, storage, access and sharing, we have analysed the fundamental principles of privacy by design and privacy design strategies, and the compatibility of our proposed healthcare principles with Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To demonstrate the proposed framework, ‘PbDinEHR’, we have implemented a Patient Record Management System (PRMS) to create interfaces for patients and healthcare providers. In addition, to provide transparency and security for sharing patients’ medical files with various healthcare providers, we have implemented a distributed file system and two permission blockchain networks using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain. This allows us to expand the proposed privacy by design mechanisms in the future to enable healthcare providers, patients, imaging labs and others to share patient-centric data in a transparent manner. The developed framework has been tested and evaluated to ensure user performance, effectiveness, and security. The complete solution is expected to provide progressive resistance in the face of continuous data breaches in the patient information domain.

BV-ICVs: A privacy-preserving and verifiable federated learning framework for V2X environments using blockchain and zkSNARKs

As part of vehicle to everything (V2X) environments, intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) generate a large amount of data, which can be exploited securely and effectively through decentralized techniques such as federated learning (FL). Existing FL systems, however, are vulnerable to attacks and barely meet the security requirements for real-world applications. If malicious or compromised ICVs upload inaccurate or low-quality local model updates to the central aggregator, they may reduce the accuracy of the global model, thereby reducing drivers safety and efficiency. This paper aims to alleviate these concerns by presenting BV-ICVs, a blockchain-enabled and privacy-preserving FL framework for ICVs in an edge-envisioned V2X environment. This system uses Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARKs) verification that is compiled as smart contracts to prevent malicious, compromised or even rational ICVs from uploading unreliable, erroneous or low-quality model updates. The verification process is embedded within the consensus of the underlying permissioned blockchain, which maximizes both the efficiency of the process and the utilization of computer resources. As demonstrated by discussions, security analysis, and numerical results, BV-ICVs reduced data poisoning attacks and increased the privacy protection and accuracy of FL.

PartitionChain: A Scalable and Reliable Data Storage Strategy for Permissioned Blockchain

Blockchain, a specific distributed database which maintains a list of data records against tampering and corruption, has aroused wide interests and become a hot topic in the real world. Nevertheless, the increasingly heavy storage consumption brought by the full-replication data storage mechanism, becomes a bottleneck to the system scalability. To address this problem, a reliable storage scheme named BFT-Store (Qi <i>et al.</i> 2020), integrating erasure coding with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), was proposed recently. While, three critical problems are still left open: (i) The complex re-initialization process of the blockchain when the number of nodes varies; (ii) The high computational overload of downloading data; (iii) The massive communication on the network. This paper proposes a better trade-off for blockchain storage scheme termed PartitionChain which addresses the above three problems, maintaining the merits of BFT-Store. First, our scheme allows the original nodes to merely update a single aggregate signature (e.g., 320 bits) when the number of nodes varies. Using aggregate signatures as the proof of the encoded data not only saves the storage costs but also gets rid of the trusted third party. Second, the computational complexity of retrieving data by decoding, compared to BFT-Store, is greatly reduced by about <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2^{18}$</tex-math></inline-formula> times on each node. Third, the amount of transmitted data for recovering each block is reduced from <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n)$</tex-math></inline-formula> (assuming <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of nodes) to <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(1)$</tex-math></inline-formula> , by partitioning each block into smaller pieces and applying Reed-Solomon coding to each block. Furthermore, this paper also introduces a reputation ranking system where the malicious behaviors of the nodes can be detected and marked, enabling PartitionChain to check the credits of each node termly and expel the nodes with misbehavior to the specific extent. Comparing with BFT-Store, our scheme allows blockchain system to suit dynamic network with higher efficiency and scalability.

PVPBC: Privacy and Verifiability Preserving E-Voting Based on Permissioned Blockchain

Privacy and verifiability are crucial security requirements in e-voting systems and combining them is considered to be a challenge given that they seem to be contradictory. On one hand, privacy means that cast votes cannot be traced to the corresponding voters. On the other hand, linkability of voters and their votes is a requirement of verifiability which has the consequence that a voter is able to check their vote in the election result. These two contradictory features can be addressed by adopting privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, which at the same time as achieving privacy, achieve verifiability. Many end-to-end schemes that support verifiability and privacy have the need for some voter action. This makes ballot casting more complex for voters. We propose the PVPBC voting system, which is an e-voting system that preserves privacy and verifiability without affecting voter usability. The PVPBC voting system uses an effective and distributed method of authorization, which is based on revocable anonymity, by making use of a permissioned distributed ledger and smart contract. In addition, the underlying PVPBC voting system satisfies election verifiability using the Selene voting scheme. The Selene protocol is a verifiable e-voting protocol. It publishes votes in plaintext accompanied by tracking numbers. This enables voters to confirm that their votes have been captured correctly by the system. Numerical experiments support the claim that PVPBC scales well as a function of the number of voters and candidates. In particular, PVPBC’s authorization time increases linearly as a function of the population size. The average latency associated with accessing the system also increases linearly with the voter population size. The latency incurred when a valid authentication transaction is created and sent on the DLT network is 6.275 ms. Empirical results suggest that the cost in GBP for casting and storing an encrypted ballot alongside a tracker commitment is a linear function of the number of candidates, which is an attractive aspect of PVPBC.

An Internet of Things Access Control Scheme Based on Permissioned Blockchain and Edge Computing

In the IoT (Internet of Things) environment, the existing access control schemes for device resources have some problems, such as poor scalability, high latency, security, and dynamics. Combining the advantages of the permissioned blockchain and edge computing, an access control scheme for the Internet of Things based on the permissioned blockchain and edge computing is proposed. By authenticating the user’s identity at the edge, the user’s identity is reliable and the response time is improved. In the ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) model, the blockchain is regarded as a trusted entity, and the access control policy is written into a smart contract and deployed on the blockchain for calling. Most of the existing consensus algorithms have the problems of low throughput and scalability. A Kraft (Kademlia–Raft) consensus algorithm is introduced to solve the above issues. Security analysis and experimental results show that the scheme can achieve fine-grained, dynamic access control, has high throughput and low latency, and ensures security and reliability.

Integrated identity and auditing management using blockchain mechanism

An integrated identity is a centralized identifier that makes it possible for customers to get access to a variety of business services from a single network. The risks and assaults include identity leaks, centralized management, auditing restrictions, and lengthy breach investigation procedures. The article presents a technique for creating a blockchain-based, integrated identification system in a marketplace by automating and decentralizing the creation and auditing of strong and secure attributes. When individuals engage in market transactions, they act as nodes in a distributed blockchain network, contributing to the development of federated identities. Using a single federated identity, members of this network are able to use any of the participating companies' services. In this, IoT sensors and wearables can automatically log real-time data for you while identifying patterns and flagging problems. The total transparency of all blockchain transactions provides participants the ability to see which services they're using and their users the ability to track the usage of their identities. To test the proposed architecture, implementation done on a public blockchain and a permissioned blockchain (Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric).