Permissioned Blockchain Research Articles

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).

HIBEChain: A Hierarchical Identity-Based Blockchain System for Large-Scale IoT

Internet-of-Things enables interconnection of billions of devices, which perform autonomous operations and collect various types of data. These things, along with their generated huge amount of data, need to be handled efficiently and securely. Centralized solutions are not desired due to security concerns and scalability issue. In this article, we propose HIBEChain, a hierarchical blockchain system that realizes scalable and accountable management of IoT devices and data. HIBEChain consists of multiple permissioned blockchains that form a hierarchical tree structure. To support the hierarchical structure of HIBEChain, we design a decentralized hierarchical identity-based signature (DHIBS) scheme, which enables IoT devices to use their identities as public keys. Consequently, HIBEChain achieves high scalability through parallel processing as blockchain sharding schemes, and it also implements accountability by use of identity-based keys. Identity-based keys not only make HIBEChain more user-friendly, they also allow private key recovery by validators when necessary. We provide detailed analysis of its security and performance, and implement HIBEChain based on Ethereum source code. Experiment results show that a 6-ary, (7,10)-threshold, 4-level HIBEChain can achieve 32,000 TPS, and it needs only 9 seconds to confirm a transaction.

Blockchain based smart contract for cooperative spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks for sustainable beyond 5G wireless communication

Cognitive radio networks allow opportunistic spectrum access to the unlicensed users, which rely on effective spectrum sensing. Recently, cooperative sensing has been found to improve sensing reliability. However, sometimes the selfish users do not cooperate, and therefore, different incentive design mechanisms like contract theory have been proposed recently, where the cooperation is encouraged by offering appropriate reward to the sensing participants. However, still no secure structure exists for the reward distribution after a successful contract completion, and a user may also deny sensing even after accepting the contract. This work proposes the use of blockchain-based smart contracts, which are based upon a permissioned blockchain that helps in making the transactions private among the participants. Further, the efficiency of this approach is improved by introducing a reputation parameter for the users. This measures the trustworthiness of a particular user based upon the accuracy of their recent sensing results. Further, a money locking approach is proposed from which a penalty is deducted if the user denies or fails to submit a correct reading. Performance analysis of the proposed scheme is done to show the superiority of the scheme.

Private Blockchain in the Field of Health Services

Blockchain is a technology that is quite popular and has been adopted in various fields in recent years. This technology has caught the attention of researchers in the health sector because of its innovation which is considered capable of providing the necessary guarantees for the safe processing, sharing, and management of sensitive patient data. There are many problems with falsifying reports and withholding important information from patients, which is considered medical fraud. Hyperledger, a type of private Blockchain, is very suitable for healthcare applications. A private blockchain is a restricted type of blockchain network created by an entity. This type of network is limited to those with access permissions. In addition, private blockchains usually use a centralized verification system and are controlled by the network's creators. Hyperledger Fabric is one example of a permissioned blockchain that can play a role in implementing patient-centric, interoperable healthcare systems

A lower approximation based integrated decision analysis framework for a blockchain-based supply chain

Organizations and their supply chains generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, popularly known as Big Data. This paper proposes a framework in the prescriptive analytics category of big data analytics (BDA) and is especially relevant for organizations on a permissioned blockchain network. The framework integrates the concepts of Artificial intelligence (Case-based reasoning, Interval-valued rough fuzzy set theory, and Value closeness relation algorithm) and blockchain to help decision-makers make accountable and conformable decisions. The framework comprises five stages - the first three stages generate the decisions, while the last two stages enable validation and communication of decisions. Its application is demonstrated on an organizational dataset with 20 supply chain KPIs. The numerical example shows how the organization's business strategy can translate to framework parameters resulting in varying outputs. The proposed framework is compared with the rough set approach through sensitivity analysis, highlighting the differences. The concept of L-Graphs is proposed to facilitate the visual display of prescribing decisions, which can help decision-makers make optimal decision choices. The framework has several unique features: (i) it is one of the first decision-making frameworks proposed for a blockchain-based supply chain that can be a part of the BDA toolbox of an organization; (ii) it uses concepts of artificial intelligence; (iii) the optimal decisions are proposed based on analysis of multicriteria; (iv) it uses multiple approaches to validate the decision rules on blockchain.

Blockchain-based Collaborative Edge Intelligence for Trustworthy and Real-Time Video Surveillance

Trustworthy and real-time video surveillance aims to analyze the live camera streams in a privacy-preserving manner for the decision-making of various advanced services, such as pedestrian reidentification and traffic monitoring. In recent years, edge computing has been identified as a promising technology for trustworthy and real-time video surveillance because it keeps confidential video data locally and reduces the latency caused by massive data transmission. Generally, a single edge device can hardly afford the computation-intensive video analytics tasks. Most existing solutions incorporate cloud servers to handle the overloaded tasks. However, such an edge-cloud collaboration approach still suffers from unpredictable latency and privacy concerns because the remote cloud is centralized and distant from the cameras. In this work, we designed a blockchain-based collaborative edge intelligence (BCEI) approach for trustworthy and real-time video surveillance. In BCEI, geo-distributed edge devices form a peer-to-peer network to maintain a permissioned blockchain and share data and computation resources to perform computation-intensive video analytics tasks. The video analytics results are written on the blockchain in an immutable manner to guarantee trustworthiness. To reduce task execution time, we formulate and solve a joint stream mapping and task scheduling problem to schedule video streams and machine learning models among edge devices. A pedestrian reidentification prototype is implemented and deployed based on BCEI with the extensive performance evaluation, indicating the superiority of BCEI in latency reduction and system throughput improvement by leveraging collaboration among edge devices.

Design of Proof-of-Stake PBFT Algorithm for IoT Environments

Blockchain ledgers are being increasingly used in Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV) applications. However, Proof of Work consensus is unsuitable in an IoV setting, which is why other paradigms need to be investigated. In this work we integrate Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus technique with multiple entry Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance voting in a permissioned blockchain network. We introduce several PoS classes based on combination of initial stake and truthfulness of voting. We also describe a differentiated medium access approach similar to Enhanced Distribution Function (EDCA). Using a Semi Markov Process-based model, we derive the probability of reaching consensus and highlight the impact of the populations of individual stake/priority classes on achieving consensus. Our results show the impact of numbers of nodes from classes with different voting behavior on consensus probability. Results also show differentiation through the number of blocks linked per second, success probability in leadership application and delay in leader selection for node belonging to certain class. These values show how much revenue a node from given class can collect from its clients depending on initial stake and voting behavior.

Data Health Functionality using Hyperledger Fabric Technology

A permissioned blockchain infrastructure called Hyperledger Fabric offers a modular architecture, smart contract execution, configurable consensus, membership services, and a representation of roles between the nodes present in the infrastructure. It also provides high rated integrity sharing. Since patient health records are highly confidential, in order to maintain security, this study examines how to communicate medical data with better privacy protection in healthcare. The transfer of health-related data functions using Hyperledger framework improves the storage reliability and security. Furthermore, the healthcare supply chain process can be improved by hyperledger fabric networks by enhancing the visibility and traceability of network interactions. Companies that have accessibility to the ledger on a fabric network can see the same unchangeable data, enforcing responsibility and lowering the possibility of counterfeiting. This study's findings showcase the utilization of blockchain technology to improve the privacy of data sharing and storage in the healthcare sectors.

Auto-Tuning with Reinforcement Learning for Permissioned Blockchain Systems

In a permissioned blockchain, performance dictates its development, which is substantially influenced by its parameters. However, research on auto-tuning for better performance has somewhat stagnated because of the difficulty posed by distributed parameters; thus, it is possible only with difficulty to propose an effective auto-tuning optimization scheme. To alleviate this issue, we lay a solid basis for our research by first exploring the relationship between parameters and performance in Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain, and we propose Athena, a Fabric-based auto-tuning system that can automatically provide parameter configurations for optimal performance. The key of Athena is designing a new Permissioned Blockchain Multi-Agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (PB-MADDPG) to realize heterogeneous parameter-tuning optimization of different types of nodes in Fabric. Moreover, we select parameters with the most significant impact on accelerating recommendation. In its application to Fabric, a typical permissioned blockchain system, with 12 peers and 7 orderers, Athena achieves a throughput improvement of 470.45% and a latency reduction of 75.66% over the default configuration. Compared with the most advanced tuning schemes (CDBTune, Qtune, and ResTune), our method is competitive in terms of throughput and latency.