Blockchain-Enabled IoT-Cloud Storage Security: A Merkle Hash Tree and Cryptographic Hashing Approach

The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to an unprecedentedincrease in data generation, necessitating robust, scalable, and secure storage solutions.Conventional cloud storage architectures are vulnerable to data breaches, single points offailure, and integrity threats. To address these challenges, this paper presents a blockchain-enabled IoT-cloud storage security framework that integrates Merkle Hash Trees (MHT),SHA-3, and Blake3 cryptographic hashing techniques to ensure data authenticity, integrity,and resilience against cyber threats. Blockchain technology provides a decentralized andtamper-proof storage mechanism, eliminating unauthorized modifications while enablingtransparent data auditing. MHT enhances the efficiency of data verification and integrityvalidation, significantly reducing computational overhead. Additionally, SHA-3 and Blake3improve cryptographic security, ensuring collision-resistant and high-speed hashing for real-time IoT applications. Experimental results demonstrate a 20% increase in computationalefficiency, 15% reduction in storage overhead, and 99.8% security robustness under attackconditions. The proposed framework ensures a scalable, privacy-aware, and resilient IoT-cloud data management architecture, making it suitable for real-world applications in smartcities, healthcare, and industrial IoT environments

ForensiBlock: A Provenance-Driven Blockchain Framework for Data Forensics and Auditability

Maintaining accurate provenance records is paramount in digital forensics, as they underpin evidence credibility and integrity, addressing essential aspects like accountability and reproducibility. Blockchains have several properties that can address these requirements. Previous systems utilized public blockchains, i.e., treated blockchain as a black box, and benefiting from the immutability property. However, the blockchain was accessible to everyone, giving rise to security concerns and moreover, efficient extraction of provenance faces challenges due to the enormous scale and complexity of digital data. This necessitates a tailored blockchain design for digital forensics. Our solution, Forensiblock has a novel design that automates investigation steps, ensures secure data access, traces data origins, preserves records, and expedites provenance extraction. Forensiblock incorporates Role-Based Access Control with Staged Authorization (RBAC-SA) and a distributed Merkle root for case tracking. These features support authorized resource access with an efficient retrieval of provenance records. Particularly, comparing two methods for extracting provenance records off chain storage retrieval with Merkle root verification and a brute-force search the offchain method is significantly better, especially as the blockchain size and number of cases increase. We also found that our distributed Merkle root creation slightly increases smart contract processing time but significantly improves history access. Overall, we show that Forensiblock offers secure, efficient, and reliable handling of digital forensic dataComment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Towards Blockchain Empowered Trusted and Accountable Data Sharing and Collaboration in Mobile Healthcare Applications

Enabled by mobile and wearable technology, personal health data delivers immense and increasing value for healthcare, benefiting both care providers and medical research. The secure and convenient sharing of personal health data is crucial to the improvement of the interaction and collaboration of the healthcare industry. Faced with the potential privacy issues and vulnerabilities existing in current personal health data storage and sharing systems, as well as the blockchain integration concerns summarized in this paper, an innovative user-centric health data sharing solution by utilizing a decentralized but permissioned blockchain is proposed to protect privacy and enhance access management, with the help of channel formation scheme supported by the blockchain. By developing a web application for Personal Health Data Management (PHDM) systems, the individuals are capable of synchronizing sensor data from wearable devices with online account and controlling data access from any third parties. A mobile application is deployed to collect health data from personal wearable devices, manual input, and medical devices, and synchronize data to the cloud for data sharing with healthcare providers and health insurance companies. To preserve the integrity of health data, a proof of integrity and validation, is made available to each record, which is permanently retrievable from cloud database and is anchored to the blockchain network. Moreover, for scalable and performance considerations, a tree-based data processing and batching method is adopted to deal with large data sets of personal health data collected and uploaded by the mobile platform. To enable a trusted data access record, the Intel Software Extensions technology is utilized to ensure the accountability for data access and token based access control scheme is enhanced with the trusted hardware. Analysis shows that the proposed approach provides user privacy and accountability with acceptable overhead and scalability

The Intersection of Blockchain and 6G Technologies

AbstractThe fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are on the way to be deployed around the world. The 5G technologies target to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines with drastic improvements in terms of high quality of service, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. However, 5G systems still remain a number of security challenges that have been mentioned by researchers and organizations, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, and network privacy vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the conventional techniques may not be sufficient to deal with the security requirements of 5G. As 5G is generally deployed in heterogeneous networks with massive ubiquitous devices, it is quite necessary to provide secure and decentralized solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper we provide a state-of-the-art survey on the integration of blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. In this detailed survey, our primary focus is on the extensive discussions on the potential of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, including cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communications. We then explore and analyse the opportunities that blockchain potentially empowers important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, data sharing, network virtualization, resource management to interference management, federated learning, privacy and security provision. The recent advances in the applications of blockchain in 5G Internet of Things are also surveyed in a wide range of popular use-case domains, such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. The main findings derived from the comprehensive survey on the cooperated blockchain-5G networks and services are then summarized, and possible research challenges with open issues are also identified. Lastly, we complete this survey by shedding new light on future directions of research on this newly emerging area.Abstract The fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are on the way to be deployed around the world. The 5G technologies target to support diverse vertical applications by connecting heterogeneous devices and machines with drastic improvements in terms of high quality of service, increased network capacity and enhanced system throughput. However, 5G systems still remain a number of security challenges that have been mentioned by researchers and organizations, including decentralization, transparency, risks of data interoperability, and network privacy vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the conventional techniques may not be sufficient to deal with the security requirements of 5G. As 5G is generally deployed in heterogeneous networks with massive ubiquitous devices, it is quite necessary to provide secure and decentralized solutions. Motivated from these facts, in this paper we provide a state-of-the-art survey on the integration of blockchain with 5G networks and beyond. In this detailed survey, our primary focus is on the extensive discussions on the potential of blockchain for enabling key 5G technologies, including cloud computing, edge computing, Network Function Virtualization, Network Slicing, and D2D communications. We then explore and analyse the opportunities that blockchain potentially empowers important 5G services, ranging from spectrum management, data sharing, network virtualization, resource management to interference management, federated learning, privacy and security provision. The recent advances in the applications of blockchain in 5G Internet of Things are also surveyed in a wide range of popular use-case domains, such as smart healthcare, smart city, smart transportation, smart grid and UAVs. The main findings derived from the comprehensive survey on the cooperated blockchain-5G networks and services are then summarized, and possible research challenges with open issues are also identified. Lastly, we complete this survey by shedding new light on future directions of research on this newly emerging area

Advancing integrity and privacy in cloud storage: challenges, current solutions, and future directions

The rapid expansion of cloud computing has steered in an era where cloud storage is increasingly prevalent, offering significant advantages in terms of reducing local storage burden. However, this technological shift has also introduced complex security challenges, including data integrity and privacy concerns. In response to these challenges, various data integrity auditing (DIA) protocols have been developed, aiming to enable efficient and secure verification of data stored in cloud environments. This survey paper provides a comprehensive analysis of existing DIA mechanisms, focusing on methods like homomorphic linear authentication, dynamic hash tables, and watermarking techniques for integrity and privacy preservation. It critically evaluates these methods in terms of their advantages, limitations, and the unique challenges they face in practical applications, such as scalability, efficiency in multi-owner contexts, and real-time auditing. Furthermore, the paper identifies key research gaps, including the need for optimizing largescale data handling, balancing watermarking imperceptibility with embedding capacity, and developing comprehensive solutions for decentralized public auditing. The survey serves as a critical resource for researchers to understand the current background of cloud data integrity auditing and the future directions in this evolving field