93 research outputs found
Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple
authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by
all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially
adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and
privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for
designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance
privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in
terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of
decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by
designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography,
distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of
adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful
privacy-preserving decentralized systems
Towards Cyber Security for Low-Carbon Transportation: Overview, Challenges and Future Directions
In recent years, low-carbon transportation has become an indispensable part
as sustainable development strategies of various countries, and plays a very
important responsibility in promoting low-carbon cities. However, the security
of low-carbon transportation has been threatened from various ways. For
example, denial of service attacks pose a great threat to the electric vehicles
and vehicle-to-grid networks. To minimize these threats, several methods have
been proposed to defense against them. Yet, these methods are only for certain
types of scenarios or attacks. Therefore, this review addresses security aspect
from holistic view, provides the overview, challenges and future directions of
cyber security technologies in low-carbon transportation. Firstly, based on the
concept and importance of low-carbon transportation, this review positions the
low-carbon transportation services. Then, with the perspective of network
architecture and communication mode, this review classifies its typical attack
risks. The corresponding defense technologies and relevant security suggestions
are further reviewed from perspective of data security, network management
security and network application security. Finally, in view of the long term
development of low-carbon transportation, future research directions have been
concerned.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, accepted by journal Renewable and Sustainable
Energy Review
BLA2C2: Design of a Novel Blockchain-based Light-Weight Authentication & Access Control Layer for Cloud Deployments
Cloud deployments are consistently under attack, from both internal and external adversaries. These attacks include, but are not limited to brute force, masquerading, improper access, session hijacking, cross site scripting (XSS), etc. To mitigate these attacks, a wide variety of authentication & access control models are proposed by researchers, and each of them vary in terms of their internal implementation characteristics. It was observed that these models are either highly complex, or lack in terms of security under multiple attacks, which limits their applicability for real-time deployments. Moreover, some of these models are not flexible and cannot be deployed under dynamic cloud scenarios (like constant reconfigurations of Virtual Machines, dynamic authentication use-cases, etc.). To overcome these issues, this text proposes design of a novel blockchain-based Light-weight authentication & access control layer that can be used for dynamic cloud deployments. The proposed model initially applies a header-level light-weight sanitization layer that removes Cross Site Scripting, SQL Injection, and other data-level attacks. This is followed by a light-weight authentication layer, that assists in improving login-level security for external attacks. The authentication layer uses IP matching with reverse geolocation mapping in order to estimate outlier login attempts. This layer is cascaded with an efficient blockchain-based access control model, which assists in mitigating session hijacking, masquerading, sybil and other control-level attacks. The blockchain model is developed via integration of Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) to reduce unnecessary complexities, and provides faster response when compared with existing blockchain-based security deployments. Efficiency of the model was estimated in terms of accuracy of detection for different attack types, delay needed for detection of these attacks, and computational complexity during attack mitigation operations. This performance was compared with existing models, and it was observed that the proposed model showcases 8.3% higher accuracy, with 10.5% lower delay, and 5.9% lower complexity w.r.t. standard blockchain-based & other security models. Due to these enhancements, the proposed model was capable of deployment for a wide variety of large-scale scenarios
Enhancing healthcare services through cloud service: a systematic review
Although cloud-based healthcare services are booming, in-depth research has not yet been conducted in this field. This study aims to address the shortcomings of previous research by analyzing all journal articles from the last five years using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) systematic literature review methodology. The findings of this study highlight the benefits of cloud-based healthcare services for healthcare providers and patients, including enhanced healthcare services, data security, privacy issues, and innovative information technology (IT) service delivery models. However, this study also identifies challenges associated with using cloud services in healthcare, such as security and privacy concerns, and proposes solutions to address these issues. This study concludes by discussing future research directions and the need for a complete solution that addresses the conflicting requirements of the security, privacy, efficiency, and scalability of cloud technologies in healthcare
In case of emergency, do not break the glass!:Secure cross-organisational data sharing in acute care
ID-based user-centric data usage auditing scheme for distributed environments
Recent years have witnessed the trend of increasingly relying on remote and distributed infrastructures, mainly owned and managed by third parties. This increased the number of reported incidents of security breaches compromising users' personal data, where involved entities may massively collect and process massive amounts of such data. Toward these challenges, this paper combines hierarchical Identity Based Cryptographic (IBC) mechanisms with emerging blockchain technologies and introduces a blockchain-based data usage auditing architecture ensuring availability and accountability in a personal data-preserving fashion. The proposed approach relies on smart auditable contracts deployed in blockchain infrastructures. Thus, it offers transparent and controlled data access, sharing and processing, so that unauthorized entities cannot process data without data subjects' consent. Moreover, thanks to the usage of hierarchical ID-based encryption and signature schemes, the proposed solution protects and ensures the confidentiality of users' personal data shared with multiple data controllers and processors. It also provides auditing capacities with tamper-proof evidences for data usage compliance, supported by the intrinsic properties of the blockchain technology
Balancing Privacy and Progress in Artificial Intelligence: Anonymization in Histopathology for Biomedical Research and Education
The advancement of biomedical research heavily relies on access to large
amounts of medical data. In the case of histopathology, Whole Slide Images
(WSI) and clinicopathological information are valuable for developing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms for Digital Pathology (DP).
Transferring medical data "as open as possible" enhances the usability of the
data for secondary purposes but poses a risk to patient privacy. At the same
time, existing regulations push towards keeping medical data "as closed as
necessary" to avoid re-identification risks. Generally, these legal regulations
require the removal of sensitive data but do not consider the possibility of
data linkage attacks due to modern image-matching algorithms. In addition, the
lack of standardization in DP makes it harder to establish a single solution
for all formats of WSIs. These challenges raise problems for bio-informatics
researchers in balancing privacy and progress while developing AI algorithms.
This paper explores the legal regulations and terminologies for medical
data-sharing. We review existing approaches and highlight challenges from the
histopathological perspective. We also present a data-sharing guideline for
histological data to foster multidisciplinary research and education.Comment: Accepted to FAIEMA 202
Data query mechanism based on hash computing power of blockchain in internet of things
Funding: This work is supported by the NSFC (61772280, 61772454, 61811530332, 61811540410), the PAPD fund from NUIST. This work was funded by the Researchers Supporting Project No. (RSP-2019/102) King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Jin Wang and Osama Alfarraj are the corresponding authors. Acknowledgments: We thank Researchers Supporting Project No. (RSP-2019/102) King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for funding this paper. Author Contributions: Y.R., F.Z. and O.A. conceived the mechanism design and wrote the paper, P.K.S. built the models. T.W. and A.T. developed the mechanism, J.W. and O.A. revised the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
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