Dwarna : a blockchain solution for dynamic consent in biobanking

Dynamic consent aims to empower research partners and facilitate active participation in the research process. Used within the context of biobanking, it gives individuals access to information and control to determine how and where their biospecimens and data should be used. We present Dwarna—a web portal for ‘dynamic consent’ that acts as a hub connecting the different stakeholders of the Malta Biobank: biobank managers, researchers, research partners, and the general public. The portal stores research partners’ consent in a blockchain to create an immutable audit trail of research partners’ consent changes. Dwarna’s structure also presents a solution to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation’s right to erasure—a right that is seemingly incompatible with the blockchain model. Dwarna’s transparent structure increases trustworthiness in the biobanking process by giving research partners more control over which research studies they participate in, by facilitating the withdrawal of consent and by making it possible to request that the biospecimen and associated data are destroyed.peer-reviewe

Deep Learning meets Blockchain for Automated and Secure Access Control

Access control is a critical component of computer security, governing access to system resources. However, designing policies and roles in traditional access control can be challenging and difficult to maintain in dynamic and complex systems, which is particularly problematic for organizations with numerous resources. Furthermore, traditional methods suffer from issues such as third-party involvement, inefficiency, and privacy gaps, making transparent and dynamic access control an ongoing research problem. Moreover detecting malicious activities and identifying users who are not behaving appropriately can present notable difficulties. To address these challenges, we propose DLACB, a Deep Learning Based Access Control Using Blockchain, as a solution to decentralized access control. DLACB uses blockchain to provide transparency, traceability, and reliability in various domains such as medicine, finance, and government while taking advantage of deep learning to not rely on predefined policies and eventually automate access control. With the integration of blockchain and deep learning for access control, DLACB can provide a general framework applicable to various domains, enabling transparent and reliable logging of all transactions. As all data is recorded on the blockchain, we have the capability to identify malicious activities. We store a list of malicious activities in the storage system and employ a verification algorithm to cross-reference it with the blockchain. We conduct measurements and comparisons of the smart contract processing time for the deployed access control system in contrast to traditional access control methods, determining the time overhead involved. The processing time of DLBAC demonstrates remarkable stability when exposed to increased request volumes.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2303.1475

A Systematic Review of Blockchain Research and Applications in Business

Blockchain, well-known as the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, has attracted plenty of attention from both practitioners and academics and has begun to revolutionize the way businesses handle their day-to-day operations. DLT leads to many interesting new research topics in different business fields. In this study, we applied the systematic mapping method to review existing articles related to blockchain applications and research in different business areas (accounting, finance and banking, information systems, marketing and supply chain). Our goal is to understand the current applications and research status related to blockchain, so that we can identify research gaps and better directions for future research. Following the recommended steps of the systematic mapping method, we extracted fifty primary papers from several scientific databases. Our findings suggest that despite the attention received, blockchain research still has a long way to go. Several future research directions are discussed

Droplet: Decentralized Authorization for IoT Data Streams

This paper presents Droplet, a decentralized data access control service, which operates without intermediate trust entities. Droplet enables data owners to securely and selectively share their encrypted data while guaranteeing data confidentiality against unauthorized parties. Droplet's contribution lies in coupling two key ideas: (i) a new cryptographically-enforced access control scheme for encrypted data streams that enables users to define fine-grained stream-specific access policies, and (ii) a decentralized authorization service that handles user-defined access policies. In this paper, we present Droplet's design, the reference implementation of Droplet, and experimental results of three case-study apps atop of Droplet: Fitbit activity tracker, Ava health tracker, and ECOviz smart meter dashboard

Cloud Storage Security Using Blockchain Technology

Data is increasing with increasing Internet technology. To handle the large data, more applications choose to enlarge storage capacity via Cloud plate form. It will not a surprise if we say most organizations have moved towards the cloud. While using the cloud, we have to keep our trust for our sensitive and private data in third parties and the data is usually not encrypted. But we need to implement nearly procedures for the assurance of our reserved data. This will be occupied by blockchains. Blockchain has been a center of attention as a next-generation goal because of its security. A comprehensive approach is used in this paper by signifying diverse blockchain methods to protect cloud computing