Read/Write Digital Libraries for Musicology

The Web and other digital technologies have democratised music creation, reception, and analysis, putting music in the hands, ears, and minds of billions of users. Music digital libraries typically focus on an essential subset of this deluge—commercial and academic publications, and historical materials—but neglect to incorporate contributions by scholars, performers, and enthusiasts, such as annotations or performed interpretations of these artifacts, despite their potential utility for many types of users. In this paper we consider means by which digital libraries for musicology may incorporate such contributions into their collections, adhering to principles of FAIR data management and respecting contributor rights as outlined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. We present an overview of centralised and decentralised approaches to this problem, and propose hybrid solutions in which contributions reside in a) user-controlled personal online datastores, b) decentralised file storage, and c) are published and aggregated into digital library collections. We outline the implementation of these ideas using Solid, a Web decentralisation project building on W3C standard technologies to facilitate publication and control over Linked Data. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing prototypes supporting two types of contribution: Web Annotations describing or analysing musical elements in score encodings and music recordings; and, music performances and associated metadata supporting performance analyses across many renditions of a given piece. Finally, we situate these ideas within a wider conception of enriched, decentralised, and interconnected online music repositories

DATA AVAILABILITY IN DECENTRALIZED DATA STORAGE USING FOUR-NODE INTERPLANETARY FILE SYSTEM

Centralized storage is a data storage model in which data is stored and managed in a single physical location or centralized system. In this model, all data and information are stored on servers or data centers managed by one entity or organization. This model also has disadvantages such as risk of system failure against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, natural disasters, and hardware failures causing a single point of failure. This threat results in loss of data and a lack of user confidence in the availability of data in centralized storage. This study proposes to evaluate the availability of data in decentralized data storage using a four-node interplanetary file system (IPFS) that is interconnected with a swarm key as the authentication key. Unlike centralized storage which has only one data center, four-node IPFS allows users to upload and download data from four interconnected data centers. This can avoid dependence on the central server and reduce server load. The evaluation results show that decentralized data storage using a four-node IPFS system is three times more resilient than centralized storage against a single point of failure. This system can increase data availability so that organizations can minimize data loss from the threat of system failure

Access Control and File Distribution Management for Electronic Diploma and Transcript using Ethereum Smart Contract and InterPlanetary File System

This reserach build access control and file distribution management system for electronic diploma and transcript using ethereum smart contract and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). The falsification of diplomas/transcripts is one of the problems in education. In Indonesia, falsification of diplomas/transcripts is a form of criminal act of falsifying letters. In addition, diplomas/transcripts that have not been digitalized make them easily damaged, lost, and difficult to manage. Therefore, this research developed digital diploma/transcript as digital twin from the hardcopy of diploma/tramscript. This research used IPFS to store data in a distributed system and Smart Contracts Blockchain to store and protect the digital diploma/transcript. The system also comes with access control to create and give approval for diplomas or transcripts to be published and saved into the system. Access control settings will be saved using the blockchain. This research using Quality of Service test method for measurethroughput, packet loss, and delay. Beside that, tis research also analysis the usage of Central Processing Unit and Random Access Memory from the system. Based on the test that has been done, the fake diploma/transcript detection system can be run properly by using 1 node to 5 nodes. The best throughput value during the process of making and validating the diploma/transcript is to use 1 node. The value of packet loss in the process of making and validating the certificate/transcript has a very good category. The value of delay in the process of making and validating the diploma/transcript has a very good category

Securing medical records based on inter-planetary file system and blockchain

In general, health records include important information like the patient’s history, findings of examinations and assessments, diagnosis reports, documentation of consent, and treatment plans. Sharing this information has grown to be a challenge concerning data security, as it could result in compromising patient privacy. Therefore, the patient's information should not be misused or tampered with. In this paper, a full process of storing and retrieving medical records is proposed using a decentralized system through the integration of two emerging technologies: Blockchain and Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). The system provides solutions for the major security concerns associated with medical files, including authentication and authorization, database breaches, data integrity of local and cloud storage, and data availability. The obtained results indicate a high level of safety by adding security layers such as confidentiality, authentication, authorization and access control, based on different factors. All these aspects contribute to reaching the aim of the proposed system, which is storing and retrieving medical records in a decentralized and safe manner

Secure Distributed Cloud Storage based on the Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts

Objectives: This paper addresses the problem of secure data storage and sharing over cloud storage infrastructures. A secure, distributed cloud storage structure incorporating the blockchain structure is proposed that supports confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Methods/Analysis: The proposed structure combines two well-known technologies: one of them is the Ethereum Blockchain and its Smart Contracts and the other is the RSA encryption and authentication scheme. The Ethereum Blockchain is used as a data structure, which ensures data availability and integrity while RSA provides sensitive data confidentiality and source authentication. Findings: As a result, users of the proposed structure can trust it and be certain that they can securely exchange information through a publicly accessible and shared cloud storage. The application can be used either through a user interface (UI) or a command-line interface (CLI). Novelty /Improvement:The novelty of this work is that the system that is proposed could be used for secure data storage on the cloud as well as for file sharing and authentication verification. Also, secure data storage and file sharing are already offered by the proposed system. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-07-02-012 Full Text: PD

Improving the Security and Performance of Web Applications Running on the Distributed IPFS

While cloud computing is gaining widespread adoption these days, some challenges are emerging around security, performance, and reliability of centralized cloud resources. Decentralized services are introduced as an effective way to overcome the limitations of cloud services. Blockchain technology with its associated decentralization is used to develop decentralized application platforms. The interplanetary file system (IPFS) is built on top of a distributed system consisting of a group of nodes that shares the data and also takes advantage of blockchain to permanently store the data. The IPFS is very useful in transferring data between people. This project focuses on blockchain technology, distributed file sharing system IPFS, and their applications in software development. It talks about different types of blockchain, its advantages and challenges, and what we can do to overcome the challenges of decentralized technology

Access controls on IP based cameras in IoT ecosystem

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Information Systems Security (MSc.ISS) at Strathmore UniversityInternet of things (IoT) is a concept of connected things that allows embedded devices, sensors and actuators to interconnect and share data thus bridging the gap between physical devices and virtual objects. The concept of IoT started gaining popularity in 2010, with its popularity impressively outgrowing other concepts up to date. The growth of IoT has seen more than 30% companies globally initiating the process of deploying IoT. IoT security has been a challenge due to its nascent market where manufacturers focus much on getting the product to the market rather than building security from start. Internet Protocol (IP) based cameras are among the most popular IoT devices. Governments, corporations to small business and homeowners are using cameras for surveillance among other activities, with their popularity growing due to their ability to collect and transmit data remotely. As cameras are expected to perform sophisticated tasks, it is important to protect the cameras and data they handle.The focus of this dissertation is to come up with an access control solution for IP based cameras, in efforts to reduce vulnerabilities associated with identity and access management. This dissertation adopted Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology to develop the proposed solution. The methodology provided flexibility in changing requirements and testing the prototype at an early stage to continuously improve the system. Must, Should, Could, Would Not (MoSCoW) method was used to identify and rank requirements in evaluating the gaps that existed in the market, as this dissertation could not address all the vulnerabilities the method helped in picking the vulnerabilities to be handled first.The tested and validated prototype provides a mechanism to restrict factory set authentication credentials, system access lockouts and sending of alerts in cases of suspicious login attempts. The prototype demonstrate how Integrity of camera feeds can be maintained by using a combination of interplanetary file system (IPFS) and Blockchain. The solution also records and stores system logs in immutable format to support forensic investigation

Reputation Driven Dynamic Access Control Framework for IoT atop PoA Ethereum Blockchain

Security and Scalability are two major challenges that IoT is currently facing. Access control to critical IoT infrastructure is considered as top security challenge that IoT faces. Data generated by IoT devices may be driving many hard real time systems, thus it is of utmost importance to guarantee integrity and authenticity of the data and resources at the first place itself. Due to heterogeneous and constrained nature of IoT devices, traditional IoT security frameworks are not able to deliver scalable, efficient and manageable mechanisms to meet the requirements of IoT devices. On the other hand Blockchain technology has shown great potential to bridge the missing gap towards building a truly decentralized, trustworthy, secure and scalable environment for IoT. Allowing access to IoT resources and data managed through Blockchain will provide an additional security layer backed by the strongest cryptographic algorithms available. In this work we present a reputation driven dynamic access control framework for small scale IoT applications based on Proof of Authority Blockchain, we name it as Rep-ACM. In RepACM framework we build two major services, one for Reputation building (for better IoT device behaviour regulations) and other for Misbehaviour detection (for detecting any Misbehaviour on object resource usage). Both of these services work in coordination with other services of proposed framework to determine who can access what and under what conditions access should be granted. For Proof of Concept (PoC) we created private Ethereum network consisting of two Raspberry Pi single board computers, one desktop computer and a laptop as nodes. We configured Ethereum protocol to use Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance (IBFT) as Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism for performance optimization in constrained environment. We deployed our model on private network for feasibility and performance analysis