Is Blockchain for Internet of Medical Things a Panacea for COVID-19 Pandemic?

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the lifestyle of the general public and the healthcare system of the society. As a promising approach to address the emerging challenges caused by the epidemic of infectious diseases like COVID-19, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) deployed in hospitals, clinics, and healthcare centers can save the diagnosis time and improve the efficiency of medical resources though privacy and security concerns of IoMT stall the wide adoption. In order to tackle the privacy, security, and interoperability issues of IoMT, we propose a framework of blockchain-enabled IoMT by introducing blockchain to incumbent IoMT systems. In this paper, we review the benefits of this architecture and illustrate the opportunities brought by blockchain-enabled IoMT. We also provide use cases of blockchain-enabled IoMT on fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the prevention of infectious diseases, location sharing and contact tracing, and the supply chain of injectable medicines. We also outline future work in this area.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

A Review of IoT Security and Privacy Using Decentralized Blockchain Techniques

IoT security is one of the prominent issues that has gained significant attention among the researchers in recent times. The recent advancements in IoT introduces various critical security issues and increases the risk of privacy leakage of IoT data. Implementation of Blockchain can be a potential solution for the security issues in IoT. This review deeply investigates the security threats and issues in IoT which deteriorates the effectiveness of IoT systems. This paper presents a perceptible description of the security threats, Blockchain based solutions, security characteristics and challenges introduced during the integration of Blockchain with IoT. An analysis of different consensus protocols, existing security techniques and evaluation parameters are discussed in brief. In addition, the paper also outlines the open issues and highlights possible research opportunities which can be beneficial for future research

Secure data sharing in cloud and IoT by leveraging attribute-based encryption and blockchain

“Data sharing is very important to enable different types of cloud and IoT-based services. For example, organizations migrate their data to the cloud and share it with employees and customers in order to enjoy better fault-tolerance, high-availability, and scalability offered by the cloud. Wearable devices such as smart watch share user’s activity, location, and health data (e.g., heart rate, ECG) with the service provider for smart analytic. However, data can be sensitive, and the cloud and IoT service providers cannot be fully trusted with maintaining the security, privacy, and confidentiality of the data. Hence, new schemes and protocols are required to enable secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. This work outlines our research contribution towards secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. For secure data sharing in the cloud, this work proposes several novel attribute-based encryption schemes. The core contributions to this end are efficient revocation, prevention of collusion attacks, and multi-group support. On the other hand, for secure data sharing in IoT, a permissioned blockchain-based access control system has been proposed. The system can be used to enforce fine-grained access control on IoT data where the access control decision is made by the blockchain-based on the consensus of the participating nodes”--Abstract, page iv

Advancing Healthcare Security: A Cutting-Edge Zero-Trust Blockchain Solution for Protecting Electronic Health Records

The effective management of electronic health records (EHRs) is vital in healthcare. However, traditional systems often need help handling data inconsistently, providing limited access, and coordinating poorly across facilities. This study aims to tackle these issues using blockchain technology to improve EHR systems' data security, privacy, and interoperability. By thoroughly analyzing blockchain's applications in healthcare, we propose an innovative solution that leverages blockchain's decentralized and immutable nature, combined with advanced encryption techniques such as the Advanced Encryption Standard and Zero Knowledge Proof Protocol, to fortify EHR systems. Our research demonstrates that blockchain can effectively overcome significant EHR challenges, including fragmented data and interoperability problems, by facilitating secure and transparent data exchange, leading to enhanced coordination, care quality, and cost-efficiency across healthcare facilities. This study offers practical guidelines for implementing blockchain technology in healthcare, emphasizing a balanced approach to interoperability, privacy, and security. It represents a significant advancement over traditional EHR systems, boosting security and affording patients greater control over their health records. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-03-012 Full Text: PD

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

A Review of Research on Privacy Protection of Internet of Vehicles Based on Blockchain

Numerous academic and industrial fields, such as healthcare, banking, and supply chain management, are rapidly adopting and relying on blockchain technology. It has also been suggested for application in the internet of vehicles (IoV) ecosystem as a way to improve service availability and reliability. Blockchain offers decentralized, distributed and tamper-proof solutions that bring innovation to data sharing and management, but do not themselves protect privacy and data confidentiality. Therefore, solutions using blockchain technology must take user privacy concerns into account. This article reviews the proposed solutions that use blockchain technology to provide different vehicle services while overcoming the privacy leakage problem which inherently exists in blockchain and vehicle services. We analyze the key features and attributes of prior schemes and identify their contributions to provide a comprehensive and critical overview. In addition, we highlight prospective future research topics and present research problems

Blockchain Application on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential integration with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we have witnessed the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which promises to seamlessly integrate into smart transportation systems. However, the key characteristics of IoV, such as high-speed mobility and frequent disconnections make it difficult to manage its security and privacy. The Blockchain, as a distributed tamper-resistant ledge, has been proposed as an innovative solution that guarantees privacy-preserving yet secure schemes. In this paper, we review recent literature on the application of blockchain to IoV, in particular, and intelligent transportation systems in general

Conditional anonymous remote healthcare data sharing over blockchain

As an important carrier of healthcare data, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) generated from various sensors, i.e., wearable, implantable, are extremely valuable research materials for artificial intelligence and machine learning. The efficient circulation of EMRs can improve remote medical services and promote the development of the related healthcare industry. However, in traditional centralized data sharing architectures, the balance between privacy and traceability still cannot be well handled. To address the issue that malicious users cannot be locked in the fully anonymous sharing schemes, we propose a trackable anonymous remote healthcare data storing and sharing scheme over decentralized consortium blockchain. Through an “on-chain & off-chain” model, it relieves the massive data storage pressure of medical blockchain. By introducing an improved proxy re-encryption mechanism, the proposed scheme realizes the fine-gained access control of the outsourced data, and can also prevent the collusion between semi-trusted cloud servers and data requestors who try to reveal EMRs without authorization. Compared with the existing schemes, our solution can provide a lower computational overhead in repeated EMRs sharing, resulting in a more efficient overall performance

An Innovative Approach for Enhancing Cloud Data Security using Attribute based Encryption and ECC

Cloud computing is future for upcoming generations. Nowadays various companies are looking to use Cloud computing services, as it may benefit them in terms of price, reliability and unlimited storage capacity. Providing security and privacy protection for the cloud data is one of the most difficult task in recent days. One of the measures which customers can take care of is to encrypt their data before it is stored on the cloud. Recently, the attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a popular solution to achieve secure data transmission and storage in the cloud computing. In this paper, an efficient hybrid approach using attribute-based encryption scheme and ECC is proposed to enhance the security and privacy issues in cloud. Here, the proposed scheme is based on Cipher text-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) without bilinear pairing operations. In this approach, the computation-intensive bilinear pairing operation is replaced by the scalar multiplication on elliptic curves. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has good cryptographic properties, and high security level which depends in the difficulty to solve the discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves (ECDLP)