13,570 research outputs found
Tree-Chain: A Fast Lightweight Consensus Algorithm for IoT Applications
Blockchain has received tremendous attention in non-monetary applications
including the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its salient features including
decentralization, security, auditability, and anonymity. Most conventional
blockchains rely on computationally expensive consensus algorithms, have
limited throughput, and high transaction delays. In this paper, we propose
tree-chain a scalable fast blockchain instantiation that introduces two levels
of randomization among the validators: i) transaction level where the validator
of each transaction is selected randomly based on the most significant
characters of the hash function output (known as consensus code), and ii)
blockchain level where validator is randomly allocated to a particular
consensus code based on the hash of their public key. Tree-chain introduces
parallel chain branches where each validator commits the corresponding
transactions in a unique ledger. Implementation results show that tree-chain is
runnable on low resource devices and incurs low processing overhead, achieving
near real-time transaction settlement
Merlin: A Language for Provisioning Network Resources
This paper presents Merlin, a new framework for managing resources in
software-defined networks. With Merlin, administrators express high-level
policies using programs in a declarative language. The language includes
logical predicates to identify sets of packets, regular expressions to encode
forwarding paths, and arithmetic formulas to specify bandwidth constraints. The
Merlin compiler uses a combination of advanced techniques to translate these
policies into code that can be executed on network elements including a
constraint solver that allocates bandwidth using parameterizable heuristics. To
facilitate dynamic adaptation, Merlin provides mechanisms for delegating
control of sub-policies and for verifying that modifications made to
sub-policies do not violate global constraints. Experiments demonstrate the
expressiveness and scalability of Merlin on real-world topologies and
applications. Overall, Merlin simplifies network administration by providing
high-level abstractions for specifying network policies and scalable
infrastructure for enforcing them
MOF-BC: A Memory Optimized and Flexible BlockChain for Large Scale Networks
BlockChain (BC) immutability ensures BC resilience against modification or
removal of the stored data. In large scale networks like the Internet of Things
(IoT), however, this feature significantly increases BC storage size and raises
privacy challenges. In this paper, we propose a Memory Optimized and Flexible
BC (MOF-BC) that enables the IoT users and service providers to remove or
summarize their transactions and age their data and to exercise the "right to
be forgotten". To increase privacy, a user may employ multiple keys for
different transactions. To allow for the removal of stored transactions, all
keys would need to be stored which complicates key management and storage.
MOF-BC introduces the notion of a Generator Verifier (GV) which is a signed
hash of a Generator Verifier Secret (GVS). The GV changes for each transaction
to provide privacy yet is signed by a unique key, thus minimizing the
information that needs to be stored. A flexible transaction fee model and a
reward mechanism is proposed to incentivize users to participate in optimizing
memory consumption. Qualitative security and privacy analysis demonstrates that
MOF-BC is resilient against several security attacks. Evaluation results show
that MOF-BC decreases BC memory consumption by up to 25\% and the user cost by
more than two orders of magnitude compared to conventional BC instantiations
Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private
information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers.
Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the
transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency.
This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data
management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our
perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for
EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We
propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care.
In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our
framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and
fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly
reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical
care, and reduce the overall costComment: AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium Proceeding
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