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

An assessment of blockchain consensus protocols for the Internet of Things

In a few short years the Internet of Things has become an intrinsic part of everyday life, with connected devices included in products created for homes, cars and even medical equipment. But its rapid growth has created several security problems, with respect to the transmission and storage of vast amounts of customers data, across an insecure heterogeneous collection of networks. The Internet of Things is therefore creating a unique set of risk and problems that will affect most households. From breaches in confidentiality, which could allow users to be snooped on, through to failures in integrity, which could lead to consumer data being compromised; devices are presenting many security challenges to which consumers are ill equipped to protect themselves from. Moreover, when this is coupled with the heterogeneous nature of the industry, and the interoperable and scalability problems it becomes apparent that the Internet of Things has created an increased attack surface from which security vulnerabilities may be easily exploited. However, it has been conjectured that blockchain may provide a solution to the Internet of Things security and scalability problems. Because of blockchain’s immutability, integrity and scalability, it is possible that its architecture could be used for the storage and transfer of Internet of Things data. Within this paper a cross section of blockchain consensus protocols have been assessed against a requirement framework, to establish each consensus protocols strengths and weaknesses with respect to their potential implementation in an Internet of Things blockchain environment

Blockchain for secured IoT and D2D applications over 5G cellular networks : a thesis by publications presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer and Electronics Engineering, Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Author's Declaration: "In accordance with Sensors, SpringerOpen, and IEEE’s copyright policy, this thesis contains the accepted and published version of each manuscript as the final version. Consequently, the content is identical to the published versions."The Internet of things (IoT) is in continuous development with ever-growing popularity. It brings significant benefits through enabling humans and the physical world to interact using various technologies from small sensors to cloud computing. IoT devices and networks are appealing targets of various cyber attacks and can be hampered by malicious intervening attackers if the IoT is not appropriately protected. However, IoT security and privacy remain a major challenge due to characteristics of the IoT, such as heterogeneity, scalability, nature of the data, and operation in open environments. Moreover, many existing cloud-based solutions for IoT security rely on central remote servers over vulnerable Internet connections. The decentralized and distributed nature of blockchain technology has attracted significant attention as a suitable solution to tackle the security and privacy concerns of the IoT and device-to-device (D2D) communication. This thesis explores the possible adoption of blockchain technology to address the security and privacy challenges of the IoT under the 5G cellular system. This thesis makes four novel contributions. First, a Multi-layer Blockchain Security (MBS) model is proposed to protect IoT networks while simplifying the implementation of blockchain technology. The concept of clustering is utilized to facilitate multi-layer architecture deployment and increase scalability. The K-unknown clusters are formed within the IoT network by applying a hybrid Evolutionary Computation Algorithm using Simulated Annealing (SA) and Genetic Algorithms (GA) to structure the overlay nodes. The open-source Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) Blockchain platform is deployed for the proposed model development. Base stations adopt a global blockchain approach to communicate with each other securely. The quantitative arguments demonstrate that the proposed clustering algorithm performs well when compared to the earlier reported methods. The proposed lightweight blockchain model is also better suited to balance network latency and throughput compared to a traditional global blockchain. Next, a model is proposed to integrate IoT systems and blockchain by implementing the permissioned blockchain Hyperledger Fabric. The security of the edge computing devices is provided by employing a local authentication process. A lightweight mutual authentication and authorization solution is proposed to ensure the security of tiny IoT devices within the ecosystem. In addition, the proposed model provides traceability for the data generated by the IoT devices. The performance of the proposed model is validated with practical implementation by measuring performance metrics such as transaction throughput and latency, resource consumption, and network use. The results indicate that the proposed platform with the HLF implementation is promising for the security of resource-constrained IoT devices and is scalable for deployment in various IoT scenarios. Despite the increasing development of blockchain platforms, there is still no comprehensive method for adopting blockchain technology on IoT systems due to the blockchain's limited capability to process substantial transaction requests from a massive number of IoT devices. The Fabric comprises various components such as smart contracts, peers, endorsers, validators, committers, and Orderers. A comprehensive empirical model is proposed that measures HLF's performance and identifies potential performance bottlenecks to better meet blockchain-based IoT applications' requirements. The implementation of HLF on distributed large-scale IoT systems is proposed. The performance of the HLF is evaluated in terms of throughput, latency, network sizes, scalability, and the number of peers serviceable by the platform. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can provide a detailed and real-time performance evaluation of blockchain systems for large-scale IoT applications. The diversity and the sheer increase in the number of connected IoT devices have brought significant concerns about storing and protecting the large IoT data volume. Dependencies of the centralized server solution impose significant trust issues and make it vulnerable to security risks. A layer-based distributed data storage design and implementation of a blockchain-enabled large-scale IoT system is proposed to mitigate these challenges by using the HLF platform for distributed ledger solutions. The need for a centralized server and third-party auditor is eliminated by leveraging HLF peers who perform transaction verification and records audits in a big data system with the help of blockchain technology. The HLF blockchain facilitates storing the lightweight verification tags on the blockchain ledger. In contrast, the actual metadata is stored in the off-chain big data system to reduce the communication overheads and enhance data integrity. Finally, experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of throughput, latency, communication, and computation costs. The results indicate the feasibility of the proposed solution to retrieve and store the provenance of large-scale IoT data within the big data ecosystem using the HLF blockchain

Data trust framework using blockchain and smart contracts

Lack of trust is the main barrier preventing more widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent and reliable infrastructure for data sharing prevents many data owners from sharing their data. Data trust is a paradigm that facilitates data sharing by forcing data controllers to be transparent about the process of sharing and reusing data. Blockchain technology has the potential to present the essential properties for creating a practical and secure data trust framework by transforming current auditing practices and automatic enforcement of smart contracts logic without relying on intermediaries to establish trust. Blockchain holds an enormous potential to remove the barriers of traditional centralized applications and propose a distributed and transparent administration by employing the involved parties to maintain consensus on the ledger. Furthermore, smart contracts are a programmable component that provides blockchain with more flexible and powerful capabilities. Recent advances in blockchain platforms toward smart contracts' development have revealed the possibility of implementing blockchain-based applications in various domains, such as health care, supply chain and digital identity. This dissertation investigates the blockchain's potential to present a framework for data trust. It starts with a comprehensive study of smart contracts as the main component of blockchain for developing decentralized data trust. Interrelated, three decentralized applications that address data sharing and access control problems in various fields, including healthcare data sharing, business process, and physical access control system, have been developed and examined. In addition, a general-purpose application based on an attribute-based access control model is proposed that can provide trusted auditability required for data sharing and access control systems and, ultimately, a data trust framework. Besides auditing, the system presents a transparency level that both access requesters (data users) and resource owners (data controllers) can benefit from. The proposed solutions have been validated through a use case of independent digital libraries. It also provides a detailed performance analysis of the system implementation. The performance results have been compared based on different consensus mechanisms and databases, indicating the system's high throughput and low latency. Finally, this dissertation presents an end-to-end data trust framework based on blockchain technology. The proposed framework promotes data trustworthiness by assessing input datasets, effectively managing access control, and presenting data provenance and activity monitoring. A trust assessment model that examines the trustworthiness of input data sets and calculates the trust value is presented. The number of transaction validators is defined adaptively with the trust value. This research provides solutions for both data owners and data users’ by ensuring the trustworthiness and quality of the data at origin and transparent and secure usage of the data at the end. A comprehensive experimental study indicates the presented system effectively handles a large number of transactions with low latency