17 research outputs found
A Consent Model for Blockchain-based Distributed Data Sharing Platforms
In modern healthcare systems, being able to share electronic health records
is crucial for providing quality care and for enabling a larger spectrum of
health services. Health data sharing is dependent on obtaining individual
consent which, in turn, is hindered by a lack of resources. To this extend,
blockchain-based platforms facilitate data sharing by inherently creating a
trusted distributed network of users. These users are enabled to share their
data without depending on the time and resources of specific players (such as
the health services). In blockchain-based platforms, data governance mechanisms
become very important due to the need to specify and monitor data sharing and
data use conditions. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based data sharing
consent model for access control over individual health data. We use smart
contracts to dynamically represent the individual consent over health data and
to enable data requesters to search and access them. The dynamic consent model
extends upon two ontologies: the Data Use Ontology (DUO) which models the
individual consent of users and the Automatable Discovery and Access Matrix
(ADA-M) which describes queries from data requesters. We deploy the model on
Ethereum blockchain and evaluate different data sharing scenarios. The
contribution of this paper is to create an individual consent model for health
data sharing platforms. Such a model guarantees that individual consent is
respected and that there is accountability for all the participants in the data
sharing platform. The evaluation of our solution indicates that such a data
sharing model provides a flexible approach to decide how the data is used by
data requesters. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed model is
efficient and adapts to personalized access control policies in data sharing
Optimal Witnessing of Healthcare IoT Data Using Blockchain Logging Contract
Verification of data generated by wearable sensors is increasingly becoming
of concern to health service providers and insurance companies. There is a need
for a verification framework that various authorities can request a
verification service for the local network data of a target IoT device. In this
paper, we leverage blockchain as a distributed platform to realize an on-demand
verification scheme. This allows authorities to automatically transact with
connected devices for witnessing services. A public request is made for witness
statements on the data of a target IoT that is transmitted on its local
network, and subsequently, devices (in close vicinity of the target IoT) offer
witnessing service.
Our contributions are threefold: (1) We develop a system architecture based
on blockchain and smart contract that enables authorities to dynamically avail
a verification service for data of a subject device from a distributed set of
witnesses which are willing to provide (in a privacy-preserving manner) their
local wireless measurement in exchange of monetary return; (2) We then develop
a method to optimally select witnesses in such a way that the verification
error is minimized subject to monetary cost constraints; (3) Lastly, we
evaluate the efficacy of our scheme using real Wi-Fi session traces collected
from a five-storeyed building with more than thirty access points,
representative of a hospital. According to the current pricing schedule of the
Ethereum public blockchain, our scheme enables healthcare authorities to verify
data transmitted from a typical wearable device with the verification error of
the order 0.01% at cost of less than two dollars for one-hour witnessing
service.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure
Overcoming the Blockchain Oracle Problem in the Traceability of Non-Fungible Products
Blockchain implications within the sustainability domain are rapidly arousing the interest of researchers and institutions. However, despite the avalanche of articles, papers, and recently published books, innovation in the blockchain domain is still heavily influenced by light literature, such as news, articles, opinion posts, and white papers. Lacking a homogeneous literature background, case studies often fall into storytelling, providing mere descriptions of the facts according to the writers\u2019 impressions and opinions. We therefore investigate blockchain adoption for sustainable purposes through a case study while remaining firmly grounded in three main theoretical literature streams: knowledge management, knowledge infrastructure, and trust. Since blockchain interaction with the real world is managed by oracles, addressing the oracle problem is essential in order to evaluate the effectiveness of blockchain for sustainability issues. However, to the best of the authors\u2019 knowledge, no other paper has effciently addressed this subject or even mentioned it. Recognizing its scarce consideration in the literature, the oracle problem will be analyzed in both theoretical and practical terms, thereby providing a way to solve the issues related to non-fungible products in the supply chain. Choice over the selected case study was made in light of the divergence in motives for the adoption of blockchain (economic over social), which makes the results more inferable at a broader scale and offers an insight into how sustainable innovations can also be economically viabl
An acquisition, curation and management workflow for sustainable, terabyte-scale marine image analysis
Optical imaging is a common technique in ocean research. Diving robots, towed cameras, drop-cameras and TV-guided sampling gear: all produce image data of the underwater environment. Technological advances like 4K cameras, autonomous robots, high-capacity batteries and LED lighting now allow systematic optical monitoring at large spatial scale and shorter time but with increased data volume and velocity. Volume and velocity are further increased by growing fleets and emerging swarms of autonomous vehicles creating big data sets in parallel. This generates a need for automated data processing to harvest maximum information. Systematic data analysis benefits from calibrated, geo-referenced data with clear metadata description, particularly for machine vision and machine learning. Hence, the expensive data acquisition must be documented, data should be curated as soon as possible, backed up and made publicly available. Here, we present a workflow towards sustainable marine image analysis. We describe guidelines for data acquisition, curation and management and apply it to the use case of a multi-terabyte deep-sea data set acquired by an autonomous underwater vehicle
Security Services Using Blockchains: A State of the Art Survey
This article surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy and access control list (ACL), data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources along with their ownership and utilization over the network. Integrity helps in verifying that the data has not been modified or altered. These services are currently managed by centralized controllers, for example, a certificate authority. Therefore, the services are prone to attacks on the centralized controller. On the other hand, blockchain is a secured and distributed ledger that can help resolve many of the problems with centralization. The objectives of this paper are to give insights on the use of security services for current applications, to highlight the state of the art techniques that are currently used to provide these services, to describe their challenges, and to discuss how the blockchain technology can resolve these challenges. Further, several blockchain-based approaches providing such security services are compared thoroughly. Challenges associated with using blockchain-based security services are also discussed to spur further research in this area