Leveraging lightweight blockchain to establish data integrity for surveillance cameras

The video footage produced by surveillance cameras is important evidence to support criminal investigations. Video evidence can be sourced from public (trusted) as well as private (untrusted) surveillance systems. This raises the issue of establishing integrity for information provided by the untrusted video sources. In this paper, we present a framework to ensure the data integrity of the stored videos, allowing authorities to validate whether video footage has not been tampered with. Our proposal uses a lightweight blockchain technology to store the video metadata as blockchain transactions to support the validation of video integrity. Our evaluations show that the overhead introduced by employing the blockchain to create the transactions introduces a minor latency of a few milliseconds

Impact of consensus on appendable-block blockchain for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a complex and dynamic system of connected devices on an unprecedented scale. Connecting everyday physical objects is creating new business models, improving processes and reducing costs and risks. Recently, blockchain technology has received a lot of attention from the community as a possible solution to overcome security issues in IoT. However, traditional blockchains (such as the ones used in Bitcoin and Ethereum) are not well suited to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and also with the large volume of information that is expected to be generated from typical IoT deployments. To overcome these issues, several researchers have presented lightweight instances of blockchains tailored for IoT. For example, proposing novel data structures based on blocks with decoupled and appendable data. However, these researchers did not discuss how the consensus algorithm would impact their solutions, i.e., the decision of which consensus algorithm would be better suited was left as an open issue. In this paper, we improved an appendable-block blockchain framework to support different consensus algorithms through a modular design. We evaluated the performance of this improved version in different emulated scenarios and studied the impact of varying the number of devices and transactions and employing different consensus algorithms. Even adopting different consensus algorithms, results indicate that the latency to append a new block is less than 161ms (in the more demanding scenario) and the delay for processing a new transaction is less than 7ms, suggesting that our improved version of the appendable-block blockchain is efficient and scalable, and thus well suited for IoT scenarios

Synthesis of Cisplatin Analogues: Cytotoxic Efficacy and Anti-tumour Activity of Bis-Amidine and Bis-Iminoether Pt(II) Complexes

A series of new platinum(Il) bis-amidine derivatives were prepared by addition of primary and secondary aliphatic amines to coordinated nitrile ligands in cis- and trans-[PtCl2(NCR)2] (R = Me, Ph, CH2Ph). The bis-amidine complexes were tested for their in vitro cytotoxicity on a panel of various human cancer cell lines. The results indicated that the trans isomers are more effective than the cis species, and in particular the benzamidine complex trans-[PtCl2{E-N(H)=C(NMe2)Ph}2] was the most active derivative and was able to circumvent acquired cisplatin resistance, thus suggesting a different mechanism of action compared to that exhibited by cisplatin. New benzyliminoether derivatives cis- and trans-[PtCl2{E-N(H)=C(OMe)CH2Ph}2] were also prepared by addition of MeOH to cis- and trans-[PtCl2(NCCH2Ph)2] and the cytotoxic properties were evaluated in terms of cell growth inhibition against a panel of different types of human cancer cell lines. The complex cis-[PtCI2{E-N(H)=C(OMe)CH2Ph}2] was significantly more potent than cisplatin against all tumour cell lines, including cisplatin-resistant ones. Moreover, the in vivo studies, performed on two transplantable tumour models, showed that cis-[PtCl2{E-N(H)=C(OMe)CH2Ph}2] exhibited a marked activity against murine L1210 leukaemia and Lewis lung carcinoma in terms of survival prolongation and tumour growth inhibition, respectively