•A novel scheme is proposed for IoT-based healthcare systems to generate and maintain medical certificates.•The proposed blockchain system ensures the security of medical certificates.•In the ...proposed scheme, the Merkle root hash of the medical certificate is maintained with a unique transaction identity.•Experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed scheme over the existing schemes.
Nowadays, blockchain technology is one of the advanced technologies to ensure the security of users’ sensitive or confidential data. Blockchain technology plays a vital role in various applications like artificial intelligence, supply chain, cloud computing, the healthcare sector, and many more. It helps the healthcare domain to get benefitted from its many advanced features, such as confidentiality, decentralization, security, and privacy. Also, the Internet of Things (IoT) devices connect with the healthcare systems, and the healthcare sector application software further communicates with the IT industry. The blockchain-based IoT systems have significantly impacted the healthcare sector by enhancing security, privacy, transparency, and efficiency, providing better business opportunities. Moreover, traditional healthcare systems face severe security and privacy problems, such as phishing, masquerades, identity theft, and many others. Thus, a secure blockchain-based Proposed Application (PA) is designed to generate, maintain, and validate healthcare certificates. The PA acts as a communication medium between the backend blockchain network and application entities like hospitals, patients, doctors, and IoT devices to create and verify medical certificates. It also ensures various security features, namely confidentiality, authentication, and access control, using the concept of smart contracts. The comparative and performance analysis of the proposed work shows that it provides a more effective solution than the existing schemes.
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A number of promising blockchain scalability technologies such as Rollups, facilitate the fast and cost-effective asset transfer by offloading transactions from a mainchain to sidechains. The ...proposed broker-based decentralized application (dApp) in this paper, named BrokerFi, also employs a sidechain approach that works as a Layer2 solution on top of a Layer1 blockchain. Comparing with conventional sidechain solutions, the distinct feature of BrokerFi is that the sidechain used in BrokerFi is a sharded blockchain, in which users can stably earn money without economic risks when they stake money to BrokerFi.BrokerFi is designed as a dApp that can offer functionalities to enable users to manage their digital assets and earn money if they join BrokerFi's ecology. Users can change the native tokens issued by BrokerFi using their fiat money. Users can also choose to stake their money in the protocol of BrokerFi and earn profit. We mainly demonstrate the design of BrokerFi in this paper. The significant components of BrokerFi mainly include two parts, i.e., the frontend used by users, and the backend that provides fundamental functionalities for BrokerFi in a Layer2-like sidechain. Experiment results show that the proposed BrokerFi can help clients earn high revenue when their staked tokens follow a low variance.
Blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention in both academia and capital market. However, overwhelming speculations on thousands of available cryptocurrencies and numerous initial coin ...offering scams have also brought notorious debates on this emerging technology. This paper traces the development of blockchain systems to reveal the importance of decentralized applications (dApps) and the future value of blockchain. We survey the state-of-the-art dApps and discuss the direction of blockchain development to fulfill the desirable characteristics of dApps. The readers will gain an overview of dApp research and get familiar with recent developments in the blockchain.
•EtherTwin, a blockchain-based Decentralized Application (DApp) for secure information management of Industry 4.0 assets using Digital Twins.•Secure information management, ensuring confidentiality ...through fine-grained access control and encryption, as well as providing integrity and availability based on the blockchain.•Quantitative and qualitative evaluation including performance/cost measurements as well as a real-world industry use case and expert interviews.•Full-featured open source prototype EtherTwin based on blockchain design patterns and state-of-the-art DApp technologies (Ethereum, Swarm).
Digital Twins are complex digital representations of assets that are used by a variety of organizations across the Industry 4.0 value chain. As the digitization of industrial processes advances, Digital Twins will become widespread. As a result, there is a need to develop new secure data sharing models for a complex ecosystem of interacting Digital Twins and lifecycle parties. Decentralized Applications are uniquely suited to address these sharing challenges while ensuring availability, integrity and confidentiality. They rely on distributed ledgers and decentralized databases for data storage and processing, avoiding single points of trust. To tackle the need for decentralized sharing of Digital Twin data, this work proposes an owner-centric decentralized sharing model. A formal access control model addresses integrity and confidentiality aspects based on Digital Twin components and lifecycle requirements. With our prototypical implementation EtherTwin we show how to overcome the numerous implementation challenges associated with fully decentralized data sharing, enabling management of Digital Twin components and their associated information. For validation, the prototype is evaluated based on an industry use case and semi-structured expert interviews.
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The Metaverse relies on advanced machine learning (ML) techniques to facilitate the seamless mapping between the virtual and physical realms. ML-based technologies also enable metaverse service ...providers (MSPs) to offer a diverse range of intelligent virtual services to metaverse users (MUs). However, it can be challenging for MSPs to collect sufficient metaverse data to train ML models by themselves. As a result, MSPs can be interested in seeking contributions from MUs in both ML data and models. To address these challenges, we propose MetaAICM, a blockchain-based framework that empowers the metaverse through two key components. Firstly, it incorporates a distributed crowdsourcing system that allows MSPs to gather metaverse data and ML models from MUs. Secondly, it features a decentralized marketplace, enabling MUs to proactively collect data and train ML models for sale using their metaverse devices and computing resources. MetaAICM leverages blockchain and smart contracts to achieve decentralization, ensuring security and privacy without relying on a trusted third-party authority or additional trust assumptions between MUs and MSPs. Numerical studies show that MetaAICM offers high processing performance and cost efficiency, while the framework is implemented on top of a consortium blockchain to show its feasibility.
Web3 is leading a wave of the next generation of web services that even many Web2 applications are keen to ride. However, the lack of Web3 background for Web2 developers hinders easy and effective ...access and transition. On the other hand, Web3 applications desire encouragement and advertisement from conventional Web2 companies and projects due to their low market shares. In this article, we propose a seamless transition framework that transits Web2 to Web3, named WEBTTCOM WEBTTCOM stands for Web2 (two)-Web3 (three) Communicator, after exploring the connotation of Web3 and the key differences betweenWeb2 andWeb3 applications.We also provide a full-stack implementation as a use case to support the proposed framework, followed by performance evaluation and surveys with ~1000 participants that show ~80% positive and ~20% neutral responses. We confirm that the proposed framework WEBTTCOM addresses the defined research question, and the implementation well satisfies the framework WEBTTCOM in terms of strong necessity, usability , and completeness based on the survey results.
In the current age of digital world with the emergence of metaverse, digital assets are increasingly recognized and become more and more valuable. Unlike real-world assets, managing digital contents ...is more challenging since their associated information might be leaked widely on the Internet, making them worthless. Traditional digital asset management (DAM) systems based on third-party authorities and centralized databases have various weaknesses, threatening the benefits of stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based DAM framework utilizing smart contract, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and multi-layer encryption mechanisms for access control of digital assets in the metaverse. Our proposed design eliminates the intervention of intermediaries and offers a wide range of advanced security features such as resistance against data leakage and data alteration without trust assumptions among participants. Besides, key features of blockchain are leveraged to provide the system with immutability, traceability and transparency of information. To prove the feasibility of our design, we build a Decentralized Application (DApp) operating as a marketplace for digital assets using the proposed DAM framework. Experimental results indicate that the framework is more cost-effective than existing platforms, while advanced security features are integrated and automation is maximized.
Crowdsourcing has attracted widespread attention in recent years and developed into various applications. An indispensable service of crowdsourcing systems is task recommendation, which means tasks ...should be accurately recommended to the workers with aligned interests. However, existing systems rely on their separate servers to conduct recommendation services, resulting in computing resources locked inside each isolated system. Moreover, due to the wide attacking surfaces of traditional centralized servers setting, existing systems are subject to single points of failure or malicious data breaches. Therefore, failure to address these inherent limitations properly will hinder the wide adoption of crowdsourcing. In this article, we propose and implement FedCrowd, the first federated and privacy-preserving crowdsourcing platform by using blockchain technology. Our main idea is to employ the smart contract as a trusted platform for systems to release encrypted tasks, and carefully craft matching protocols to enable efficient task recommendations in the ciphertext domain. Our task-matching protocols are highly customized for the decentralized settings, where users can securely perform keyword and range-based queries over federated task indexes without sharing secret keys. We formally analyze the security strengths and complete the prototype implementation on Ethereum. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the FedCrowd platform.
One of the major challenges the university faces is to provide real-time verification of their student's degree certification upon request by other parties. Conventional verification systems are ...typically costly, time-consuming and bureaucratic against certificate credential misconduct. In addition, the forgery of graduation degree certificates has become more efficient due to easy-to-use scanning, editing, and printing technologies. Therefore, this research proposes verifying Ph.D. certificates using QR codes on the Ethereum blockchain to address certificate verification challenges. Blockchain technology ensures tamper-proof and decentralized management of degree certificates as the certificates stored on the blockchain are replicated across the network. The issuance of certificates requires the use of the issuer's private key, thus preventing forgery. The system was developed using Solidity for the smart contract, PHP, HTML/CSS for the web-based implementation, and MetaMask for blockchain integration. User testing confirmed the successful implementation and functionality of the system. Users can add, update, and delete certificates, generate and scan QR codes, and receive instant verification feedback. The verification system effectively meets all requirements, providing a robust solution for validating Ph.D. certificates. Future research may focus on scalability and adoption, privacy and data protection, user experience, and integration with existing systems. Other researchers can optimize the verification system for widespread adoption and utilization by exploring these areas. This research contributes to securing and efficiently verifying academic certificates using QR codes on the Ethereum blockchain. Ultimately, this work advances the field of certificate verification and promotes trust in academic credentials.
Wallet applications play a crucial role in securely storing users’ private keys needed to interact with the blockchain, while decentralized applications (DApps) take profit of blockchain technologies ...to create transparent, tamper-proof environments without the need for trust relationships. As DApps need private keys to interact with the blockchain, the secure interconnection of these applications is vital yet still challenging. This article introduces DA2Wa, a protocol designed to establish a secure pairing between a cryptocurrency wallet and a DApp, both of which run as isolated applications on the same machine. The protocol utilizes a six-character PIN exchange mechanism, delivering a security level equivalent to that of Bluetooth. To demonstrate the security of DA2Wa, we employ Tamarin Prover, a tool for symbolically modelling and analysing security protocols.
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