Priority evaluation factors for blockchain application services in public sectors.

Blockchain is rapidly becoming established as the core technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. By combining blockchain to improve processes in existing industries, innovative new services will emerge, but services not effectively applied by blockchain will also develop. This study investigated the factors to be considered when applying the characteristics of blockchain technology to business. We developed a framework of blockchain service utility evaluation indexes using the analytic hierarchy process method. The Delphi method is used to identify highly effective blockchain application service cases by applying the evaluation framework to actual use cases in the public sector. By proposing a framework of utility evaluation factors for blockchain application services, this study provides a systematic foundation for blockchain business review. We address the question of "why blockchain should be applied to this service" by providing a more comprehensive approach than existing research, such as a fragmentary decision tree. Blockchains are expected to become more active along with the full-scale digital transformation of industries, and thus, we must examine the ways to broadly use blockchain as a base technology in a form applicable to the diverse industries and societies constituting the digital economy. Accordingly, this study presents an evaluation solution for promoting efficient policies and developing successful blockchain application services.

Adoption, implementation, definitions, and future of blockchain technology in ophthalmology.

In this era of cutting-edge research and digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly penetrated all subspecialties, including ophthalmology. Managing AI data and analytics is cumbersome, and implementing blockchain technology has made this task less challenging. Blockchain technology is an advanced mechanism with a robust database that allows the unambiguous sharing of widespread information within a business model or network. The data is stored in blocks that are linked together in chains. Since its inception in 2008, blockchain technology has grown over the years, and its novel use in ophthalmology has been less well documented. This section on current ophthalmology discusses the novel use and future of blockchain technology for intraocular lens power calculation and refractive surgery workup, ophthalmic genetics, payment methods, international data documentation, retinal images, global myopia pandemic, virtual pharmacy, and drug compliance and treatment. The authors have also provided valuable insights into various terminologies and definitions used in blockchain technology.

A Taxonomic Hierarchy of Blockchain Consensus Algorithms: An Evolutionary Phylogeny Approach.

Countless endeavors have been undertaken to address the Byzantine Generals Problem, a generalization of the Two Generals Problem. The emergence of proof of work (PoW) for Bitcoin has led to various consensus algorithms diverging, and comparable existing consensus algorithms are being gradually utilized interchangeably, or only developed for each specific application domain. Our approach employs an evolutionary phylogeny method to classify blockchain consensus algorithms based on their historical development and current usage. To demonstrate the relatedness and lineage of distinct algorithms, as well as to support the recapitulation theory, which posits that the evolutionary history of its mainnets is mirrored in the development of an individual consensus algorithm, we present a taxonomy. We have created a comprehensive classification of past and present consensus algorithms that serves to organize this swift consensus algorithm evolution period. By recognizing similarities, we have compiled a list of different verified consensus algorithms and performed clustering on over 38 of these. Our new taxonomic tree presents five taxonomic ranks, including the evolutionary process and decision-making method, as a technique for analyzing correlation. Through the examination of the evolution and utilization of these algorithms, we have developed a systematic and hierarchical taxonomy that enables the grouping of consensus algorithms into distinct categories. The proposed method classifies various consensus algorithms according to taxonomic ranks and aims to reveal the direction of research on the application of blockchain consensus algorithms for each domain.

DRLBTS: deep reinforcement learning-aware blockchain-based healthcare system.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is the new paradigm to perform different healthcare  applications with different services in daily life. Healthcare applications based on IIoT paradigm are widely used to track patients health status using remote healthcare technologies. Complex biomedical sensors exploit wireless technologies, and remote services in terms of industrial workflow applications to perform different healthcare tasks, such as like heartbeat, blood pressure and others. However, existing industrial healthcare technoloiges still has to deal with many problems, such as security, task scheduling, and the cost of processing tasks in IIoT based healthcare paradigms. This paper proposes a new solution to the above-mentioned issues and presents the deep reinforcement learning-aware blockchain-based task scheduling (DRLBTS) algorithm framework with different goals. DRLBTS provides security and makespan efficient scheduling for the healthcare applications. Then, it shares secure and valid data between connected network nodes after the initial assignment and data validation. Statistical results show that DRLBTS is adaptive and meets the security, privacy, and makespan requirements of healthcare applications in the distributed network.

Examining public views on decentralised health data sharing.

In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the use of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), also known as blockchain, in health data sharing contexts. However, there is a significant lack of research that examines public attitudes towards the use of this technology. In this paper, we begin to address this issue and present results from a series of focus groups which explored public views and concerns about engaging with new models of personal health data sharing in the UK. We found that participants were broadly in favour of a shift towards new decentralised models of data sharing. Retaining 'proof' of health information stored about patients and the capacity to provide permanent audit trails, enabled by immutable and transparent properties of DLT, were regarded as particularly valuable for our participants and prospective data custodians. Participants also identified other potential benefits such as supporting people to become more health data literate and enabling patients to make informed decisions about how their data was shared and with whom. However, participants also voiced concerns about the potential to further exacerbate existing health and digital inequalities. Participants were also apprehensive about the removal of intermediaries in the design of personal health informatics systems.

Implementation of Blockchain Technology Could Increase Equity and Transparency in Organ Transplantation: A Narrative Review of an Emergent Tool.

In the last few years, innovative technology and health care digitalization played a major role in all medical fields and a great effort worldwide to manage this large amount of data, in terms of security and digital privacy has been made by different national health systems. Blockchain technology, a peer-to-peer distributed database without centralized authority, initially applied to Bitcoin protocol, soon gained popularity, thanks to its distributed immutable nature in several non-medical fields. Therefore, the aim of the present review (PROSPERO N° CRD42022316661) is to establish a putative future role of blockchain and distribution ledger technology (DLT) in the organ transplantation field and its role to overcome inequalities. Preoperative assessment of the deceased donor, supranational crossover programs with the international waitlist databases, and reduction of black-market donations and counterfeit drugs are some of the possible applications of DLT, thanks to its distributed, efficient, secure, trackable, and immutable nature to reduce inequalities and discrimination.

P-PBFT: An improved blockchain algorithm to support large-scale pharmaceutical traceability.

To solve the problems of high latency, high system overhead, and small supported scale in the current application of pharmaceutical traceability combined with blockchain technology, an algorithm called Pharmaceutical-Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (P-PBFT) based on PBFT, grouping, and credit voting is proposed. The algorithm combines the characteristics of a pharmaceutical supply chain, optimizes the consistency protocol in the original algorithm, divides large-scale network nodes into different consensus sets by response speed, and performs grouping consensus. The algorithm's credit model and voting mechanism dynamically updates user status according to the behavior of nodes in consensus, evaluates the reliability of users, and also serves as a basis for electing management nodes. Experimental results show that the improved P-PBFT consensus algorithm provides smaller latency and higher throughput for pharmaceutical traceability systems, supports larger-scale traceability, effectively alleviates the dramatic increase in communication among network nodes, and reduces the influence of malicious nodes.

Increasing the security and traceability of biological samples in biobanks by blockchain technology.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: One of the main tasks in a biobank consists in storing biological samples in a high-quality condition in order to future research. At moment, there exist many applications to manage a biobank. However, in general, these are web-based applications. In these web-based applications different tasks can be done. Among them, it is possible to remark the following: informed consent, confidentiality, non-profit, respect for quality and safety standards, including traceability of samples. In this paper, we describe a blockchain smart contract to ensure the traceability of the processes done in a biobank meaning a step forward to guarantee this traceability. METHODS: Use of blockchain technology to improve security, integrity and traceability of the processes carried out in a biobank. In particular IBM Hyperledger Fabric. RESULTS: As a result, a set of smart contracts have been developed describing the biobank processes. CONCLUSIONS: Improvement of the security, integrity, and traceability of samples in biobanks.

Post quantum blockchain architecture for internet of things over NTRU lattice.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, the hottest frontier technologies in recent years, are expected to lead the next technological revolution. Blockchain promises to solve the current challenges encountered by the IoT. However, most of the proposed blockchain-based IoT architectures, which are based on discrete logarithm or large integer factorization problems, are susceptible to quantum attacks. Several quantum-resistant blockchain schemes have recently been proposed. However, the efficiency of their construction or the equipment required is not satisfactory. In this paper, to construct a more efficient postquantum blockchain infrastructure, we propose blockchain architecture for the IoT over the NTRU lattice and provide a cryptographic security proof of the scheme. Attributed to the more efficient underlying lattice structure, our scheme has excellent performance when compared to the existing quantum-resistant blockchain scheme, and we reduce the transaction size from hundreds of megabytes to several kilobytes. To further improve the blockchain's performance, we present the general framework of segregated witnesses and aggregate signatures over the NTRU lattice. Our scheme promises a blockchain solution for resource-constrained environments.

Federated blockchain system (FBS) for the healthcare industry.

Blockchain is a distributed technology that introduced the well known Bitcoin cryptocurrency into action. Blockchain has been considered for research by many countries and industries. It is being applied in many fields such as the healthcare domain. Many companies started using Blockchain to increase the security and privacy of the Electronic Healthcare Records for their patients. The work in this paper discusses some existing healthcare problems and challenges. In addition, the paper reviews some related work models and provides a comparison that shows their objectives and limitations. Also, a proposed Federated Blockchain System (FBS) is introduced to provide solutions for these healthcare problems and elaborates the technical details of the system architecture. Moreover, the effectiveness of the system has been validated which showed an average of 68-100 ms for performing query operations and average of 0.944-19.041 s for performing writing operations on the system. Finally, a discussion of the system validation and future work are presented.

A Decentralized Marketplace for Patient-Generated Health Data: Design Science Approach.

BACKGROUND: Wearable devices have limited ability to store and process such data. Currently, individual users or data aggregators are unable to monetize or contribute such data to wider analytics use cases. When combined with clinical health data, such data can improve the predictive power of data-driven analytics and can proffer many benefits to improve the quality of care. We propose and provide a marketplace mechanism to make these data available while benefiting data providers. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to propose the concept of a decentralized marketplace for patient-generated health data that can improve provenance, data accuracy, security, and privacy. Using a proof-of-concept prototype with an interplanetary file system (IPFS) and Ethereum smart contracts, we aimed to demonstrate decentralized marketplace functionality with the blockchain. We also aimed to illustrate and demonstrate the benefits of such a marketplace. METHODS: We used a design science research methodology to define and prototype our decentralized marketplace and used the Ethereum blockchain, solidity smart-contract programming language, the web3.js library, and node.js with the MetaMask application to prototype our system. RESULTS: We designed and implemented a prototype of a decentralized health care marketplace catering to health data. We used an IPFS to store data, provide an encryption scheme for the data, and provide smart contracts to communicate with users on the Ethereum blockchain. We met the design goals we set out to accomplish in this study. CONCLUSIONS: A decentralized marketplace for trading patient-generated health data can be created using smart-contract technology and IPFS-based data storage. Such a marketplace can improve quality, availability, and provenance and satisfy data privacy, access, auditability, and security needs for such data when compared with centralized systems.

Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Systems, Interoperability Model in a Pharmaceutical Case Study.

The main purpose of supply chain systems based on blockchain technology is to take advantage of technology innovations to ensure that a tracked asset's audit trail is immutable. However, the challenge lies in tracking the asset among different blockchain-based supply chain systems. The model proposed in this paper has been designed to overcome the identified challenges. Specifically, the proposed model enables: (1) the asset to be tracked among different blockchain-based supply-chain systems; (2) the tracked asset's supply chain to be cryptographically verified; (3) a tracked asset to be defined in a standardized format; and (4) a tracked asset to be described with several different standardized formats. Thus, the model provides a great advantage in terms of interoperability between different blockchain-driven supply chains over other models in the literature, which will need to replicate the information in each blockchain platform they operate with, while giving flexibility to the platforms that make use of it and maintain the scalability of those logistic platforms. This work aims to examine the application of the proposed model from an operational point of view, in a scenario within the pharmaceutical sector.

Metaverse in Healthcare Integrated with Explainable AI and Blockchain: Enabling Immersiveness, Ensuring Trust, and Providing Patient Data Security.

Digitization and automation have always had an immense impact on healthcare. It embraces every new and advanced technology. Recently the world has witnessed the prominence of the metaverse which is an emerging technology in digital space. The metaverse has huge potential to provide a plethora of health services seamlessly to patients and medical professionals with an immersive experience. This paper proposes the amalgamation of artificial intelligence and blockchain in the metaverse to provide better, faster, and more secure healthcare facilities in digital space with a realistic experience. Our proposed architecture can be summarized as follows. It consists of three environments, namely the doctor's environment, the patient's environment, and the metaverse environment. The doctors and patients interact in a metaverse environment assisted by blockchain technology which ensures the safety, security, and privacy of data. The metaverse environment is the main part of our proposed architecture. The doctors, patients, and nurses enter this environment by registering on the blockchain and they are represented by avatars in the metaverse environment. All the consultation activities between the doctor and the patient will be recorded and the data, i.e., images, speech, text, videos, clinical data, etc., will be gathered, transferred, and stored on the blockchain. These data are used for disease prediction and diagnosis by explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) models. The GradCAM and LIME approaches of XAI provide logical reasoning for the prediction of diseases and ensure trust, explainability, interpretability, and transparency regarding the diagnosis and prediction of diseases. Blockchain technology provides data security for patients while enabling transparency, traceability, and immutability regarding their data. These features of blockchain ensure trust among the patients regarding their data. Consequently, this proposed architecture ensures transparency and trust regarding both the diagnosis of diseases and the data security of the patient. We also explored the building block technologies of the metaverse. Furthermore, we also investigated the advantages and challenges of a metaverse in healthcare.

Performance Evaluation and Cyberattack Mitigation in a Blockchain-Enabled Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Framework.

With the electric power grid experiencing a rapid shift to the smart grid paradigm over a deregulated energy market, Internet of Things (IoT)-based solutions are gaining prominence, and innovative peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading at a micro level is being deployed. Such advancement, however, leaves traditional security models vulnerable and paves the path for blockchain, a distributed ledger technology (DLT), with its decentralized, open, and transparency characteristics as a viable alternative. However, due to deregulation in energy trading markets, most of the prototype resilience regarding cybersecurity attack, performance and scalability of transaction broadcasting, and its direct impact on overall performances and attacks are required to be supported, which becomes a performance bottleneck with existing blockchain solutions such as Hyperledger, Ethereum, and so on. In this paper, we design a novel permissioned Corda framework for P2P energy trading peers that not only mitigates a new class of cyberattacks, i.e., delay trading (or discard), but also disseminates the transactions in a optimized propagation time, resulting in a fair transaction distribution. Sharing transactions in a permissioned R3 Corda blockchain framework is handled by the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and transport layer security (TLS). The unique contribution of this paper lies in the use of an optimized CPU and JVM heap memory scenario analysis with P2P metric in addition to a far more realistic multihosted testbed for the performance analysis. The average latencies measured are 22 ms and 51 ms for sending and receiving messages. We compare the throughput by varying different types of flow such as energy request, request + pay, transfer, multiple notary, sender, receiver, and single notary. In the proposed framework, request is an energy asset that is based on payment state and contract in the P2P energy trading module, so in request flow, only one node with no notary appears on the vault of the node.Energy request + pay flow interaction deals with two nodes, such as producer and consumer, to deal with request and transfer of asset ownership with the help of a notary. Request + repeated pay flow request, on node A and repeatedly transfers a fraction of energy asset state to another node, B, through a notary.

Leveraging Blockchain Technology for Ensuring Security and Privacy Aspects in Internet of Things: A Systematic Literature Review.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) concept materialized worldwide in complex ecosystems, the related data security and privacy issues became apparent. While the system elements and their communication paths could be protected individually, generic, ecosystem-wide approaches were sought after as well. On a parallel timeline to IoT, the concept of distributed ledgers and blockchains came into the technological limelight. Blockchains offer many advantageous features in relation to enhanced security, anonymity, increased capacity, and peer-to-peer capabilities. Although blockchain technology can provide IoT with effective and efficient solutions, there are many challenges related to various aspects of integrating these technologies. While security, anonymity/data privacy, and smart contract-related features are apparently advantageous for blockchain technologies (BCT), there are challenges in relation to storage capacity/scalability, resource utilization, transaction rate scalability, predictability, and legal issues. This paper provides a systematic review on state-of-the-art approaches of BCT and IoT integration, specifically in order to solve certain security- and privacy-related issues. The paper first provides a brief overview of BCT and IoT's basic principles, including their architecture, protocols and consensus algorithms, characteristics, and the challenges of integrating them. Afterwards, it describes the survey methodology, including the search strategy, eligibility criteria, selection results, and characteristics of the included articles. Later, we highlight the findings of this study which illustrates different works that addressed the integration of blockchain technology and IoT to tackle various aspects of privacy and security, which are followed by a categorization of applications that have been investigated with different characteristics, such as their primary information, objective, development level, target application, type of blockchain and platform, consensus algorithm, evaluation environment and metrics, future works or open issues (if any), and further notes for consideration. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of all articles is included from an architectural and operational perspective. Finally, we cover major gaps and future considerations that can be taken into account when integrating blockchain technology with IoT.

A security testing mechanism for detecting attacks in distributed software applications using blockchain.

Distributed software applications are one of the most important applications currently used. Rising demand has led to a rapid increase in the number and complexity of distributed software applications. Such applications are also more vulnerable to different types of attacks due to their distributed nature. Detecting and addressing attacks is an open issue concerning distributed software applications. This paper proposes a new mechanism that uses blockchain technology to devise a security testing mechanism to detect attacks on distributed software applications. The proposed mechanism can detect several categories of attacks, such as denial-of-service attacks, malware and others. The process starts by creating a static blockchain (Blockchain Level 1) that stores the software application sequence obtained using software testing techniques. This sequence information exposes weaknesses in the application code. When the application is executed, a dynamic blockchain (Blockchain Level 2) helps create a static blockchain for recording the responses expected from the application. Every response should be validated using the proposed consensus mechanism associated with static and dynamic blockchains. Valid responses indicate the absence of attacks, while invalid responses denote attacks.

Blockchain-enabled K-harmonic framework for industrial IoT-based systems.

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based systems have become an important part of industry consortium systems because of their rapid growth and wide-ranging application. Various physical objects that are interconnected in the IIoT network communicate with each other and simplify the process of decision-making by observing and analyzing the surrounding environment. While making such intelligent decisions, devices need to transfer and communicate data with each other. However, as devices involved in IIoT networks grow and the methods of connections diversify, the traditional security frameworks face many shortcomings, including vulnerabilities to attack, lags in data, sharing data, and lack of proper authentication. Blockchain technology has the potential to empower safe data distribution of big data generated by the IIoT. Prevailing data-sharing methods in blockchain only concentrate on the data interchanging among parties, not on the efficiency in sharing, and storing. Hence an element-based K-harmonic means clustering algorithm (CA) is proposed for the effective sharing of data among the entities along with an algorithm named underweight data block (UDB) for overcoming the obstacle of storage space. The performance metrics considered for the evaluation of the proposed framework are the sum of squared error (SSE), time complexity with respect to different m values, and storage complexity with CPU utilization. The results have experimented with MATLAB 2018a simulation environment. The proposed model has better sharing, and storing based on blockchain technology, which is appropriate IIoT.

Blockchain-Internet of Things Applications: Opportunities and Challenges for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0.

Today, blockchain is becoming more popular in academia and industry because it is a distributed, decentralised technology which is changing many industries in terms of security, building trust, etc. A few blockchain applications are banking, insurance, logistics, transportation, etc. Many insurance companies have been thinking about how blockchain could help them be more efficient. There is still a lot of hype about this immutable technology, even though it has not been utilised to its full potential. Insurers have to decide whether or not to use blockchain, just like many other businesses do. This technology keeps a distributed ledger on each blockchain node, making it more secure and transparent. The blockchain network can operate smart contracts and convince others to agree, so criminals cannot make mistakes. On another side, the Internet of Things (IoT) might make a real-time application work faster through its automation. With the integration of blockchain and IoT, there will always be a problem with technology regarding IoT devices and mining the blockchain. This paper gives a real-time view of blockchain-IoT-based applications for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. The last few sections discuss essential topics such as open issues, challenges, and research opportunities for future researchers to expand research in blockchain-IoT-based applications.

Blockchain-Driven Intelligent Scheme for IoT-Based Public Safety System beyond 5G Networks.

Mobile applications have rapidly grown over the past few decades to offer futuristic applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart farming, and smart city. Such applications require ubiquitous, real-time, and secure communications to deliver services quickly. Toward this aim, sixth-generation (6G) wireless technology offers superior performance with high reliability, enhanced transmission rate, and low latency. However, managing the resources of the aforementioned applications is highly complex in the precarious network. An adversary can perform various network-related attacks (i.e., data injection or modification) to jeopardize the regular operation of the smart applications. Therefore, incorporating blockchain technology in the smart application can be a prominent solution to tackle security, reliability, and data-sharing privacy concerns. Motivated by the same, we presented a case study on public safety applications that utilizes the essential characteristics of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and a 6G network to handle data integrity attacks on the crime data. The case study is assessed using various performance parameters by considering blockchain scalability, packet drop ratio, and training accuracy. Lastly, we explored different research challenges of adopting blockchain in the 6G wireless network.