Disseminating medical data beyond the protected cloud of institutions poses severe risks to patients’ privacy, as breaches push them to the point where they abstain from full disclosure of their condition. This situation negatively impacts the patient, scientific research, and all stakeholders. To address this challenge, we propose a blockchain-based data sharing framework that sufficiently addresses the access control challenges associated with sensitive data stored in the cloud using immutability and built-in autonomy properties of the blockchain. Our system is based on a permissioned blockchain which allows access to only invited, and hence verified users. As a result of this design, further accountability is guaranteed as all users are already known and a log of their actions is kept by the blockchain. The system permits users to request data from the shared pool after their identities and cryptographic keys are verified. The evidence from the system evaluation shows that our scheme is lightweight, scalable, and efficient.
According to research, classifiers and detectors are less accurate when images are blurry, have low contrast, or have other flaws which raise questions about the machine learning model’s ability to recognize items effectively. The chest X-ray image has proven to be the preferred image modality for medical imaging as it contains more information about a patient. Its interpretation is quite difficult, nevertheless. The goal of this research is to construct a reliable deep-learning model capable of producing high classification accuracy on chest x-ray images for lung diseases. To enable a thorough study of the chest X-ray image, the suggested framework first derived richer features using an ensemble technique, then a global second-order pooling is applied to further derive higher global features of the images. Furthermore, the images are then separated into patches and position embedding before analyzing the patches individually via a vision transformer approach. The proposed model yielded 96.01% sensitivity, 96.20% precision, and 98.00% accuracy for the COVID-19 Radiography Dataset while achieving 97.84% accuracy, 96.76% sensitivity and 96.80% precision, for the Covid-ChestX-ray-15k dataset. The experimental findings reveal that the presented models outperform traditional deep learning models and other state-of-the-art approaches provided in the literature.
27 March 2024 in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
The metaverse gradually evolves into a virtual world containing a series of interconnected sub-metaverses. Diverse digital resources, including identities, contents, services, and supporting data, are key components of the sub-metaverse. Therefore, a Domain Name System (DNS)-like system is necessary for efficient management and resolution. However, the legacy DNS was designed with security vulnerabilities and trust risks due to centralized issues. Blockchain is used to mitigate these concerns due to its decentralized features. Additionally, it supports identity management as a default feature, making it a natural fit for the metaverse. While there are several DNS alternatives based on the blockchain, they either manage only a single type of identifiers or isolate identities from other sorts of identifiers, making it difficult for sub-metaverses to coexist and connect with each other. This article proposes a M ulti- I dentifier management and resolution S ystem (MIS) in the metaverse, supporting the registration, resolution, and inter-translation functions. The basic MIS is portrayed as a four-tier architecture on a consortium blockchain due to its manageability, enhanced security, and efficiency properties. On-chain data is lightweight and compressed to save on storage while accelerating reading and writing operations. The resource data is encrypted based on the attributes of the sub-metaverse in the storage tier for privacy protection and access control. For users with decentralization priorities, a modification named EMIS is built on top of Ethereum. Finally, MIS is implemented on two testbeds and is available online as the open-source system. The first testbed consists of 4 physical servers located in the UK and Malaysia while the second is made up of 200 virtual machines (VMs) spread over 26 countries across all 5 continents on Google Cloud. Experiments indicate that MIS provides efficient reading and writing performance than the legacy DNS and other public blockchain-based workarounds including EMIS and Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
Cloud servers offer data owners the opportunityto upload and store encrypted data that several data users can access. However, after outsourcing data to the cloud, data owners have limited control of their data, and external systems are incorporated to manage it. Several research-based solutions use encryption techniques to prevent unauthorized access to the data but ignore the challenge of maintaining the trace of valid changes applied to the data. Provenance data can be used to ascertain the integrity of data and, therefore, should be immutable and secured from adversaries since it contains private information. This article proposes an efficient way of securing access logs by leveraging blockchain. A generic framework is designed, tested, and evaluated, with results showing our model can effectively enhance the security of provenance data. This work considers two categories of data users and account for the distinct roles and permitted actions on the outsourced data. In summary, this work ensures that the data is trustworthy, and verification and management of the outsourced data are assured. Experimental results illustrate the efficiency and scalability of our solution.
19 February 2024 in Future Generation Computer Systems
Recently, more and more mobile devices have been connected to the Internet. The Internet environment is complicated, and network security incidents emerge endlessly. Traditional blocking and killing passive defense measures cannot fundamentally meet the network security requirements. Inspired by the heuristic establishment of multiple lines of defense in immunology, we designed and prototyped a Double Defense strategy with Endogenous Safety and Security (DDESS) based on multi-identifier network (MIN) architecture. DDESS adopts the idea of a zero-trust network, with identity authentication as the core for access control, which solves security problems of traditional IP networks. In addition, DDESS achieves individual static security defense through encryption and decryption, consortium blockchain, trusted computing whitelist, and remote attestation strategies. At the same time, with the dynamic collection of data traffic and access logs, as well as the understanding and prediction of the situation, DDESS can realize the situation awareness of network security and the cultivation of immune vaccines against unknown network attacks, thus achieving the active herd defense of network security.