Nowadays, the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology worldwide is accelerating the digital transformation of healthcare industry. In this context, smart healthcare (s-healthcare) solutions are ensuring better and innovative opportunities for healthcare providers to improve patients’ care. However, these solutions raise also new challenges in terms of security and privacy due to the diversity of stakeholders, the centralized data management, and the resulting lack of trustworthiness, accountability, and control. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Blockchain-based and privacy-preserving framework called SmartMedChain for data sharing in s-healthcare environment. The Blockchain is built on Hyperledger Fabric and stores encrypted health data by using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a distributed data storage solution with high resiliency and scalability. Indeed, compared to other propositions and based on the concept of smart contracts, our solution combines both data access control and data usage auditing measures for both Medical IoT data and Electronic Health Records (EHRs) generated by s-healthcare services. In addition, s-healthcare stakeholders can be held accountable by introducing an innovative Privacy Agreement Management scheme that monitors the execution of the service in respect of patient preferences and in accordance with relevant privacy laws. Security analysis and experimental results show that the proposed SmartMedChain is feasible and efficient for s-healthcare environments.

The rapid development of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) technology has resulted in various advances in the smart healthcare field; it improves healthcare systems to offer more complicated real-time services and provides an efficient patient motioning system. However, despite the brilliant side of IoMT, several concerns continue to undercut its adoption. In fact, collecting, transmitting, storing, and using data in IoMT applications raises issues regarding privacy and data protection, especially with the multitude of stakeholders involved during the whole data life cycle. Motivated from these facts, this article is devoted to perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of privacy-preserving solutions used in the smart healthcare ecosystem. The recent research papers disseminated between 2017 and 2021 are selected from multiple databases and a standardized SLR method is conducted. A total of 100 papers were reviewed and a critical analysis was conducted on the selected papers. Moreover, this review study attempts to highlight the limitation of the current approaches and aims to find possible solutions to them. Thus, a detailed analysis was carried out on the selected papers in terms of the privacy techniques they deployed, the data life cycle phase they addressed, the stakeholders needs they met, and the privacy principles they covered according to privacy laws and regulations. Finally, we summarize our results showing privacy-preserving trends and identifying recommendations to involve privacy principles coverage in smart healthcare applications.

Smart contracts are essential for managing digital assets in blockchain networks, highlighting the need for effective security measures. This paper introduces SmartLLMSentry, a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT with in-context training, to advance smart contract vulnerability detection. Traditional rule-based frameworks have limitations in integrating new detection rules efficiently. In contrast, SmartLLMSentry utilizes LLMs to streamline this process. We created a specialized dataset of five randomly selected vulnerabilities for model training and evaluation. Our results show an exact match accuracy of 91.1% with sufficient data, although GPT-4 demonstrated reduced performance compared to GPT-3 in rule generation. This study illustrates that SmartLLMSentry significantly enhances the speed and accuracy of vulnerability detection through LLM-driven rule integration, offering a new approach to improving Blockchain security and addressing previously underexplored vulnerabilities in smart contracts.

As cyber threats are permanently jeopardizing individuals privacy and organizations’ security, there have been several efforts to empower software applications with built-in immunity. In this paper, we present our approach to immune applications through application-level, unsupervised, outlier-based intrusion detection and prevention. Our framework allows tracking application domain objects all along the processing lifecycle. It also leverages the application business context and learns from production data, without creating any training burden on the application owner. Moreover, as our framework uses runtime application instrumentation, it incurs no additional cost on the application provider. We build a fine-grained and rich-feature application behavioral model that gets down to the method level and its invocation context. We define features to be independent from the variable structure of method invocation parameters and returned values, while preserving security-relevant information. We implemented our framework in a Java environment and evaluated it on a widely-used, enterprise-grade, and open-source ERP. We tested several unsupervised outlier detection algorithms and distance functions. Our framework achieved the best results in terms of effectiveness using the Local Outlier Factor algorithm and the Clark distance, while the average instrumentation overhead per intercepted call remains acceptable.

Nearly most of the organizations store massive amounts of data in large databases for research, statistics, and mining purposes. In most cases, much of the accumulated data contain sensitive information belonging to individuals which may breach privacy. Hence, ensuring privacy in big data is considered a very important issue. The concept of privacy aims to protect sensitive information from various attacks that may violate the identity of individuals. Anonymization techniques are considered the best way to ensure privacy in big data. Various works have been already realized, taking into account horizontal clustering. The L-diversity technique is one of those techniques dealing with sensitive numerical and categorical attributes. However, the majority of anonymization techniques using L-diversity principle for hierarchical data cannot resist the similarity attack and therefore cannot ensure privacy carefully. In order to prevent the similarity attack while preserving data utility, a hybrid technique dealing with categorical attributes is proposed in this paper. Furthermore, we highlighted all the steps of our proposed algorithm with detailed comments. Moreover, the algorithm is implemented and evaluated according to a well-known information loss-based criterion which is Normalized Certainty Penalty (NCP). The obtained results show a good balance between privacy and data utility.