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.
8 June 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
With rapid growth in data volume generated from different industrial devices in IoT, the protection for sensitive and private data in data sharing has become crucial. At present, federated learning for data security has arisen, and it can solve the security concerns on data sharing by model sharing on Internet of mutual distrust. However, the hackers still launch attack aiming at the security vulnerabilities (e.g., model extraction attack and model reverse attack) in federated learning. In this article, to address the above problems, we first design an application model of blockchain-enabled federated learning in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and formulate our data protection aggregation scheme based on the above model. Then, we give the distributed K-means clustering based on differential privacy and homomorphic encryption, and the distributed random forest with differential privacy and the distributed AdaBoost with homomorphic encryption methods, which enable multiple data protection in data sharing and model sharing. Finally, we integrate the methods with blockchain and federated learning, and provide the complete security analysis. Extensive experimental results show that our aggregation scheme and working mechanism have the better performance in the selected indicators.
18 January 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Blockchain smart contracts have given rise to a variety of interesting and compelling applications and emerged as a revolutionary force for the Internet. Smart contracts from various fields now hold over one trillion dollars worth of virtual coins, attracting numerous attacks. Quite a few practitioners have devoted themselves to developing tools for detecting bugs in smart contracts. One line of efforts revolve around static analysis techniques, which heavily suffer from high false positive rates. Another line of works concentrate on fuzzing techniques. Unfortunately, current fuzzing approaches for smart contracts tend to conduct fuzzing starting from the initial state of the contract, which expends too much energy revolving around the initial state of the contract and thus is usually unable to unearth bugs triggered by other states. Moreover, most existing methods treat each branch equally, failing to take care of the branches that are rare or more likely to possess bugs. This might lead to resources wasted on normal branches. In this paper, we try to tackle these challenges from three aspects: (1) In generating function invocation sequences, we explicitly consider data dependencies between functions to facilitate exploring richer states. We further prolong a function invocation sequence S 1 by appending a new sequence S 2 , so that the appended sequence S 2 can start fuzzing from states that are different from the initial state. (2) We incorporate a branch distance-based measure to evolve test cases iteratively towards a target branch. (3) We engage a branch search algorithm to discover rare and vulnerable branches, and design an energy allocation mechanism to take care of exercising these crucial branches. We implement IR-Fuzz and extensively evaluate it over 12K real-world contracts. Empirical results show that: (i) IR-Fuzz achieves 28% higher branch coverage than state-of-the-art fuzzing approaches, (ii) IR-Fuzz detects more vulnerabilities and increases the average accuracy of vulnerability detection by 7% over current methods, and (iii) IR-Fuzz is fast, generating an average of 350 test cases per second. Our implementation and dataset are released at https://github.com/Messi-Q/IR-Fuzz, hoping to facilitate future research.
6 March 2020 in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
Ethereum, the largest blockchain for running smart contracts, charges the people who send transactions to deploy or invoke smart contracts for thwarting resource abuse. The amount of transaction fee depends on the size of that contract and the operations executed by that contract. Consequently, smart contracts with inefficient code will waste money. In this paper, we propose and develop the first tool, named GasChecker, for automatically identifying gas-inefficient code in smart contracts, and conduct the first empirical study on the prevalence of gas-inefficient code in the deployed smart contracts. More precisely, we first summarize ten gas-inefficient programming patterns and propose a new approach based on symbolic execution (SE) to detect them in the bytecode of smart contracts.To make our approach scalable to analyze millions of smart contracts, we parallelize SE by tailoring it to the MapReduce programming model, and propose a new feedback-based load balancing strategy to effectively utilize cloud resources. Extensive experiments show that GasChecker scales well with the increase of workers. The empirical study demonstrates that lots of real smart contracts contain various inefficient code. Manual investigation demonstrates that only 2.5% of discovered gas-inefficient instances are false positives.
22 February 2019 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Applying consortium blockchain as a trust layer for heterogeneous Industrial Internet-of-Things devices is cost-effective. However, with an increase in computing power, some powerful attacks (e.g. the 51% attack) are inevitable and will cause severe consequences. Recent studies also confirm that anonymity and immutability of blockchain have been abused to facilitate black market trades, etc. To operate controllable blockchain for IIoT devices, it is necessary to rewrite blockchain history back to a normal state once the chain is breached. Ateniese et al proposed redactable blockchain by using chameleon hash (CH) to replace traditional hash function, it allows blockchain history to be written when needed (EuroS and P 2017). However, we cannot apply this idea directly to IIoT without solving the following problems: (1) achieve a decentralized design of CH; (2) update the signatures accordingly to authenticate the redacted contents; (3) satisfy the low-computing need of the individual IIoT device. In this work, we overcome the above issues by proposing the first threshold chameleon hash (TCH) and accountable-and-sanitizable chameleon signature (ASCS) schemes. Based on them, we build a redactable consortium blockchain which is efficient for IIoT devices to operate. It allows a group of authorized sensors to write and rewrite blockchain without causing any hard forks. Basically, TCH is the first threshold chameleon hash and ASCS is a public-key signature supporting file-level and block-level modifications of signatures without impairing authentications. Additionally, ASCS achieves accountability to avoid abuse of redaction. While security analysis validates our proposals, the simulation results show that redaction is acceptably efficient if it is executed at a small scale or if we adopt a coarse-grained redaction while sacrificing some securities.
17 January 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Cloud storage has been used to reduce the cost and support convenient collaborations for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data management. When data owners share IIoT data with authorized parties for data interaction, secure cloud data searching and file access control are fundamental security requirements. In this paper, first we discuss a new insider attack to the Cui's multi-key aggregate searchable encryption scheme, where the unauthorized inside users can guess the other users private keys. Then, we propose a novel file-centric multi-key aggregate keyword searchable encryption (Fc-MKA-KSE) system for the IIoT data in the file-centric framework. Specifically, we present two formal security models, namely the security models of the indistinguishable selective-file chosen keyword attack (IND-sF-CKA) and the indistinguishable selective-file keyword guessing attack (IND-sF-KGA), which can satisfy the security requirements. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves computational efficiency.