The dissemination of patients' medical records results in diverse risks to patients' privacy as malicious activities on these records cause severe damage to the reputation, finances, and so on of all parties related directly or indirectly to the data. Current methods to effectively manage and protect medical records have been proved to be insufficient. In this paper, we propose MeDShare, a system that addresses the issue of medical data sharing among medical big data custodians in a trust-less environment. The system is blockchain-based and provides data provenance, auditing, and control for shared medical data in cloud repositories among big data entities. MeDShare monitors entities that access data for malicious use from a data custodian system. In MeDShare, data transitions and sharing from one entity to the other, along with all actions performed on the MeDShare system, are recorded in a tamper-proof manner. The design employs smart contracts and an access control mechanism to effectively track the behavior of the data and revoke access to offending entities on detection of violation of permissions on data. The performance of MeDShare is comparable to current cutting edge solutions to data sharing among cloud service providers. By implementing MeDShare, cloud service providers and other data guardians will be able to achieve data provenance and auditing while sharing medical data with entities such as research and medical institutions with minimal risk to data privacy.

Electricity is the commonest commodity for most businesses in our world today. The use of electricity has been a breakthrough for the discovery of new technologies and has become the main driving force behind several innovations. With the introduction of smart grid systems, there have been improvements in how utility companies interact with their customers with regards to electricity use. However, since the readings are done via the internet, there is the tendency for the data to be compromised when it gets into the hands of the wrong people. Moreover, customers mostly do not know why they pay huge amounts and which appliances use more electricity, since they are not privy to the readings. The sovereign blockchain technology, which provides transparency and provenance, is utilized in this paper to mitigate these above mentioned problems. A smart contract, which executes laid down procedures to provide a trust-based system between participants on the network is also implemented. Our system proves very efficient as the user can monitor how the electricity is used, and it also provides a platform where there is no manipulation from either parties.

The goal of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is to enhance network performance of Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs). Even though it presents new opportunities to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) environment, there are some security concerns including the need to establish trust among the connected peers. The fifth generation (5G) communication system, which provides reliable and low-latency communication services, is seen as the technology to cater for the challenges in VANETs. The incorporation of software defined networks (SDN) also ensures an effective network management. However, there should be monitoring and reporting services provided in the IoV. Blockchain, which has decentralization, transparency and immutability as some of its properties, is designed to ensure trust in networking platforms. In that regard, this paper analyzes the combination of blockchain and SDN for the effective operation of VANET systems in 5G and fog computing paradigms. With managerial responsibilities shared between the blockchain and the SDN, it helps to relieve the pressure off the controller due to the ubiquitous processing that occurs. A trust-based model that curbs malicious activities in the network is also presented. Simulation results substantially guarantee an efficient network performance, while also ensuring there is trust among the entities.

The evolution of the Internet of Things has seen data sharing as one of its most useful applications in cloud computing. As eye-catching as this technology has been, data security remains one of the obstacles it faces since the wrongful use of data leads to several damages. In this article, we propose a proxy re-encryption approach to secure data sharing in cloud environments. Data owners can outsource their encrypted data to the cloud using identity-based encryption, while proxy re-encryption construction will grant legitimate users access to the data. With the Internet of Things devices being resource-constrained, an edge device acts as a proxy server to handle intensive computations. Also, we make use of the features of information-centric networking to deliver cached content in the proxy effectively, thus improving the quality of service and making good use of the network bandwidth. Further, our system model is based on blockchain, a disruptive technology that enables decentralization in data sharing. It mitigates the bottlenecks in centralized systems and achieves fine-grained access control to data. The security analysis and evaluation of our scheme show the promise of our approach in ensuring data confidentiality, integrity, and security.

Health information exchanges have been popular for some time with their advantages known and widely researched. In spite of their utility in increasing provider efficiency and decreasing administrative costs, one challenge that has persisted is the data owners inability to control data after transmission. The lack of technical mechanisms to effectively control patients' health data in the network significantly affects participation of health and medical institutions while perpetrating the silo-based data management that locks value and potential inherent in the data. This not only affects researchers due to the lack of data for research and analysis but the quality of life of patients.We present a blockchain-supported architectural framework for secure control of personal data in a health information exchange by pairing user-generated acceptable use policies with smart contracts. We highlight the merits of our system, its user-centric focus and also show experimental results along with directions for extending our work. The framework introduces minimal risk to data by architecting a mechanism for controlling data after sharing. In adopting our framework, health service providers can deliver a stronger assurance for data management than is possible with current systems.

Modern healthcare has a sharp focus on data aggregation and processing technologies. Consequently, from a data perspective, a patient may be regarded as a timestamped list of medical conditions and their corresponding corrective interventions. Technologies to securely aggregate and access data for individual patients in the quest for precision medicine have led to the adoption of Digital Twins in healthcare. Digital Twins are used in manufacturing and engineering to produce digital models of physical objects that capture the essence of device operation to enable and drive optimization. Thus, a patient’s Digital Twin can significantly improve health data sharing. However, creating the Digital Twin from multiple data sources, such as the patient’s electronic medical records (EMR) and personal health records (PHR) from wearable devices, presents some risks to the security of the model and the patient. The constituent data for the Digital Twin should be accessible only with permission from relevant entities and thus requires authentication, privacy, and provable provenance. This paper proposes a blockchain-secure patient Digital Twin that relies on smart contracts to automate the updating and communication processes that maintain the Digital Twin. The smart contracts govern the response the Digital Twin provides when queried, based on policies created for each patient. We highlight four research points: access control, interaction, privacy, and security of the Digital Twin and we evaluate the Digital Twin in terms of latency in the network, smart contract execution times, and data storage costs.