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.

Traditional power grids have been the major source of electricity for several households and industries for a number of years. However, with that kind of supply, every member of the grid is affected whenever there is a fault on the transmission line connecting them. With that in mind, microgrids, usually powered by numerous distributed electrical sources, were introduced to curb this problem, and as such, energy users have also become producers themselves. Nonetheless, the generation of power by distributed sources brings about unpredictability on the network and, in essence, problems in energy sharing. Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has several advantages and has been introduced to mitigate energy sharing problems. With networked energy trading comes the issue of trust, as several prosumers are concerned about their privacy and security in such environments. Therefore, this work leverages the advantages of blockchain in proposing a secure energy trading platform for all parties involved. Coupled with certificateless signcryption, an immutable energy trading market is designed, and its use case is applicable in smart cities. A thorough security analysis was performed, and the efficiency of our proposed solution is backed by numerical results.

The challenges of population management as urban density increases globally has compelled researchers and developers to consider more efficient means of managing resources in cities. Consequently, the smart city concept has emerged as a response to addressing the challenge of optimal resource utilization in urban centers. However, with digital technologies proliferating as key components of the solution, it is necessary to develop a digital identity solution for all components of the smart city environment. For completeness, the solution must encompass all entities including physical and intangible assets, processes, and most importantly, its residents. Consequently, a unified, distributed data integration and efficient analysis platform is required: the Digital City Operating System. In this work, we focus on a key component of digital city management in the form of secure identification of individual residents. We collect user attributes and securely transmit them to other system components for verification. Upon successful completion of the verification process, a digital identity is created for the applying resident and the set of transactions leading to the ID creation are stored in the blockchain. Our system is secure and can serve as the basis for the development of a digital infrastructure for smart city management.

Named data networking (NDN), which is an implementation of information-centric networking (ICN), has emerged as a promising new direction in networking as a result of the shortcomings of the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) architecture. NDN differs from the conventional networking protocols since it places more importance on the data than where it originated. Vehicular-NDN (VNDN) is a game-changing architecture due to its name-based forwarding and in-network caching. VNDN is designed to facilitate effective management of vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) characteristics, such as high mobility, connection intermittency, and dynamic topology. However, the VNDN’s data verification procedure might lead to lengthy wait times, particularly for the mobile and vehicle networks. So, it is sometimes unfit for uses, where speed and security are paramount, such as exchanging safety messages. Moreover, the performance of the vehicle networks is negatively affected by the longer reaction times brought about by the computing-intensive jobs. Therefore, we present a lightweight VNDN-based certificateless signcryption strategy that leverages the hyperelliptic curve cryptosystem’s security hardness and edge computing. Analysis of the scheme’s security and comparisons with the similar systems demonstrate its effectiveness. Our suggested approach offers superior security with fewer computing and communication requirements, as verified by the final findings.

The Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture is a futuristic internet infrastructure that aims to deliver content efficiently. However, NDN is faced with the challenge of ensuring the privacy of both content and names. Traditional solutions have focused on encrypting and signing content before injecting the resultant ciphertext into the NDN platform to provide confidentiality and integrity. However, these solutions fail to protect content name privacy in critical applications such as the military and healthcare. To address this challenge, we propose Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing on Named Data Networking (PRIDN), which employs a combination of proxy re-encryption and symmetric mechanisms to secure both content and names. PRIDN offers several advantages over existing solutions. Firstly, it eliminates the need for subscribers to communicate with content publishers for decryption keys, reducing communication overhead and ensuring that content publishers do not need to be online all the time to respond to key generation requests. Second, the proxy re-encryption mechanism prevents replication of ciphertexts, thus avoiding multiple instances of the same content in the network. Lastly, PRIDN also protects sensitive information in content names, preventing user profiling and censorship. Simulation results from ndnSIM and MIRACL libraries demonstrate that PRIDN reduces content retrieval time on NDN. A crypto-verification tool, Verifpal, shows that the proposed protocols are secure for real-world deployment.