Blockchain in healthcare and health sciences-A scoping review.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides cryptographic key management guidance for defining and implementing appropriate key management procedures, using algorithms that adequately protect sensitive information, and planning ahead for possible changes in the use of cryptography because of algorithm breaks or the availability of more powerful computing techniques. NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-57 Part 1 includes a general approach for transitioning from one algorithm or key length to another. This Recommendation (SP 800-131A Revision 1) provides more specific guidance for transitions to the use of stronger cryptographic keys and more robust algorithms.

Transitions: Recommendation for Transitioning the Use of Cryptographic Algorithms and Key Lengths

Blockchain, a form of distributed ledger technology has attracted the interests of stakeholders across several sectors including healthcare. Its’ potential in the multi-stakeholder operated sector like health has been responsible for several investments, studies, and implementations. Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems traditionally used for the exchange of health information amongst healthcare stakeholders have been criticised for centralising power, failures and attack-points with exchange data custodians. EHRs have struggled in the face of multi-stakeholder and system requirements while adhering to security, privacy, ethical and other regulatory constraints. Blockchain is promising amongst others to address the many EHR challenges, primarily trustless and secure exchange of health information amongst stakeholders. Many blockchain-in-healthcare frameworks have been proposed; some prototyped and/or implemented. This study leveraged the PRISMA framework to systematically search and evaluate the different models proposed; prototyped and/or implemented. The bibliometric and functional distribution of all 143 articles from this study were presented. This study evaluated 61 articles that discussed either prototypes or pilot or implementations. The technical and architectural analysis of these 61 articles for privacy, security, cost, and performance were detailed. Blockchain was found to solve the trust, security and privacy constraints of traditional EHRs often at significant performance, storage and cost trade-offs.

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A Systematic Review of Blockchain in Healthcare: Frameworks, Prototypes, and Implementations

Digital Signature Standard (DSS) [includes Change Notice 1 from 12/30/1996] | NIST

A supply chain consists of many stakeholders such as suppliers, carriers and customers. It is often complex due to the rapid development of economic globalization and the intense competition pressure in the market which resulted in information sharing within a supply chain to be fragmented. Blockchain technology can solve this problem by having only a “one trusted ledger” that could reshape the element of data trust. The goal of this paper is to identify and understand the impact of blockchain technology for information sharing within a supply chain. The decentralized nature of blockchain technology offers a high level of transparency and has gained the attention from various sectors to deploy this technology. A systematic literature review in the academic literature was conducted using different databases. Blockchain-enabled information sharing can add value to enhance collaborative work in different types of supply chains such as health and medical, construction and smart city. From our findings, one potential impact of deploying blockchain-enabled information sharing within a supply chain is that it ensures all members in the chain can obtain verified information which enhances collaborative partnerships. Through this in-depth research, we highlighted potential barriers that could impede the development of blockchain technology in supply chain such as the lack of understanding of blockchain technology in businesses and conflict of interests. Future work such as information hiding, in parallel with information sharing, could close the gap in deploying this technology within a supply chain. Understanding the nature of different supply chain is also important to better prepare the deployment of blockchain. We acknowledge that our approach in selecting literatures in our systematic review may exclude certain literatures. Nonetheless, we tried to include as many relevant literatures as possible, to develop a roadmap on the current situation of blockchain-enabled information sharing within a supply chain.

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Blockchain-Enabled Information Sharing Within a Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review

Medical information is private, and medical data are valuable for medical research. Thus, medical information sharing is challenging because the data might be manipulated improperly and revealed during the operational process. The accuracy and integrity of medical information should be guaranteed throughout the sharing process. Medical institutions require shared information for scientific research and development; however, the issue of privacy inhibits the sharing process. In this article, we propose a new business process and a blockchain-based platform for medical information sharing. Our method exploits the advantages of blockchain in medical information recording and sharing. Information can be stored, shared, and credibly verified among parties in the distributed network. In addition, we propose a new consensus algorithm and a universal anonymous sharing model. These methods improve the efficiency and security of medical information sharing between users. In this way, both the information and the traces of the transaction can be stored in a distributed manner to prevent manipulation and fraud. Consequently, the value of medical information can be fully utilized.

An Optimized Consortium Blockchain for Medical Information Sharing

Blockchain technology is an emerging distributed ledger technology that has exploratory applications in many areas. The consensus algorithm, as the core module of the blockchain, has an important impact on the security, scalability, and efficiency of the blockchain network. The consensus algorithm is also a popular topic in current blockchain technology research. In existing consortium blockchains and public blockchains, the blockchain has low efficiency or poor fault tolerance because of the limitations of the consensus algorithm. To both ensure the fault tolerance of the blockchain and improve the scalability and throughput, in this paper, we propose a new type of consensus algorithm: mixed Byzantine fault tolerance (MBFT). MBFT uses sharding and layered technology. MBFT functionally partitions the nodes that participate in the consensus process and improves the scalability and efficiency without sacrificing security. MBFT also introduces a random node selection mechanism and a credit mechanism to improve security and fault tolerance. We analyze the security and experiment on transaction throughput in a real network environment. The results prove that MBFT has good security and scalability and high throughput.

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MBFT: A New Consensus Algorithm for Consortium Blockchain

Medical information are private and medical data are valuable for medical research. Medical information sharing is challenging as the data might be manipulated improperly and revealed during the whole operational process. Medical institutions need shared information for scientific research and develop, on the contrary, privacy issue inhibits the sharing process. In this paper, a new business process and a novel architecture for medical information sharing based on blockchain are proposed. Exploiting the advantage of blockchain in recording transactions, information can be shared and verified among parties like a distributed ledger. On the other hand, medical information can be shared securely between users without an intermediary. The main benefit is that both the information and the traces of the transaction can be distributed stored which avoid manipulation and fraud. Consequently, the value of information can be fully utilized.

A Blockchain Application for Medical Information Sharing

Wireless updating is an essential method to update system files or fix bugs in Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A significant and challenging problem in wireless updating is security. First, without security guarantees, attackers can utilize the updating procedure to install harmful programs into the victim devices. Second, it is challenging to provide security for wireless updating, since in many IoT scenarios, the devices to be updated are computationally limited devices and located far from the center that issues update files. Currently, there are two types of solution to protect the wireless updating. The first one is the transport layer security (TLS) protocol or secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol that are used by wireless updating schemes for mobile terminals with the following operation systems: Windows, Debian, Android, and iOS. Another solution is the elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH)-based handshake in the software-defined function (SDF) wireless updating scheme for the IoT devices. However, both the two solutions require equal computation tasks on the update file issuing center and the device to be updated. Normally, the former is much powerful than the latter. Therefore, to further address the security problem in wireless updating, we propose a novel solution with unbalanced computation costs on the two parties. In particular, we design an improved ECDH-based handshake protocol for the SDF wireless updating scheme, namely, the unbalanced OpenFunction handshake protocol. The protocol transfers significant computation task from the limited IoT device to the powerful center. The security of the protocol is analyzed. A prototype is realized to test the performance of the protocol. The experiment results show that in the same experimental platform, our protocol is much lightweight than the TLS handshake protocol and SSL handshake protocol.

A Handshake Protocol With Unbalanced Cost for Wireless Updating

Blockchain is an emerging technology with broad applications. As an important application of the blockchain, smart contracts can formulate trading rules to manage thousands of virtual currencies. Nowadays, the IoT (Internet of Things) combined with blockchain has become a new trend and smart contract can implement different transaction demands for IoT-blockchain systems. Once there exits vulnerability in the smart contract program, the security of the virtual currency will not be guaranteed. However, ensuring the security of smart contracts is never an easy task. On the one hand, existing smart contracts cannot identify fake users or malicious programs, which is difficult to be regulated at present; on the other hand, smart contracts involving in multiple trading users are very similar to shared-memory concurrent programs. To deal with these problems, this study uses formal verification methods, adopting the Communicating Sequence Processes (CSP) theory to formally model concurrent programs. Then the FDR (Failure Divergence Refinement), a refinement checker or model checker for CSP, is utilized to successfully detect the vulnerability regarding concurrency in one smart contract public in Ethereum. The results show the potential advantage of using CSP and FDR tool to check the vulnerability in smart contracts especially from the perspective of concurrency.

Xiaofeng Ma

Papers

An Optimized Consortium Blockchain for Medical Information Sharing

MBFT: A New Consensus Algorithm for Consortium Blockchain

A Blockchain Application for Medical Information Sharing

A Handshake Protocol With Unbalanced Cost for Wireless Updating

Formal Verification of Smart Contracts from the Perspective of Concurrency