Blockchain-Based Security Mechanisms for IoMT Edge Networks in IoMT-Based Healthcare Monitoring Systems

The Hyperledger fabric as a Blockchain framework preserves the security of electronic health records

The Hyperledger Fabric (HF) framework is widely studied for securing electronic health records (EHRs) in the healthcare sector. Despite the various cross-domain blockchain technology (BCT) applications, little is known about the role of the HF framework in healthcare. The purpose of the systematic literature review (SLR) is to review the existing literature on the HF framework and its applications in healthcare. This SLR includes literature published between January 2015 and March 2023 in the ACM digital library, IEEE Xplore, SCOPUS, Springer, PubMed, and Google Scholar databases. Following the inclusion and exclusion criteria, a total of 57 articles emerged as eligible for this SLR. The HF framework was found to be useful in securing health records coming from the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and many other devices. The main causes behind using the HF framework were identified as privacy and security, integrity, traceability, and availability of health records. Additionally, storage issues with transactional data over the blockchain are reduced by the use of the HF framework. This SLR also highlights potential future research trends to ensure the high-level security of health records.

Microcontroller-Based PUF for Identity Authentication and Tamper Resistance of Blockchain-Compliant IoT Devices

Blockchain-based applications necessitate the authentication of connected devices if they are employed as blockchain oracles. Alongside identity authentication, it is crucial to ensure resistance against tampering, including safeguarding against unauthorized alterations and protection against device counterfeiting or cloning. However, attaining these functionalities becomes more challenging when dealing with resource-constrained devices like low-cost IoT devices. The resources of IoT devices depend on the capabilities of the microcontroller they are built around. Low-cost devices utilize microcontrollers with limited computational power, small memory capacity, and lack advanced features such as a dedicated secure cryptographic chip. This paper proposes a method employing a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to authenticate identity and tamper resistance in IoT devices. The suggested PUF relies on a microcontroller's internal pull-up resistor values and, in conjunction with the microcontroller's built-in analog comparator, can also be utilized for device self-checking. A main contribution of this paper is the proposed PUF method which calculates the PUF value as the average value of many single PUF measurements, resulting in a significant increase in accuracy. The proposed PUF has been implemented successfully in a low-cost microcontroller device. Test results demonstrate that the device, specifically the microcontroller chip, can be identified with high accuracy (99.98%), and the proposed PUF method exhibits resistance against probing attempts.

Survey on Sensors and Smart Devices for IoT Enabled Intelligent Healthcare System

The Internet of Things (IoT) in the healthcare system is rapidly changing from the conventional hospital and concentrated specialist behavior to a distributed, patient-centric approach. With the advancement of new techniques, a patient needs sophisticated healthcare requirements. IoT-enabled intelligent health monitoring system with sensors and devices is a patient analysis technique to monitor the patient 24 h a day. IoT is swapping the architecture and has improved the application of different complex systems. Healthcare devices are one of the most remarkable applications of the IoT. Many patient monitoring techniques are available in the IoT platform. This review presents an IoT-enabled intelligent health monitoring system by analyzing the papers reported between 2016 and 2023. This survey also discusses the concept of big data in IoT networks and the IoT computing technology known as edge computing. This review concentrated on sensors and smart devices used in intelligent IoT based health monitoring systems with merits and demerits. This survey gives a brief study based on sensors and smart devices used in IoT smart healthcare systems.

RBEF: Ransomware Efficient Public Blockchain Framework for Digital Healthcare Application

These days, the use of digital healthcare has been growing in practice. Getting remote healthcare services without going to the hospital for essential checkups and reports is easy. It is a cost-saving and time-saving process. However, digital healthcare systems are suffering from security and cyberattacks in practice. Blockchain technology is a promising technology that can process valid and secure remote healthcare data among different clinics. However, ransomware attacks are still complex holes in blockchain technology and prevent many healthcare data transactions during the process on the network. The study presents the new ransomware blockchain efficient framework (RBEF) for digital networks, which can identify transaction ransomware attacks. The objective is to minimize transaction delays and processing costs during ransomware attack detection and processing. The RBEF is designed based on Kotlin, Android, Java, and socket programming on the remote process call. RBEF integrated the cuckoo sandbox static and dynamic analysis application programming interface (API) to handle compile-time and runtime ransomware attacks in digital healthcare networks. Therefore, code-, data-, and service-level ransomware attacks are to be detected in blockchain technology (RBEF). The simulation results show that the RBEF minimizes transaction delays between 4 and 10 min and processing costs by 10% for healthcare data compared to existing public and ransomware efficient blockchain technologies healthcare systems.

BFT-IoMT: A Blockchain-Based Trust Mechanism to Mitigate Sybil Attack Using Fuzzy Logic in the Internet of Medical Things

Numerous sensitive applications, such as healthcare and medical services, need reliable transmission as a prerequisite for the success of the new age of communications technology. Unfortunately, these systems are highly vulnerable to attacks like Sybil, where many false nodes are created and spread with deceitful intentions. Therefore, these false nodes must be instantly identified and isolated from the network due to security concerns and the sensitivity of data utilized in healthcare applications. Especially for life-threatening diseases like COVID-19, it is crucial to have devices connected to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) that can be believed to respond with high reliability and accuracy. Thus, trust-based security offers a safe environment for IoMT applications. This study proposes a blockchain-based fuzzy trust management framework (BFT-IoMT) to detect and isolate Sybil nodes in IoMT networks. The results demonstrate that the proposed BFT-IoMT framework is 25.43% and 12.64%, 12.54% and 6.65%, 37.85% and 19.08%, 17.40% and 8.72%, and 13.04% and 5.05% more efficient and effective in terms of energy consumption, attack detection, trust computation reliability, packet delivery ratio, and throughput, respectively, as compared to the other state-of-the-art frameworks available in the literature.

A Survey on Quantitative Risk Estimation Approaches for Secure and Usable User Authentication on Smartphones

Mobile user authentication acts as the first line of defense, establishing confidence in the claimed identity of a mobile user, which it typically does as a precondition to allowing access to resources in a mobile device. NIST states that password schemes and/or biometrics comprise the most conventional user authentication mechanisms for mobile devices. Nevertheless, recent studies point out that nowadays password-based user authentication is imposing several limitations in terms of security and usability; thus, it is no longer considered secure and convenient for the mobile users. These limitations stress the need for the development and implementation of more secure and usable user authentication methods. Alternatively, biometric-based user authentication has gained attention as a promising solution for enhancing mobile security without sacrificing usability. This category encompasses methods that utilize human physical traits (physiological biometrics) or unconscious behaviors (behavioral biometrics). In particular, risk-based continuous user authentication, relying on behavioral biometrics, appears to have the potential to increase the reliability of authentication without sacrificing usability. In this context, we firstly present fundamentals on risk-based continuous user authentication, relying on behavioral biometrics on mobile devices. Additionally, we present an extensive overview of existing quantitative risk estimation approaches (QREA) found in the literature. We do so not only for risk-based user authentication on mobile devices, but also for other security applications such as user authentication in web/cloud services, intrusion detection systems, etc., that could be possibly adopted in risk-based continuous user authentication solutions for smartphones. The target of this study is to provide a foundation for organizing research efforts toward the design and development of proper quantitative risk estimation approaches for the development of risk-based continuous user authentication solutions for smartphones. The reviewed quantitative risk estimation approaches have been divided into the following five main categories: (i) probabilistic approaches, (ii) machine learning-based approaches, (iii) fuzzy logic models, (iv) non-graph-based models, and (v) Monte Carlo simulation models. Our main findings are summarized in the table in the end of the manuscript.

Secure and Efficient Smart Healthcare System Based on Federated Learning

The rapid development of smart healthcare system in the Internet of Things (IoT) has made the early detection of many chronic diseases more convenient, quick, and economical. However, when healthcare organizations collect users’ health data through deployed IoT devices, there are issues of compromising users’ privacy. In view of this situation, this paper introduces federated learning technology to solve the problem of data security. In this paper, we consider the two main problems of federated learning applications in IoT smart healthcare system: (1) how to reduce the time overhead of system running and (2) how to authenticate that the user device uploading data is deployed by the system itself. To solve the above problems, we propose the first federated learning scheme based on full dynamic secret sharing. First, we use a two-mask protocol to keep the user’s local model parameters confidential during federated learning. Then, based on homogeneous linear recursive equation, homomorphic hash function, and elliptic curve cryptosystem, the full dynamic secret sharing and user identity authentication are realized. In addition, our scheme allows users to join or quit during training. Finally, we have carried out simulation test on this scheme. The experimental results show that the efficiency of our scheme is improved by about 60% on average in the case of no user dropping and by about 30% in the case of some users dropping.

A systematic review of the purposes of Blockchain and fog computing integration: classification and open issues

The fog computing concept was proposed to help cloud computing for the data processing of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, fog computing faces several challenges such as security, privacy, and storage. One way to address these challenges is to integrate blockchain with fog computing. There are several applications of blockchain-fog computing integration that have been proposed, recently, due to their lucrative benefits such as enhancing security and privacy. There is a need to systematically review and synthesize the literature on this topic of blockchain-fog computing integration. The purposes of integrating blockchain and fog computing were determined using a systematic literature review approach and tailored search criteria established from the research questions. In this research, 181 relevant papers were found and reviewed. The results showed that the authors proposed the combination of blockchain and fog computing for several purposes such as security, privacy, access control, and trust management. A lack of standards and laws may make it difficult for blockchain and fog computing to be integrated in the future, particularly in light of newly developed technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. The findings of this paper serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners of blockchain-fog computing integration for future research and designs.

A Blockchain-Based Product Traceability System with Off-Chain EPCIS and IoT Device Authentication

Blockchain-based traceability systems are a promising approach because they are decentralized, transparent, and tamper proof; however, if all traceability data are uploaded to a blockchain platform, it may affect the efficiency or even lead to data explosion. Additionally, it is difficult to guarantee the reliability of the original data source of massive Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Furthermore, when different enterprise nodes adopt different data storage structures, the costs that are associated with data sharing will increase. In this paper, we have proposed a trustworthy product traceability system that is based on hyperledger fabric and Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS), which is not only capable of making products traceable, but it can also authenticate and authorize the IoT devices that are used for data collection. First, we adopted the on-chain and off-chain collaborative management mechanism in order to alleviate data explosion on the chain. Second, we proposed a scheme to authenticate and authorize devices based on blockchain. Third, we complied with EPCIS and Core Business Vocabulary (CBV) standards and provided the EPCIS location discovery service in order to improve the interactivity. Finally, we implemented and tested the proposed traceability system and compared it with the existing research. The proposed solution provides product information traceability, data tamper proofing, data confidentiality, and data source reliability.

An Effective Self-Configurable Ransomware Prevention Technique for IoMT

Remote healthcare systems and applications are being enabled via the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which is an automated system that facilitates the critical and emergency healthcare services in urban areas, in addition to, bridges the isolated rural communities for various healthcare services. Researchers and developers are, to date, considering the majority of the technological aspects and critical issues around the IoMT, e.g., security vulnerabilities and other cybercrimes. One of such major challenges IoMT has to face is widespread ransomware attacks; a malicious malware that encrypts the patients' critical data, restricts access to IoMT devices or entirely disable IoMT devices, or uses several combinations to compromise the overall system functionality, mainly for ransom. These ransomware attacks would have several devastating consequences, such as loss of life-threatening data and system functionality, ceasing emergency and life-saving services, wastage of several vital resources etc. This paper presents a ransomware analysis and identification architecture with the objective to detect and validate the ransomware attacks and to evaluate its accuracy using a comprehensive verification process. We first develop a comprehensive experimental environment, to simulate a real-time IoMT network, for experimenting various types of ransomware attacks. Following, we construct a comprehensive set of ransomware attacks and analyze their effects over an IoMT network devices. Furthermore, we develop an effective detection filter for detecting various ransomware attacks (e.g., static and dynamic attacks) and evaluate the degree of damages caused to the IoMT network devices. In addition, we develop a defense system to block the ransomware attacks and notify the backend control system. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we experimented our architecture with 194 various samples of malware and 46 variants, with a duration of sixty minutes for each sample, and thoroughly examined the network traffic data for malicious behaviors. The evaluation results show more than 95% of accuracy of detecting various ransomware attacks.

RAMi: A New Real-Time Internet of Medical Things Architecture for Elderly Patient Monitoring

The aging of the world’s population, the willingness of elderly to remain independent, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated the urgent need for home-based diagnostic and patient monitoring systems to reduce the financial and organizational burdens that impact healthcare organizations and professionals. The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), i.e., all medical devices and applications that connect to health information systems through online computer networks. The IoMT is one of the domains of IoT where real-time processing of data and reliability are crucial. In this paper, we propose RAMi, which is a Real-Time Architecture for the Monitoring of elderly patients thanks to the Internet of Medical Things. This new architecture includes a Things layer where data are retrieved from sensors or smartphone, a Fog layer built on a smart gateway, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), a cloud component, blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the specific problems of IoMT. Data are processed at Fog level, MEC or cloud in function of the workload, resource requirements, and the level of confidentiality. A local blockchain allows workload orchestration between Fog, MEC, and Cloud while a global blockchain secures exchanges and data sharing by means of smart contracts. Our architecture allows to follow elderly persons and patients during and after their hospitalization. In addition, our architecture allows the use of federated learning to train AI algorithms while respecting privacy and data confidentiality. AI is also used to detect patterns of intrusion.

Improving Agricultural Product Traceability Using Blockchain

Most traditional agricultural traceability systems are centralized, which could result in the low reliability of traceability results, enterprise privacy data leakage vulnerabilities, and the generation of information islands. To solve the above problems, we propose a trusted agricultural product traceability system based on the Ethereum blockchain in this paper. We designed a dual storage model of "Blockchain+IPFS (InterPlanetary File System)" to reduce the storage pressure of the blockchain and realize efficient information queries. Additionally, we propose a data privacy protection solution based on some cryptographic primitives and the Merkle Tree that can avoid enterprise privacy and sensitive data leakage. Furthermore, we implemented the proposed system using the Ethereum blockchain platform and provided the cost, performance, and security analysis, as well as compared it with the existing solutions. The results showed that the proposed system is both efficient and feasible and can meet the practical application requirements.