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Innovative Projects in Cybersecurity with Blockchain Technology

Blockchain is an emerging technology, which provides the way to store and manage information in a distributed fashion. It enables the creation of decentralized crypto-currencies, smart contracts, development of new governance, voting systems over a network of computer systems without any human intervention. The beauty of blockchain is that an attacker has to compromise 51% of the systems to surpass the hashing power of the target network. Thus, it is computationally impractical to launch an attack against the blockchain network. Unprecedented reliability and security over other cryptographic schemes has expanded the application domains of blockchain including financial services, real estate, stock exchange, identity management, supply chain, and Internet of Things. Some of the potential blockchain applications, which can be investigated further are listed below.

 

• Blockchain-based Voting System

Electronic voting system has become popular due to its accuracy and faster results. Countries with large population like India, Brazil, and Philippines use electronic voting and counting which reduces the time require obtaining election results from a couple of hours to a week. However, transparency and security are two key issues since electronic voting system depends on the third party. It would be easy and simple for the intermediaries to manipulate the voting software to produce fraudulent results. To overcome this situation, Blockchain-based Voting System can be developed and implemented. Since blockchain technology stores the votes as individual blocks in a public ledger, a voter could verify her vote at any time later.  Further, each block is verified by the by the consensus algorithm trust can be easily built into the system and the potential for any compromise or ability to include a fake block in the chain can be eliminated.

• Smart Contracts

Smart contract also called self-executing contract is an automated process that is capable of initiating, facilitating, and executing an agreement i.e., contract using the blockchain technology. The main objective of smart contract is to enable two or more anonymous parties to securely run business among each other without the need of a middleman. The smart contract-driven applications include supply chain management (especially, food, agriculture, and medicine), post trade solution for stock exchange, insurance claiming process, trade clearing and settlement.

IoT Projects

In an IoT network, the blockchain can keep an immutable record of the history of the smart devices, which enable them to work autonomously without the need of any centralized control. One example of such systems is ADEPT (Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to- Peer Telemetry), which provides a secure, low-cost way for devices to interact. In this system, a home appliance such as a dishwasher could initiate ‘smart contracts’ to send request to a detergent retailer for supplies. Furthermore, these contracts authorize the dishwasher to pay for the order as well as receive the payment acknowledgement. However, the goal of this project is to design a blockchain based IoT device management system where a secondary data records could be maintained in addition to baseline authentication methods such as device model and serial number. For example, a smart door lock system may keep a transaction log of video activations when someone locks or unlocks the door. Each item in the transaction log would create another historical database, linked to its corresponding entry in the identity chain to prevent malicious attacks.

• Smart Privacy Meter

At present, privacy is a key concern in our daily life since invasion of privacy can take place in several ways without notice. The use of smart sensors, technical gadgets, and social media makes it easy for the invaders to collect personal information such as individual’s activities, profiles including home address, location visits, date of birth, and personal interests. Smart Privacy Meter App is a tool that will collect user information from electronic devices and then provide an indication of the privacy level. To ensure transparency and security, all transactions will be recorded in the blockchain.

• Health Records / TeleHealth

Electronic medical records are very sensitive and must be kept secure to ensure patient’s privacy. These records can be stored in the blockchain in order to provide easy access to health records upon multi-signature approvals between patients and practitioners or providers. Furthermore, the payment systems can also be integrated with the system to automatically bill the patient for the service provided.

 

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