Today's smartphones are equipped with a large number of powerful value-added sensors and features such as a low power Bluetooth sensor, powerful embedded sensors such as the digital compass, accelerometer, GPS sensors, Wi-Fi capabilities, microphone, humidity sensors, health tracking sensors, and a camera, etc. These value-added sensors have revolutionized the lives of the human being in many ways such, as tracking the health of the patients and movement of doctors, tracking employees movement in large manufacturing units, and monitoring the environment, etc. These embedded sensors could also be used for large-scale personal, group, and community sensing applications especially tracing the spread of certain diseases. Governments and regulators are turning to use these features to trace the people thought to have symptoms of certain diseases or virus e.g. COVID-19. The outbreak of COVID-19 in December 2019, has seen a surge of the mobile applications for tracing, tracking and isolating the persons showing COVID-19 symptoms to limit the spread of disease to the larger community. The use of embedded sensors could disclose private information of the users thus potentially bring threat to the privacy and security of users. In this paper, we analyzed a large set of smartphone applications that have been designed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus and bring the people back to normal life. Specifically, we have analyzed what type of permission these smartphone apps require, whether these permissions are necessary for the track and trace, how data from the user devices is transported to the analytic center, and analyzing the security measures these apps have deployed to ensure the privacy and security of users.

Cloud computing is an important technology for businesses and individual users to obtain computing resources over the Internet on-demand and flexibly. Although cloud computing has been adopted across diverse applications, the owners of time-and-performance critical applications require cloud service providers’ guarantees about their services, such as availability and response times. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a mechanism to communicate and enforce such guarantees typically represented as service level objectives (SLOs), and financial penalties are imposed on SLO violations. Due to delays and inaccuracies caused by manual processing, an automatic method to periodically verify SLA terms in a transparent and trustworthy manner is fundamental to effective SLA monitoring, leading to the acceptance and credibility of such service to the customers of cloud services. This paper presents a blockchain-based distributed infrastructure that leverages fundamental blockchain properties to achieve immutable and trustworthy SLA monitoring within cloud services. The paper carries out an in-depth empirical investigation for the scalability of the proposed system in order to address the challenge of transparently enforcing real-time monitoring of cloud-hosted services leveraging blockchain technology. This will enable all the stakeholders to enforce accurate execution of SLA without any imprecisions and delays by maintaining an immutable ledger publicly across blockchain network. The experimentation takes into consideration several attributes of blockchain which are critical in achieving optimum performance. The paper also investigates key characteristics of these factors and their impact to the behaviour of the system for further scaling it up under various cases for increased service utilization.

Healthcare has evolved significantly in recent years primarily due to the advancements in and increasing adoption of technology in healthcare processes such as data collection, storage, diagnostics, and treatment. The emergence of the industrial internet of things (IIoT) has further evolved e-Health by facilitating the development of connected healthcare systems which can significantly improve data connectivity, visibility, and interoperability leading to improved quality of service delivered to patients. However, such technological advancements come with their perils—there are growing concerns with regards to the security and privacy of healthcare data especially when collected, shared, and processed using cutting-edge connected sensor devices affecting the adoption of next-generation e-healthcare systems. In particular, during the front-end and back-end data transfer in health information exchange (HIE) there exist a security risk in term of confidentiality, integrity, authentication and access control of the data due to the limited capabilities of IoT devices involved. In this paper, we investigate the use of distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to address such security concerns for emerging healthcare systems. In particular, we use masked authenticated messaging (MAM) over the Tangle to achieve secure data sharing within a healthcare system and provide a proof-of-concept of applying the proposed approach for securing healthcare data in a connected IIoT environment. Further, we have performed the evaluation and analysis of data communication against the metrics of encryption and efficiency in transaction time.

Blockchain has introduced new opportunities with the potential to enhance systems and services across diverse application domains. Fundamental characteristics of blockchains such as immutability, decentralisation, transparency and traceability have a profound role in this. However, integration with contemporary systems and among disparate blockchain-based applications is a non-trivial challenge primarily due to differences with respect to platforms, consensus mechanism, and governance. Although this challenge has received some attention from the research community, it requires careful analysis to analyse existing work and ascertain gaps to achieve effective and efficient solution to this challenge. This article presents a thorough systematic review of existing research within blockchain interoperability highlighting significant contributions. Leveraging this analysis, the article presents an internet-inspired framework (Chain-Net) to facilitate interoperability within blockchain-based systems whereby two systems within independent Blockchain networks can securely exchange data with each other. This is achieved by using gateway module at each network. This module is a lightweight node registered by the Blockchain network, equipped with discovery service to lookup a target blockchain, and is responsible for forwarding cross-chain transactions to gateway module at the target blockchain. Gateway module plays a vital role in the Chain-Net model, as it holds a cross-chain transaction in a pending state until a confirmation is received from the target blockchain, thus maintaining the record integrity between the two chains. The article presents our efforts to evaluate the proposed blockchain interoperability framework against success criteria based on our analysis of the blockchain interoperability challenge.

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