Nikolaos Pavlidis, Andreas Sendros, Theodoros Tsiolakis
et al.
In an era of increasing reliance on digital health solutions, safeguarding user privacy has emerged as a paramount concern. Health applications often need to balance advanced AI functionalities with sufficient privacy measures to ensure user engagement. This paper presents the architecture of FLORA, a privacy-first ovulation-tracking application that leverages federated learning (FL), privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and blockchain to protect user data while delivering accurate and personalized health insights. Unlike conventional centralized systems, FLORA ensures that sensitive information remains on users’ devices, with predictive algorithms powered by local computations. Blockchain technology provides immutable consent tracking and model update transparency, further improving user trust. In addition, FLORA’s design incentivizes participation through a token-based reward system, fostering collaborative data contributions. This work illustrates how the integration of cutting-edge technologies creates a secure, scalable, and user-centric health application, setting a new standard for privacy-preserving digital health platforms.
In recent years, cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and digital twin (DT), have revolutionized the healthcare sector by enhancing public health and treatment quality through precise diagnosis, preventive measures, and real-time care capabilities. Despite these advancements, the massive amount of generated biomedical data puts substantial challenges associated with information security, privacy, and scalability. Applying blockchain in healthcare-based digital twins ensures data integrity, immutability, consistency, and security, making it a critical component in addressing these challenges. Federated learning (FL) has also emerged as a promising AI technique to enhance privacy and enable decentralized data processing. This paper investigates the integration of digital twin concepts with blockchain and FL in the healthcare domain, focusing on their architecture and applications. It also explores platforms and solutions that leverage these technologies for secure and scalable medical implementations. A case study on federated learning for electroencephalogram (EEG) signal classification is presented, demonstrating its potential as a diagnostic tool for brain activity analysis and neurological disorder detection. Finally, we highlight the key challenges, emerging opportunities, and future directions in advancing healthcare digital twins with blockchain and federated learning, paving the way for a more intelligent, secure, and privacy-preserving medical ecosystem.
In the social media environment, fake news is a significant issue. It might be online or offline, depending on the field of journalism. Concerns have been expressed by media and publishing houses, who are looking for solutions to the problem. One of the solutions the industry has to offer in this area is Blockchain. It could be digital security trading, source or identity verification, or quotes following a certain news piece, photo, or video. It's miles of shared document generation to deliver timely files, and it's done with the help of a specific article, video, or image that has been addressed. This will no longer assist the fact abuser in verifying the details. This will help the fact abuser confirm the details, but it will also offer documentation of metadata generated at all phases. It allows you to cut the expense of disseminating false information by forwarding and explicit disclosure to persons who have first-hand knowledge of the subject. The proposed structure for acquiring fake news is supported by the blockchain age, which allows news organizations to deliver their content to their subscribers transparently. This framework was created for journalists and can be integrated into any current platform to publish a news piece and include asset statistics.
Current attempts to regulate blockchain technology are mainly based on securities law framework, which considers crypto tokens and digital assets as either securities, currencies or derivatives thereof. The main limitation of such approach lies in its inability to accommodate the diverse legal rights, obligations and assets that blockchain technology can virtually reproduce. Already in 2017–2018 there were attempts to tokenize rights outside of securities law framework, these initiatives served more as makeshift solutions to circumvent securities regulations than as thorough frameworks for managing real-world assets and commercial activities. This article conducts a comparative and historical analysis of blockchain regulatory initiatives in Europe and the US, positing that the regulation of blockchain technology through a securities law lens is driven by reactionary opportunism. Such a basis is deemed inappropriate and insufficient, as securities laws being a field of public law were not designed to govern real-world assets and commerce, which fundamentally rely on the principles of laissez-faire and freedom of contract inherent in private law. A regulatory stance focused solely on public law overlooks the full potential of blockchain technology, and risks stifling innovation and practical applications. To illustrate this, the article presents case study of tokenization of contractual rights demonstrating that securities law-focused legal regulations, such as the EU Regulation 2023/1114 on Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) and Regulation 2022/858 on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), inadequately address the field of private commerce. Based on the analysis, the article concludes that comprehensive legal framework for blockchain technology shall combine public and private law regime akin to the regulation of traditional rights, obligations and assets.
Shruti Jadon, Karthikeya Bhat, Karthikeya R. Jenni
et al.
In the current digital landscape, almost everyone is on social media or various social media platforms. People use social media for a plethora of purposes, which include staying connected with friends and family, accessing information and updates about ongoing events, entertainment, networking with professionals, expressing themselves to a wide range of users, promoting businesses, joining online communities and engaging in various activities which has led to an increase in the consumption and usage of online social networks (OSN). One of the reasons for such a growth is their features such as ubiquitous access, on-demand service, friendship networks, user engagement strategies like recommendation engines, etc. However, there are various limitations to the current approach, such as the centralization of control, lack of data ownership, poor access control, fake news, bot accounts, censorship, digital rights management issues, etc. To address these limitations, a paradigm shift is necessary. This paper aims to develop a social media application where every post can be converted to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and be sold to earn money. Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is used as the decentralized storage. Algorithms for all the functionalities of the applications are given along with an algorithm for a reputation score for every user and their posts in social media are also proposed.
Data centres have grown drastically in size and in number as the digital economy has proliferated. For the advancement of society and the economy, data centres are becoming increasingly important. But even a little period of data centre downtime can be extremely harmful. Secure management of the physical infrastructure of data centres is essential to resolving this problem. A decentralized approach to healthcare systems is also made possible by blockchain technology, which gets rid of some of the drawbacks of centralized systems like single points of failure. Currently, a number of enhanced resilience security solutions using blockchain and ANP (Analytical Neural Processes) techniques have been presented to improve the security of transformation-based technologies. ANP finds false data and recognizes harmful data measured by medical sensors. For the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), the development of defences against diverse cyber threats is advancing. Leveraging cloud environments to discover harmful code may not be a practical strategy in the future as malicious code grows in prevalence and there are no established techniques for identifying malicious code. Therefore, before the fog layer processes the data, transformation-based systems can identify and stop cyber-attacks. Additionally, it makes use of a blockchain network at the fog layer to guarantee data integrity and privacy by preventing data modification. Experimental findings demonstrate that the ANP and block chain models deliver what is promised. Additionally, the Transformer Neural Network (TNN) model's accuracy is 99.99% according to the F1 score accuracy indicator.
Muhammad Zohaib, Muhammad Asim, Mohammed ELAffendi
Emergency vehicle detection plays a critical role in ensuring timely responses and reducing accidents in modern urban environments. However, traditional methods that rely solely on visual cues face challenges, particularly in adverse conditions. The objective of this research is to enhance emergency vehicle detection by leveraging the synergies between acoustic and visual information. By incorporating advanced deep learning techniques for both acoustic and visual data, our aim is to significantly improve the accuracy and response times. To achieve this goal, we developed an attention-based temporal spectrum network (ATSN) with an attention mechanism specifically designed for ambulance siren sound detection. In parallel, we enhanced visual detection tasks by implementing a Multi-Level Spatial Fusion YOLO (MLSF-YOLO) architecture. To combine the acoustic and visual information effectively, we employed a stacking ensemble learning technique, creating a robust framework for emergency vehicle detection. This approach capitalizes on the strengths of both modalities, allowing for a comprehensive analysis that surpasses existing methods. Through our research, we achieved remarkable results, including a misdetection rate of only 3.81% and an accuracy of 96.19% when applied to visual data containing emergency vehicles. These findings represent significant progress in real-world applications, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in improving emergency vehicle detection systems.
У статті досліджено перспективні напрямки управління виробничими процесами сільськогосподарських підприємств з використанням блокчейн технологій в умовах забезпечення продовольчої безпеки. Визначено важливість блокчейн децентралізованої бази даних при зборі інформації при поставках виробників продуктів харчування, уточнено п’ять основних характеристик. Деталізовано способи використання блокчейн технологій. Представлено переваги від блокчейну з точки зору економії витрат задля більшої ефективності в існуючих процесах виробництва сільськогосподарської продукції. Уточнено чотири етапи реалізації блок-ланцюга в сільськогосподарських організаціях. Визначено основні переваги технології Blockchain: обмін продукцією без посередництва третьої сторони, безпека і надійність здійснюваних операцій, висока якість даних, робота з кваліфікованими користувачами, цілісність процесу, прозорість і незмінність системи, спрощена система обліку, ефективні транзакції.
Nassmah Y. Al-Matari, Ammar T. Zahary, Asma A. Al-Shargabi
Abstract The emergence of 6G cognitive radio IoT networks introduces both opportunities and complexities in spectrum access and security. Blockchain technology has emerged as a viable solution to address these challenges, offering enhanced security, transparency, and efficiency in spectrum management. This survey paper offers a thorough analysis of recent advancements in blockchain-enabled security mechanisms specifically for spectrum access within 6G cognitive radio IoT networks. Covering literature from 2019 to the present, the paper highlights significant contributions and developments in integrating blockchain technology with cognitive radio and IoT systems. It reviews spectrum access security and shows how blockchain’s decentralized approach can solve related issues. Key areas of focus include secure authentication systems, tamper-resistant spectrum sensing, decentralized databases, and smart contracts for spectrum management. The paper also addresses ongoing challenges like interoperability, scalability, and the need for comprehensive security frameworks. Future research directions are proposed, emphasizing the development of advanced blockchain protocols, integration with machine learning, and addressing regulatory and standardization concerns. This paper provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners aiming to leverage blockchain technology, alongside ML/AI, to enhance security and efficiency in next-generation cognitive radio IoT networks.
“Code is law” became a buzz term in Web3 and blockchain reality. Despite the term being already used much earlier by Lawrence Lessig in the year 2000 in his book titled “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” when the internet and Web2 were emerging, the rise of smart contracts and complex algorithmic power made the term genuinely resonate with the (idealised) Web3 reality. The entrainment of technological solutionism in the brains of members of society gives an impression that a world governed by algorithms will be a fairer one. However, research has shown that many members of society are not standard statistical representations of the majority and whilst algorithmic governance leaves room for “standard deviation,” individuals that fall outside this standard deviation are, in fact, very disadvantaged. There are numerous research papers as well as popular science books that address the issue of algorithmic bias and unfairness in Web 2. The proponents of blockchain and web3 technology argue that with a DAO-governed, decentralised society, problems of biased algorithmic governance are solved as power and decision-making are decentralised, and members use their governance tokens to collectively decide on the law encoded in the smart contracts that are the ultimate law enforcement apparatus. Web3 promises a shift of power from governments and corporations to people and token holders, arguing it will make a Web3-governed society fairer. This paper is based on decoding this promise and using Althusser’s model of a state apparatus to show how the power relations changed in Web2 and Web3 realities. It shows that Web3 promises of the code becoming the law were already present in the Web2 discourse and discovers a model of an ideological apparatus power struggle between states and Web2 giants. Next, the power relations in the blockchain society are researched, starting from the idealised model of decentralised, token-holder governed power, which regulates the governments and corporations, to a discussion on what the actual power relations and struggles might result from encoding the law in the smart contract. Research shows that in Web3, “code is law” society. There will be power struggles and opposition on a vertical and horizontal level. The vertical struggle is the power enforcement (originally in the hands of the state in Althusser’s (1970) model between the code and individuals, governments and corporations not willing to conform with the code-enforced law or falling outside the standard deviation of statistics-based AI algorithms hence being disadvantaged by the smart contract enforced laws. The horizontal power struggle is based on what Althusser describes as the ideological apparatus. Here, the struggle is based on a fight between individuals (the society), corporations, and the state for code-modifying resources and/or leverage over the governance token holders. Overall, the paper argues and shows that blockchain-based “code is law” reality does not solve the issue of unequal power relations within societies but only as any technological revolution shifts the power relations and power struggles between existing and new actors. Unlike the founder of Polkadot, Gavin Wood states that blockchain, DAOs, smart contracts, and Web3 overall do not result in the new social sphere with revolutionised power relations. Where Web3 is now is much more similar to where Web1 and Web2 were 25–30 years ago—Creating a new space for social interactions and discourse yet being stuck within the same social sphere and uneven power relations that have governed our societies for centuries.
The development of cryptocurrency technology is the latest innovation in the financial sector. The purpose of this study is to determine the efforts made by BNPT and to assess the ideal regulations in addressing this issue in the future. Through the use of blockchain technology, users can transact anonymously. This research is considered as a normative juridical research equipped with interviews using a statutory approach. Sources of data obtained from secondary data which includes primary, secondary, and tertiary legal materials. The novelty of the study shows that the BNPT establish the CTF Task Force which aims to combat terrorism financing through cryptocurrency and based on several previous studies and after looking at the above-mentioned examples of the phenomenon of terrorism financing, it is undeniable that many terrorists are trying to utilise cryptocurrencies to fund criminal acts. This has resulted in the issue of a legal or regulatory vacuum regarding the use of cryptocurrencies, in this case, the Commodity Futures Trading Supervisory Agency Regulation No. 6/2019 on Implementation of Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Prevention In its future endeavors, there is a need for specific regulations to ensure that the implementation process of the CTF Task Force with other agencies can be carried out more optimally.
The access control (AC) system in an IoT (Internet of Things) context ensures that only authorized entities have access to specific devices and that the authorization procedure is based on pre-established rules. Recently, blockchain-based AC systems have gained attention within research as a potential solution to the single point of failure issue that centralized architectures may bring. Moreover, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology is included in blockchain-based AC systems to address the issue of sensitive data leaking. However, current solutions have two problems: (1) systems built by these works are not adaptive to high-traffic IoT environments because of low transactions per second (TPS) and high latency; (2) these works cannot fully guarantee that all user behaviors are honest. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based AC system with zero-knowledge rollups to address the aforementioned issues. Our proposed system implements zero-knowledge rollups (ZK-rollups) of access control, where different AC authorization requests can be grouped into the same batch to generate a uniform ZKP, which is designed specifically to guarantee that participants can be trusted. In low-traffic environments, sufficient experiments show that the proposed system has the least AC authorization time cost compared to existing works. In high-traffic environments, we further prove that based on the ZK-rollups optimization, the proposed system can reduce the authorization time overhead by 86%. Furthermore, the security analysis is presented to show the system’s ability to prevent malicious behaviors.
Although previous research has identified that consumers are willing to pay for traceability, it remains unknown which types of traceability information might have the highest value, and whether consumers have an intrinsic value for blockchain technology above and beyond the instrumental value of providing traceability. A choice experiment was conducted with over 1500 consumers in Hong Kong, South Korea, and the U.S. In all three countries, consumers were willing to pay premiums for beef with traceability related to all parts of the supply chain, country of origin, and temperature history; however, the preference ordering of beef from different countries varied across Hong Kong, South Korea, and the U.S. The intrinsic value of using blockchain to deliver traceability information differed by country and by attribute, and consumers in the U.S. were most sensitive to the information describing blockchain technology. Even when traceability conveys negative information, such as temperature rising above safe levels for a short period, we find that consumers prefer knowing to not knowing, suggesting uncertainty and ambiguity aversion.
Digital forensics deals with digital evidence. Digital forensics is the study of data detection, acquisition, processing, analysis, and reporting. Encouraging the use of digital forensics in law enforcement investigations. With digital forensics, you can find out what data was taken and how it was copied or spread. Some hackers purposefully destroy data to harm their targets. In other cases, malicious software or hacker involvement can accidentally corrupt vital data. Digital forensics faces challenges of security and integrity. IoT devices can collect digital forensic evidence in an IoT setting, putting cybercrime agencies at danger owing to security and integrity. Many studies have been done recently to improve IoT based digital forensics integrity and security, but researchers face the risk of confidentiality. Recent research shows that digital forensics still faces manipulation and security issues. So a clever and effective approach is needed that not only protects security and integrity but also anticipates threats. So we propose an intelligent and effective solution based on Blockchain and Hashing algorithms. We will store the data collected from IoT devices into Blockchain. Anomalies in the evidence and transactions will be predicted using Machine Learning boosted models. So the proposed model works well because it can predict attacks early on.
Financing is one of the challenging issues for business owners no matter where they stand in the cycle of organization's life. The reason of failure for most of the newly started businesses (called startups) in their early stages is known to be the lack of cash resources. The problem of finance in Iran, no matter the source of it, whether from capital market or debt market, has had a long history. Initial coin offering could be a solution for this problem that could safely invest the increasing cash flow in the businesses. It was introduced in 2013 as a new method, utilizing the technology capacity of fintech's, and reached its peak in 2017, acquiring a worldwide name. The purpose of this study is to explain the different perspectives to this method which would be suitable for Iran's condition. This has accomplished by using GQR method while conducting semi-structured interviews with 12 experts on the subject. Advantaging from SWAT matrix, this paper attempted to offer a way to inform CEOs on the pros and cons of financing by this new method.