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Multi-site clinical trial systems face security challenges when streamlining information sharing while protecting patient privacy. In addition, patient enrollment, transparency, traceability, data integrity, and reporting in clinical trial systems are all critical aspects of maintaining data compliance. A Blockchain-based clinical trial framework has been proposed by lots of researchers and industrial companies recently, but its limitations of lack of data governance, limited confidentiality, and high communication overhead made data-sharing systems insecure and not efficient. We propose 𝖲𝗈𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺, a privacy-preserving smart contracts framework, to manage, share and analyze clinical trial data on fabric private chaincode (FPC). Compared to public Blockchain, fabric has fewer participants with an efficient consensus protocol. 𝖲𝗈𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺 consists of several modules: patient consent and clinical trial approval management chaincode, secure execution for confidential data sharing, API Gateway, and decentralized data governance with adaptive threshold signature (ATS). We implemented two versions of 𝖲𝗈𝗍𝖾𝗋𝗂𝖺 with non-SGX deploys on AWS blockchain and SGX-based on a local data center. We evaluated the response time for all of the access endpoints on AWS Managed Blockchain, and demonstrated the utilization of SGX-based smart contracts for data sharing and analysis. 

While our society accelerates its transition to the Internet of Things, billions of IoT devices are now linked to the network. While these gadgets provide enormous convenience, they generate a large amount of data that has already beyond the network’s capacity. To make matters worse, the data acquired by sensors on such IoT devices also include sensitive user data that must be appropriately treated. At the moment, the answer is to provide hub services for data storage in data centers. However, when data is housed in a centralized data center, data owners lose control of the data, since data centers are centralized solutions that rely on data owners’ faith in the service provider. In addition, edge computing enables edge devices to collect, analyze, and act closer to the data source, the challenge of data privacy near the edge is also a tough nut to crack. A large number of user information leakage both for IoT hub and edge made the system untrusted all along. Accordingly, building a decentralized IoT system near the edge and bringing real trust to the edge is indispensable and significant. To eliminate the need for a centralized data hub, we present a prototype of a unique, secure, and decentralized IoT framework called Reja, which is built on a permissioned Blockchain and an intrusion-tolerant messaging system ChiosEdge, and the critical components of ChiosEdge are reliable broadcast and BFT consensus. We evaluated the latency and throughput of Reja and its sub-module ChiosEdge. 

Blockchain is the technology used by developers of cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, to enable exchange of financial “coins” between participants in the absence of a trusted third party to ensure the transaction, such as is typically done by governments. Blockchain has evolved to become a generic approach to store and process data in a highly decentralized and secure way. In this article, we review blockchain concepts and use cases, and discuss the challenges in using them from a governmental viewpoint. We begin with reviewing the categories of blockchains, the underlying mechanisms, and why blockchains can achieve their security goals. We then review existing known governmental use cases by regions. To show both technical and deployment details of blockchain adoption, we study a few representative use cases in the domains of healthcare and energy infrastructures. Finally, the review of both technical details and use cases helps us summarize the adoption and technical challenges of blockchains. 

We present Chios, an intrusion-tolerant publish/subscribe system which protects against Byzantine failures. Chios is the first publish/subscribe system achieving decentralized confidentiality with fine-grained access control and strong publication order guarantees. This is in contrast to existing publish/subscribe systems achieving much weaker security and reliability properties. Chios is flexible and modular, consisting of four fully-fledged publish/subscribe configurations (each designed to meet different goals). We have deployed and evaluated our system on Amazon EC2. We compare Chios with various publish/subscribe systems. Chios is as efficient as an unreplicated, single-broker publish/subscribe implementation, only marginally slower than Kafka and Kafka with passive replication, and at least an order of magnitude faster than all Hyperledger Fabric modules and publish/subscribe systems using Fabric. 

While adopting Blockchain technologies to automate their enterprise functionality, organizations are recognizing the challenges of scalability and manual configuration that the state of art present. Scalability of Hyperledger Fabric is an open challenge recognized by the research community. We have automated many of the configuration steps of installing Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain on AWS infrastructure and have benchmarked the scalability of that system. We have used the UCR (University of California Riverside) Time Series Archive with 128 timeseries datasets containing over 191,177 rows of data totaling 76,453,742 numbers. Using an automated Serverless approach, we have loaded this dataset, by chunks, into different AWS instances, triggering the load by SQS messaging. In this paper, we present the results of this benchmarking study and describe the approach we took to automate the Hyperledger Fabric processes using serverless Lambda functions and SQS triggering. We will also discuss what is needed to make the Blockchain technology more robust and scalable.