Gowri Ramachandran

Rodrigo Dutra Garcia, Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, Raja Jurdak et al.

Real-world applications in healthcare and supply chain domains produce, exchange, and share data in a multi-stakeholder environment. Data owners want to control their data and privacy in such settings. On the other hand, data consumers demand methods to understand when, how, and who produced the data. These requirements necessitate data governance frameworks that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, and consent management. We introduce a decentralized data governance framework based on blockchain technology and proxy re-encryption to let data owners control and track their data through privacy-enhancing and consent management mechanisms. Besides, our framework allows the data consumers to understand data lineage through a blockchain-based provenance mechanism. We have used Digital e-prescription as the use case since it has multiple stakeholders and sensitive data while enabling the medical fraternity to manage patients' prescription data, involving patients as data owners, doctors and pharmacists as data consumers. Our proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation results based on CosmWasm, Ethereum, and pyUmbral PRE show that the proposed decentralized system guarantees transparency, privacy, and trust with minimal overhead.

Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, Sidra Malik, Shantanu Pal et al.

Supply chain applications operate in a multi-stakeholder setting, demanding trust, provenance, and transparency. Blockchain technology provides mechanisms to establish a decentralized infrastructure involving multiple stakeholders. Such mechanisms make the blockchain technology ideal for multi-stakeholder supply chain applications. This chapter introduces the characteristics and requirements of the supply chain and explains how blockchain technology can meet the demands of supply chain applications. In particular, this chapter discusses how data and trust management can be established using blockchain technology. The importance of scalability and interoperability in a blockchain-based supply chain is highlighted to help the stakeholders make an informed decision. The chapter concludes by underscoring the design challenges and open opportunities in the blockchain-based supply chain domain.

Khondokar Fida Hasan, Anthony Overall, Keyvan Ansari et al.

The recent advancement of cloud technology offers unparallel strength to support intelligent computations and advanced services to assist with automated decisions to improve road transportation safety and comfort. Besides, the rise of machine intelligence propels the technological evolution of transportation systems one step further and leads to a new framework known as Cognitive Internet of Vehicles (C-IoV). The redefined cognitive technology in this framework promises significant enhancements and optimized network capacities compared with its predecessor framework, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). CIoV offers additional security measures and introduces security and privacy concerns, such as evasion attacks, additional threats of data poisoning, and learning errors, which may likely lead to system failure and road user fatalities. Similar to many other public enterprise systems, transportation has a significant impact on the population. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the evolution and equally essential to identify potential security vulnerabilities and issues to offer mitigation towards success. This chapter offers discussions framing answers to the following two questions, 1) how and in what ways the penetration of the latest technologies are reshaping the transportation system? 2) whether the evolved system is capable of addressing the concerns of cybersecurity? This chapter, therefore, starts presenting the evolution of the transportation system followed by a quick overview of the evolved CIoV, highlighting the evolved cognitive design. Later it presents how a cognitive engine can overcome legacy security concerns and also be subjected to further potential security, privacy, and trust issues that this cloud-based evolved transportation system may encounter.

Arvin Hekmati, Gowri Ramachandran, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

Pandemic and epidemic diseases such as CoVID-19, SARS-CoV2, and Ebola have spread to multiple countries and infected thousands of people. Such diseases spread mainly through person-to-person contacts. Health care authorities recommend contact tracing procedures to prevent the spread to a vast population. Although several mobile applications have been developed to trace contacts, they typically require collection of privacy-intrusive information such as GPS locations, and the logging of privacy-sensitive data on a third party server, or require additional infrastructure such as WiFi APs with known locations. In this paper, we introduce CONTAIN, a privacy-oriented mobile contact tracing application that does not rely on GPS or any other form of infrastructure-based location sensing, nor the continuous logging of any other personally identifiable information on a server. The goal of CONTAIN is to allow users to determine with complete privacy if they have been within a short distance, specifically, Bluetooth wireless range, of someone that is infected, and potentially also when. We identify and prove the privacy guarantees provided by our approach. Our simulation study utilizing an empirical trace dataset (Asturies) involving 100 mobile devices and around 60000 records shows that users can maximize their possibility of identifying if they were near an infected user by turning on the app during active times.

Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

The advent of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies enable IoT and smart city application developers to conceive new types of applications and solutions for identity management, trust, and data monetization. However, architecting blockchain-based IoT applications remain challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of blockchain platforms and lack of guidelines on how to interface existing components in the IoT ecosystem with the emerging Blockchain technology. This article explains the characteristics of blockchain and IoT technologies and presents a general reference architecture that can be used to develop many blockchain-based peer-to-peer IoT applications.

Mahmoud Ammar, Mahdi Washha, Gowri Sankar Ramachandran et al.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly intertwined with critical industrial processes, yet contemporary IoT devices offer limited security features, creating a large new attack surface. Remote attestation is a well-known technique to detect cyber threats by remotely verifying the internal state of a networked embedded device through a trusted entity. Multi-device attestation has received little attention although current single-device approaches show limited scalability in IoT applications. Though recent work has yielded some proposals for scalable attestation, several aspects remain unexplored, and thus more research is required. This paper presents slimIoT, a scalable lightweight attestation protocol that is suitable for all IoT devices. slimIoT depends on an efficient broadcast authentication scheme along with symmetric key cryptography. It is resilient against a strong adversary with physical access to the IoT device. Our protocol is informative in the sense that it identifies the precise status of every device in the network. We implement and evaluate slimIoT considering many factors. On the one hand, our evaluation results show a low overhead in terms of memory footprint and runtime. On the other hand, simulations demonstrate that slimIoT is scalable, robust and highly efficient to be used in static and dynamic networks consisting of thousands of heterogenous IoT devices.

Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, Bhaskar Krishnamachari

Blockchain technology has been transforming the financial industry and has created a new crypto-economy in the last decade. The foundational concepts such as decentralized trust and distributed ledger are promising for distributed, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the applications of Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies in this domain are few and far between because of the lack of understanding and inherent architectural challenges. In this paper, we describe the opportunities for applications of blockchain for the IoT and examine the challenges involved in architecting Blockchain-based IoT applications.