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Uniquely identifying individuals across the various networks they interact with on a daily basis remains a challenge for the digital world that we live in, and therefore the development of secure and efficient privacy preserving identity mechanisms has become an important field of research. In addition, the popularity of decentralised decision making networks such as Bitcoin has seen a huge interest in making use of distributed ledger technology to store and securely disseminate end user identity credentials. In this paper we describe a mechanism that allows one to store the COVID-19 vaccination details of individuals on a publicly readable, decentralised, immutable blockchain, and makes use of a two-factor authentication system that employs biometric cryptographic hashing techniques to generate a unique identifier for each user. Our main contribution is the employment of a provably secure input-hiding, locality-sensitive hashing algorithm over an iris extraction technique, that can be used to authenticate users and anonymously locate vaccination records on the blockchain, without leaking any personally identifiable information to the blockchain.

5G technology is expected to enable many innovative applications in different verticals. These applications have heterogeneous performance requirements (e.g., high data rate, low latency, high reliability, and high availability). In order to meet these requirements, 5G networks endorse network flexibility through the deployment of new emerging technologies, mainly network slicing and mobile edge computing. This article introduces a distributed blockchain-enabled network slicing (DBNS) framework that enables service and resource providers to dynamically lease resources to ensure high performance for their end-to-end services. The key component of our framework is global service provisioning, which provides admission control for incoming service requests along with dynamic resource assignment by means of a blockchain-based bidding system. The goal is to improve users’ experience with diverse services and reduce providers’ capital and operational expenditure.

The traditional Domain Name System (DNS) does not include any security details, making it vulnerable to a variety of attacks which were discovered in 1990. The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) attempted to address these concerns and extended the DNS protocol to add origin authentication and message integrity whilst remaining backwards compatible. Yet despite the fact that issues with DNS have been well known since the late 90s, there has been very little adoption of DNSSEC. This paper proposes a new system using blockchain technology. Our system aims to provide the same security benefits as DNSSEC whilst addressing the concerns that led to its slow adoption.

Bitcoin was launched in 2009, becoming the world’s first ever decentralized digital currency. It uses a publicly distributed ledger called the blockchain to record the transaction history of the network. The Bitcoin network is structured as a decentralized peer-to-peer network, where there are no central or supernodes, and all peers are seen as equal. Nodes in the network do not have a complete view of the entire network and are only aware of the nodes that they are directly connected to. In order to propagate information across the network, Bitcoin implements a gossip-based flooding protocol. However, the current flooding protocol is inefficient and wasteful, producing a number of redundant and duplicated messages. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to the current flooding protocol implemented by Bitcoin. We propose a novel protocol that changes the current flooding protocol to a probabilistic flooding approach. Our approach allows nodes to maintain certain probabilities of sending information to their neighbours, based on previous message exchanges between the nodes. Our experimental evaluation shows a reduction in the number of duplicated messages received by each node in the network and the total number of messages exchanged in the network, whilst ensuring that the reliability and resilience of the system were not negatively affected.

The widespread adoption of fax machines in the 1980s revolutionised everyday communications. It was quickly adopted as the standard form of communication across the globe. Since then, the internet has replaced fax as a truly global form of instant communication. However, the fax machine still reigns as the primary form of communication in a number of industries, healthcare being one of them. This paper presents a system that uses a blockchain and an off-chain centralised data storage to give patients and medical professionals instant access to their medical records from anywhere. By assigning each medical record a pseudo anonymous identifier, a second layer "blockchain" for each user can be created allowing for the rapid collection and querying of data. The off-chain pseudo anonymous data storage allows for the data to remain unencrypted enabling the rapid generation of anonymous medical datasets which can be used for machine learning and data mining on the data, potentially bringing many benefits to the healthcare industry.

The SSL protocol has been widely used for verifying digital identities and to secure Internet traffic since the early days of the web. Although X.509 certificates have been in existence for more than two decades, individual user uptake has been low due to the high cost of issuance and maintenance of such certs. This has led to a situation whereby users are able to verify the identity of an organization or e-commerce retailer via their digital certificate, but organizations have to rely on weak username and password combinations to verify the identity of customers registered with their service. We propose the X509Cloud framework which enables organizations to issue certificates to their users at zero cost, and allows them to securely store and disseminate client certificates using the Bitcoin inspired blockchain protocol. This in turn will enable organizations and individuals to authenticate and to securely communicate with other users on the Internet.

This paper presents the implementation and validation of PI2 Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithm in ns-3. PI2 provides an alternate design and implementation to Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (PIE) algorithm without affecting the performance benefits it provides in tackling the problem of bufferbloat. Bufferbloat is a situation arising due to the presence of large unmanaged buffers in the network. It results in increased latency and therefore, degrades the performance of delay-sensitive traffic. PIE algorithm tries to minimize the queuing delay by auto-tuning its control parameters. However, with PI2, this auto-tuning is replaced by just squaring the packet drop probability. In this paper, we implement a model for PI2 in ns-3 and verify its correctness by comparing the results obtained from it to those obtained from the PIE model in ns-3. The results indicate that PI2 offers a simple design and achieves similar or at times better responsiveness and stability than PIE.