Effectively and securely retrieving data from various blockchain networks remains a critical challenge. We propose a novel framework that provides enhanced capabilities for authenticated data retrieval, empowering users and regulatory bodies. Our framework provides a scalable solution for information verification across diverse blockchain systems, enabling a variety of different types of actors to be integrated. Our framework allows metadata from various systems to be combined, also providing support for secure querying.

Material reuse and recycling plays a key role in reducing carbon emissions in the architecture and construction sector. A “Material Passport” (MP) is a record describing how a material is used throughout its lifetime, from genesis to termination, recording operations carried out on the material. The granularity of information recorded in a MP can vary, however ensuring that this provenance trail remains immutable is a key requirement. The benefits of using a MP, operations carried out on a MP, and recording of transactions within a distributed Blockchain (parachain) is described. A scenario is used to illustrate how the proposed approach can be used in practice.

The recognition of capabilities supplied by cloud systems is presently growing. Collecting or sharing healthcare data and sensitive information especially during the Covid-19 pandemic has motivated organizations and enterprises to leverage the upsides coming from cloud-based applications. However, the privacy of electronic data in such applications remains a significant challenge for cloud vendors to adapt their solutions with existing privacy legislation standards such as general data protection regulation (GDPR). This article first proposes a formal model and verification for data usage requests of providers in a cloud composite service using a model checking tool. A cloud pharmacy scenario is presented to illustrate the connectivity of providers in the composite service and the stream of their requests for both collection and movement of patient data. A set of verifications is then undertaken over the pharmacy service in accordance with three significant GDPR obligations, namely user consent, data access, and data transfer. Following that, the article designs and implements a cloud container virtualization based on the verified formal model realizing GDPR requirements. The container makes use of some enforcement smart contracts to only proceed with the providers’ requests that are compliant with GDPR. Finally, several experiments are provided to investigate the performance of our approach in terms of time, memory, and cost.

Emerging multitenant cloud computing ecosystems allow multiple applications to share virtualized pool of computing and networking resources. As a result, such ecosystems are becoming increasingly prone to data privacy concerns (personal data leakages and unauthorized access). While cloud computing providers support robust security and privacy mechanisms (e.g., public key cryptography, firewalls, and virtual private networks, among many others), they lack mechanisms and frameworks to monitor, audit, and verify these data privacy concerns. The emergence of data protection regulations around the world, such as General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Data Protection Act in the U.K., further emphasizes the need to overcome these privacy limitations. In this article, a novel technique for monitoring, auditing, and verifying the operations carried out on a user’s personal data in cloud computing ecosystems is proposed. Our research methodology leverages distributed ledger technologies (e.g., blockchain and smart contracts) for developing an immutable recording technique, which transparently logs, monitors, and verifies the operations carried out on user data. Using a healthcare pharmacy scenario and extensive real-world experiments, we validate the feasibility of the proposed technique. The proposed work handles a large pool of requests ($>$13K) ensuring minimal latency ($\approx$50–60 ms) and overheads for three different service packages varied with respect to the number of actors and operations.