STTR Phase II: Increased Security for Blockchains Applied to Healthcare

这个小企业技术转让（STTR）第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是医疗安全公私区块链协议的安全性的显著提高。区块链技术的使用直接提高了效率，改善了患者体验，改善了健康状况，同时降低了成本。降低医疗保健成本的经济影响有可能使数百万人受益。工作量证明（PoW）区块链上的一个严重威胁是双重支出攻击。通过成功的双重支出攻击，矿工可以逆转付款并掩盖数据访问的审计线索。拟议协议的部署将确保这两个属性的完整性。更广泛地说，该系统可以提高任何PoW区块链的安全性，如比特币、以太坊和莱特币。该系统还可以通过定期创建的区块以及时和标准的方式进行处理，从而大大改善用户体验。该STTR第二阶段项目旨在消除医疗安全区块链的双重支出威胁。现有的PoW区块链基于计算难题。一旦矿工解决了一个难题，她就会在链条上添加一个区块，并获得硬币奖励。在预期中，矿工产生的区块与他们的计算资源份额成比例。但是挖矿是一个随机的过程，偶尔一个拥有少量资源的矿工可以生成大多数区块。在这种情况下，少数矿工可以覆盖现有的区块，使之前的条目无效或重复支出。该系统通过要求矿工在提交区块之前聚合PoW问题的多个解决方案来防止双重花费攻击。这种聚合确保了拥有大多数处理能力的矿工有很高的概率提交大多数区块，从而降低了数量级的双重支出风险。技术方面的工作包括：第一，为区块链开发新的共识机制。共识机制是一个高度敏感的嵌入式软件，这种采用将通过仔细的工程来处理。其次，该项目将减少网络上的相关带宽使用，这是一项主要成本。该项目将寻求创建一个新的解决方案，以降低基于高级过滤器的网络成本。第三，该项目将解决和缓解剩余的安全问题，如证据扣留攻击和拒绝服务攻击。最后，这项工作将根据经验量化改进，以确保高质量的工程和通知翻译战略。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project is a significant increase to the security of healthcare safe public-private blockchain protocols. The use of blockchain technology drives efficiencies in direct alignment with improved patient experience and improved health, both at a reduced cost. The economic impact of bringing down the costs of providing healthcare has the potential to benefit millions of lives. One serious threat on Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains is the double-spend attack. With a successful double-spend attack, miners can reverse payments and obscure the audit trail of data access. The deployment of the proposed protocol will ensure the integrity of both these properties. More broadly, the proposed system can improve security for any PoW blockchain, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. The system can also greatly improve user experience by processing in a timely and standard manner via regularly created blocks.This STTR Phase II project proposes to virtually remove the threat of double-spends for healthcare safe blockchains. Existing PoW blockchains are based on computational puzzles. Once a miner solves a puzzle, she adds a block to the chain and is rewarded with coins. In expectation, miners produce blocks proportional to their share of the computational resources. But mining is a random process and occasionally a miner with a small share of the resources can generate a majority of the blocks. In those cases, a minority miner can overwrite existing blocks, nullifying or double-spending earlier entries. The proposed system prevents double-spend attacks by requiring miners to aggregate multiple solutions to the PoW problem before submitting a block. This aggregation ensures that miners with the majority of the processing power have a high probability of submitting the majority of the blocks, reducing the risk of double-spends by orders of magnitude. The technical work includes: First, developing a new consensus mechanism for blockchains. The consensus mechanism is a highly sensitive, embedded piece of software and this adoption will be handled with careful engineering. Second, the project will decrease associated bandwidth use on the network, a primary cost. The project will seek to create a new solution for reducing network costs based on advanced filters. Third, the project will address and mitigate remaining security issues, such as proof withholding attacks and Denial of Service attacks. Finally, the work will empirically quantify the improvements to ensure high quality engineering and to inform translation strategy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.