STTR Phase II: Increased Security for Blockchains Applied to Healthcare

这个小型企业技术转让（STTR）第二阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是显著提高医疗保健安全公私区块链协议的安全性。区块链技术的使用提高了效率，直接改善了患者体验，改善了健康状况，同时降低了成本。降低提供医疗保健的成本所带来的经济影响有可能惠及数百万人的生命。工作量证明（PoW）区块链面临的一个严重威胁是双重支出攻击。通过成功的双花攻击，矿工可以逆转支付，并掩盖数据访问的审计痕迹。拟议协议的部署将确保这两个属性的完整性。更广泛地说，提议的系统可以提高任何PoW bb0的安全性，如比特币、以太坊和莱特币。系统还可以通过定期创建块，以及时和标准的方式进行处理，从而大大改善用户体验。这个STTR二期项目旨在消除医疗安全区块链的双重支出威胁。现有的PoW区块链基于计算谜题。一旦矿工解决了一个谜题，她就会在链条上添加一个区块，并获得硬币奖励。在预期中，矿工生产的区块与他们的计算资源份额成正比。但挖矿是一个随机过程，偶尔一个拥有一小部分资源的矿工可以生成大部分区块。在这种情况下，少数矿工可以覆盖现有的区块，使早期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花攻击。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，从而将双重花费的风险降低了几个数量级。技术工作包括：第一，开发新的区块链共识机制。共识机制是一个高度敏感的嵌入式软件，它的采用将通过仔细的工程处理。其次，该项目将减少网络上相关的带宽使用，这是一项主要成本。该项目将寻求创造一种基于先进过滤器的降低网络成本的新解决方案。第三，该项目将解决和减轻剩余的安全问题，如扣留证据攻击和拒绝服务攻击。最后，该工作将实证量化改进，以确保高质量的工程，并告知翻译策略。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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.