Search Results (64)

For national statistics offices (NSOs), data sharing is essential for the production of official statistics, yet it must comply with stringent confidentiality and governance mandates. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising means to enable trusted and auditable data exchange under these constraints, motivating a growing body of research across public-sector domains. This paper presents an up-to-date survey of blockchain-based data-sharing solutions in government and NSO contexts, reviewing studies published between 2018 and 2026. Given the limited research specific to official statistics, this survey evaluates public-sector solutions with particular attention to their alignment with NSOs’ strict privacy and data governance requirements. Departing from prior reviews that primarily organise the literature by technical architectures or application domains, the survey adopts the Five Safes framework as a unifying analytical lens. Through this governance-focused synthesis, the survey identifies recurring architectural patterns and design principles that support secure and accountable data sharing, including permissioned or consortium blockchains, hybrid on/off-chain storage, selective integration of privacy-enhancing technologies, and smart contracts to automate governance functions such as access control and workflow management. Building on these insights, the paper outlines two distinct reference architectures that distil best practices from existing studies for blockchain-enabled data sharing under public-sector constraints, and highlights open challenges—most notably scalability and integration with legacy systems—pointing to future research directions towards solutions that combine strong security assurances with practical governance compliance. Full article

Blockchain technology is very often presented as a promising solution for modernizing property registration, due to its characteristics of immutability, auditability, and traceability. However, the evolution of research in recent years shows that the initial technological enthusiasm has been followed by a more critical phase, in which the focus has shifted from abstract promises to the concrete conditions of legal, institutional, and operational integration. This article pursues two main objectives: (i) to present the current state of research regarding the use of blockchain in property registration systems and (ii) to identify the suitability of implementing such an infrastructure in Romania, by reference to the legal framework governing real estate registration, data protection requirements, and the current stage of digitalization of the National Agency of Cadastre and Land Registration (ANCPI). The study is qualitative, interdisciplinary, and evaluative in nature and is based on a set of sources such as scientific literature, institutional reports, case studies, and official normative sources. The analysis shows that international literature is dominated by prototypes and architectural models, while real-world implementations remain limited and, in all relevant cases, rely on permissioned and hybrid models, rather than fully decentralized public ledgers. For Romania, the article shows that the main barriers are not strictly technical, but legal–institutional: the legal recognition of distributed entries, the relationship with the function of the land book, the role of ANCPI, and compliance with GDPR. The conclusion of the research is that blockchain may be useful for cadastral records in Romania only within a complementary, phased, and institutionally controlled architecture, rather than as an immediate replacement for the current cadastral registration system. Full article

Public sector organizations are under increasing pressure to modernize service delivery while preserving transparency, interoperability, accountability, and citizen trust. Blockchain technology offers relevant capabilities for these objectives, particularly through shared ledgers, cryptographic verification, and programmable rules. However, its adoption in public sector contexts remains constrained by the lack of architectural guidance tailored to inter-organizational services. This study proposes BRA-PS, a Blockchain Reference Architecture for Public Sector Citizen-Centric Applications, developed from a real-world digitalization project in Quebec, Canada. The architecture organizes components into six layers (presentation, business, communication, smart contract, blockchain, and data) with cross-cutting concerns addressing governance, access control, security, and monitoring. A key design principle is the public–private workflow separation, which enables inter-organizational collaboration while preserving each organization’s operational autonomy and data confidentiality. We validated the architecture through a case study involving a vehicle registration process between two public agencies, supported by a proof-of-concept implementation using Hyperledger Fabric. An Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method (ATAM) evaluation, conducted with a panel of five domain experts, identified six architectural risks, including InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) confidentiality exposure and smart contract inflexibility, six non-risks, six sensitivity points, and six trade-offs across three key quality attributes: autonomy, collaboration, and functional suitability. The results show that BRA-PS can support implementation decisions, clarify stakeholder responsibilities, and expose relevant architectural trade-offs. The recommendations derived from the evaluation provide practical guidance for the adoption of blockchain in citizen-centric public sector services. Full article

The digital transformation has revolutionized document management, making Digital Transaction Management (DTM) systems essential for enhancing efficiency, security, and regulatory compliance in a wide range of organizations. This paper investigates the challenges, innovations, and state-of-the-art solutions in DTM platforms, with a focus on their integration with emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain. In particular, the work introduces a reference architecture for next-generation DTM platforms, emphasizing blockchain-based security, smart-contract-based automation, and semantics-enhanced document retrieval and analysis. A case study in the utilities sector illustrates the benefits of the envisioned proposal, showcasing its suitability for managing complex, high-volume workflows. This research provides a foundation for future developments in resilient and interconnected DTM solutions, addressing the evolving demands of modern organizations within the broader digital ecosystem. Full article

The digital sharing of healthcare data necessitates a careful balance between the need for verifiability and the protection of patient privacy. In many real-world scenarios, particularly in employer and third-party verification processes, excessive clinical information is disclosed beyond what is strictly required. This practice introduces significant privacy risks and conflicts with data minimization principles. To address this problem, this study proposes a blockchain-based, privacy-preserving system architecture that enables health report verification without revealing diagnosis information. The proposed system is built upon a dual-layer architecture that structurally separates clinical data from verification processes. In the clinical data layer, health reports are encrypted on the client side and stored in off-chain environments, while only reference data and access control information are recorded on the blockchain. The system further integrates revocation mechanisms, role-based access control, and auditability through a modular smart contract design. In conclusion, this study introduces a modular, privacy-oriented, and practically applicable solution for secure healthcare data verification. By eliminating the need for clinical data disclosure during verification, the proposed architecture offers a novel design perspective and contributes both conceptually and technically to the development of blockchain-based healthcare information systems. Full article

Remote tele-rehabilitation requires objective pain assessment, but existing approaches fail in two distinct ways. Self-report scales such as the Visual Analog Scale and the Numeric Pain Rating Scale are easy to falsify, opening a special case of the Oracle problem in blockchain-based insurance. Cloud-based computer vision handles falsification but transmits raw biometric video off the patient’s device, violating privacy requirements. A decentralized Edge AI-Oracle architecture is proposed that combines MediaPipe Face Mesh landmark extraction with a recurrent classifier mapping Action-Unit feature sequences to a learned pain score aligned with the Prkachin and Solomon Pain Intensity scale. The recurrent cell is selected empirically across short-context (T = 2) and long-context (T = 120 frames at 24 fps) regimes, with a two-layer Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network adopted for deployment. Inference and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) signing run inside an ARM TrustZone Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Biometric logs are stored off-chain on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Smart contracts anchor results on-chain and open a 24 h optimistic verification window for an off-chain Watchtower auditor. On SynPAIN the LSTM reaches F1 = 0.683 on T = 120 video (leave-one-stratum-out), with a directional but non-significant advantage over Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) (Wilcoxon p = 0.167). Cross-dataset validation on BioVid Heat Pain Database Part A (87 subjects, 174 paired observations, leave-one-subject-out) yields F1 = 0.519 for LSTM and 0.499 for GRU (Wilcoxon p = 0.549). A processor-only TEE surrogate benchmark estimates 1.96 ms (FP32) and 0.45 ms (INT8) inference latency at T = 120 with a 0.34 MB footprint and 707 µs ECDSA signing latency, leaving the INT8 inference latency more than an order of magnitude below the 33 ms per-frame budget. The dual-layer storage reduces gas costs by a factor of 23.4 (160,261 vs. 3,744,872 gas), corresponding to an illustrative mainnet cost of approximately 0.53 USD per submission at 1 gwei, rising to roughly 16 USD at a busier 30 gwei, and falling to approximately 0.005 USD on Arbitrum One (April 2026 reference parameters), so that continuous monitoring is economically practical on Layer-2. An adaptive-adversary analysis of the Watchtower shows that gross score tampering is detected at every usable operating threshold, whereas a rational adversary who inflates by less than the dispute threshold, or who shapes the injected score to fall just inside it, evades detection. Because the false-positive rate reaches zero only for $\mathsf{\delta }\gtrsim 0.15$, the protocol bounds rather than eliminates patient-side fraud and motivates a zero-knowledge proof-of-inference successor. The framework is architecturally and economically feasible as a cryptographically verifiable, privacy-preserving tele-rehabilitation substrate aligned with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements through the Zero-Video Transmission principle, while remaining economically viable under post-Dencun mainnet and Layer-2 conditions. Recognition accuracy on real-world data and robustness to small-magnitude tampering remain limitations that the interchangeable recognition and audit components must improve before clinical deployment. Full article

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is reshaping intelligent transportation through pervasive connectivity, real-time data exchange, cooperative perception, and vehicle–edge–cloud services, while also expanding cybersecurity and privacy risks across heterogeneous cyber–physical environments. This paper presents a PRISMA 2020-informed systematic review of IoV security and privacy protection research. A cross-layer and lifecycle-oriented analytical framework is developed by integrating a four-layer IoV architecture—sensing layer, network access layer, coordinative computing layer, and application layer—with a five-stage data lifecycle covering data collection, transmission, storage, usage, and disposal. Based on this framework, the paper examines representative threat surfaces, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication security, public key infrastructure (PKI) based authentication, trust management, privacy-preserving data sharing, intrusion detection, active defense, and AI-assisted security analytics. Privacy-preserving mechanisms, including differential privacy, federated learning, blockchain, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation, are further compared in terms of deployment layer, lifecycle stage, real-time suitability, and representative performance evidence. In addition, the review discusses the engineering relevance of UNECE WP.29 R155/R156, ISO/SAE 21434, and related national standards, with emphasis on compliance evidence, over-the-air (OTA) governance, supply-chain coordination, and lifecycle cybersecurity management. The review shows that no single protection mechanism can simultaneously satisfy the requirements of real-time performance, scalability, privacy preservation, trustworthiness, and regulatory compliance in dynamic IoV environments. Future research should emphasize lightweight and adaptive protection, cross-layer trust coordination, privacy–utility co-optimization, trustworthy AI-assisted security operations, and evidence-based lifecycle governance. This review provides a structured reference for researchers and a practical basis for secure and privacy-aware IoV system design. Full article

The digital transformation of agrifood systems demands an integrated infrastructure to ensure traceability, trust, and intelligent decision-making across complex and heterogeneous value chains. METROFOOD-IT, a large-scale national research infrastructure in food metrology aligned with the ESFRI METROFOOD-RI, addresses these challenges by combining advanced experimental facilities with a comprehensive digital ecosystem. This paper focuses on the IT kernel of METROFOOD-IT and presents an integrated architectural model that brings together four key technological paradigms: data acquisition through Internet of Things (IoT) and laboratory infrastructures, an Open Data Platform for interoperability and sharing, blockchain-based notarization for integrity and provenance, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for knowledge extraction and decision support. Rather than describing these components in isolation, the paper abstracts from their implementation within the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) project METROFOOD-IT to distill a coherent and reusable architectural pattern in which data management, trust enforcement, and intelligent analytics are tightly coupled. Five explicit design principles are identified and articulated: federated data with centralized metadata, selective on-chain anchoring, user-unobtrusive trust infrastructure, explainability as a first-class architectural concern, and machine learning as the backbone of decision-making. Two empirical case studies—one centered on explainable AI for hyperspectral crop nitrogen assessment and the other on IoT-driven sustainable agriculture monitoring secured by distributed ledger technology—serve a dual role: they motivate and shape the architectural pattern, and they exemplify the operational regimes the resulting design supports. A reference deployment on the Ethereum Sepolia public test network, grounded on an IBM Power E1050 and IBM Storage Scale enterprise substrate, provides quantitative evidence for the proposed hybrid on-chain/off-chain pattern with streaming hash-only notarization. The architecture illustrates how research infrastructures can evolve into integrated digital platforms that enable transparent, verifiable, and scalable agrifood systems, and offers a foundation for generalizable design principles in data-intensive and trust-sensitive settings. Full article

Institutional adoption of blockchain technology in supply chains, healthcare, and public administration remains constrained. Organizations that manage digital assets on behalf of large numbers of non-technical users lack custody architectures suited to their scale. Existing approaches either require users to manage private keys directly; rely on centralized custodians that store encrypted keys; or depend on distributed protocols such as multi-party computation, which impose substantial infrastructure and coordination overhead. This paper presents CryptoVault, a stateless custody architecture for institutional blockchain deployments that derives private keys on demand from a single master seed using BIP-44 hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, eliminating persistent storage entirely. Only an AES-256-GCM-encrypted derivation index is persisted per wallet; the corresponding private key is re-derived at signing time and discarded immediately after use, ensuring no private key material ever rests on disk. The security model requires the simultaneous compromise of three independent components (the encrypted derivation index, the encryption key, and the master seed) for full key recovery, compared to two components in custody systems that persist encrypted private keys. An empirical evaluation under concurrent load demonstrates 13 to 22 ms steady-state signing latency on development hardware, with re-derivation accounting for approximately 4 to 7% of that total, confirming that on-demand derivation introduces negligible overhead. Thus, CryptoVault has been validated against an agricultural cooperative deployment as a representative institutional scenario, with an architecture that generalizes to any organization managing wallets on behalf of users who have no direct interaction with cryptographic material. A reference implementation is available as open-source software. Full article

Digital Product Passports (DPPs) are being introduced in the European Union to support circular economy strategies, improve product transparency, and enable lifecycle-based compliance and decision-making. Despite growing interest, research on DPPs remains fragmented, and there is limited consensus on how to design and validate DPP frameworks in real-world contexts. This paper presents a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed studies that explicitly define, structure, or assess DPP-related frameworks. Using a transparent search strategy based on Scopus and IEEE Xplore, combined with structured screening, the review assesses framework design elaboration and validation maturity across included studies and interprets recurring framework archetypes across application sectors. The results show that most studies emphasise conceptual or architectural designs. These commonly adopt data-centric, layered, technology-anchored, or ecosystem-oriented structures and frequently refer to enabling technologies such as digital twins, blockchain, data spaces, and knowledge graphs. However, explicit validation remains limited and is primarily restricted to illustrative case studies, stakeholder-informed assessments, or prototypes, with few studies evaluating scalability, interoperability, or lifecycle-spanning operation in real-world contexts. By consolidating design principles and validation practices across sectors in this targeted corpus, the review clarifies the current state of the art and highlights critical research gaps. The findings indicate that DPP research is characterised by a strong emphasis on framework design, with comparatively limited empirical validation. Furthermore, critical research gaps include the lack of rigorous empirical validation, cross-organisational testing, lifecycle-spanning evaluation, clearly defined data governance responsibilities, convergence towards shared reference architectures, and sector-specific adaptation. Full article

With decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization, energy coordination increasingly involves many actors, heterogeneous cyber–physical data, and compliance-sensitive settlement workflows. Although blockchain has been widely discussed in this domain, existing studies are still fragmented across application-specific or platform-specific narratives. As a result, it remains difficult to compare recurring mechanisms across scenarios or to determine which blockchain functions are operationally justified in deployable energy systems. We address that fragmentation through a structured narrative review of 41 representative sources, including prior surveys, foundational technical references, and scenario-specific studies. We formulate three research questions concerning architectural positioning, cross-scenario mechanisms, and deployment barriers. On this basis, we synthesize a unified five-layer reference architecture that links off-chain physical infrastructure and trusted data acquisition to protocol-level trust anchoring, reusable business services, interface and compliance functions, and application scenarios. The framework is then used to compare five recurring scenario families, namely peer-to-peer energy trading, carbon markets and renewable energy certificates, electric vehicle charging and vehicle-to-grid services, virtual power plants, and grid flexibility coordination. The analysis shows that blockchain is most defensibly positioned as an evidence-and-settlement trust layer, rather than as a replacement for real-time physical control. It also identifies three persistent adoption bottlenecks, namely scalable ledger interaction, trustworthy cyber–physical data binding, and interoperability with regulatory and operational infrastructures. By making the trust boundary explicit and by providing a common analytical lens for cross-scenario comparison, this review clarifies the scientific contribution of blockchain to energy systems and outlines stakeholder-oriented directions for deployable hybrid designs. Full article

Smart contracts raise persistent challenges regarding compliance with traditional contract formalities, including writing, signature, notarization, and in certain transactions, registration. These issues are particularly significant in high-value and public-facing transactions such as real estate, where formalities determine legal validity, evidentiary sufficiency and publicity effects. While existing scholarly work has examined these challenges from either doctrinal or technological perspectives, limited attention has been given to how the functional roles of formalities interact with blockchain architecture, practitioner perceptions and institutional legal frameworks. This study addresses this gap through a mixed-methods approach combining doctrinal legal analysis with qualitative socio-legal research based on 27 semi-structured interviews with legal professionals including attorneys, judges, and academic scholars. The analysis is grounded in a civil law framework, with particular reference to the Jordanian legal system, while references to the European Union’s eIDAS Regulation are used illustratively to demonstrate regulatory approaches to digital authentication. The findings demonstrate that blockchain-based systems can effectively support the evidentiary and attribution functions of contractual formalities through cryptographic verification, consensus mechanisms, and automated execution. However, they do not independently satisfy formalities that perform cautionary, constitutive, protective or public order function, namely notarization and registration, which remain dependent on institutional validation and legal recognition. The analysis further shows that practitioner concerns reflect not only doctrinal constraints but also institutional roles and varying levels of technical familiarity. To address these limitations, the study proposes a function-based analytical framework for evaluating smart contract formalities and identifies two complementary pathways for legal adaptation: (i) institutional integration, including registry-linkage systems and hybrid contracts; and (ii) technological adaptation, including digital authentication frameworks and legal oracles that connect on-chain execution to off-chain legal conditions. The study concludes that smart contract formalities’ challenges arise not solely from technological limitations, but from the interaction between legal doctrine, institutional structures, and system design. It advances a functional framework for aligning automation with the evidentiary, protective, and publicity functions of contractual formalities. Full article

Ukraine’s reconstruction, estimated at $524 billion over the next decade, presents an unprecedented opportunity to embed circular economy principles into industrial rebuilding, but the financial architecture currently deployed for reconstruction is structurally blind to circular outcomes. This paper examines how digital tools and innovative financing mechanisms can channel investment toward circular industrial reconstruction in Ukraine, drawing on Germany’s National Circular Economy Strategy (NCES, adopted December 2024) as a reference model. A comparative institutional analysis combines a documentary review of Ukrainian reconstruction policy frameworks (Ukraine Plan 2024–2027, RDNA4, Ukraine Facility) and German NCES instruments with the construction of a financing−technology pathway typology. Five pathways are proposed: circular bond issuance with Digital Product Passport integration; blended finance with blockchain impact verification; EU Facility conditionality with AI-driven resource management; war risk insurance with circular construction standards; and SME digitalisation credit with circular economy competency building. Each pathway is assessed against five criteria: investment scale, risk mitigation, circular measurement, digital readiness, and institutional feasibility, and applied to four industrial corridors (Dnipro region, Zaporizhzhia region, Kharkiv region, and Donetsk region). The analysis reveals that no single pathway is sufficient; a layered strategy differentiating by region is required. Digital tools, particularly the Digital Product Passport and blockchain traceability, serve as partial substitutes for institutional trust in post-conflict settings, reducing information asymmetry between investors and project operators. The paper contributes a practically oriented framework at the under-theorised intersection of post-conflict reconstruction finance and circular economy scholarship. Full article

The rapid expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) has added complexity to the resilience and security challenges to the EV charging systems, especially owing to the exposure to the cyber–physical threats and the reliance on centrally coordinated systems. Although the previous literature has discussed the use of blockchain in the context of smart grids and mobility services; its implementation to improve the resilience of EV charging, particularly when integrated with cybersecurity systems, is still insufficiently synthesized. Despite these issues, critical gaps persist in terms of scalability, interoperability, and cybersecurity enforcement. This study presents an exploratory literature review that examines the intersection of blockchain and cybersecurity enabled applications and introduces a comparative framework evaluating the conventional security controls with blockchain based cybersecurity solutions to improve the resilience of EV charging infrastructure. The authors analyzed 70 studies published between 2018 and 2025 to determine the security weaknesses and map them to decentralized solutions. Reported threats, security mechanisms, architectural decisions, and levels of validation were grouped and reviewed critically in the patterns of limitations with respect to scalability, interoperability, and deployment maturity. Through the synthesis of fragmented results in cross disciplinary research, the paper finds the main gaps in research and comparative research results that could be used as a comprehensive reference in future studies and system design in resilient EV charging infrastructures. Full article

The evaluation of research and development (R&D) project proposals plays a critical role in shaping national scientific and technological priorities. However, existing expert review systems are often characterized by fragmented digital workflows, limited traceability of decisions, and a strong reliance on manual coordination, which reduces transparency and auditability. This paper proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for a national research project evaluation system that integrates artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies as complementary decision-support and data integrity mechanisms. The framework formalizes the complete evaluation lifecycle, including applicant authorization, formal compliance verification, originality and plagiarism analysis, expert selection and assessment, analytical consolidation of reviews, and fixation of final decisions. Artificial intelligence modules are introduced to support thematic classification, compliance checking, expert matching, and analytical processing of expert evaluations, while blockchain technology is incorporated as an immutable integrity layer for recording critical evaluation events and ensuring data provenance. The proposed approach focuses on architectural design, governance principles, and process modeling rather than system implementation or empirical validation. The framework is intended to serve as a reference model for the design and future development of transparent, accountable, and scalable research project evaluation platforms at national and institutional levels. Full article