Ha Xuan Son

Mobile apps represent essential tools in our daily routines, supporting us in almost every task. However, this assistance might imply a high cost in terms of privacy. Indeed, mobile apps gather a massive amount of data about individuals (e.g., users’ profiles and habits) and their devices (e.g., locations), where not all are strictly needed for app execution. According to privacy laws, apps’ providers must inform end-users on adopted data usage practices (e.g., which data are collected and for which purpose). Unfortunately, understanding these practices is a complex task for average end-users. The result is that they install apps without understanding their privacy implications. To support users in making more privacy-aware decisions on app usage, we propose a risk estimation approach based on an analysis of the app’s code. This analysis adopts a hybrid strategy, exploiting static and dynamic code analyses. Static analysis aims at discovering which personal data an app is collecting to determine whether the target app is asking more than required. This gives the first estimation of the app’s risk level. In addition, we also perform a dynamic analysis of the target app’s code. This further analysis helps determining whether the collected personal data is consumed locally on the mobile device or sent out to external services. If this happens, the risk level has to be increased, as personal data are more exposed. To prove the proposal’s effectiveness, we run several experiments involving different groups of participants. The obtained accuracy results are promising and outperform those obtained with static analysis only.

To prevent the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2019 has seen unprecedented demand for medical equipment and supplies. However, the problem of waste treatment has not yet been given due attention, i.e., the traditional waste treatment process is done independently, and it is not easy to share the necessary information. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the interaction between parties is minimized to limit infections. To evaluate the current system at medical centers, we also refer to the traditional waste treatment processes of four hospitals in Can Tho and Ho Chi Minh cities (Vietnam). Almost all hospitals are handled independently, lacking any interaction between the stakeholders. In this article, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based system for automating waste treatment processes for medical equipment and supplies after usage among the relevant parties, named Medical-Waste Chain. It consists of four components: medical equipment and supplies, waste centers, recycling plants, and sorting factories. Medical-Waste Chain integrates blockchain-based Hyperledger Fabric technology with decentralized storage of medical equipment and supply information, and securely shares related data with stakeholders. We present the system design, along with the interactions among the stakeholders, to ensure the minimization of medical waste generation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed solution using system-wide timing and latency analysis based on the Hyperledger Caliper engine. Our system is developed based on the hybrid-blockchain system, so it is fully scalable for both on-chain and off-chain-based extensions. Moreover, the participants do not need to pay any fees to use and upgrade the system. To encourage future use of Medical-Waste Chain, we also share a proof-of-concept on our Github repository.

Due to the rapid change of population structure, leading to lower birth rates and quick aging rates, the demand for blood supply is increasing significantly. In most countries, blood quality and origin are managed by blood management information systems, such as national authorities. Nevertheless, the traditional system has limitations in this field, such as a lack of detailed blood information, making it challenging to manage blood quality, supply, and demand. Hence, to solve these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based system called BloodChain, an improved system to support blood information management, providing more detailed information about blood, such as blood consumption and disposal. BloodChain exploits private blockchain techniques with a limited number of relatively fast and reliable participants, making them suitable for B2B (Business to Business) transactions. In this paper, we also develop a proposed system based on the architecture of Hyperledger Fabric. The evaluation of BloodChain is performed in several scenarios to prove our proposed model’s effectiveness.