Two more accepted papers -
ICDF2C’21: “A Hybrid Cloud Deployment Architecture For Privacy-preserving Collaborative Genome-Wide Association Studies”
Fatima-zahra Boujdad, David Niyitegeka, Reda Bellafqira, Gouenou Coatrieux, Emmanuelle Genin, and Mario Südholt
The increasing availability of sequenced human genomes is enabling health professionals and genomics researchers to well understand the implication of genetic variants in the development of common diseases, notably by means of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) which are very promising for personalized medicine and diagnostic testing. However, the ever present need to handle genetic data from different sources to conduct large studies entails multiple privacy and security issues. Actually, classical methods of anonymization are inapplicable for genetic data that are now known to be identifying per se. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for privacy-preserving collaborative GWAS performed in the cloud. Indeed, our proposal is the first framework which combines a hybrid cloud deployment with a set of four security mechanisms that are digital watermarking, homomorphic encryption, meta-data de-identification and the Intel Software Guard Extensions technology in order to ensure confidentiality of genetic data as well as their integrity. Furthermore, our approach describes meta-data management which has rarely been considered in state-of-the-art propositions despite their importance to genetic analyses; in addition, the new deployment model we suggest fits with existing infrastructures which makes its integration straightforward. Experimental results of a prototypical implementation on typical data sizes demonstrate that our solution protocol is feasible and that the framework is practical for real-world scenarios.
Cluster Computing Journal: “Measuring performances and footprint of blockchains with BCTMark: a case study on Ethereum smart contracts energy consumption”
Dimitri Saingre, Thomas Ledoux and Jean-Marc Menaud
A rich ecosystem of blockchain-based projects has emerged since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2008. New protocols seek to improve the performances of blockchain systems. In particular, the energy consumption of blockchains has been particularly decried. Unfortunately, those new proposals are often evaluated with ad hoc tools and experimental environments. Therefore, reproducibility and comparison of these new contributions with the state of the art of blockchain technologies are complicated. To the best of our knowledge, only a few tools partially address the design of a generic benchmarking of blockchain technologies (e.g., load generation). This paper introduces BCTMark, a generic framework for benchmarking blockchain technologies on an emulated network in a reproducible way. Based on this novel framework, we studied a key aspect of modern blockchains’ energy consumption: smart-contract execution. Based on experiments and the analysis of one year of real-world Ethereum transactions, we measured and modeled smart-contracts’ energy consumption on Ethereum. Furthermore, this study details how the replication of contract calls execution can impact their energy cost. In particular, we give insights on the energy consumed by smart-contracts on Ethereum over one year.