Building Information Modeling (BIM) is envisioned as an indispensable opportunity in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries as a revolutionary technology and process. Smart construction relies on BIM for manipulating information flow, data flow, and management flow. Currently, BIM model has been explored mainly for information construction and utilization, but rare works pay efforts to information security, e.g., critical model audit and sensitive model exposure. Moreover, few BIM systems are proposed to chase after upcoming computing paradigms, such as mobile cloud computing, big data, blockchain, and Internet of Things. In this paper, we make the first attempt to propose a novel BIM system model called bcBIM to tackle information security in mobile cloud architectures. More specifically, bcBIM is proposed to facilitate BIM data audit for historical modifications by blockchain in mobile cloud with big data sharing. The proposed bcBIM model can guide the architecture design for further BIM information management system, especially for integrating BIM cloud as a service for further big data sharing. We propose a method of BIM data organization based on blockchains and discuss it based on private and public blockchain. It guarantees to trace, authenticate, and prevent tampering with BIM historical data. At the same time, it can generate a unified format to support future open sharing, data audit, and data provenance.
Traditional construction supply chains suffer from extra delays, costs and information wastages due to information intermediaries. Blockchain, a decentralized infrastructure, can provide irreversibility, undeniableness, uniqueness and anonymity for trades. Hence, we first propose a blockchain-based construction supply chain framework to reduce limitations in traditional ones. However, payment security by blockchain must be guaranteed and token assets in accounts must be protected. Although the loss of private keys will not result in the exposure or the modification of records in blockchain due to merkle root and blockheader hash, fake payments can be generated and all tokens in the accounts controlled by the private keys may be stolen by attackers. Existing approaches towards private-key protections include biometric-basic signature schemes, index-hidden private key designs and post-quantum blockchain schemes. Nevertheless, none of them can recover lost private keys. Therefore, we design a private-key distribution protocol in blockchains to preserve security of private keys with key recovery. Specifically, our scheme not only uses secret sharing to improve possibilities of recovering lost keys but also introduces network protocols to guarantee security of secret share transmission. The proposed scheme is then proven secure and feasible both in theoretical and experimental analysis. INDEX TERMS Construction supply chain, private key distribution, blockchain, secret sharing.
In the big data era, data are envisioned as critical resources with various values, e.g., business intelligence, management efficiency, and financial evaluations. Data sharing is always mandatory for value exchanges and profit promotion. Currently, certain big data markets have been created for facilitating data dissemination and coordinating data transaction, but we have to assume that such centralized management of data sharing must be trustworthy for data privacy and sharing fairness, which very likely imposes limitations such as joining admission, sharing efficiency, and extra costly commissions. To avoid these weaknesses, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based fair data exchange scheme, called FaDe. FaDe can enable de-centralized data sharing in an autonomous manner, especially guaranteeing trade fairness, sharing efficiency, data privacy, and exchanging automation. A fairness protocol based on bit commitment is proposed. An algorithm based on blockchain script architecture for a smart contract, e.g., by a bitcoin virtual machine, is also proposed and implemented. Extensive analysis justifies that the proposed scheme can guarantee data exchanging without a trusted third party fairly, efficiently, and automatically.
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