To demonstrate the practicality and scalability of DTL application, AZ BARC has developed a prototype solution and evaluated the performance of the system against an existing centralized Healthcare Information Exchange (HIE) implementation. Results show that decentralization technology, like blockchain, could help to mitigate some issues that HIE faces today. Issues include transparency for patients/data sources, delayed emergency response and policy based data access control.

In order to accomplish this, BARC has collaborated with Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) to demonstrate the application of DTL to medical device supply chain management to identify technology and regulatory requirements (included FDA regulations to identify and track medical devices) and high-value use cases to guide platform development.

The project is using permissioned Distributed Ledger Technology (DTL) and/or permissionless blockchain in order to handle device attributes coming from different physical and legal “entities” and from different networking/cyber domains. A particular device ID will be formed as a tuple (collection of signals/attributes) and transition (change of attributes) for a given device will be logged on blockchain ledger(s). 

In this way device/IoT management system will be linked to verifying integrity and consistency of the device state transitions recorded on immutable blockchain ledger.

The founding members of AZ BARC unanimously agreed that it was important to focus the Center’s applied research effort on a Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) project. Zero knowledge proofs have been proposed to limit information leakage on public ledger systems (blockchain).  Such a proof would enable someone to prove his/her age range, for example, without providing any additional information about other aspects of one’s identity.

The particular focus of this project would be centered on ZKP for voting systems. The founding members of AZ BARC agreed that the project’s main objective is to validate different ZKP designs from their technical viability and business feasibility for corporate voting services. 

This is a three year effort and to that end, we will: (1) survey existing work on the use of zero knowledge proofs in blockchain systems, commercial, non-profit  and academic; (2) identify and test meaningful performance measures for zero-knowledge proofs, both performance and security measures; (3) build a proof of concept applications of zero knowledge proofs; and (4) provided that step #3 yields satisfactory results then  develop a platform for the use of zero-knowledge proofs on a blockchain network for casting, counting and validating votes for corporate shareholder voting application.