Research Ethics - Assignment 1

Student No : Y60680432
Student Name : Tharaka Hewa

1 . Overview of the research

My research is entitled as “Decentralized Security Service Architecture for Industrial Internet of
Things in 6G”. The research mainly focuses on leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT)
Security with the incorporation of smart contracts than enable the security services from cloud to
the edge infrastructure layer. The proposed security algorithms to ensure security services
including privacy, integrity, and authentication. The developed algorithms have been validated
with near-realistic implementations
2. Ethical issues and challenges in my research
2.1 Acquisition of medical data for use cases in resarch
The proposed security algorithms required to be evaluated in the near realistic implementation
and the research utilizes the state-of-art services(Eg. Cloud-based IoT authentication security
services) for comparison. However, one of the primary challenge I encountered in the research
is the accessing the realistic data set. Mostly, the research work will be published as journal
articles or conference proceedings. Hence, accessing the realistic data and publishing the
results based on the medical data is a significant challenge. However, the research utilized
some publicly available data sets that use for machine learning applications. In addition to that,
the a in-house formulated test data will be used.
2.2 Data privacy etablishment of medical data in
research
Data privacy is one of the most important security concern in the healthcare data. The Health
Information Accountability and Portability Act(HIPAA) and General Data Protection
Regulation(GDPR) are two key definitions that enforce the privacy on data, including healthcare.
The security services developed in the research must comply with the privacy standards and
definitions defined in such definitions. Developing the security algorithms preserving the
compliance is one of the most significant challenge I have encountered. As my research mainly
focuses on the development of decentralized security service architecture incorporating
blockchain-based smart contracts, availability of the healthcare data on a public ledger is a
significant challenge.
2.3 Conflict of interest within the inter-organizational
collobaration
The research includes collaboration with the industries such as VTT. When the publications
comprises with the multiple authors from different institutions, a conflict of interest can be
identified. For example, each when each organization has their own direction of research on
same topic, there is a risk of compromising the privacy of intellectual content in the discussions
of their individual collaborations. Therefore, it is important to identify the potential research
groups who can synergestically collaborate by yielding a better result for each other. For
example, a machine learning team from VTT and 5G security research team can collaboratively
work together.
2.4 Conflict of interests in industrial colloboration
The conflict of interest may be occured when the collaboration with industrial partners in same
domain. For example, in collaboration of Horizon 2020 projects, several academic partners and
industrial partners collaborate on similar research topics. Collaboration of industrial and
academic partners reveal the intellectual content of the research which will be a mutually
disclose the content on the ongoing work. In addition to that, such collaborative works will
deviate from the student’s research topic when it evolves with the inputs received from the
partners within the collaboration. This affects the deviation of thesis topic that will be a problem.
2.5 Exposing the unpublished work in mentoring
Completion of the doctoral degree includes follow-up group meetings with academic mentors
from similar contexts. The discussions reveal the future plans of the students and upcoming
research work. It is important to select the academic mentors in the mentoring tasks from
different domains of the doctoral student. Otherwise, it is an ethical issue that will disclose the
intellectual information relevant to upcoming research work of the student.