Blockchain Papers

Soumya Purohit, Prasad Calyam, Mauro Lemus Alarcon, Naga Ramya Bhamidipati · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Yacov Manevich, Artem Barger, Gal Assa

As user privacy gains popularity and attention, and starts to shape relations between users and service providers, blockchain based solutions thrive for ways to relax immutability without sacrificing consistency. This work answers that need and presents the first design for a redactable execute-order-validate blockchain, that grants users with the \emph{right to be forgotten}. The design is easy to adopt, as we exemplify by implementing it on top of Hyperledger Fabric. It modifies the block structure and extracts user data from the hash-chain without loosening any correctness or liveness criteria. We evaluate our design and show that it provides compliance with only a minimal performance overhead, making it a feasible add-on to any execute-order-validate blockchain system.

Mustafa A. Ali, Wesam S. Bhaya

Abstract Blockchain technology has revolutionized economic transactions, and it is expected to spread and influence other fields. It can create innovative and destructive effects on the systems that need to be executed, store, verified, and continually update digital data among participating parties. Moreover, it provides security, privacy, trust, and transparency. In the education field, there is a shy presence of some blockchain applications, and the majority of them have a pilot character. Hence, a model based on blockchain is introduced in this study, which aims to provides easy to apply for certificates, as well as share and verify these certificates with a third party. Moreover, the mechanism of the proposed model proposes permanent distributed hashes records of students’ certificates in Higher Education to reduce forgery. In conclusion, the study discussed the opportunities, benefits, features, and challenges are represented by deploying this model in the Higher Education field.

Sun Ya-hong

Abstract Blockchain originated in 2009, it was the underlying “ledger” recording technology of Bitcoin. After several years of development and improvement, it has gradually become a distributed, decentralized, and trustless technical solution. In the past two years, blockchain has become a new decentralized distributed computing paradigm. We apply blockchain technology into cloud computing, using the former’s security mechanism to improve the latter’s secure storage and secure computing performance. This is a promising research topic. The paper mainly discusses the design and implementation of blockchain from a technical prospect, it summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the blockchain, and it also analyzes the possible application scenarios.

Yan Zhuang

Clinical trials are the cornerstone of treatment discovery because they provide comprehensive scientific evidence on the safety, efficacy, and optimal use of therapeutics. However, current clinical trials are facing multiple challenges such as patient recruitment, data capture, and overall management. There are various causes of patient recruitment challenges such as inefficient advertising models, complex protocols, and distant trial sites. Data inconsistency is the main challenge of the data capture process. Source data verification, a standard method used for data monitoring, is resource-intensive that can cost up to 25 percent of the total budget. The current clinical trial management system market is fragmented and lacks thorough designs with all desired features so that nearly all respondents to management systems from the annual global survey reported dissatisfaction with the current management system. Based on these challenges, disruptive technologies such as blockchain may provide feasible solutions by utilizing its unique features. Blockchain is an open-source distributed ledger technology that was first applied in the financial sector. Its features such as public audibility, data security, immutability, anonymity, and smart contracts are a good fit for the needs of many healthcare applications. However, there are several common challenges of blockchain technology so that most blockchain designs for healthcare applications are still in the early stage of implementation. This dissertation aims at optimizing clinical trials by developing multiple applications using blockchain technology to provide feasible solutions to the current challenges. We will use real-world data to conduct large-scale simulations to evaluate the feasibility and performance of proposed blockchain models for clinical trial applications.

Chengzu Dong, Frank Jiang, Xuejun Li, Aiting Yao · 6 authors

Edge computing is becoming more and more popular in both academics and industries. With the booming of edge computing technology, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) based delivery system is expected to achieve higher efficiency and low latency. However, the UAV often collects user-specific data during the delivery process, the data-leakage or security/privacy breaching could occur during the data-sharing process between the edge nodes and UAV devices. Privacy-preserving issues are further refraining from the popularity of the UAV-based logistic systems. It is believed that the UAV tracking and identity verification system can provide imminent access-level security and privacy protection, which is urgently required to eliminate the practical concerns under the edge computing-based environment. To the best knowledge of authors, for the first time, this paper proposes a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) integrated framework with the latest Blockchain technology for UAV-based delivery system. It is expected to protect the edge computing-based UAV delivery system against security flaws and privacy concerns. In this work, the benefits of using SSI with Blockchain technology are analyzed, the efficiency of identifying and authenticating UAVs and their respective users is further experimented and discussed. The experimental results show that the integrated SSI framework with Blockchain can effectively improve the efficiency of the user identity management system as well as the identity verification process in the delivery process.

Ziaur Rahman, Ibrahim Khalil, Xun Yi, Mohammed Atiquzzaman

There has been intense concern for security alternatives because of the recent rise of cyber attacks, mainly targeting critical systems such as industry, medical, and energy ecosystems. Although the latest industry infrastructures largely depend on AI-driven maintenance, prediction based on corrupted data undoubtedly results in loss of life and capital. Admittedly, an inadequate data protection mechanism can readily challenge the security and reliability of the network. The shortcomings of the conventional cloud or trust-ed-certificate-driven techniques have motivated us to exhibit a unique blockchain-based framework for a secure and efficient Industry 4.0 system. The demonstrated framework obviates the long-established certificate authority after enhancing the consortium blockchain that reduces the data processing delay and increases cost-effective throughput. Nonetheless, the distributed Industry 4.0 security model entails cooperative trust rather than depending on a single party, which in essence indulges the costs and threat of the single point of failure. Therefore, the multi-signature technique of the proposed framework accomplishes multi-party authentication, which confirms its applicability for a real-time and collaborative cyber-physical system.

João Paulo de Brito Gonçalves, Henrique Carvalho de Resende, Rodolfo da Silva Villaça, Esteban Municio · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ruijun Duan, Li Guo

As a disruptive emerging technology, the Internet of things (IoT) has rapidly developed, but its privacy risks and security vulnerabilities are still key challenges. The decentralized and distributed architecture of blockchain has the potential to satisfy IoT privacy and security requirements. This gives birth to the new domain of blockchain for IoT (BIoT). BIoT will cause significant transformations across several industries, paving the way for new business models. Based on the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) databases in Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, this study aims to explore the research trends and cooperation in the field of BIoT using the bibliometric method. The results indicate that the publications in this field have increased significantly from 2016 to 2020, with China and the USA being the most productive and influential countries. Keyword co-occurrence analysis shows that the most important research topics are as follows: security issues, core technologies, application dimensions, and transaction processes. Text mining analysis indicates that future research directions for BloT will focus more on both computing paradigms and key applications. This study will provide researchers with a greater understanding on the state of the art of BIoT and will serve as a reference for researchers engaging in this field to identify their own future research directions.

Yunkai Wei, Zixian An, Supeng Leng, Kun Yang

The sixth generation (6G) systems are generally recognized to be established on ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence (AI) and distributed ledger such as blockchain. However, the AI training demands tremendous computing resource, which is limited in most 6G devices. Meanwhile, miners in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains devote massive computing power to block mining, and are widely criticized for the waste of computation. To address this dilemma, we propose an Evolved-Proof-of-Work (E-PoW) consensus that can integrate the matrix computations, which are widely existed in AI training, into the process of brute-force searches in the block mining. Consequently, E-PoW can connect AI learning and block mining via the multiply used common computing resource. Experimental results show that E-PoW can salvage by up to 80 percent computing power from pure block mining for parallel AI training in 6G systems.

Harsha R. Vyawahare

Blockchain technology and distributed ledger has attracted massive attention and has triggered multiple projects in different industries. Blockchain is one of the most important technical invention in the recent years. It serves as an immutable ledger which allows transactions to take place in a decentralized manner. Blockchain based applications are springing up and are covering numerous fields including financial services, reputation system and Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. However, there are still many challenges of blockchain technology such as scalability and security problems waiting to be overcome. This paper presents a comprehensive overview on blockchain technology.

Et. al. Shadab Alam

Blockchain provides a creative approach to storing information, executing transactions, conducting tasks, and building trust. Some see Blockchain as a revolutionary technology for cryptography and cybersecurity, with applications ranging from cryptocurrency to healthcare, smart contracts, Internet of Things, smart grids governance, supply-chain etc. This research work would offer a detailed analysis of blockchain Security, Privacy and Trust. It further studies the applications of blockchain technology in the domain of education and involved challenges. Finally, it proposes a blockchain-based framework for secure and reliable student's record management.

Sujit Biswas, Kashif Sharif, Fan Li, Anupam Kumar Bairagi · 6 authors

Contagious diseases are prevalent even in the current era of advanced technology. A uniformed initiative is required to build a reliable interactive information exchange service targeting vaccination data management and other medical services. The conventional data exchange mechanism is centralized, creating many vulnerable issues such as a single point failure, data leakage, access control, etc. This article introduces a Blockchain-based medical data-sharing framework (called GlobeChain) to overcome the technical challenges to handle the outbreak records. The challenges that might arise due to the proposed Blockchain-based framework are also presented as a future direction that grabs the proposal's effectiveness.

Safa Otoum, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Hussein T. Mouftah

The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread rapidly in late 2019, has revealed that the use of computing and communication technologies provides significant aid in preventing, controlling, and combating infectious diseases. With the ongoing research in next-generation networking (NGN), the use of secure and reliable communication and networking is of utmost importance when dealing with users' health records and other sensitive information. Through the adaptation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled NGN, the shape of healthcare systems can be altered to achieve smart and secure healthcare capable of coping with epidemics that may emerge at any given moment. In this article, we envision a cooperative and distributed healthcare framework that relies on state-of-the-art computing, communication, and intelligence capabilities, namely, Federated Learning (FL), mobile edge computing (MEC), and Blockchain, to enable epidemic (or suspicious infectious disease) discovery, remote monitoring, and fast health-authority response. The introduced framework can also enable secure medical data exchange at the edge and between different health entities. Such a technique, coupled with the low latency and high bandwidth functionality of 5G and beyond networks, would enable mass surveillance, monitoring and analysis to occur at the edge. Challenges, issues, and design guidelines are also discussed in this article with highlights on some trending solutions.

Tarek Frikha, Faten Chaabane, Nadhir Aouinti, Omar Cheikhrouhou · 6 authors

The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technology across many applications, such as autonomous systems, communication, and healthcare, is driving the market’s growth at a positive rate. The emergence of advanced data analytics techniques such as blockchain for connected IoT devices has the potential to reduce the cost and increase in cloud platform adoption. Blockchain is a key technology for real-time IoT applications providing trust in distributed robotic systems running on embedded hardware without the need for certification authorities. There are many challenges in blockchain IoT applications such as the power consumption and the execution time. These specific constraints have to be carefully considered besides other constraints such as number of nodes and data security. In this paper, a novel approach is discussed based on hybrid HW/SW architecture and designed for Proof of Work (PoW) consensus which is the most used consensus mechanism in blockchain. The proposed architecture is validated using the Ethereum blockchain with the Keccak 256 and the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) ZedBoard development kit. This implementation shows improvement in execution time of 338% and minimizing power consumption of 255% compared to the use of Nvidia Maxwell GPUs.

Yong Zhu, Chao Huang, Zhihui Hu, Abdullah Al‐Dhelaan · 5 authors

In the post-cloud era, edge computing is a new computing paradigm with data processed at the edge of the network, which can process the data close to the end-user in real time and offload the cloud task intelligently. Meanwhile, the decentralization, tamper-proof and anonymity of blockchain technology can provide a new trusted computing environment for edge computing. However, it does raise considerable concerns of security, privacy, fault-tolerance and so on. For example, identity authentication and access control rely on third parties, heterogeneous devices and different vendors in IoT, leading to security and privacy risks, etc. How to combine the advantages of the two has become the highlight of academic research, especially the issue of secure resource management. Comprehensive security and privacy involve all aspects of platform, data, application and access control. In. this paper, the architecture and behavior of an Access Management System (AMS) in a proof of concept (PoC) prototype are proposed with a Color Petri Net (CPN) model. The two domains of blockchain and edge computing are organically connected by interfaces and interactions. The simulation of operation, activity and role association proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the AMS. The instances of platform business access control, data access control, database services, IOT hub service are run on Advantech WISE-PaaS through User Account and Authentication (UAA). Finally, fine-grained and distributed access control can be realized with the help of a blockchain attribute. Namely, smart contracts are used to register, broadcast, and revoke access authorization, as well as to create specific transactions to define access control policies.

Khizar Abbas, Lo’ai Tawalbeh, Ahsan Rafiq, Ammar Muthanna · 6 authors

Smart cities provide citizens with smart and advanced services to improve their quality of life. However, it has been observed that the collection, storage, processing, and analysis of heterogeneous data that are usually borne by citizens will bear certain difficulties. The development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, social media, and other Industry 4.0 influencers pushed technology into a smart society’s framework, bringing potential vulnerabilities to sensor data, services, and smart city applications. These vulnerabilities lead to data security problems. We propose a decentralized data management system for smart and secure transportation that uses blockchain and the Internet of Things in a sustainable smart city environment to solve the data vulnerability problem. A smart transportation mobility system demands creating an interconnected transit system to ensure flexibility and efficiency. This article introduces prior knowledge and then provides a Hyperledger Fabric-based data architecture that supports a secure, trusted, smart transportation system. The simulation results show the balance between the blockchain mining time and the number of blocks created. We also use the average transaction delay evaluation model to evaluate the model and to test the proposed system’s performance. The system will address residents’ and authorities’ security challenges of the transportation system in smart, sustainable cities and lead to better governance.

B. Prabadevi, N. Deepa, Quoc‐Viet Pham, Dinh C. Nguyen · 8 authors

Blockchain is gaining momentum as a promising technology for many application domains, one of them being the Edge-of- Things (EoT) that is enabled by the integration of edge computing and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Particularly, the amalgamation of blockchain and EoT leads to a new paradigm, called blockchain enabled EoT (BEoT) that is crucial for enabling future low-latency and high-security services and applications. This article envisions a novel BEoT architecture for supporting industrial applications under the management of blockchain at the network edge in a wide range of IoT use cases such as smart home, smart healthcare, smart grid, and smart transportation. The potentials of BEoT in providing security services are also explored, including access authentication, data privacy preservation, attack detection, and trust management. Finally, we point out some key research challenges and future directions in this emerging area.

Moritz Y. Becker, Balázs Bodó

Trust can best be understood as a relational attribute between (1) a social actor and other actor(s) (interpersonal trust) and / or (2) actors and institutions (institutional or systemic trust) and (3) institutions and (trusting) actors (trust as shared expectations), where institutional frameworks define the nature and strength of trust relationships between different actors.

Xianjia Yu, Jorge Peña Queralta, Jukka Heikkonen, Tomi Westerlund

Autonomous systems are becoming inherently ubiquitous with the advancements of computing and communication solutions enabling low-latency offloading and real-time collaboration of distributed devices. Decentralized technologies with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are playing a key role. At the same time, advances in deep learning (DL) have significantly raised the degree of autonomy and level of intelligence of robotic and autonomous systems. While these technological revolutions were taking place, raising concerns in terms of data security and end-user privacy has become an inescapable research consideration. Federated learning (FL) is a promising solution to privacy-preserving DL at the edge, with an inherently distributed nature by learning on isolated data islands and communicating only model updates. However, FL by itself does not provide the levels of security and robustness required by today's standards in distributed autonomous systems. This survey covers applications of FL to autonomous robots, analyzes the role of DLT and FL for these systems, and introduces the key background concepts and considerations in current research.

Ibrahim Abunadi, Ramasamy Kumar

In the current epoch of smart homes and cities, personal data such as patients' names, diseases and addresses are often violated. This is frequently associated with the safety of the electronic health records (EHRs) of patients. EHRs have numerous benefits worldwide, but at present, EHR information is subject to considerable security and privacy issues. This paper proposes a way to provide a secure solution to these issues. Previous sophisticated techniques dealing with the protection of EHRs usually make data inaccessible to patients. These techniques struggle to balance data confidentiality, patient demand and constant interaction with provider data. Blockchain technology solves the above problems since it distributes information in a transactional and decentralized manner. The usage of blockchain technology could help the health sector to balance the accessibility and privacy of EHRs. This paper proposes a blockchain security framework (BSF) to effectively and securely store and keep EHRs. It presents a safe and proficient means of acquiring medical information for doctors, patients and insurance agents while protecting the patient's data. This work aims to examine how our proposed framework meets the security needs of doctors, patients and third parties and how the structure addresses safety and confidentiality concerns in the healthcare sector. Simulation outcomes show that this framework efficiently protects EHR data.

Yuan Liang, Qiang He, Siyu Tan, Bo Li · 8 authors

Edge computing (EC) has recently emerged as a novel computing paradigm that offers users low-latency services. Suffering from constrained computing resources due to their limited physical sizes, edge servers cannot always handle all the incoming computation tasks timely when they operate independently. They often need to cooperate through peer-offloading. Deployed and managed by different stakeholders, edge servers operate in a distrusted environment. Trust and incentive are the two main issues that challenge cooperative computing between them. Another unique challenge in the EC environment is to facilitate trust and incentive in a decentralized manner. To tackle these challenges systematically, this paper proposes CoopEdge, a novel blockchain-based decentralized platform, to drive and support cooperative edge computing. On CoopEdge, an edge server can publish a computation task for other edge servers to contend for. A winner is selected from candidate edge servers based on their reputations. After that, a consensus is reached among edge servers to record the performance in task execution on blockchain. We implement CoopEdge based on Hyperledger Sawtooth and evaluate it experimentally against a baseline and two state-of-the-art implementations in a simulated EC environment. The results validate the usefulness of CoopEdge and demonstrate its performance.

Raman Singh, Ark Nandan Singh Chauhan, Hitesh Tewari

In this era of ubiquitous social media and messaging applications, users are becoming increasingly aware of the data privacy issues associated with such apps. Major messaging applications are moving towards end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to give their users the privacy they are demanding. However the current security mechanisms employed by different service providers are not unfeigned E2EE implementations, and are blended with many vulnerabilities. At present, the major part of the E2EE mechanism is controlled by the service provider’s servers, and the decryption keys are also stored by them in case of backup restoration. These shortcomings diminish user confidence in the privacy of their data when using these apps. A public key infrastructure (PKI) can be used to circumvent some of these issues, but it comes with high monetary costs, which makes it impossible to roll out on a global scale. This paper proposes a blockchain-based E2EE framework that can mitigate many of the contemporary vulnerabilities in today’s messaging applications. A user’s device generates the public/private key pair during application installation, and asks its mobile network operator (MNO) to issue a digital certificate and store it on a public blockchain. Any user can fetch a certificate for another user from the application server, and communicate securely with them using a ratchet forward encryption mechanism.

Xi Li, Zehua Wang, Victor C. M. Leung, Hong Ji · 6 authors

The paths leading to future networks are pointing towards a data-driven paradigm to better cater to the explosive growth of mobile services as well as the increasing heterogeneity of mobile devices, many of which generate and consume large volumes and variety of data. These paths are also hampered by significant challenges in terms of security, privacy, services provisioning, and network management. Blockchain, which is a technology for building distributed ledgers that provide an immutable log of transactions recorded in a distributed network, has become prominent recently as the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies and is revolutionizing data storage and processing in computer network systems. For future data-driven networks (DDNs), blockchain is considered as a promising solution to enable the secure storage, sharing, and analytics of data, privacy protection for users, robust, trustworthy network control, and decentralized routing and resource managements. However, many important challenges and open issues remain to be addressed before blockchain can be deployed widely to enable future DDNs. In this article, we present a survey on the existing research works on the application of blockchain technologies in computer networks and identify challenges and potential solutions in the applications of blockchains in future DDNs. We identify application scenarios in which future blockchain-empowered DDNs could improve the efficiency and security, and generally the effectiveness of network services.