With data intensive computing helping advance state-of-the-art in varied fields, data provenance and lineage continue to remain formidable challenges in assisting with integrity and reproducibility in research and applications. This is particularly challenging for distributed scenarios, where data may be originating from decentralized sources without any centralized control by a single trusted entity. To date most of the data provenance systems are specific to particular domains, and are often centralized. Distributed ledgers such as blockchains have proved quite popular and effective in addressing trust and consensus without central control. There are a few recent proposals to employ blockchains for data provenance, however, they rely on currency in order to propose transactions using public blockchains.\n\nWe present HyperProv, a general framework for data provenance based on the permissioned blockchain Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), and to the best of our knowledge, the first provenance system that is ported to ARM based devices such as Raspberry Pi (RPi). HyperProv records the operation history and data lineage by tracking checksums, editors, timestamps, data pointers, dependencies, and more. Provenance data is retrieved and stored through a NodeJS client library to simplify interactions with the blockchain. HyperProv has a set of built-in queries using smart contracts that enable lightweight retrieval of large collections of provenance data. We evaluate the throughput, latency and resource consumption of HyperProv on x86-64 desktop machines, as well as RPi, demonstrating the feasibility of using HyperProv on RPi for tamperproof data provenance, useful in particular for Internet of Things use cases.
Marten Sigwart, Michael Borkowski, Marco Peise, Stefan Schulte · 5 authors
As more and more applications and services depend on data collected and provided by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is of importance that such data can be trusted. Data provenance solutions together with blockchain technology are one way to make data more trustworthy. However, current solutions do not address the heterogeneous nature of IoT applications and their data. In this work, we identify functional and non-functional requirements for a generic IoT data provenance framework, and conceptualise the framework as a layered architecture. Using a proof-of-concept implementation based on Ethereum smart contracts, data provenance can be realised for a wide range of IoT use cases. Benefits of a generic framework include simplified adoption and a more rapid implementation of data provenance for the IoT.
Maribel Acosta, Tim Berners‐Lee, Stefan Dietze, Anastasia Dimou · 9 authors
Decentralised data solutions bring their own sets of capabilities, requirements and issues not necessarily present in centralised solutions. In order to compare the properties of different approaches or tools for management of decentralised data, it is important to have a common evaluation framework. We present a set of dimensions relevant to data management in decentralised contexts and use them to define principles extending the FAIR framework, initially developed for open research data. By characterising a range of different data solutions or approaches by how TRusted, Autonomous, Distributed and dEcentralised, in addition to how Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, they are, we show that our FAIR TRADE framework is useful for describing and evaluating the management of decentralised data solutions, and aim to contribute to the development of best practice in a developing field.
David Hawig, C. Zhou, Sebastian Fuhrhop, Andre S Fialho · 5 authors
BACKGROUND: Distributed ledger technology (DLT) holds great potential to improve health information exchange. However, the immutable and transparent character of this technology may conflict with data privacy regulations and data processing best practices. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to develop a proof-of-concept system for immutable, interoperable, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant exchange of blood glucose data. METHODS: Given that there is no ideal design for a DLT-based patient-provider data exchange solution, we proposed two different variations for our proof-of-concept system. One design was based purely on the public IOTA distributed ledger (a directed acyclic graph-based DLT) and the second used the same public IOTA ledger in combination with a private InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) cluster. Both designs were assessed according to (1) data reversal risk, (2) data linkability risks, (3) processing time, (4) file size compatibility, and (5) overall system complexity. RESULTS: The public IOTA design slightly increased the risk of personal data linkability, had an overall low processing time (requiring mean 6.1, SD 1.9 seconds to upload one blood glucose data sample into the DLT), and was relatively simple to implement. The combination of the public IOTA with a private IPFS cluster minimized both reversal and linkability risks, allowed for the exchange of large files (3 months of blood glucose data were uploaded into the DLT in mean 38.1, SD 13.4 seconds), but involved a relatively higher setup complexity. CONCLUSIONS: For the specific use case of blood glucose explored in this study, both designs presented a suitable performance in enabling the interoperable exchange of data between patients and providers. Additionally, both systems were designed considering the latest guidelines on personal data processing, thereby maximizing the alignment with recent GDPR requirements. For future works, these results suggest that the conflict between DLT and data privacy regulations can be addressed if careful considerations are made regarding the use case and the design of the data exchange system.
Daniel R. Wong, Sanchita Bhattacharya, Atul J. Butte
Monitoring and ensuring the integrity of data within the clinical trial process is currently not always feasible with the current research system. We propose a blockchain-based system to make data collected in the clinical trial process immutable, traceable, and potentially more trustworthy. We use raw data from a real completed clinical trial, simulate the trial onto a proof of concept web portal service, and test its resilience to data tampering. We also assess its prospects to provide a traceable and useful audit trail of trial data for regulators, and a flexible service for all members within the clinical trials network. We also improve the way adverse events are currently reported. In conclusion, we advocate that this service could offer an improvement in clinical trial data management, and could bolster trust in the clinical research process and the ease at which regulators can oversee trials.
Jan 1, 2019·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Antonio Tenorio-Fornés, Viktor Jacynycz, David Llop-Vila, Antonio A. Sánchez‐Ruiz · 5 authors
The current processes of scientific publication and peer review raise concerns around fairness, quality, performance, cost, and accuracy. The Open Access movement has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and a few middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits. This paper, using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, proposes a decentralized publication system for open science. The proposed system would provide (1) a distributed reviewer reputation system, (2) an Open Access by-design infrastructure, and (3) transparent governance processes. A survey is used to evaluate the problems, proposed solutions and possible adoption resistances, while a working prototype serves as a proof-of-concept. Additionally, the paper discusses the implementation, in a distributed context, of different privacy settings for both open peer review and reputation systems, introducing a novel approach supporting both anonymous and accountable reviews. The paper concludes reviewing the open challenges of this ambitious proposal.
We present a decentralised solution for managing scientific communication, based on distributed ledger technologies, also called blockchains. The proposed system aims to solve incentive problems displayed by traditional systems in scientific communication and publication. A minimal working model is presented, defining roles, processes, and expected results from the novel system. The proposed solution is viable, given the current status of blockchain technology, and should lead to a rethinking of current practices and their consequences for scientific communication.
Zeeshan Jan, Allan Third, Michelle Bachler, John Domingue
Peer-reviewing holds a significant importance in the process of scientific publishing. The process of peer-reviewing has been criticized for its defects, but research communities have faith in it, and hence, it is perceived as the backbone of scientific publishing. The process needs improvements in a number of ways, i.e, establishing trust in the pro- cess, preventing abuse, bringing transparency in the process and keeping the integrity of data intact. Moreover, the activity of peer-reviewing is carried out without any formal incentives. We present considerations in refreshing peer-review, and our approach to experiment in this space.
The paper suggests a new approach based on blockchain technologies and smart contracts to creation of a distributed system for managing provenance metadata, as well as access rights to data in distributed storages, which is fault-tolerant, safe and secure from the point of view of preservation of metadata records from accidental or intentional distortions. The implementation of the proposed approach is based on the permissioned blockchains and on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform in conjunction with Hyperledger Composer.
Blockchains are tamper evident and tamper resistant digital ledgers implemented in a distributed fashion (i.e., without a central repository) and usually without a central authority (i.e., a bank, company, or government). At their basic level, they enable a community of users to record transactions in a shared ledger within that community, such that under normal operation of the blockchain network no transaction can be changed once published. This document provides a high-level technical overview of blockchain technology. The purpose is to help readers understand how blockchain technology works.
Ravi Kiran Raman, Roman Vaculín, Michael Hind, Sekou L. Remy · 9 authors
Large-scale computational experiments, often running over weeks and over large datasets, are used extensively in fields such as epidemiology, meteorology, computational biology, and healthcare to understand phenomena, and design high-stakes policies affecting everyday health and economy. For instance, the OpenMalaria framework is a computationally-intensive simulation used by various non-governmental and governmental agencies to understand malarial disease spread and effectiveness of intervention strategies, and subsequently design healthcare policies. Given that such shared results form the basis of inferences drawn, technological solutions designed, and day-to-day policies drafted, it is essential that the computations are validated and trusted. In particular, in a multi-agent environment involving several independent computing agents, a notion of trust in results generated by peers is critical in facilitating transparency, accountability, and collaboration. Using a novel combination of distributed validation of atomic computation blocks and a blockchain-based immutable audits mechanism, this work proposes a universal framework for distributed trust in computations. In particular we address the scalaibility problem by reducing the storage and communication costs using a lossy compression scheme. This framework guarantees not only verifiability of final results, but also the validity of local computations, and its cost-benefit tradeoffs are studied using a synthetic example of training a neural network.
Key points Digital Science's paper is one of the first looking at the application of blockchain technology in scholarly publishing. Wholesale use of blockchain technologies is suggested as a possible replacement for scholarly publishers. There remain questions around the adoption of blockchain technologies, including privacy, researcher support, and fraudulent use. Blockchain technologies may provide a new means of understanding problems and customers' evolving expectations, but careful consideration is required of whether blockchain is the best solution.
Krzysztof Janowicz, Blake Regalia, Pascal Hitzler, Gengchen Mai · 8 authors
Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchains and smart contracts have the potential to transform many sectors ranging from the handling of health records to real estate. Here we discuss the value proposition of these technologies and cryptocurrencies for science in general and academic publishing in specific. We outline concrete use cases, provide an informal model of how the Semantic Web journal's peer-review workflow could benefit from distributed ledger technologies, and also point out challenges in implementing such a setup.
This paper offers an overview of the highlights of the NFAIS Conference, Blockchain for Scholarly Publishing, that was held in Alexandria, VA from May 15–16, 2018. The goal of the conference was to take a close look at the initiatives that have emerged as a result of the increasing global acceptance of blockchain technology. This technology, chiefly known as the foundation of Bitcoin and originally introduced as a means of securely managing cryptocurrency, has proven to have practical applications beyond finance. The basic technology is that of a distributed ledger and it is being broadly-adopted by multiple industries, including the scholarly publishing community. The capabilities of this new technology are prompting a direct exchange among stakeholders, as blockchain promises a more structured, decentralized, and immutably secure approach that has the potential to significantly impact researcher workflows - from data collection to peer review to access and published work. The technology inspires passion - there are those who believe that it will ultimately transform our lives while others are completely skeptical. The NFAIS conference provided a look at both sides of the coin (no pun intended).
Petr Novotny, Qi Zhang, Richard Hull, Salman Baset · 8 authors
Academic publishing is continuously evolving with the gradual adoption of new technologies. Blockchain is a new technology that promises to change how individuals and organizations interact across various boundaries. The adoption of blockchains is beginning to transform diverse industries such as finance, supply chain, international trade, as well as energy and resource management and many others. Through trust, data immutability, decentralized distribution of data, and facilitation of collaboration without the need for centralized management and authority, blockchains have the potential to transform the academic publishing domain and to address some of the current problems such as productivity and reputation management, predatory publishing, transparent peer-review processes and many others. In this paper, we outline the technologies available in the domain of permissioned blockchains with focus on Hyperledger Fabric and discuss how they can be leveraged in the domain of academic publishing.
With the increasing of using workflow management systems workflow improvement becomes a new emerging problem. Many issues must be considered to handle all aspects of the workflow improvement. Workflows might become quite complex, especially when we move to Web3 (ubiquitous computing web). Workflows from different domains (e.g., scientific or business) have similarities and, more important, differences between themselves. Some concepts and solutions developed in one domain may be readily applicable to the other. In ubiquitous computing, multi-domain workflow data analysis might cause Big Data challenge. This paper investigates the problem of workflow improvement having an observed behavior (i.e., event logs). It proposes a cross-domain concept extraction by similarity assessment to solve some aspects of workflow improvement problem, and it has a new research effort at the intersection of workflow domains. Besides, the proposed technique is evaluated with the benefit of using Deep learning and Transfer learning. One of the greatest assets to use these both learning methods is analyzing a massive amount of data. Our results show that our proposed technique is effectively applicable for analyzing real-life huge data in workflow improvement.
Hao Dai, H. P. Young, Thomas J S Durant, Guannan Gong · 8 authors
The governance of data used for biomedical research and clinical trials is an important requirement for generating accurate results. To improve the visibility of data quality and analysis, we developed TrialChain, a blockchain-based platform that can be used to validate data integrity from large, biomedical research studies. We implemented a private blockchain using the MultiChain platform and integrated it with a data science platform deployed within a large research center. An administrative web application was built with Python to manage the platform, which was built with a microservice architecture using Docker. The TrialChain platform was integrated during data acquisition into our existing data science platform. Using NiFi, data were hashed and logged within the local blockchain infrastructure. To provide public validation, the local blockchain state was periodically synchronized to the public Ethereum network. The use of a combined private/public blockchain platform allows for both public validation of results while maintaining additional security and lower cost for blockchain transactions. Original data and modifications due to downstream analysis can be logged within TrialChain and data assets or results can be rapidly validated when needed using API calls to the platform. The TrialChain platform provides a data governance solution to audit the acquisition and analysis of biomedical research data. The platform provides cryptographic assurance of data authenticity and can also be used to document data analysis.
The rise of fraudulent cases seems to be a nuisance to an organization as they're an investment of money. Various resources also gives the impression to be on someone else, who has false claims. The verification process of these organizations are long and tedious process where the organization would have lost its time and resource on. Blockchain technology was introduced fairly recently in literature, which is the underlying technology behind the very popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The blockchain is a decentralized approach, it is secured by design network which was to overcome double spending problem by a central server. The concept of servers is eradicated in this architecture, where the data is distributed across geographically on separate ledgers. Blockchain applications have diversified as MIT Media Labs introduced Blockcerts for certification of academic records. Ethereum is platform for developing these decentralized applications using Blockchain ledgers. Ethereum uses a concept called Merkle trees which is the concept used for verification through hashing. As per the working in the literature; this application would make verification of academic documents simple and quick with the usage of Blockchain clients such as Ethereum and an IPFS hash. In this paper we propose a system that provides a solution that addresses the above mentioned issues.
Nicholas Stifter, Aljosha Judmayer, Philipp Schindler, Alexei Zamyatin · 5 authors
The term Nakamoto consensus is generally used to refer to Bitcoin’s novel consensus mechanism, by which agreement on its underlying transaction ledger is reached. It is argued that this agreement protocol represents the core innovation behind Bitcoin, because it promises to facilitate the decentralization of trusted third parties. Specifically, Nakamoto consensus seeks to enable mutually distrusting entities with weak pseudonymous identities to reach eventual agreement while the set of participants may change over time. When the Bitcoin white paper was published in late 2008, it lacked a formal analysis of the protocol and the guarantees it claimed to provide. It would take the scientific community several years before first steps towards such a formalization of the Bitcoin protocol and Nakamoto consensus were presented. However, since then the number of works addressing this topic has grown substantially, providing many new and valuable insights. Herein, we present a coherent picture of advancements towards the formalization of Nakamoto consensus, as well as a contextualization in respect to previous research on the agreement problem and fault tolerant distributed computing. Thereby, we outline how Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism sets itself apart from previous approaches and where it can provide new impulses and directions to the scientific community. Understanding the core properties and characteristics of Nakamoto consensus is of key importance, not only for assessing the security and reliability of various blockchain systems that are based on the fundamentals of this scheme, but also for designing future systems that aim to fulfill comparable goals.
Sharing provenance across workflow management systems automatically is not currently possible, but the value of such a capability is high since it could greatly reduce the amount of duplicated workflows, accelerate the discovery of new knowledge, and verify the integrity of past and present analyses. Although numerous technological challenges exist to efficiently share provenance information across workflow management systems, permissioned distributed ledgers could surmount many of them. The primary benefit of permissioned distributed ledgers over other technologies is that their distribution is over a peer-to-peer network that encodes transactions across the network into an immutable hash list and achieves consensus on the validity of the new data through a common consensus mechanism. This work discusses provenance and distributed ledgers on their own and then presents an argument that distributed ledgers naturally satisfy many of the requirements of workflow provenance, that provenance information can exist in the ledger in multiple ways, and that a number of novel research areas exist based on this strategy.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
The purpose of this thesis was to investigate and study the various issues faced by educational and technological researchers while raising the funds for their respective projects and the issues faced by the fund’s providers. Multiple existing traditional fundraising platforms were identified, and their advantages and disadvantages were studied to check if it was suitable for educational and technological researchers to carry on their funding campaign using the existing platforms. Finally, the goal was to develop a decentralized research funding application which would replace the existing traditional methods of raising funds by providing the researchers the ability to create a fundraising campaign on Ethereum blockchain while ensuring the transparent and auditable usage of the funds provided for the development of the project by the stakeholders.\n\nThe research funding application was developed and deployed to Ethereum blockchain. During the development process, the technologies used were Solidity, HTML, CSS, Javascript and React. The requirements for the Minimum Viable Product of the research funding application were finalized and the project was implemented by following the Waterfall software development model. \n\nAs a result, the requirements set for the research funding application were accomplished and the application was deployed to the blockchain and can be accessed by the general public. Furthermore, additional features such as the ability to create and manage multiple funding campaigns by a single entity were also developed successfully.
We study distributed declarative workflow execution in an adversarial setting.In this setting, parties to an agreed-upon workflow do not trust each other to follow that workflow, or suspect the other party might misrepresent proceedings at a later time.We demonstrate how distributed declarative workflow execution can be implemented as smart contracts, guaranteeing (I) enforcement of workflow semantics, and (II) an incontrovertible record of workflow execution history.Crucially, we achieve both properties without relying on a trusted third party.The implementation is based on the Ethereum blockchain, inheriting the security properties (I) and (II) from the guarantees given by that chain.A recurring challenge for both the implementation and the analysis is the cost of operations on Ethereum: This cost must be minimised for honest parties, and an adversary must be prevented from inflicting extra cost on others.
We present a proof of concept implementation of an integration strategy for connecting CAD with Blockchain. We explain the components of most blockchains and the value they bring to the built environment ecosystem, the potential impact a complete integration might have and we demonstrate the first two of four levels of integration we have identified between CAD and blockchain technologies. For the purposes of the paper we use Rhino / Grasshopper and Ethereum as the two components of integration.