Blockchain Papers

Jazem Mutared Alanazi, Ahmad Ali AlZubi

Technological advancement has made a significant contribution to the change of the economy and the advancement of humanity. Because it is changing how economic transactions are carried out, the blockchain is one of the technical developments that has a lot of promise for this progress. The public record of the Bitcoin blockchain provides dispersed users with evidence of transaction ownership by publishing all transaction data from block reward transactions to unspent transaction outputs. Attacks on the public ledger, on the other hand, are a result of the fact that all transaction information are exposed. De-anonymization attacks allow users to link transaction entities and acquire user privacy through specified transaction amounts. As a result, in light of the Bitcoin blockchain system’s privacy issues, this scheme combines the concept of coin mixing with encrypted transaction technology to create a truly anonymous blockchain system that preserves the payer identity and transaction amount privacy. The one-way aggregated signature technique of Boneh, Gentry, and Lynn systematically embeds the notion of mixing into the whole block. The homomorphic encryption approach of Boneh, Goh, and Nissim allows miners to check the legality of encrypted transactions. Miners will validate transactions, conceal transactions, and package transactions as entities in the scheme. Finally, this technique was chosen after a comparison of several privacy-preserving blockchain schemes. It not only ensures complete anonymity, but also keeps transaction storage overhead to a minimum.

G. Uganya, Radhika Baskar

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that moves the world in the direction of smart things. But, IoT security is the complex problem due to its centralized architecture, and limited capacity. So, blockchain technology has great attention due to its features of decentralized architecture, transparency, immutable records and cryptography hash functions when combining with IoT. Cryptography hash algorithms are very important in blockchain technology for secure transmission. It converts the variable size inputs to a fixed size hash output which is unchangeable. Existing cryptography hash algorithms with digital signature have issues of single node accessibility and accessed up to 128 bytes of key size only. As well as, if the attacker tries to hack the key, it cancels the transaction. This paper presents the Modified Elliptic Curve Cryptography Multi Signature Scheme (MECC-MSS) for multiple node accessibility by finding nearest path for secure transaction. In this work, the input key size can be extended up to 512 bytes to enhance the security. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed with other cryptography hash algorithms like Secure Hashing Algorithms (SHAs) such as SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA3-224, SHA3-256, SHA3-384, SHA3-512 and Message Digest5 by one-way analysis of variance test in terms of accuracy and time complexity. Results show that the MECC-MSS achieves 90.85% of accuracy and time complexity of 1.4 nano seconds with significance less than 0.05. From the statistical analysis, it is observed that the proposed algorithm is significantly better than other cryptography hash algorithms and also having less time complexity.

Arun Kumar Rana, Sharad Sharma, Kashif Nisar, Ag Asri Ag Ibrahim · 8 authors

Most Internet of Things (IoT) resources are exposed to security risks due to their essential functionality. IoT devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have a limited network, computation, and storage capacity, making them more vulnerable to attacks. In addition, the huge volume of data generated by IoT devices remains an open challenge for existing platforms to process, analyze, and discover underlying trends to create a convenient environment. As a result, to deliver acceptable services, a new solution is necessary to secure data accountability, increase data privacy and accessibility, and extract hidden patterns and usable knowledge. Moving the Internet of Things to a distributed ledger system might be the most effective way to solve these issues. One of the most well-known and extensively utilized distributed ledger systems is the blockchain. Due to its unique properties, such as privacy, accountability, immutability, and anonymity, blockchain technology has recently attracted a lot of interest. Using IoT in conjunction with blockchain technology can bring several benefits. This paper reviews the current state of the art different BIoT architectures, with a focus on current technologies, applications, challenges, and opportunities. The test findings prove that the decentralized authentication platform-based blockchain-based IoT (BIoT) device-to-device architecture has a significantly higher throughput than the gateway-based architecture. To encrypt the elliptical curve cryptographic (ECC) and to generate keys, the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT)-based scheme is proposed and compared with the secure hash algorithm (SHA-256). Finally, ECC-CRT is used to access system performance in terms of latency, throughput, and resource consumption, simulated through the Contiki Cooja (CC) simulator, and alter orderer and peer nodes for performance study in BIoT. A comprehensive analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme is secure against a variety of known attacks, including the man-in-the-middle (MiM) attack, and outperforms the SHA-256 cryptographic algorithm. Moreover, the significance of blockchain and IoT, as well as their analysis of proposed architecture, is discussed. This paper will help readers and researchers understand the IoT and its applicability to the real world.

Aisha Zahid Junejo, Manzoor Ahmed Hashmani, Abdullah Alabdulatif, Mehak Maqbool Memon · 6 authors

Preserving anonymity and confidentiality of transactions has become crucial with widespread of the blockchain technology. Despite of the increased efforts for retaining privacy in blockchain networks, invasion attacks are still surfacing. Most of these attacks do not come from outsiders, but from the resident adversarial nodes. Existence of these insider adversaries lead to damaging of an organization’s internal network system and information leakage. Consequently, transaction anonymity and confidentiality are compromised. Hence, adversary detection and filtration play a vital role in protecting networks against unforeseen privacy and security threats. Therefore, in this paper, we propose RZee, a cryptographic and statistical privacy preserving model for adversary detection and filtering in blockchain networks. Firstly, RZee exploits zero-knowledge proofs to cryptographically secure the data. Secondly, based on certain identified conditions, RZee captures node behavior and blacklists malicious nodes to restrict those from injecting harmful data into the chain or viewing transactions as they propagate across the network. This adds an additional layer of protecting transactions from unauthorized and malicious intervention. The proposed framework is evaluated based on various privacy attributes as identified by literature. For this evaluation, 4 different types of experiments have been conducted. Further, the comparison of privacy perseverance of RZee with existing benchmark privacy-preserving frameworks is also done. The results depict that performance and privacy preservation in RZee exceeds the rest with an attribute score of 6.774 and a gain margin of 46.5%.

Mohammed Shuaib, Sumit Badotra, Muhammad Irfan Khalid, Abeer D. Algarni · 9 authors

Cryptography and associated technologies have existed for a long time. This field is advancing at a remarkable speed. Since the inception of its initial application, blockchain has come a long way. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency based on blockchain, also known as distributed ledger technology (DLT). The most well-known cryptocurrency for everyday use is Bitcoin, which debuted in 2008. Its success ushered in a digital revolution, and it currently provides security, decentralization, and a reliable data transport and storage mechanism to various industries and companies. Governments and developing enterprises seeking a competitive edge have expressed interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies due to the rapid growth of this recent technology. For computer experts and individuals looking for a method to supplement their income, cryptocurrency mining has become a big source of anxiety. Mining is a way of resolving mathematical problems based on the processing capacity and speed of the computers employed to solve them in return for the digital currency incentives. Herein, we have illustrated benefits of utilizing GPUs (graphical processing units) for cryptocurrency mining and compare two methods, namely overclocking and undervolting, which are the superior techniques when it comes to GPU optimization. The techniques we have used in this paper will not only help the miners to gain profits while mining cryptocurrency but also solve a major flaw; in order to mitigate the energy and resources that are consumed by the mining hardware, we have designed the mining hardware to simultaneously run longer and consume much less electricity. We have also compared our techniques with other popular techniques that are already in existence with respect to GPU mining.

Moez Krichen, Meryem Ammi, Alaeddine Mihoub, Mutiq Almutiq

Blockchain is a modern technology that has revolutionized the way society interacts and trades. It could be defined as a chain of blocks that stores information with digital signatures in a distributed and decentralized network. This technique was first adopted for the creation of digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, research and industrial studies have recently focused on the opportunities that blockchain provides in various other application domains to take advantage of the main features of this technology, such as: decentralization, persistency, anonymity, and auditability. This paper reviews the use of blockchain in several interesting fields, namely: finance, healthcare, information systems, wireless networks, Internet of Things, smart grids, governmental services, and military/defense. In addition, our paper identifies the challenges to overcome, to guarantee better use of this technology.

Kentaro Sako, Shin’ichiro Matsuo, Tatsuya Mori

We propose N-choice game (NCG), a decentralized pseudo-random number generation method that can be executed on smart contracts. Of the M participants, one is a dealer, and the rest are players, each with a different role. Each participant randomly chooses one value between 0 and N − 1 and receives a score determined by the NCG rule. The amount of reward each participant receives is determined by the score. The values chosen by the participants are combined and hashed into a pseudo-random number. The NCG framework is designed to achieve the following three goals: (1) Incentivize participants to provide random choices, (2) Evaluate the level of randomness in the decentralized environment, and (3) Establish high performance. We implement the NCG framework in Solidity and evaluate its performance. Our extensive experiments revealed that unless more than 90% of NCG players collide, the generated random numbers have high randomness that can pass the NIST randomness test. The experiments also demonstrated that the throughput of random number generation in NCG was 129 times faster than in the existing framework, Random Bit Generator [2].

Xiaojun Wen, Yongzhi Chen, Wei Zhang, Zoe L. Jiang · 5 authors

The consensus mechanism is the core secret of the blockchain network. However, the consensus mechanism of the classical blockchain is based on the classical cryptosystem, which is based on the problem of computational complexity. With the improvement of computing power, the security of this cryptosystem is being threatened. In addition, the consensus mechanism of classic blockchain also has the following disadvantages: serious waste of computing resources and energy; the inability to withstand a 51% attack; low system throughput and large delay. Based on quantum teleportation technology and the randomness of quantum measurement, a consensus mechanism for a quantum blockchain system is proposed. Based on the physical properties of quantum mechanics, this scheme has the unconditional security of quantum cryptography. This new consensus mechanism does not involve a great deal of computing resources and hence has a lower energy consumption, shorter time delay and higher throughput. Furthermore, the new consensus mechanism could withstand a 51% attack.

Muntadher Sallal, Ruairí de Fréin, Ali Malik, Benjamin Aziz

There is an increasing demand for digital crypto-currencies to be more secure and robust to meet the following business requirements: (1) low transaction fees and (2) the privacy of users. Nowadays, Bitcoin is gaining traction and wide adoption. Many well-known businesses have begun accepting bitcoins as a means of making financial payments. However, the susceptibility of Bitcoin networks to information propagation delay, increases the vulnerability to attack of the Bitcoin network, and decreases its throughput performance. This paper introduces and critically analyses new network clustering methods, named Locality Based Clustering (LBC), Ping Time Based Approach (PTBC), Super Node Based Clustering (SNBA), and Master Node Based Clustering (MNBC). The proposed methods aim to decrease the chances of performing a successful double spending attack by reducing the information propagation delay of Bitcoin. These methods embody proximity-aware extensions to the standard Bitcoin protocol, where proximity is measured geographically and in terms of latency. We validate our proposed methods through a set of simulation experiments and the findings show how the proposed methods run and their impact in optimising the transaction propagation delay. Furthermore, these new methods are evaluated from the perspective of the Bitcoin network’s resistance to partitioning attacks. Numerical results, which are established via extensive simulation experiments, demonstrate how the extensions run and also their impact in optimising the transaction propagation delay. We draw on these findings to suggest promising future research directions for the optimisation of transaction propagation delays.

Amer A. Sallam, Taha H. Rassem, Hanadi Abdu, Haneen Abdulkareem · 6 authors

On the Ethereum network, users communicate with one another through a variety of different accounts. Pseudo-anonymity was enforced over the network to provide the highest level of privacy. By using accounts that engage in fraudulent activity across the network, such privacy may be exploited. Like other cryptocurrencies, Ethereum blockchain may exploited with several fraudulent activities such as Ponzi schemes, phishing, or Initial Coin Offering (ICO) exits, etc. However, the identification of parameters with abnormal account characteristics is not an easy task and requires an intelligent approach to distinguish between normal and fraudulent activities. Therefore, this paper has attempted to solve this a problem by using machine learning techniques to introduce a robust approach that can detect fraudulent accounts on Ethereum. We have used a K-Nearest Neighbor, Random Forest and XGBoost over a collected dataset of 4,681 instances along with 2,179 fraudulent accounts associated and 2,502 regular accounts. The XGBoost, RF, and KNN techniques achieved average accuracies of 96.80 %, 94.8 8%, and 87.85% and an average AUC of 0.995, 0.99 and 0.93, respectively.

Syada Tasmia Alvi, Mohammed Nasir Uddin, Linta Islam, Sajib Ahamed

Voting is a fundamental democratic activity. Many experts believe that paper balloting is the only appropriate method to ensure everyone’s right to vote. But this method is prone to errors and abuse. Many nations utilize digital voting methods to solve the difficulties of paper balloting. A single flaw in digital voting may lead to massive vote-rigging. Election voting methods must be legal, accurate, safe, and convenient. However, issues with digital voting methods may restrict acceptance. Due to its end-to-end verification capabilities, blockchain technology was developed to address these problems. To guarantee We have used blockchain technology anonymity, privacy, verifiability, mobility, integrity, security, and fairness in voting. By using blockchain our proposed system ensures security, privacy, and integrity. This system provides voter anonymity by keeping the voter information as a hash in the blockchain. It also provides fairness by keeping the casted vote encrypted till the ending time of the election. After ending time, the voter can verify their casted vote, ensuring verifiability. To test our protocol, we put it on Ethereum 2.0, a blockchain platform that uses Solidity as a programming language to create smart contracts. The adoption of smart contracts provides a safe means for performing voter verification, ensuring the correctness of voting results, making the counting system public, and protecting against fraudulent activities. We analyzed the system’s performance based on security and gas costs. It improves in terms of security characteristics and the related cost for the necessary infrastructure.

Jamal Kh-Madhloom

Blocks and chains are the building blocks of the blockchain, which is a community network. Blocks and chains are two terms used to describe collections of data information. The most fundamental need for a blockchain is that these postings be connected by cryptography, which is the case here. Cryptography. the entries in each block are added to as the list grows. Although the concept of blockchain cryptography is difficult, we have made it easier for you to understand. Asymmetric-key cryptography and hash functions are used in blockchains. Hash functions provide participants with a complete image of the internet. The SHA-256 hashing algorithm is often used in blockchains. In Bitcoin, where addresses are tracked by public-private key pairs, blockchains are often used. The public key in blockchain cryptography is a person's address. All participants have access to the participant's public key. The private key is used to get access to the address database and to authorise activities using the address. To ensure the integrity of the blockchain ledger, encryption plays a key role. Each event on the blockchain is recorded using encrypted data. As long as each user has access to their cryptographic keys, they may buy or trade cryptocurrencies. The root hashes of all transactions are stored in blockchains via cryptographic hashing. If somebody attempts to tamper with any data upon that blockchain, the main hash will have a completely new hash. Root hash comparisons may be performed on any other system to check whether the data is safe.

Turgut Hanoymak, Ömer Küsmüş

Blockchain technology, which includes cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum,…etc [1,2] which has been evaluated as an investment tool by many people all over the world in recent years, needs to be examined in details, both mathematically and conceptually [8,9]. In fact, it can be said that blockchain technology, which is characterized as an accounting system and database based on distributed ledgers in its most basic form, is extremely secure in terms of copying data or attacking. For this reason, we can say that technology has a more effective security mechanism than any central state-of-the-art authoritative system used today. However, as it is almost impossible to bring all of the security, speed and cost parameters to their full extend in a system at the same time, as in any cryptosystem, the security parameter from the distributed ledger structure in blockchain technology adversely affects the speed and cost parameters. In this article, we discuss the cryptographic working principles of cryptocurrencies, which is an application field of blockchain technology, together with blockchain technology and the features and structures of the blocks contained.

Buhari Ugbede Umar, Olayemi Mikail Olaniyi, Daniel Oluwaseun Olajide, Eustace M. Dogo

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger of transactions that are linked together cryptographically leading to immutability and tamper-resistance, thereby ensuring the integrity of data. Due to the ability of blockchain to guarantee the integrity of data, it has found wide-range adoption in electronic voting (e-voting) systems in recent years, this is in a bid to prevent manipulation of votes. However, due to the distributed nature of the blockchain, opportunities arise for privacy intrusion of the data being secured. The translation of this privacy flaw in blockchain to e-voting systems is the possibility of violation of the privacy of the electorates. Consequently, in a bid to achieve integrity and privacy of votes in e-voting, this study presents the use of an open-source blockchain system, coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem, towards addressing the privacy concerns of the blockchain. The performance of the system was evaluated and a transaction throughput of 1424 tps was obtained for ten thousand simulated ballot transactions. Further evaluation was carried out on the system, by increasing the number of system transactions. This showed that the mining time of the blockchain increased by an average factor of 0.18 s for every thousand increases in the number of transactions. Also, the response time of the system to a range of user actions was evaluated over an increasing number of voters. Results obtained showed that the response time of the system for vote casting operations increased by an average of 0.33 min per thousand voters while for vote tallying there was an increase in response time by an average of 0.848 min per thousand voters. The scientific value of this study is the development of an integrity and privacy-preserving e-voting system consisting of an open-source nodechain coupled with a privacy-oriented cryptosystem known as the Paillier cryptosystem following the security requirements of e-voting systems. The proposed system addresses the issue of integrity in e-voting while still maintaining the privacy of the electorates.

Peiru Li, Shanshan Li, Mengjie Ding, Jiapeng Yu · 7 authors

Hyperledger Fabric is another development of blockchain technology after Ethereum, which is more suitable as an operating platform for smart contracts. However, the testing technology of Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts (also known as chaincode) is not yet mature currently. Based on this, this paper studies the vulnerability detection of Golang chaincodes. Firstly, we summarize 17 kinds of Golang chaincode vulnerabilities by investigating existing research. Secondly, taking the high accuracy of dynamic detection and the high efficiency of static detection into consideration, we propose a chaincode vulnerability detection framework that combines the dynamic symbolic execution and the static abstract syntax tree analysis technology. We also implement a supporting-tool that can detect the above 15 types of vulnerabilities. Finally, we test the tool by 15 chaincodes collected from GitHub and unknown vulnerabilities were detected in 13 projects. The precision turned out to be 91% after manual inspection. In order to verify the recall rate, we manually inject 30 vulnerabilities into the collected chaincodes and all of them are detected. The evaluation results show the accuracy of the proposed vulnerability detection method for Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts.

D. Prabakaran, Shyamala Ramachandran

No abstract is available for this record.

Wei Liu, Wenlong Feng, Mengxing Huang, Yun Xu · 5 authors

A service can be an intangible commodity in which no physical goods are transferred from the seller to the buyer. However, traditional trading platforms have many limitations in trading services due to dishonest buyers and brokers. In this paper, we propose a service trading ecosystem based on blockchain, named STEB, which combines blockchain, smart contract, encryption, and digital authentication techniques for service trading. In addition, a dual-chain architecture, which contains two types of blockchains, namely TraChain and SerChain, and a hierarchical encryption scheme of the data on the chain, are proposed to ensure the integrity of transaction data and fine-grained privacy protection of users. Furthermore, we describe a new set of smart contracts to ensure safe transactions for the entire service trading. Security analysis and simulation results confirm that the proposed STEB can achieve more efficient contract execution and enhance service transaction privacy.

Ming Fong Sie, Jingze Wu, Seth Austin Harding, Chien-Lung Lin · 6 authors

Technologies designed for digital provenance, especially the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, may allow for security, transparency, and traceability in the global supply chain. However, upstream nodes in the supply chain that work for large-scale production suppliers are not considered. In addition, most IoT blockchain systems adopt an ID-based signature scheme that may affect the efficiency of IoT devices. We propose using aggregate verification to improve the security and efficiency of ID-based verification, reduce network traffic on the blockchain, and transfer computing overhead to aggregator nodes. This paper implements a multi-layer blockchain for Agriculture 4.0 supply chain management that has higher efficiency, effectiveness, and security in comparison to conventional blockchains. We design a Multi-Layer Aggregate Verification (MLAV) solution to improve supply chain management with IoT Blockchain for Agriculture 4.0 through the following methods. First, we use a multi-layer IoT blockchain system to reduce Ethereum gas fee. Second, we design an ID-based Aggregate Verification scheme, thereby eliminating the certificate management cost in the traditional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and reducing bandwidth and computation time requirements. Third, we implement a three-layer blockchain infrastructure. In Layer 1, IoT devices sense and upload data to the system's database; in Layer 2, smart contracts execute aggregate ID-based signature verification from IoT devices and upload the transactions to the private blockchain; in Layer 3, a batch converts the layer 2 data and uploads its Merkle root to Ethereum, thereby reducing the required gas fee.

Zichi Wang, Xin Feng, Xinpeng ZHANG

The images with non-fungible token (NFT) are employed as the digital artistic works in metaverse for creation, transaction, sharing, and collection.Being different from natural images, the content of NFT images is defined by user and distributed in the digital space widely.It is convenient for the hidden of secret data.In this case, covert communication with NFT images is a new branch of image steganography.Then, a steganographic method for NFT images was proposed accordingly.Given a NFT image, the regions of its profile and the components with high frequency were enhanced firstly to enrich the details which were beneficial to hide the modification trace of steganography.In this way, the enhanced image was used as cover since it is more suitable for steganography.Then, the tendency modification direction of each pixel was determined by the differences between the enhanced image and the given image.The differences were also used to determine the cost value of modification amplitude.Thus, the undetectability of steganography can be increased further.Secret data was embedded into the cover image using the popular steganographic coding schemes.Experimental results showed that the proposed method had imporoved undetectability on NFT images compared with existing digital steganographic schemes.Compared with HILL, MiPOD, and DEFI, the proposed method can increase the detection error P_E of steganalysis by 8.7%, 9.2% and 6.2%, respectively (the average value for the cases of different payload and steganalytic features).Therefore, the proposed method is suitable for NFT images and it provides targeted steganographic method for the third kind of images, i.e., NFT images, except of natural images and generated images.For further study, the deep learning-based steganographic method can be designed for NFT images using the strong fitting and learning ability of neural networks.

Vehbi Neziri, Isak Shabani, Ramadan Dervishi, Blerim Rexha

Anonymity and privacy in the electoral process are mandatory features found in any democratic society, and many authors consider these fundamental civil liberties and rights. During the election process, every voter must be identified as eligible, but after casting a vote, the voter must stay anonymous, assuring voter and vote unlinkability. Voter anonymity and privacy are the most critical issues and challenges of almost all electronic voting systems. However, vote immutability must be assured as well, which is a problem in many new democracies, and Blockchain as a distributed technology meets this data immutability requirement. Our paper analyzes current solutions in Blockchain and proposes a new approach through the combination of two different Blockchains to achieve privacy and anonymity. The first Blockchain will be used for key management, while the second will store anonymous votes. The encrypted vote is salted with a nonce, hashed, and finally digitally signed with the voter’s private key, and by mixing the timestamp of votes and shuffling the order of cast votes, the chances of linking the vote to the voter will be reduced. Adopting this approach with Blockchain technology will significantly transform the current voting process by guaranteeing anonymity and privacy.

Omaji Samuel, Akogwu Blessing Omojo, Syed Muhammad Mohsin, Prayag Tiwari · 6 authors

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for health institutions to have remote diagnosis, reliable, preventive, and real-time decision-making. However, the anonymity and privacy of patients are not considered in IoT. Therefore, this article proposes a blockchain-based anonymous system, known as GarliMediChain, for providing anonymity and privacy during COVID-19 information sharing. In GarliMediChain, garlic routing and blockchain are integrated to provide low-latency communication, privacy, anonymity, trust, and security. Also, COVID-19 information is encrypted multiple times before transmitting to a series of nodes in the network. To ensure that COVID-19 information is successfully shared, a blockchain-based coalition system is proposed. The coalition system enables health institutions to share information while maximizing their payoffs. In addition, each institution uses the proposed fictitious play to study the strategies of others in order to update its belief by selecting the best responses from them. Furthermore, simulation results show that the proposed system is resistant to security-related attacks and is robust, efficient, and adaptive. From the results, the proposed proof-of-epidemiology-of-interest consensus protocol has 15.93% less computational cost than 26.30% of proof-of-work and 57.77% proof-of-authority consensus protocol, respectively. Nonetheless, the proposed GarliMediChain system promotes global collaborations by combining existing anonymity and trust solutions with the support of blockchain technology.

James A. Cunningham, Nigel Davies, Sarah Devaney, Søren Holm · 7 authors

In recent years we have seen the adoption of distributed ledger technology (DLT), originally the mechanism underpinning the operation of the Bitcoin crypto currency, across a wider range of technology sectors including healthcare. DLT allows for the design of informatics systems with the properties of immutability, security, and decentralization. One recent innovation in the space has been the specification and development of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are decentralized DLT-based records that represent ownership of a unique digital asset. The predominant current use case for NFTs has been in the representation and sale of digital artwork, however the features offered by NFTs, unique-ness, immutability, transferability, and verifiability, are directly applicable to the design of health informatics systems. In this paper we explore these properties and describe a reference architecture for using NFTs as a means of representing and transferring records of patient's consent for medical data use.

Zhimei Sui, Joseph K. Liu, Jiangshan Yu, Man Ho Au · 5 authors

Payment channels have been a promising solution to blockchain scalability. While payment channels for script-empowered blockchains (such as Bitcoin and Ethereum) have been well studied, developing payment channels for scriptless blockchains (such as Monero) is considered challenging. In particular, nabling bidirectional payment on scriptless blockchains remains an open challenge.

Mayank Raikwar

A distributed and reliable source of randomness is always a critical element in cryptography, both in the construction and application of cryptographic primitives. Modern cryptography such as blockchain, cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance is heavily dependent on a trusted randomness source. In particular, Decentralized Randomness Beacon (DRB) protocols can be a reliable source of randomness. A DRB protocol generates a continuous stream of publicly verifiable random values. Almost all the available DRB protocols are collaborative in nature where participants of a DRB protocol collaborate their local entropy to generate global randomness.