Candy So Suk Yi Candice, Eric Yung, Samuel Lee, Christopher Fong · 5 authors
A Deloitte (2016) survey report states that blockchain technology can have an impact on the telecommunications industry in preventing fraud, identifying as-a-service and data management, 5G enabling, and IoT connectivity. For example, fraud costs more than USD 38 billion a year. In a panel of industry experts, Carrier Industry is looking for ways to cut costs, boost revenues, and market segments through blockchain technology (Total Telecom, 2018). Blockchain is treated as a breakthrough technology for managing the operation of telecommunications such as identity management, smart contracts, payments and transactions, reporting and analysis, network management, billing / OSS, etc. A statistical analysis shows that blockchain in telecommunications and postal services in 2017 amounted to more than USD 39 million and is expected to achieve an estimate of more than USD 641 million by 2023-end, suggesting powerful market growth over the next few years (Market Research Future Report, 2018). Since carriers apply telecom standards to run its business and operations, and thus blockchain technology, a high secure of distributed ledger and trust processes to solve the high traffics. According to a survey by IBM Institute for Business Value (2018), it states that 36 percent of Communication Service Providers (CSP) are already considering or actively engaged with blockchain, 41 percent of CSP may support their strategy by assuring data management, and 46 percent of CSP are already exploring or engaging with blockchain and already invested in it to develop new business models. Carriers in telecommunications Industry Hong Kong are mainly private-owned, and thus they must follow the Telecommunication Ordinance (Cap. 106) governed by Office of the Communications Authority (OFCA) of HKSAR. Telecommunications services such as fixed-line, internet broadband and mobile service support business and residential customers. Hong Kong Telecom (HKT), Hutchison Telecommunications Hong Kong Holdings Ltd (HTHK) and Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited (HKBN) are selected by this study as a number of operators (fixed-line and broadband, mobile, or a mix of both fixed-line, broadband and mobile). HKT (Stock Code: SEHK: 6823), is the major operator to meet the needs of public, local and international businesses with a wide range of services such as local telephony, local data and broadband, international communications, mobile service and enterprise solutions. HKT employs approximately 17,400 staff, the headquarters are located in Hong Kong, and telecommunications network covers more than 3,000 cities and 140 countries (HKT, 2019) Hutchison Telecommunications Holdings Hong Kong Limited (Stock Code: SEHK215), conglomerate of CK Hutchison Holdings, is the leading operator provides mobile service in Hong Kong and Macau. HTHK employs 1,180 staff and the headquarters are located in Hong Kong (HTHK, 2019). Hong Kong Broadband Network, Stock Code: SEHK: 1310), is the foremost operator provides broadband service to commerce and residential customers. HKBN is an aggressive operator with merger and acquisition with New World Telecommunications in February 2016 and WTT Holding Ltd in February 2019. HKBN employs approximately 3,000 staff, and the headquarters are located in Hong Kong (HKBN, 2019). An example of two dominating carrier representatives, Marc Halbfinger, Chief Executive Officer of PCCW Global (subsidiary of HKT) and the Chairman of the GLF, and Andrew Kwok, CEO of Hutchison Global Telecommunications (ex-mega conglomerate of CK Hutchison Holdings sold to Asia Cube Global in Jul 2017) partnering with Colt Technologies Service to conduct trial blockchain technology to re-shape business practices (Colt Technology News, 2018). Other example of blockchain, HKT and PCCW obtained a virtual banking license in early 2019 to expand finance business (South China Morning Post, 2019). Given examples of operators actively study on blockchain technology to its core business and the role of blockchain plays a tremendous role in telecommunications landscape. The research paper is focussed on blockchain/blockchain technology impact to Human Resources hiring and off-boarding practices in telecommunications sector in Hong Kong.
Problem setting. In modern conditions special consideration is attracted to the global discussion related to the nature and unshadowing of cryptocurrencies. One of the most relevant topics for discussion in the cryptocurrency space is the future legal regulation of this sphere and the necessity of tight control of financial institutions in the cryptocurrency trading. Nowadays on the territory of Ukraine the legal regulation of the cryptocurrency sphere remains unresolved, effective legislative changes have not been adopted yet. However, some consensus has already been reached on the territory of the European Union in the field of the legal regulation of cryptocurrencies reformation, which causes unconditional interest for Ukrainian scientists and businesses. Based on the stated above, the purpose of the article is to analyze the legal regulation of cryptocurrency unshadowing in the European Union in order to identify the most effective mechanisms for its adaptation into the domestic legal framework. Analysis of recent researches and publications. Some aspects of the legal regulation of the domestic legislation reformation in the sphere of cryptocurrencies have become the subject of scientific research of such authors as Burkovskaya A. V., Varnavsky A. V., Vasilevskaya L. Yu., Kravchenko L. M., Kud A. A., Kucheryavenko N. P., Lizunova A. N., Lunkin T. I., Perebinis M. G., Smychok E. N., and others. At the same time, comprehensive studies of the European Union legislation innovations in the sphere of the cryptocurrency unshadowing and the impact of the reformed legal EU regulation on national legislation of Ukraine is not carried out, that fact actualizes the theme of the article and further research and development. Article’s main body. European leaders today have reached the consensus on the issue that innovative technologies, which are the basis of cryptocurrencies, have the potential to increase the efficiency of the financial system and the economy as a whole, both at the national level and across the European Union. At the same time, European experts have not yet formed a unified approach to the nature and legal status of virtual currency. Scientists argue that increasingly virtual (fiat) currencies are used to finance terrorism through transaction anonymity, so the European Union introduces additional monitoring of virtual currencies and transactions, legalized in Directive (EU) 2018/843, which was analyzed in the article. Repeated attempts to legalize digital assets in Ukraine were made by the legislator, however, none of the bills has been adopted and so far the only regulatory act that would resolve the issues of the cryptocurrencies’ legalization and effective measures to unshadow them have not been adopted, which, in turn, requires the intensification of the legislators’ activities, given the rapid development of cryptocurrencies and innovations. Conclusions and prospects for development. The study showed multivariate interpretations of the legal text of the Directive (EU) 2018/843 by member-countries, as well as the presence of a hidden control regime that goes beyond the needs of the document. At the same time, the Directive (EU) 2018/843 is intended to become an effective regulator of legal relations in the sphere of cryptocurrencies and requires its gradual implementation in the legislation of Ukraine in order to fulfill the international legal obligations of our state.
Human decision making is often prone to biases and irrationality. Group decisions add dynamic interactions that further complicate the choice process and frequently result in outcomes that are suboptimal for both the individual and the collective. We show that an implementation of a Blockchain protocol improves individuals’ decision strategies and increases the alignment between desires and outcomes. The Blockchain protocol affords (1) a distributed decision, (2) the ability to iterate repeatedly over a choice, (3) the use of feedback and corrective inputs, and (4) the quantification of intrinsic choice attributes (i.e., greed, desire for fairness, etc.). We test our protocol’s performance in the context of the Public Goods Game. The game, a generalized version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, allows players to maximize their own gain or act in ways that benefit the collective. Empirical evidence shows that participants’ cooperation in the game typically decreases once a single player favors their own interest at the expense of others’. In our Blockchain implementation, “smart contracts” are used to safeguard individuals against losses and, consequently, encourage contributions to the public good. Across different tested simulations, the Blockchain protocol increases both the overall trust among the participants and their profits. Agents decision strategies remain flexible while they act as each other’s source of accountability (which can be seen as formalized distributed “Ulysses contract”). To highlight the contribution of our protocol to society at large we incorporated an entity that represents the public good. This benevolent independent beneficiary of the contributions of all participants (e.g. a charity organization or a tax system) maximized its payoffs when the Blockchain protocol was implemented. We provide a formalized implementation of the Blockchain protocol and discuss potential applications that could benefit society by more accurately capturing individuals’ preferences. For example, the protocol could help maximize profits in groups, facilitate democratic election that better reflect the public opinion, or enable group decision in circumstances where a balance between anonymity, diverse opinions, personal preferences and loss-aversion play a role.
We are interested in mining incentives in the Bitcoin protocols. The blockchain Bitcoin. The mining process is used to confirm and secure all transactions in the network. This process is organized as a speed game between individuals or groups, referred to as "miners" or "pools of miners", respectively. Miners or pools of miners use different computational powers to solve a mathematical problem, obtain a proof-of-work, spread their solution, and this solution is verified by the community before the block is added in the only public blockchain replicated over all nodes. First, we define and specify this game in the case with n players, n 2, under the assumptions denoted by (H) below. Next, we analytically find its Nash equilibrium points. In other words, we generalize the idea of [1] by taking into account the hypotheses of Peter Rizun's paper [2], through cumbersome computations. Our purpose here is to show some intuitions about the model rather than derive applicable results.
Climate insurance is already a hot topic due to the increased number of climate-related catastrophic events accompanied by associated losses for the economy in general and insurance companies, in particular. The extremely hot and dry summer of 2018 in some European countries highlighted existing weaknesses of the agricultural insurance mechanisms in Europe, where the farmers had to wait for months before compensation payments could bemade. Our paper aims to compare features of the yield-based insurance2and the index-based insurance (IBI)3in agriculture in the light of new developments and trends in information technologies (IT). The results show that an application of the distributed ledger technologies (DLT) in combination with IBI could not only resolve existing problems, but also facilitate development of the innovative insurance mechanisms at the EU level –providing effective protection against climate-related risks and preventing a systemic risk escalation
In the modern financial sector, interest in providing financial services that employ blockchain technology has increased. Blockchain technology is efficient and can operate without a trusted party to store all transaction information; additionally, it provides transparency and prevents the tampering of transaction information. However, new security threats can occur because blockchain technology shares all the transaction information. Furthermore, studies have reported that the private keys of users who use the same signature value two or more times can be recovered. Because private keys of blockchain identify users, private key leaks can result in attackers stealing the ownership rights to users' property. Therefore, as more financial services use blockchain technology, actions to counteract the threat of private key recovery must be continually investigated. Private key recovery studies are presented here. Based on these studies, duplicated signatures generated by blockchain users are defined. Additionally, scenarios that generate and use duplicated signatures are applied in an actual bitcoin environment to demonstrate that actual bitcoin users' private keys can be recovered.
This paper compares a number of stochastic volatility (SV) models for modeling and predicting the volatility of the four most capitalized cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin). The standard SV model, models with heavy-tails and moving average innovations, models with jumps, leverage effects and volatility in mean were considered. The Bayes factor for model fit was largely in favor of the heavy-tailed SV model. The forecasting performance of this model was also found superior than the other competing models. Overall, the findings of this study suggest using the heavy-tailed stochastic volatility model for modeling and forecasting the volatility of cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin being a safe haven asset is one of the traditional stories in the cryptocurrency community. However, during its existence and relevant presence, i.e. approximately since 2013, there has been no severe situation on the financial markets globally to prove or disprove this story until the COVID-19 pandemics. We study the quantile correlations of Bitcoin and two benchmarks -- S\&P500 and VIX -- and we make comparison with gold as the traditional safe haven asset. The Bitcoin safe haven story is shown and discussed to be unsubstantiated and far-fetched, while gold comes out as a clear winner in this contest.
While Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus mechanism for blockchain, it received harsh criticism due to its massive waste of energy for meaningless hash calculation. Some studies have introduced Proof-of-Stake to address this issue. However, such protocols widen the gap between rich and poor and in the worst case lead to an oligopoly, where the rich control the entire network. Other studies have attempted to translate the energy consumption of PoW into useful work, but they have many limitations, such as narrow application scope, serious security issues and impractical incentive model. In this paper, we introduce AxeChain, which can use the computing power of blockchain to solve practical problems raised by users without greatly compromising decentralization or security. AxeChain achieves this by coupling hard problem solving with PoW mining. We model the security of AxeChain and derive a balance curve between power utilization and system security. That is, under the reasonable assumption that the attack power does not exceed 1/3 of the total power, 1/2 of total power can be safely used to solve practical problems. We also design a novel incentive model based on the amount of work involved in problem solving, balancing the interests of both the users and miners. Moreover, our experimental results show that AxeChain provides strong security guarantees, no matter what kind of problem is submitted.
Yan Zhuang, Yin-Wu Chen, Zon‐Yin Shae, Chi‐Ren Shyu
BACKGROUND Data coordination across multiple health care facilities has become increasingly important for many emerging health care applications. Distrust has been recognized as a key barrier to the success of such applications. Leveraging blockchain technology could provide potential solutions tobuild trust between data providers and receivers by taking advantage of blockchain properties such as security, immutability, anonymity, decentralization, and smart contracts. Many health technologies have empirically proven that blockchain designs fit well with the needs of health care applications with certain degrees of success. However, there is a lack of robust architecture to provide a practical framework for developers to implement applications and test the performance of stability, efficiency, and scalability using standard blockchain designs. A generalized blockchain model is needed for the health care community to adopt blockchain technology and develop applications in a timely fashion. OBJECTIVE This study aimed at building a generalized blockchain architecture that provides data coordination functions, including data requests, permission granting, data exchange, and usage tracking, for a wide spectrum of health care application developments. METHODS An augmented, 3-layered blockchain architecture was built on a private blockchain network. The 3 layers, from bottom to top, are as follows: (1) incorporation of fundamental blockchain settings and smart contract design for data collection; (2) interactions between the blockchain and health care application development environment using Node.js and web3.js; and (3) a flexible development platform that supports web technologies such as HTML, https, and various programing languages. Two example applications, health information exchange (HIE) and clinical trial recruitment, were developed in our design to demonstrate the feasibility of the layered architecture. Case studies were conducted to test the performance in terms of stability, efficiency, and scalability of the blockchain system. RESULTS A total of 331,142 simulated HIE requests from accounts of 40,000 patients were successfully validated through this layered blockchain architecture with an average exchange time of 11.271 (SD 2.208) seconds. We also simulated a clinical trial recruitment scenario with the same set of patients and various recruitment criteria to match potential subjects using the same architecture. Potential subjects successfully received the clinical trial recruitment information and granted permission to the trial sponsors to access their health records with an average time of 3.07 seconds. CONCLUSIONS This study proposes a generalized layered blockchain architecture that offers health technology community blockchain features for application development without requiring developers to have extensive experience with blockchain technology. The case studies tested the performance of our design and empirically proved the feasibility of the architecture in 2 relevant health application domains.
Institut Teknologi Bandung Bandung, Indonesia, Intan Muchtadi-Alamsyah, Muhammad Thufaili Imdad, Institut Teknologi Bandung Bandung, Indonesia · 6 authors
Blockchain technology is one of the most contemporary and disruptive technologies in the world. It has gained considerable attention in numerous applications such as financial services, cybersecurity applications, Internet of Things (IoT), network data management. Now its range of applications is beyond the financial services as the healthcare industry has also adopted blockchain technology in its various subdomains such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical supply chain management system, genomic market, neuroscience technology, clinical research, and pharmaceutical medicine. Blockchain is considered a secure and viable solution for storing and accessing patients medical records and the patients can diagnosed and treated with safe and secure data sharing. Blockchain technology will revolutionize the healthcare systems with personalized, authentic, and secure access to the clinical data of patients and that data can be used for further health improvements and clinical researches. In this paper, we conduct a contemporary research on existing applications and developments in healthcare industry with the use of blockchain technology. We also discuss some robust applications and various existing companies that are using blockchain solutions for securing their data along with some current challenges and future perspectives.
In the next few years, Blockchain will play a central role in IoT as a technology. It enables the traceability of processes between multiple parties independent of a central instance. Blockchain allows to make the processes more transparent, cheaper, and safer. This research paper was conducted as systematic literature search. Our aim is to understand current state of implementation in context of Blockchain Technology for digital protection of communication in industrial cyber-physical systems. We have extracted 28 primary papers from scientific databases and classified into different categories using visualizations. The results show that the focus in around 14\% papers is on solution proposal and implementation of use cases "Secure transfer of order data" using Ethereum Blockchain, 7\% papers applying Hyperledger Fabric and Multichain. The majority of research (around 43\%) is focusing on solution development for supply chain and process traceability.
Eugene Tartakovsky, Ksenia Plesovskikh, Anastasiia Sarmakeeva, Alexander Bibik
This paper is the first of a series of short articles that explore the efficiency of major cryptocurrency markets. A number of statistical tests and properties of statistical distributions will be used to assess if cryptocurrency markets are efficient, and how their efficiency changes over time. In this paper, we analyze autocorrelation of returns in major cryptocurrency markets using the following methods: Pearson's autocorrelation coefficient of different orders, Ljung-Box test, and first-order Pearson's autocorrelation coefficient in a rolling window. All experiments are conducted on the BTC/USD, ETH/USD, ETH/BTC markets on Bitfinex exchange, and the XBT/USD market on Bitmex exchange, each on 5-minute, 1-hour, 1-day, and 1-week time frames. The results are represented visually on charts. Statistically significant autocorrelation is persistently present on the 5m and 1H time frames on all markets. The tests disagree on the 1D and 1W time frames. The results of this article are fully reproducible. Used datasets, source code, and a runnable Jupyter Notebook are available on GitHub.
Anonymity is one of the most important qualities of blockchain technology. For example, one can simply create a bitcoin address to send and receive funds without providing KYC to any authority. In general, the real identity behind cryptocurrency addresses is not known, however, some addresses can be clustered according to their ownership by analyzing behavioral patterns, allowing those with known attribution to be assigned labels. These labels may be further used for legal and compliance purposes to assist in law enforcement investigations. In this document, we discuss our methodology behind assigning attribution labels to cryptocurrency addresses.
В роботі розглянуто проект з відкритим кодом Ethereum Blockchain, що є одним з найпопулярніших представників блокчейн-технологій. В своїй канонічній реалізації Ethereum працює як відкрита публічна децентралізована система, що базується на алгоритмі консенсусу PoW та дозволяє користувачам керувати власною криптовалютою, розробляти та розгортати розумні контракти на базі EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), взаємодіяти з розумними контрактами інших користувачів. Оскільки такий алгоритм не задовольняє вимогам більшості корпоративних проектів на базі Ethereum Blockchain, був проведений порівняльний аналіз найпопулярніших алгоритмів консенсусу і на основі результатів цього аналізу проведена оптимізація роботи приватного блокчейн за допомогою вибору алгоритму консенсусу.
Master degree, Engineering in Information Technology., Shrikant Nagure, Aarti Pratap, Aishwarya Bhanage · 6 authors
Bitcoin has emerged as necessary cash software systems.For making the use of bitcoin we are using blockchain for various security reasons and transactions. Mining adds records of past transactions to the distributed ledger referred to as Blockchain, permitting users to achieve secure, strong agreement for each dealing. Mining in addition introduces wealth among the kinds of the latest units of currency. They consider miners to validate transactions. Cryptocurrencies need robust, secure mining algorithms. During this paper, we tend to survey & develop the particular Bitcoin referral system, platform in distinction employed by major Cryptocurrencies platform. We tend to assess the techniques, quick withdrawals,users/admin dashboard, referral system, combination & different several terms.
M.E in Computer Engineering from SVBIT, GTU, Gandhinagar, India., Pratik Patel, Pinkal Chauhan, M.E in Computer Engineering from LDRP, Gandhinagar, India.
In our everyday lives, IoT plays a vital role. It is crucial to sense, capture and share data from connected devices via internet. Existing system proposed centralized client/server approach where central authority keeps a record of all the activities. Failure of such centralized authority makes the whole system fail. A decentralized / distributed approach is therefore needed if a single failure point is avoided. In this paper contains information to integrating Blockchain in IoT ecosystem in order to achieve access control. We proposed smart contract based architecture which consist multiple permission contract, one decision contract and one entry contract, to achieve distributed and secure IoT device access control. To conclude system framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with two laptops and one Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the PCs, DC and EC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.
Assistant professor of Information technology in SRM IST, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India., R. Mythili*, Akkudalai Priyanka, Ruchika Prasad · 5 authors
It is necessary to keep the patient’s health history confidential as it attracts various attackers who can steal the patient’s valuable information and can lead to wrong medication which is dangerous for the patients. Healthcare using block chain provides security measures using various algorithms and one of them is consensus algorithm. Block chain is a secure gateway composed of decentralized ledger, when it comes to a specific grant of personalized access. Block chain plays a vital role when it comes to security. In Healthcare Block chain organizes the data so that transactions (i.e. Patient’s record) can be verified. Also, Block chain is decentralized ledger which is distributed in nature and has a vital role in securing the data and transactions. Block chain basically contains records in order and is arranged particularly in a block type structure.
We propose BSC, a Bitcoin Smart Contract implementation. It integrates the functionality of smart contracts into the Bitcoin system, giving developers the ability to build decentralized applications on Bitcoin. BSC will require a new hard fork, on which Bitcoin holders can use their existing funds directly. BSC combines the unlimited creative space of smart contracts and the vast network effect of Bitcoin, which will bring even more possibilities to the cryptocurrency world.
Purpose-Determination whether there exists a connection or interaction between Bitcoin and safe investment products, which were seen as safe havens, during the trade wars formalized with US President Donald Trump after the 2016 US presidential election is the main of this paper. With the first tariff raise (application) which officially started trade wars, it is desired to understand whether there was a change in the safe investment product preference in the period of the first tariff raise and the US Central Bank's decision to enlarge the balance sheet over the NY FED in September 2019 (after the July 2019 first interest rate cut) due to the liquidity shortage between banks. Methodology-Using Markow Regime Switching Model, the relationship between Bitcoin, gold, silver, Swiss franc and Japanese yen between these two dates and market regimes (bullish, bearish) were examined. Since the dollar and the euro have already been seen as safe havens as base currency, they are not included in the analysis. Findings-If bullish, Japanese yen and Swiss franc can affect investors in Bitcoin's investment decisions, contrary it can be seen that there is not any effect in the bear market regime. In Bitcoin, investor behavior is longer to hold its position in the bear market. Conclusion-Similar to some studies in the literature, during the period of trade wars, Bitcoin could be evaluated as a profit-making investment instrument and portfolio diversification rather than being a safe investment product (haven) among the regimes.
The article reveals the economic essence of cryptocurrency as an information and technological innovation. The authors have determined that cryptocurrency is a universal global means of payment, exchange, and investing, which exists in the form of a highly protected software code and is characterized by a free market exchange rate. Having considered technical, technological, and organizational aspects of using cryptocurrencies, the authors carried out the comparison of electronic money and cryptocurrency. The done analysis of markets and types of cryptocurrencies has enabled to form a ranking of cryptocurrencies by level of capitalization. The article describes the dynamics of the growth of cryptocurrency market capitalization and the domination of a Bitcoin’s market share. The authors have ascertained strengths of Bitcoin, which had allowed this cryptocurrency to become a useful international means of payment with the high investment potential. The article examines weaknesses of the exchange of cryptocurrency both ordinary consumers and governments. The authors have proven that institutionalization ensured by the formal and informal establishment of rules for functioning of cryptocurrency is necessary for effective functioning of cryptocurrency. The authors have substantiated three positions of institutional support describing the attitude of countries to functioning of a cryptocurrency market: a loyal position, categorical position, and position of anticipation. The authors have developed an organizational and economic mechanism for forming a cryptocurrency market based on functions, methods, and tools of management and suggested directions for undertaking a policy in the sphere of functioning of a cryptocurrency market for countries with the position of anticipation. The process of virtualization of modern society is inevitable. Сountries with the position of anticipation should support the course on innovation by solving a range of regulatory, technical and information issues on the development of the cryptocurrency market, based on leading international experience. The primary tasks should be: granting the legal status of cryptocurrency and developing rules for its circulation, introduction of technological innovations with the participation of the state, large corporations and venture funds, creation of an open ecosystem for interaction of all participants, as well as wide information support at all levels.
Hanumantharaju R, K. N. Shreenath, K. G. Srinivasa, Swetha Namburu
Mobile edge computing is a recent trend to complement the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem in the computing sector. IoT is the internet connected communications related to physical devices and everyday objects. The emergence of intelligent living spaces has been due to the rapid development of IoT technologies. Blockchain is one such technology that expands the list of information also referred to like records that are saved as blocks in the Blockchain which are connected using cryptographic algorithms. Within a Blockchain IoT environment, when data or device authentication information is stored in a Blockchain, authentication information can be displayed when verifying Block chain’s transactions, which are also referred to as proof of work. A principle of Zero-knowledge proof (ZKF) is implemented in this paper which is a way of proving that knowledge is known without exposing any data to the user. The proposed model uses a Mobile application where users can prove without revealing users' passwords. Blockchain stores client information that can prevent data from being manipulated. The results of applying the ZKF theory for data security are shown through a web application and NFC.
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and its public-key infrastructure (PKI) are widely used in the Internet to achieve secure communication. Validating domain ownership by trusted certification authorities (CAs) is a critical step in issuing digital certificates, but unfortunately, this process provides a poor security level. In this work, we present SmartCert, a novel approach based on smart contracts to improve digital certificates. A certificate in SmartCert conveys detailed information about its validation state which is constantly changing but only with respect to the specified smart contract code and individual domain policies. CAs issuing and updating certificates are kept accountable and their actions are transparent and monitored by the code. We present the implementation and evaluation of SmartCert, and discuss its deployability.