This paper examines the benefits and constraints of applying blockchain technology for the Paris Agreement carbon market mechanism and develops a list of technical requirements and soft factors as selection criteria to test the feasibility of two different blockchain platforms. The carbon market mechanism, as outlined in Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, can accelerate climate action by enabling cooperation between national Parties. However, in the past, carbon markets were limited by several constraints. Our research investigates these constraints and translates them into selection criteria to design a blockchain platform to overcome these past limitations. The developed selection criteria and assumptions developed in this paper provide an orientation for blockchain assessments. Using the selection criteria, we examine the feasibility of two distinct blockchains, Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, for the specific use case of Article 6.2. These two blockchain systems represent contrary forms of design and governance; Ethereum constitutes a public and permissionless blockchain governance system, while Hyperledger Fabric represents a private and permissioned governance system. Our results show that both blockchain systems can address present carbon market constraints by enhancing market transparency, increasing process automation, and preventing double counting. The final selection and blockchain system implementation will first be possible, when the Article 6 negotiations are concluded, and governance preferences of national Parties are established. Our paper informs about the viability of different blockchain systems, offers insights into governance options, and provides a valuable framework for a concrete blockchain selection in the future.
Background: Pharmaceutical corruption is a serious challenge in global health. Digital technologies that can detect and prevent fraud and corruption are particularly important to address barriers to access to medicines, such as medicines availability and affordability, stockouts, shortages, diversion, and infiltration of substandard and falsified medicines.Objectives: To better understand how digital technologies are used to combat corruption, increase transparency, and detect fraud in pharmaceutical procurement systems to improve population health outcomes.Methods: We conducted a multidisciplinary review of the health/medicine, engineering, and computer science literature. Our search queries included keywords associated with medicines procurement and digital technology in combination with terms associated with transparency and anti-corruption initiatives. Our definition of ‘digital technology’ focused on Internet-based communications, including online portals and management systems, supply chain tools, and electronic databases.Results: We extracted 37 articles for in-depth review based on our inclusion criteria focused on the utilization of digital technology to improve medicines procurement. The vast majority of articles focused on electronic data transfer and/or e-procurement systems with fewer articles discussing emerging technologies such as machine learning and blockchain distributed ledger solutions. In the context of e-procurement, slow adoption, justifying cost-savings, and need for technical standards setting were identified as key challenges for current and future utilization.Conclusions: Though there is a significant promise for digital technologies, particularly e-procurement, overall adoption of solutions that can enhance transparency, accountability and concomitantly combat corruption, is still underdeveloped. Future efforts should focus on tying cost-saving measurements with anti-corruption indicators, prioritizing centralization of e-procurement systems, establishing regulatory harmonization with standards setting, and incorporating additional anti-corruption technologies into procurement processes for improving access to medicines and to reach the overall goal of Universal Health Coverage.
Blockchain technology has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry recently. Ethereum, which uses blockchain technology, is a distributed computing platform and operating system. Smart contracts are small programs deployed to the Ethereum blockchain for execution. Errors in smart contracts will lead to huge losses. Formal verification can provide a reliable guarantee for the security of blockchain smart contracts. In this paper, the formal method is applied to inspect the security issues of smart contracts. We summarize five kinds of security issues in smart contracts and present formal verification methods for these issues, thus establishing a formal verification framework that can effectively verify the security vulnerabilities of smart contracts. Furthermore, we present a complete formal verification of the Binance Coin (BNB) contract. It shows how to formally verify the above security issues based on the formal verification framework in a specific smart contract. All the proofs are checked formally using the Coq proof assistant in which contract model and specification are formalized. The formal work of this paper has a variety of essential applications, such as the verification of blockchain smart contracts, program verification, and the formal establishment of mathematical and computer theoretical foundations.
Safi Faizullah, Muhammad Asad Khan, Ali Alzahrani, Imdadullah Khan
The advancement in cloud networks has enabled connectivity of both traditional networked elements and new devices from all walks of life, thereby forming the Internet of Things (IoT). In an IoT setting, improving and scaling network components as well as reducing cost is essential to sustain exponential growth. In this domain, software-defined networking (SDN) is revolutionizing the network infrastructure with a new paradigm. SDN splits the control/routing logic from the data transfer/forwarding. This splitting causes many issues in SDN, such as vulnerabilities of DDoS attacks. Many solutions (including blockchain based) have been proposed to overcome these problems. In this work, we offer a blockchain-based solution that is provided in redundant SDN (load-balanced) to service millions of IoT devices. Blockchain is considered as tamper-proof and impossible to corrupt due to the replication of the ledger and consensus for verification and addition to the ledger. Therefore, it is a perfect fit for SDN in IoT Networks. Blockchain technology provides everyone with a working proof of decentralized trust. The experimental results show gain and efficiency with respect to the accuracy, update process, and bandwidth utilization.
Yeṣem Kurt Peker, Xavier Rodríguez, James Ericsson, Suk Jin Lee · 5 authors
Blockchain is a developing technology that can be utilized for secure data storage and sharing. In this work, we examine the cost of Blockchain-based data storage for constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. We had two phases in the study. In the first phase, we stored data retrieved from a temperature/humidity sensor connected to an Ethereum testnet blockchain using smart contracts in two different ways: first, appending the new data to the existing data, storing all sensor data; and second, overwriting the new data onto the existing data, storing only a recent portion of the data. In the second phase, we stored simulated data from several sensors on the blockchain assuming sensor data is numeric. We proposed a method for encoding the data from the sensors in one variable and compared the costs of storing the data in an array versus storing the encoded data from all sensors in one variable. We also compared the costs of carrying out the encoding within the smart contract versus outside the smart contract. In the first phase, our results indicate that overwriting data points is more cost-efficient than appending them. In the second phase, using the proposed encoding method to store the data from several sensors costs significantly less than storing the data in an array, if the encoding is done outside the smart contract. If the encoding is carried out in the smart contract, the cost is still less than storing the data in an array, however, the difference is not significant. The study shows that even though expensive, for applications where the integrity and transparency of data are crucial, storing IoT sensor data on Ethereum could be a reliable solution.
The state-of-the-art for auditing and reproducing scientific applications on high-performance computing (HPC) systems is through a data provenance subsystem. While recent advances in data provenance lie in reducing the performance overhead and improving the user's query flexibility, the fidelity of data provenance is often overlooked: there is no such a way to ensure that the provenance data itself has not been fabricated or falsified. This paper advocates to leverage blockchains to deliver immutable and autonomous data provenance services such that scientific data are trustworthy. The challenges for adopting blockchains to HPC include designing a new blockchain architecture compatible with the HPC platforms and, more importantly, a set of new consensus protocols for scientific applications atop blockchains. To this end, we have designed the proof-of-scalable-traceability (POST) protocol and implemented it in a blockchain prototype, namely SciChain, the very first blockchain system for HPC. We evaluated SciChain by comparing it with multiple state-of-the-art systems; Experimental results showed that SciChain guaranteed trustworthy data while incurring orders of magnitude lower overhead.
Wireless body area network includes some tiny wearable sensors for monitoring the physiological data of user, which has been a promising method of promoting the quality and efficiency greatly in healthcare. The collected physical signs are aggregated into the medical documents and uploaded to cloud server for utilizing by the remote user. As these files are highly sensitive privacy data, there is a vital challenge that constructs a secure and efficient communication architecture in this application scenario. Based on this standpoint, we present a lightweight verifiability ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption protocol with outsourced decryption in this article. Specifically, our construction enjoys the following six features: (1) Although the outsourced decryption enables to save the computation overhead of the data user sharply in an attribute-based encryption scheme, the ciphertext is out of control and the correctness cannot be guaranteed by the data owner. The proposal provides the verifiability of ciphertext that ensures the user to check the correctness efficiently. (2) The size of the ciphertext is constant that is not increased with the complexity of attribute and access structure. (3) For Internet of Things devices, it introduces the fog computing into our protocol for the purpose of low latency and relation interactions, which has virtually saved the bandwidth. (4) With the help of blockchain technique, we encapsulate the hash value of public parameter, original and transformed ciphertext and transformed key into a block, so that the tamper-resistance is facilitated against an adversary from inside and outside the system. (5) In the standard model, we prove that it is selectively chosen-plaintext attack-secure and verifiable provided that the computational bilinear Diffie–Hellman assumption holds. (6) It implements this protocol and shows the result of performance measurement, which indicates a significant reduction on communication and computation costs burden on every entity in wireless body area network.
The contract is the sovereign tool employed to manage agreements between entities in today’s society. It plays a crucial role in a variety of different fields, ranging from politics to finance. This fact implies the efficiency of these applications is determined in part by the efficiency of the contracts they rely on. Despite their important role, contracts have changed relatively little in the last few centuries and remain based on an outdated technology of bureaucracy and procedures done by hand. Such systems are full of unnecessary complications, are incredibly wasteful in terms of time, money and resources, and are susceptible to human failure. In the last few years, a type of contract represented by a computer program has appeared. This concept, known as a smart contract, is based on the emerging blockchain technology. Blockchain is a type of distributed system which assures the immutability of data via the use of mathematically secure cryptographic techniques and that, as will be discussed, is well-suited for the implementation of smart contract systems. Transitioning contracts into the digital era would not only allow them to catch up to the technological pace of society but also would be advantageous from a safety and efficiency standpoint. This body of work will test the feasibility of using blockchain-based smart contracts to facilitate the first steps of this evolution. This thesis assembles a proof of concept platform that supports the specification and execution of smart contracts on a blockchain network. This proof of concept will in particular target the use case of opening a bank account, aiming to create an efficient, permanent, reliable and safe process. To achieve this, we constructed a Hyperledger Fabric network. We present herein the system developed and discuss the nuances pertaining to deploying a codebase on a blockchain, the evaluation of our system, and finally some visions for further development of this and related use cases.
Smart Contracts are computer programs which implement and execute transactions and manage business logic on a decentralized public ledger. Smart Contracts can be written in different programming languages and for different Blockchains. Currently the most used language for Smart Contracts is Solidity and the most used platform is the Ethereum Blockchain. Assessing the quality of Smart Contract programs is an important task required to professional programmers, especially when a programming language has so powerful economic implications. It is therefore crucial to provide professional programmers with tools for the evaluation of Smart Contracts. In software engineering, software metrics has been defined and used to measure software quality and, more in general, to qualify software under the principle “You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure”. For the Solidity programming language there are only a few Standalone Applications to analyse the Smart Contract metrics. The aim of this paper is first to build a tool for the practical computation of a specific set of Solidity source code metrics, so that the set will be extensible in the future according also to Solidity compiler evolution, second to fully enable a web-based usage of the tool to access the metrics of the Solidity programming language. The tool, PASO, differently from the existing application, is able to give software metrics values for Smart Contracts written in Solidity programming language just using a web browser.
The copyright of data is a key point that needs to be solved in spatial data infrastructure for data sharing. In this paper, we propose a decentralized digital rights management model of spatial data, which can provide a novel way of solving the existing copyright management problem or other problems in spatial data infrastructure for data sharing. An Ethereum smart contract is used in this model to realize spatial data digital rights management function. The InterPlanetary File System is utilized as external data storage for storing spatial data in the decentralized file system to avoid data destruction that is caused by a single point of failure. There is no central server in the model architecture, which has a completely decentralized nature and it makes spatial data rights management not dependent on third-party trust institutions. We designed three spatial data copyright management algorithms, developed a prototype system to implement and test the model, used the smart contract security verification tool to check code vulnerabilities, and, finally, discussed the usability, scalability, efficiency, performance, and security of the proposed model. The result indicates that the proposed model not only has diversified functions of copyright management compared with previous studies on the blockchain-based digital rights management, but it can also solve the existing problems in traditional spatial data infrastructure for data sharing due to its characteristics of complete decentralization, mass orientation, immediacy, and high security.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The digital economy has had a profound impact on society, including the global business landscape and market dynamics. New phenomena such as online platforms, social media, distributed ledger technology (such as blockchain), big data and online service providers affect business models and our understanding of what a “business” is. The links between digitalisation and Responsible Business conduct (RBC) are manifold. New digital tools can help firms accelerate their contribution to sustainable development, and enable businesses to strengthen their efforts to meet standards of RBC. At the same time, digitalisation can also cause business to violate human rights, or contribute to social and environmental harms in new ways. This paper discusses the links between RBC and digitalisation. It aslo summarises the key issues and findings emerging from the stocktaking and analysis of current initiatives.
Digital transformation affects almost all areas of government management, including public procurement. World experience shows that the procurement sector acts as a driver of digital transformation of corporations. According to the authors, digitalization of public procurement should not be an end in itself, a balanced approach is needed to make the contract system more open, accountable to citizens, convenient for business, cost-effective and anti-corruption. Currently, there have been significant changes in the public procurement system in the direction of its electronicization, electronic platforms, electronic stores for small purchases have appeared, all competitive procurement methods have switched to electronic format. The next stage in the development of the contract system is digitalization due to the transition to smart technologies, including blockchain, smart contracts, cloud services, artificial intelligence, bigdata. The purpose of this article is to show how digital technologies, including those successfully used in corporate procurement, will help move to state “procurement 4.0” and lead to the formation of an intellectual contract system, including eliminating the influence of the subjective “human” factor as much as possible, by transferring the collateral function making managerial decisions to artificial intelligence.
International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation - IJPR, is an editorial & peer-reviewed journal publication for mental health care providers, practitioners, nurses, consumers, and applied researchers, bearing ISSN: 1475-7192.
Anatolii Georgievich Korchagin, Andrei Aleksandrovich Yakovenko
  This article explores the phenomenon of cryptocurrency and technology it is based upon. The authors describe the mechanism of its functionality along with the occurred problems of legal nature, which being interrelated make the phenomenon in question appealing within the criminal environment. Global digitalization sets new requirements, namely the combinations of legal and technical regulators meant to achieving adequate legal regulation in the digital era. The subject of this research is the Russian and foreign legal doctrine that reveals the essence of the indicated technology and mechanisms for protecting social relations in the context of utilization of this technology. The research methodology consists of the following methods: statistical, dogmatic, comparative-legal, synergetic, logical, functional, and systemic. The scientific novelty is substantiated by the need for convergence of the legal and information systems and demonstration of such convergence during the period of rapid digitalization in all social spheres. The authors draw a conclusion that the problem carries a comprehensive character, and the longer it takes to resolve the issues of legal regulation, the higher are the risks of using cryptocurrency.  
Marco Savi, Daniele Santoro, Katarzyna Di Meo, Daniele Pizzolli · 9 authors
This demonstration aims at showcasing an initial version of the DECENTER Brokerage Platform, which leverages an Ethereum blockchain to enable resource federation among different Fog Computing infrastructures. We consider a scenario where an Italian Infrastructure Provider wants to seamlessly extend its pool of resources to get access to an IP camera located in Korea, so that it can deploy an application to locally perform text recognition from a live video stream.
Nikolay Buldakov, Timur Khalilev, Salvatore Distefano, Manuel Mazzara
This paper discusses an open source solution to smart-parking in highly urbanized areas. Interviews have been conducted with domain experts, user stories defined and a system architecture has been proposed with a case study. Our solution allows independent owners of parking space to be integrated into one unified system, that facilitates the parking situation in a smart city. The utilization of such a system raises the issues of trust and transparency among several actors of the parking process. In order to tackle those, we propose a smart contract-based solution, that brings in trust by encapsulating sensitive relations and processes into transparent and distributed smart contracts.
Blockchain technology is an interlinked systematic chain of blocks that contains transaction history and other user data. It works under the principle of decentralized distributed digital ledger. This technology enables cryptographically secure and anonymous financial transactions among the user nodes of the network enabling the transactions to be validated and approved by all the users in a transparent environment. It is a revolutionary technology that earned its emerging popularity through the usage of digital cryptocurrencies. Even though Blockchain holds a promising scope of development in the online transaction system, it is prone to several security and vulnerability issues. In this paper, blockchain methodology, its applications, and security issues are discussed which might shed some light on blockchain enthusiasts and researchers.
Open access
3 source records
cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Suyash Gupta, Sajjad Rahnama, Jelle Hellings, Mohammad Sadoghi
Recent developments in blockchain technology have inspired innovative new designs in resilient distributed and database systems. At their core, these blockchain applications typically use Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to maintain a common state across all replicas, even if some replicas are faulty or malicious. Unfortunately, existing consensus protocols are not designed to deal with geo-scale deployments in which many replicas spread across a geographically large area participate in consensus. To address this, we present the Geo-Scale Byzantine FaultTolerant consensus protocol (GeoBFT). GeoBFT is designed for excellent scalability by using a topological-aware grouping of replicas in local clusters, by introducing parallelization of consensus at the local level, and by minimizing communication between clusters. To validate our vision of high-performance geo-scale resilient distributed systems, we implement GeoBFT in our efficient ResilientDB permissioned blockchain fabric. We show that GeoBFT is not only sound and provides great scalability, but also outperforms state-of-the-art consensus protocols by a factor of six in geo-scale deployments.
This paper presents a new blockchain network simulator that uses bitcoin's original reference implementation as its main application. The proposed simulator leverages the use of lightweight virtualization technology to build a fine tuned local testing network. To enable fast simulation of a large scale network without disabling mining service, the simulator can adjust the bitcoin mining difficulty level to below the default minimum value. In order to assess the performance of blockchain under different network conditions, the simulator allows to define different network topologies, and integrates Linux kernel traffic control (tc) tool to apply distinct delay or packet loss on the network nodes. Moreover, to validate the efficiency of our simulator we conduct a set of experiments and study the impact of the computation power and network delay on the network's consistency in terms of number of forks and mining revenues. The impact of applying different mining difficulty levels is also studied and the block time as well as fork occurrences are evaluated. Furthermore, a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of existing blockchain simulators are provided along with a discussion justifying the need of new simulator. As part of our contribution, we have made the simulator available on Github (https://github.com/noureddinel/core-bitcoin-net-simulator) for the community to use and improve it.
Abstract The current contract system that has been running in a supply chain is not necessarily going well. Particularly, this contract was attributed by unfairness distribution of margins in each stakeholder, which causes one of the stakeholders took place as disadvantaged ones. This challenges potentially overcame by industry 4.0 paradigm constructing a smart contract system based on blockchain technology. This study aims to analyze the task of each stakeholder to achieve a transparent smart contract system and design system for a transparent smart contract that is able to provide a fair and transparent contract for each stakeholder involved in the supply chain of “Gasol flour” industry. By the existence of a smart contract, each stakeholder visibly and determine what contracts to establish and to create with other parties a transparently. The relief method used in this research provides input in the form of features needed to make a contract system in the supply chain of “Gasol flour” industry. Furthermore, these features are selected to obtain an output in the form of contract items to display in the distributed smart contract system. The selected items are input to run IF-THEN logic on the smart contract system using the M5P Tree algorithm method. The main results of this study are to obtain features that have the most influence on a transparent smart contract system and the rule of the selected feature so that a system is able to provide a fair contract for each stakeholder established in the supply chain of “Gasol flour” industry.
The envisioned embracing of thriving knowledge societies is increasingly compromised by threatening perceptions of information overload, attention poverty, opportunity divides, and career fears. This paper traces the roots of these symptoms back to causes of information entropy and structural holes, invisible private and undiscoverable public knowledge which characterize the sad state of our current knowledge management and creation practices. As part of an ongoing design science research and prototyping project, the article's (neg)entropic perspectives complement a succession of prior multi-disciplinary publications. Looking forward, it proposes a novel decentralized generative knowledge management approach that prioritizes the capacity development of autonomous individual knowledge workers not at the expense of traditional organizational knowledge management systems but as a viable means to foster their fruitful co-evolution. The article, thus, informs relevant stakeholders about the current unsustainable status quo inhibiting knowledge workers; it presents viable remedial options (as a prerequisite for creating the respective future generative Knowledge Management (KM) reality) to afford a sustainable solution with the generative potential to evolve into a prospective general-purpose technology.
Open access
Personal Information Management and User Behavior
Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development
Wilfridus Bambang Triadi Handaya, Mohd Najwadi Yusoff, Aman Jantan
Abstract Cybercrime is the highest threat to every private company and government agency in the world. Using synergistic threats to attack provides many success alternatives that lead to the same goal, which is to take over the network and carry out illegal mining activities using CPU resources from the victim’s computer. One of the main motives for the success of this criminal business is its relatively low cost and high return of investment. Using the infection chain method in carrying out cryptocurrency mining malware attacks with fileless techniques involves loading malicious code into system memory. Monero (XMR) is by far the highest popular cryptocurrency among threat actor installing mining malware because it comes with full anonymity and resistance to an application-specific circuit mining (ASIC). This work proposes a better method for classifying conventional malware and cryptocurrency mining malware. On the other hand, grouping specific of suitable features extracted from the sources of EMBER dataset shown as malware and need to categorize as a cryptocurrency mining malware. The proposed approach is defining a better algorithm for enhancing accuracy and efficiency for cryptocurrency mining malware detection.
International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation - IJPR, is an editorial & peer-reviewed journal publication for mental health care providers, practitioners, nurses, consumers, and applied researchers, bearing ISSN: 1475-7192.