As a quite attractive secure search mechanism in cloud environments, searchable encryption allows encrypted files to be searched by keyword and does not reveal any information about original data files. However, most existing searchable encryption schemes only support single keyword ciphertext retrieval, and they cannot resist against inside keyword guessing attacks. Besides, the previous schemes rarely focus on integrity verification and fair transactions without any third party. Focusing on these problems, we propose a multi-keyword certificateless searchable public key authenticated encryption scheme based on blockchain. We use certificateless cryptosystem to encrypt keywords, which avoids the problems of certificate management in traditional cryptosystem and key escrow in identity-based cryptosystem. Our scheme also supports multi-keyword search, which locates encrypted files precisely and returns the desired files. Moreover, we upload the real encrypted files to the cloud server, while the encrypted indexes are put in blockchain, which ensures the anti-tampering, integrity and traceability of the encrypted indexes. The anti-tampering of blockchain also ensures that users can receive accurate search results without any third party verification. Furthermore, we utilize smart contract to track monetary rewards, which enables fair transactions between data owners and users without any trusted third party. We prove that the proposed scheme is secure against inside keyword guessing attacks in the random oracle model. Finally, our performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has higher computational performance than other related schemes.
Emerging technologies have played an important role in driving major changes in human society. However, the advent of most technologies is typically initially accompanied by confusion; this is often because technology developers overlook the user perspective. This study was conducted to systematically determine the fundamental causes of problems that users encounter when they interact with blockchain technology, one of the promising emerging technologies today, and to suggest relevant design strategies. To this end, usability evaluation was conducted for the KDEX decentralized exchange application. To ensure the effective identification of the significant usability problems, heuristic evaluation with four experts and usability testing with 23 experimental participants were carried out. The results obtained show that more user-centered design is necessary to enable the widespread use of decentralized applications. Based on the experimental findings, actionable design strategies that facilitate the effective utilization of emerging technologies are suggested. The proposed strategies are expected to enable users to easily understand and navigate applications based on these technologies.
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to developing model for Organization Structure and Firm Performance
relationship mediated by impacting factors i.e., Organization Culture, Strategic Orientation, Environmental
Uncertainty and Technology usage in service sector in India.
Design/methodology/approach:The proposed test size for the research is 750 out of which 600 respondents are
found usable. The population universe is huge and spread across different region of India in the various public and
private service sector clusters. The sample nature is heterogeneous in the sense that the various managerial positions
of the respondents belong to different departments like Finance, Human Resource, Advertising, and Operation
management.
Finding:Thus, model so developed attempts to build a theory on understanding mediation effect of culture,
technology, environment and strategy prevailing in service sector i.e., banks, insurance and IT companies to know
how organization structure influence firm performance.
Originality/Value: It is found that impact of formalization, centralization and decentralization constructs of
organization structure with the four mediators have a stronger impact on firm performance. It also stated to emphasis
less on specialization of duties, responsibilities and authority towards employee in an organization for increasing the
performance.
Open access
Organizational Leadership and Management Strategies
In the course of its economic and legal development, the formation and improvement of the financial system from a legal perspective continues to occur in Ukraine. Today, political transformations in one aspect or another affect the state of the financial system, that is, in some cases, they stabilize it, and in others, unfortunately, lead to its imbalance. At the same time, it should be noted that the financial system of Ukraine, as well as its functions in modern conditions, usually develop in close interaction with other links. Their interaction with the budget system is especially important for the functioning of the financial system itself since it contributes to the financial support of various branches of public life in Ukraine. At the same time, the axiology of the financial system of Ukraine requires analysis of its functional component, since in the legal and economic literature the specified category is still debatable. In addition, the concept of “financial system” is absent both in scientific sources and in the current legislation. The problems of the financial system have already been the subject of research by individual scholars. However, an analysis of their work shows that the administrative and legal aspects of the financial system are only partially revealed. That is why the purpose of this article is to analyze the very concept of the financial system and its components, as well as to study the impact on it of the relevant administrative and legal principles. As a result, it is concluded that finance, as well as the financial system as a whole, is crucial for the development of the state. They serve as the economic basis for the existence of even the state itself. The notion of “finance” is applied not only to the sphere of state property but also to the sphere of the effect of private relations, because in Ukraine the market relations develop. In this regard, finance is regarded as a public-law and private-law category, which is the very foundation of Ukraine’s financial system. Nowadays in Ukraine, there is a tendency of scientific research of peculiarities of legal regulation of a certain type of activity, including financial, because the latter has state-defined elements. Given that the main elements of the financial system include finance: state, local, economic entities of all forms of ownership, the non-productive sphere of activity, the population of the financial market, as well as financial infrastructure, it is possible to improve the definition of the content of the financial system as a set regulated by financial and legal norms individual units of financial relations and financial institutions through which the state creates, distributes and uses centralized and decentralized funds. This definition directly indicates that there is a specific model of legal influence created by a special combination of legal regulation of financial relations in Ukraine. The aforementioned allows convincingly to assert that in Ukraine there is an administrative-legal regime of the financial system, which is functionally oriented to the performance of functions and actions of the authorized state bodies in the implementation and provision of all elements of the financial system. Keywords: administrative and legal principles of the financial system, financial system, finances, money.
By design, smart contracts' data and computations are public to all participants. In this paper, we study how to create smart contracts with parameters that need to stay secret. We propose a way to keep some of the parameters off-chain, while guaranteeing correctness of the computation, using a combination of a commitment scheme and a zero-knowledge proof system. We describe an implementation of our construction, based on ethereum smart contracts and zk-SNARKS. We also provide a small example and a cost analysis of our approach.
The Onion Router (Tor) is one of the major network systems that provide anonymous communication and censorship circumvention. Tor enables its users to surf the Internet, chat, and send messages anonymously; however, cyber attackers also exploit the system for circumventing criminal activity detection. Recently, various approaches that prevent or mitigate abuse of Tor have been proposed in the literature. This paper, which presents one of the approaches, addresses an IP traceback problem. In our model, onion routers that voluntarily participate in attacker tracing detect attack packets (packets carrying an attacker's code or data) recorded in the log files by sharing necessary information with an attacked server over an Ethereum blockchain network. The detection algorithm in this paper uses the statistics of packet travel and relay times and outputs attack-packet candidates. The proposed method attaches a reliability degree to each candidate, which is based on the upper bounds of its Type I and II error rates. A smart contract running on the blockchain network ranks the detection results from onion routers according to the reliability degrees.
The adoption of blockchain in the public electrical vehicle charging market has yet to be realized to its full potential, despite existing proof-of-concept. A positive outlook for blockchain is suggested by contemporary research, as well as the need for empirical studies to fully identify blockchain’s barriers to adoption. Through qualitative methods, a focused literature review, and in-depth interviews with subject matter experts, this thesis investigated which barriers to blockchain adoption exist in the public electrical vehicle charging market. The results indicated that the main barrier to blockchain adoption was the structure of the public electrical vehicle charging market itself, since it is an immature market experiencing constant change. This was followed by: coordination, norms and cultures, business process, incumbent technological solutions, regulations and legislations, shared infrastructure, and distributed ledger technology. These barriers were not shown individually, but were affected by each other. It is concluded that blockchain technology is not needed by the market in its current state, as its key defining attributes of privacy, security and decentralization are not deemed worth the cost of its own implementation. This research contributes to, and updates, the knowledge of blockchain utilization for the public electrical vehicle charging market. The results can be used by private and public organizations and scholars as reference material with regards to blockchain adoption for public electrical vehicle charging.
The inseparable internet requirements and the endless stream of cyber-attacks have led to strong demand for trusted IP addresses. However, the existing collaborative DNS security schemes have the defects of low credibility and imperfect incentive mechanism. Enlightened by the Consortium blockchain technology, we propose a novel DNS Cache Resources Trusted Sharing Model, which can improve the credibility of DNS resolution results by establishing a complete chain of trust. Firstly, the consortium blockchain is introduced as the carrier of the peer-to-peer network to reduce the impact of illegal access and complicity tampering on the DNS cache credibility; Secondly, the evaluation index of the node credibility in the DNS cache sharing model is proposed, and the trust-based incentive mechanism is designed to reduce the impact of free-riding behavior and on the trusted performance of the system. The two indicators of node abnormal behavior similarity and roundtrip time between nodes are used to comprehensively evaluate the degree of recommendation of the node and serve as the basis for dynamic scheduling; Finally, we use the stochastic distributed decentralized storage mechanism to solve the problem of low efficiency in the consortium blockchain. The simulation results show that the model has certain advantages in ensuring the credibility of domain name resolution results, and maintains the ideal efficiency while ensuring trust.
In online crowdsourcing services, credible accountability mechanisms are crucial for guaranteeing a good interactive environment. However, the crowdsourcing systems are established in virtual environments, the identities of the participants are various and complicated, the systems could scarcely identify malicious nodes automatically. So it is very hard to preserve the complete evidence of malicious behaviors and investigate relevant legal responsibilities. Blockchain is regarded as a very promising solution to these problems because it possesses characteristics of decentration, non-modifiability and traceability. However, a main challenge is to design an applicable blockchain consensus algorithm which can reach an agreement on credibility of participants automatically, prevent transaction data from tampering, and trace to the source of malicious behaviors. In this paper, an improved Proof-of-Trust (PoT) consensus scheme is proposed with the underlying technology of blockchain, which is properly to the crowdsourcing service scenarios. Firstly, this PoT consensus selects nodes with high credibility using subjective logic reputation algorithm. Only selected nodes have the chance to generate blocks, participate in verification, and claim crowdsourcing tasks. Secondly, the choice scheme of generate-block nodes is further optimized through the unpredictability of timestamp and digital signature. Moreover, an incentive mechanism based on game theory is designed in this consensus. With this mechanism, candidate nodes prefer to give honest verification results rather than engage in collusion with malicious nodes. The analysis and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness, feasibility and scalability of the proposed approach.
Internal audit is an independent activity that provides an objective professional opinion of advisory character (recommendations on how to improve the functioning of the system), with the purpose of contributing to the improvement of the organization's business. It assists the organization in achieving its goals by systematically and disciplinedly assessing and evaluating risk management, existing controls and management of the organization. Also, internal audit is one of the three key components of the public sector internal financial control framework, and is defined as a "functionally independent and decentralized internal audit" that reviews the effectiveness of internal controls. Internal audit provides support to the organization in achieving management goals through auditing financial management and control systems, and enhances business value through good recommendations. Internal audit is not the same as inspection! Internal audit does not penalize or sanction! The introduction of an adequate system of internal controls and audits into the defense system achieves and ensures the efficient and rational use of funds to finance defense expenditures, on the one hand, and on the other hand significantly narrows the space for significant irregularities, frauds, corruption and the appearance of various forms organized crime. The audit function assists management insomuch as it indicates what is wrong with the entity's business and provides recommendations on how to create the preconditions for a better business. The role of the audit is that it represents: 1) the management controlling instrument used by the management of the organization to determine where the organization's failures are located; 2) the control over the functioning of the Accounting and Internal Financial Control system. This form of control involves the organization, policies and procedures used by budget users to ensure that the tasks entrusted to them are performed. It verifies that the resources used in the execution of tasks within the competence of the budgetary beneficiary have been used in accordance with the set goals.
Blaž Podgorelec, Marjan Herieko, Muhamed Turkanović
Currently, developers and researchers are dedicated to finding better ways to achieve greater scalability of various blockchain platforms. Focused on the Ethereum blockchain platform, the state channels are currently the only maturely researched and implemented a solution for achieving scalability. However, there are still several problems, such as transparency of state channel networks, transaction traceability, and the incapability that the off-chain state is transferred back on the blockchain network in an ad-hoc manner. To solve the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel state channel solution in the form of a State Channel as a Service, which, although off-chain, still incorporates a secure distributed and decentralized network. This solves the challenge of transparency and traceability while giving users the confidence that only the valid last off-chain state is transferred back on the blockchain network. With the proposed solution, there is no need for users to monitor state channel activities for possible malicious actions. Implementation was performed in the form of a payment channel system, presenting a potential use case for the SCaaS. Furthermore, we performed a security and performance analysis, which shows that the solution is secure and by a factor of 12 more efficient than the classical on-chain payment systems. To evaluate and prove the contributions of the proposed solution, quantitative, and qualitative comparisons with selected related works (i.e., Raiden and Celer) were also performed.
Amjad Saeed Khan, Gaojie Chen, Yogachandran Rahulamathavan, Gan Zheng · 6 authors
The UAV is emerging as one of the greatest technology developments for rapid network coverage provisioning at affordable cost. The aim of this paper is to outsource network coverage of a specific area according to a desired quality of service requirement and to enable various entities in the network to have intelligence to make autonomous decisions using blockchain and auction mechanisms. In this regard, by considering a multiple-UAV network where each UAV is associated to its own controlling operator, this paper addresses two major challenges: the selection of the UAV for the desired quality of network coverage and the development of a distributed and autonomous real-time monitoring framework for the enforcement of service level agreement (SLA). For a suitable UAV selection, we employ a reputation-based auction mechanism to model the interaction between the business agent who is interested in outsourcing the network coverage and the UAV operators serving in closeby areas. In addition, theoretical analysis is performed to show that the proposed auction mechanism attains a dominant strategy equilibrium. For the SLA enforcement and trust model, we propose a permissioned blockchain architecture considering Support Vector Machine (SVM) for real-time autonomous and distributed monitoring of UAV service. In particular, smart contract features of the blockchain are invoked for enforcing the SLA terms of payment and penalty, and for quantifying the UAV service reputation. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of theoretical analysis and efficacy of the proposed model.
Blockchain technology is a new general-purpose technology that poses significant challenges to the existing state of law, economy and society. Blockchain has one feature that makes it even more distinctive than other disruptive technologies: it is, by nature and design, global and transnational. Moreover, blockchain operates based on its own rules and principles that have a law-like quality. What we may call the lex cryptographia of blockchain has been designed based on a rational choice vision of human behavior. Blockchain adopts a framing derived from neoclassical economics, and instantiates it in a new machinery that implements rational choice paradigms using blockchain in a semi-automatic way, across all spheres of life, and without regard to borders. Accordingly, a global law and crypto-economics movement is now emerging owing to the spread of blockchain.
This Article suggests that such a rational choice paradigm is an insufficient foundation for the future development of blockchain. It seeks to develop a new understanding of blockchain and its regulation through code according to the emerging “law and political economy” framework. Blockchain should be understood as much more than a machine that enables the automation of transactions according to a rational choice framework. Blockchain should instead be understood as a technological infrastructure. Acknowledging the infrastructural dimension of blockchain technology may help identify a new role for the law in its interaction with blockchain, as well as for government in its interaction with the new technology. More precisely, identifying blockchain as an “infrastructural commons” helps us recognize that law and regulation should not be relegated to the role of merely facilitating the operation of the invisible hand of the market by and within blockchain, but should rather acquire more active roles, such as safeguarding access on non-discriminatory terms to users, on a model with net neutrality and other public utility safeguards. The Article closes by proposing a “law and political economy” framework for blockchain that is based on principles of publicness, trust, and interoperability.
Godwin C. Okwuibe, Zeguang Li, Thomas Brenner, Ole Langniß
The increase in development of electric vehicle(EV) will have a strong impact on the power distribution grid if adequate care is not taken on the high power demand required for charging EV. Consequently, there is need to create a platform to enable charging point operators to effectively manage the EV user’s charging requests and ensure that there charging needs are satisfied while not exceeding the distribution grid capacity. If this is not done, there is no doubt that in few a years, EV owners will be faced with the problems of unavailability of charging stations and congestion in grid sequel to simultaneous charging of many EV’s. This work proposes a smart EV charging infrastructure based on a blockchain platform. With the charging demand (kWh) and maximum duration of the charging event provided by the EV user, the EV load flexibility is determined and utilized through smart charging to achieve a stable grid. EV owners and charging stations are linked through the platform thereby reducing the actors in EV charging ecosystem from six to four. Flexibility (power and time) in charging of EV is traded within the blockchain platform. By this, additional investors will be attracted into the business of EV charging station and through flexible offers, EV loads are shifted from the peak load hours. Consequently, the simulations shows that the acceptance rate of EV users increased by more than 50% when our smart charging system was adopted compared to the normal charging scenario.
New Zealand biodiversity is highly endemic and suffers from extreme loss due to habitat destruction and invasive mammalian predators. Building on New Zealand’s expertise in mammal eradications on offshore islands, the New Zealand government recently announced NZ$28 million to initiate the process to eradicate invasive rats, possums, and mustelids from the New Zealand mainland by 2050. Predator Free 2050 Ltd was established to distribute these funds to groups who could demonstrate local eradication and landscape scale suppression of predators, and lever additional funding to achieve their goals. Not surprisingly, this programme has raised a few eyebrows, enthralled people, angered others, or kick-started a tranche of new biodiversity protection projects across the country. Whatever one’s perspective, the bar has been set very high, and consequently has engaged a lot of people in the thinking, planning, and on-the-ground action. This is one of the most exciting times in New Zealand’s history to be either managing predators or studying them. The challenge is huge, and the opportunities tremendous, but we won’t get there unless we address a number of important knowledge gaps. Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research is one of many New Zealand research providers helping to fill these gaps. Achieving eradication of predators at a national scale requires quantum leaps in pest management, including: 1) new tools and strategies for removing predators; 2) more accurate methods of detecting predators at very low abundance; 3) statistical methods for declaring success; and 4) public co-operation and involvement in the programme. Manaaki Whenua scientists have recently developed a long-life novel lure using kairomones emitted by ferrets. Adding ferret odour to regular bait increased stoat detection rates by 200%, and in kill traps, ferret odour increased stoat kills by 150%. Responses were not limited to stoats, as weasel and hedgehog detections increased by similar amounts with ferret odour. We have also developed a free decision-support tool (TrapSim) to simulate the effects of varying trapping and poisoning regimes. The tool is being further developed to include predator reinvasion and the variation between individuals in their interaction rates with control devices. We have also developed software to help managers estimate the minimum amount of surveillance needed to achieve the required sensitivity and the target probability of eradication. Declaring local eradication reliably is a critical part of moving from one eradication zone to the next. Lack of detections does not necessarily mean eradication, as this depends on the detection network and the probability that a predator can be detected if it is present. We modified software created for determining proof-of-freedom from animal diseases for proof-of-eradication of pests. This allows managers to declare the probability of eradication based on Bayesian statistical methods, given zero detections. Motion-triggered cameras are excellent devices to detect pests at very low densities, but they suffer from the time required to process thousands of images. We are co-developing artificial intelligence that automatically culls out images with no animals and learns to identify animal species when animals are present. This will be a huge cost saver. A key component of the success of this programme is demonstrating the biodiversity, economic, and social benefits. We conduct repeated surveys of urban and rural public to gauge the extent to which the programme affects people’s lives in terms of fewer encounters with pests, more encounters with native biodiversity, perverse outcomes, and greater awareness and understanding about their local biodiversity. Regardless of whether the programme succeeds in the next 30 years, the research and technological advances that are already happening will be hugely beneficial for pest management. Technical challenges, however, are only part of the solution. Working in a populated and agricultural landscape, maintaining the initial enthusiasm we are currently experiencing, and ensuring the majority of the population remains on board, are all enormous challenges.