M. Sivaram, E. Laxmi Lydia, Irina V. Pustokhina, Denis A. Pustokhin · 7 authors
The booming applications of bitcoin Blockchain technologies made investors concerned about the return and risk of financial products. So, the return rate of bitcoin must be foreseen in prior. This research article devises an effective return rate prediction technique for Blockchain financial products based on Optimal Least Square Support Vector Machine (OLS-SVM) model. The parameter optimization of the LS-SVM model was performed using hybridization of Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) with Differential Evolution (DE), called optimal GWO (OGWO) algorithm. The hybridization process is performed to eliminate the local optima problem of GWO and enhance the diversity of the population. To verify the goodness of the proposed model, the Ethereum (ETH) return rate was chosen as the target and experimental analysis was performed on it to verify the predictive results on the time series. The experimental outcome was analyzed in terms of two performance measures namely Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The obtained simulation outcome infers that the OLS-SVM model yielded better predictive outcome of the return rate of financial products.
Marc Eisenstadt, Manoharan Ramachandran, Niaz Chowdhury, Allan Third · 5 authors
Goal: As the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2019/2020 unfolds, a COVID-19 ‘Immunity Passport’ has been mooted as a way to enable individuals to return back to work. While the quality of antibody testing, the avail- the ability of vaccines, and the likelihood of even attaining COVID-19 immunity continue to be researched, we address the issues involved in providing tamper-proof and privacy-preserving certification for test results and vaccinations. Methods: We developed a prototype mobile phone app and requisite decentralized server architecture that facilitates instant verification of tamper-proof test results. Personally identifiable information is only stored at the user’s discretion, and the app allows the end-user selectively to present only the specific test result with no other personal information revealed. The architecture, designed for scalability, relies upon (a) the 2019 World Wide Web Consortium standard called ‘Verifiable Credentials’, (b) Tim Berners-Lee’s decentralized personal data platform ‘Solid’, and (c) a Consortium Ethereum-based blockchain. Results: Our mobile phone app and decentralized server architecture enable the mixture of verifiability and privacy in a manner derived from public/private key pairs and digital signatures, generalized to avoid restrictive ownership of sensitive digital keys and/or data. Benchmark performance tests show it to scale linearly in the worst case, as significant processing is done locally on each app. For the test certificate Holder, Issuer (e.g. healthcare staff, pharmacy) and Verifier (e.g. employer), it is ‘just another app’ which takes only minutes to use. Conclusions: The app and decentralized server architecture offer a prototype proof of concept that is readily scalable, applicable generically, and in effect ‘waiting in the wings’ for the biological issues, plus key ethical issues raised in the discussion section, to be resolved.
We study Nakamoto’s Bitcoin protocol that implements a distributed ledger on peer-to-peer asynchronous networks. In particular, we define a principled formal model of key participants - the miners - as stochastic processes and describe the whole system as a parallel composition of miners. We therefore compute the probability that ledgers turn into a state with more severe inconsistencies, e.g. with longer forks, under the assumptions that messages are not lost and nodes are not hostile. We also study how the presence of hostile nodes mining blocks in wrong positions impacts on the consistency of the ledgers. Our theoretical results agree with the simulations performed on a probabilistic model checker that we extended with dynamic datatypes in order to have a faithful description of miners' behaviour.
Dara Tith, Joong-Sun Lee, H. Suzuki, W. M. A. B. Wijesundara · 7 authors
OBJECTIVES: Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are increasingly used as an effective method to share patients' records among different hospitals. However, it is still a challenge to access scattered patient data through multiple EHRs. Our goal is to build a system to access patient records easily among EHRs without relying on a centralized supervisory system. METHODS: We apply consortium blockchain to compose a distributed system using Hyperledger Fabric incorporating existent EHRs. Peer nodes hold the same ledger on which the address of a patient record in an EHR is written. Individual patients are identified by unique certificates issued by a local certificate authorities that collaborate with each other in a channel of the network. To protect a patient's privacy, we use a proxy re-encryption scheme when the data are transferred. We designed and implemented various chaincodes to handle business logic agreed by member organizations of the network. RESULTS: We developed a prototype system to implement our concept and tested its performance including chaincode logic. The results demonstrated that our system can be used by doctors to find patient's records and verify patient's consent on access to the data. Patients also can seamlessly receive their past records from other hospitals. The access log is stored transparently and immutably in the ledger that is used for auditing purpose. CONCLUSIONS: Our system is feasible and flexible with scalability and availability in adapting to existing EHRs for strengthening security and privacy in managing patient records. Our research is expected to provide an effective method to integrate dispersed patient records among medical institutions.
Die Distributed-Ledger-Technologie (DLT) ist ein neues und sich schnell entwickelndes Gebiet. Ihre dezentralisierten und kryptographisch geschützten Strukturen ermöglichen die sichere Übertragung, Speicherung und Validierung von Daten ohne den Einsatz eines Intermediärs. Dies verleiht ihr ein transformatives Potenzial. Industrie und Regierungen haben seinen Wert erkannt, müssen jedoch die bestehenden Strukturen anpassen. Dazu gehört auch das traditionelle Zivilrecht. Die hier vorgestellte interdisziplinäre Forschung befasst sich mit einer spezifischen Reihe von Bemühungen in diesem Bereich. Sie untersucht Bestimmungen des ersten umfassenden zivilrechtlichen Rahmens für DLT-Systeme, des Gesetzes vom 3. Oktober 2019 über Token und VT-Dienstleister (Token- und VT-Dienstleister-Gesetz; TVTG) LGBl-Nr. 2019.301, LR-Nr.: 950.6. Dies geschieht sowohl aus rechtlicher als auch aus wirtschaftlicher Sicht, um ein umfassenderes Verständnis der Implikationen und Herausforderungen der Einführung des Zivilrechts in DLT-Systeme zu gewinnen. Der angewandte theoretische Rahmen ist der der Transaktionskostentheorie. Ziel dieser Bestimmungen ist es, einen rechtlichen Rahmen für DLT-Systeme zu schaffen, der eine zivilrechtliche Grundlage für Token, die Darstellung von Rechten in Token und die Übertragung dieser Token umfasst, Art. 1 Abs. 1 lit. a TVTG. Die Analyse zeigt, dass der Gesetzgeber eine umfassende Definition des Begriffs "Token" vorsieht, die die Inklusion einer grossen Vielfalt von Rechten wie Eigentumsrechte an materiellen Gegenständen, Gesellschaftsrechte, Wertrechte und mehr ermöglicht. Darüber hinaus gelingt es ihm, eine Disparität zwischen den Verfügungen über Rechte in der analogen und der digitalen Welt zu vermeiden, die, wenn sie nicht vermieden wird, zu erheblicher Rechtsunsicherheit führen würde. Dies hat auch ökonomische Auswirkungen. DLT-Systeme senken die Transaktionskosten, am offensichtlichsten durch den Ersatz von Intermediären durch verschlüsselte dezentrale Datenspeicherung und Konsensmechanismen. Das TVTG senkt Transaktionskosten, indem es die Zuordnung von Rechten zwischen der "realen" Welt und digitalen Systemen klärt und damit effiziente und zuverlässige Transaktionen ermöglicht, weleche rechtliches double spending vermeiden. Dies bildet eine wichtige Brücke zwischen dem traditionellen Zivilrecht und DLT-Systemen und fördert die volle Ausschöpfung des Potentials von DLT-Systemen, indem es Rechtssicherheit bietet. Die hier vorgestellte Forschung deckt nur einen kleinen Teil der Fragen ab, die sich im Zusammenhang mit der Anpassung etablierter Rechtssysteme an diese neue Technologie stellen. Der TVTG dient somit als Diskussionspunkt, der die nachfolgende Forschung und Gesetzgebung stark beeinflussen könnte.
Mahmoud M. Badr, Wesam Al Amiri, Mostafa M. Fouda, Mohamed Mahmoud · 6 authors
Most of the existing smart parking systems threaten the drivers' privacy by revealing information about their visited locations. Moreover, they are centralized making them vulnerable to a single point of failure and attack, which threatens the availability of the parking service. They also suffer from a lack of transparency, where the centralized service organizer may favor some parking lots by booking their parking slots first. To tackle these concerns, we propose a blockchain-based smart parking system with privacy preservation and reputation management. In our system, a consortium blockchain is created by different parking lots to run the parking system securely and transparently, where the parking offers are recorded on a shared and immutable ledger. We use a commitment technique during the submission of the offers to ensure fair parking rates. Then, we use a private information retrieval technique during the offers retrieval to preserve the drivers' location privacy. Furthermore, to anonymously and efficiently authenticate drivers during the reservation process, we use a short randomizable signature. We also use a time-locked anonymous payment technique to discourage drivers from not committing to their parking reservations and provide a secure and privacy-preserving payment method for parking service. Finally, we integrate a blockchain-based anonymous reputation management scheme into our system, where drivers can anonymously rate the parking service to ensure high quality of service. Our evaluations demonstrate that our smart parking system is secure and capable of preserving drivers' privacy with low communication, computation, and storage overheads.
Open access
Smart Parking Systems Research
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Telecare medical information system (TMIS) implemented in wireless body area network (WBAN) is convenient and time-saving for patients and doctors. TMIS is realized using wearable devices worn by a patient, and wearable devices generate patient health data and transmit them to a server through a public channel. Unfortunately, a malicious attacker can attempt performing various attacks through such a channel. Therefore, establishing a secure authentication process between a patient and a server is essential. Moreover, wearable devices have limited storage power. Cloud computing can be considered to resolve this problem by providing a storage service in the TMIS environment. In this environment, access control of the patient health data is essential for the quality of healthcare. Furthermore, the database of the cloud server is a major target for an attacker. The attacker can try to modify, forge, or delete the stored data. To resolve these problems, we propose a secure authentication protocol for a cloud-assisted TMIS with access control using blockchain. We employ ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to establish access control for health data stored in the cloud server, and apply blockchain to guarantee data integrity. To prove robustness of the proposed protocol, we conduct informal analysis and Burrows-Adabi-Needham (BAN) logic analysis, and we formally validate the proposed protocol using automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA). Consequently, we show that the proposed protocol provides more security and has better efficiency compared to related protocols. Therefore, the proposed protocol is proper for a practical TMIS environment.
The fragmented market of freight transportation imposes several inefficiency costs as a result of delay, double-spending, disputes, and cancellations. While in such competitive market, every player seeks its own profit, optimisation at individual level also becomes harder due to invisibility and disconnectivity. Although tackling some of these issues are doable by synchronization, encryption and integration, it seems that blockchain not only incorporates all these solutions in one package, but also may provide other economic benefits. This paper discusses blockchain’ s potential in improving the inefficiencies in maritime supply chain and logistics, as well as limitations and challenges.
Property law has traditionally relied on tangible boundaries to delineate legal thinghood and to inform the bounds of in rem rights and duties. Unfortunately, property doctrines have fossilized around tangibility, causing fragmentation in the legal treatment of digital assets. In the United States, for example, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) may simultaneously be classified as commodities, securities, currencies, assets, or not property at all, depending on the jurisdiction, domain, or specific asset in question. This fragmented system of overlapping legal treatments increases the information cost of using digital assets, decreases efficiency, and ultimately hinders future innovation.\nIn this Article, I propose a unified and tech-neutral approach to legal thinghood, providing a theoretically coherent and robust way to increase property law’s resilience in adapting to future technologies. Specifically, I deconstruct the conceptual purpose of tangibility in traditional doctrines of legal thinghood, uncovering its role as a technology (i.e., a tool) in property law to delineate rights. From this insight, I derive a coherent doctrinal test for distinguishing between digital assets that fulfill all conceptual requisites to be legal things and assets that do not. By doing so, I conclude that the traditional ontological categories of property law, such as choses in possession, are sufficiently robust to incorporate new and evolving digital assets. This tech-neutral approach paves the way toward an elegant and efficient legal treatment of digital assets and digital resource management in the twenty-first century.
Health indicators have been gradually improving in India, but health for all is yet to be achieved. The life expectancy is 68.7 years, infant mortality rate is 33/1000 live births, maternal mortality ratio is 130/100,000 live births, and total fertility rate is 2.3 children/woman; however, large inequities by geography, gender, class, caste, religion, and region are seen.[1] Health of the Nation's States Report[2] indicates that despite rising income, poverty and hidden hunger still exist; environmental pollution has increased, more so, in urban areas; sanitation services and clean fuel use have not yet improved to the desired level, especially in the villages. In urban areas, slums have mushroomed, built area has increased, and open spaces have shrunk. Moreover, dietary patterns have changed in favor of more sugar, salt, fat, and alcohol, whereas consumption of vegetables and fruits has declined. Mechanization, especially motorized transport, has encouraged sedentary life styles and a rise in road traffic injuries is noticed. The gap between aspirations and real-life situations has pushed many into addictions and mental health problems. To address these issues, multisectoral public health actions are needed, in addition to the reorientation of health sector. In the last decade, the implementation of the National Health Mission (NHM) did bring back some focus on social determinants of health and encouraged development of a health system based on primary health care.[3] Investments in health system led to improvement in health services. It had an impact on health indicators, but the full potential of NHM is yet to be realized.[4] The recently announced Ayushman Bharat Mission (ABM) has started insurance coverage for selected package of medical and surgical procedures for hospitalized patients belonging to socioeconomically vulnerable families on the lines of Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna though the insurance amount is larger.[5] The development of subcenters into health and wellness centers continues to be under the NHM. These two missions, i.e., NHM and ABM, deal with primary and secondary care, respectively. In the absence of a linkage between these two missions, it may not be possible to maintain a balance. Therefore, the funds earmarked for ABM should flow through the primary health-care system on per capita basis. The primary health-care providers should be empowered to decide which patient to refer, to which hospital (public or private), and at what cost to pay, so that ultimately health services are cashless for the patient. Coordinated actions are required not only within the health and family welfare ministry, but across multiple sectors. Hence, to operationalize multisectoral public health action in a decentralized manner, every village or urban ward should have Arogya Kendra (health center) financed by the state through a village or ward fund, but managed by local volunteers under the guidance of the community it serves, and it should have a decentralized Integrated Health Information System for Universal Health Care supported by Information Communication Technology (ICT), if possible. Devolution of funds to district health societies and decentralization of planning, implementation, and monitoring would build a sustainable system rooted in local sociocultural contexts, which will be able to harness the locally available resources. However, broad policy framework, guidelines, and oversight can remain at the central and state level. Primary health-care teams should be incentivized to invest in prevention and health promotion, so that health literacy improves and spending on illness care can be reduced. Therefore, NHM and ABM should advocate for a comprehensive public health-oriented “whole-of-government” intersectoral health promotion initiative keeping in view “inclusive growth” and “health development” as a social goal of the society. Health impact assessment of all public policies should be mandated by legislation. “Prevention of diseases” is a more cost-effective strategy than the popular approach of “Treatment.” Therefore, several countries have reengineered their health systems in a variety of ways to protect and improve peoples' health. For example, in England, the Health and Social Care Act 2012 reorganized the health services to create National Health Service England and Public Health England,[6] and in Thailand, the National Health Security Act 2002 granted everyone the right to a standard and efficient health service and established National Health Security Office to improve universal health coverage.[7] The World Health Organization has also recently planned a call to countries to set up leadership at all levels to protect the people from public health emergencies, to improve universal health coverage, and to ensure that people enjoy better health and well-being.[8] Indian should also reorganize its health system. Parliament should promulgate Indian Public Health Act with a mandate to protect and promote health of people as a fundamental right to health and health care. An autonomous “Public Health Commission” should be established to implement the provisions of the Act. It should have a public health commissioner with three deputy commissioners to head (a) epidemiology, (b) public policy, and (c) health promotion and education divisions. At state level, an additional public health commissioner should chair the State Public Health Commission which should have three deputy commissioners representing the above-mentioned three divisions, and at district level, a public health officer should head the District Public Health Commission who should be assisted by three additional public health officers. Each municipality should have a deputy public health officer and three public health supervisors. The Panchayat Raj Institutions, at district and community development block level, should have a deputy public health officer and an assistant public health officer. At Panchayat level, a public health supervisor should be appointed. Public Health Commission should have sufficient infrastructure (secretarial support staff, technical staff, equipment, office space, and budget) so that, in coordination with all sectors, a Public Health Action Plan can be prepared, funded, implemented, and monitored periodically. In summary, to achieve the universal health coverage, major challenge in India is promotion of health, prevention of diseases, and provision of health care in a balanced manner, which will require innovative public policies, strategies, and programs in many sectors. Development and implementation of a multisectoral approach to achieve sustainable development goals is the need of the hour. Establishment of a Public Health Commission will go a long way in achieving coordination of various initiatives not only in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare but also in many other relevant ministries/sectors. At least 5% of the gross domestic product should be earmarked for public health and a responsive governance mechanism as outlined above should be set up, to achieve universal health coverage by 2030 as envisaged in the United Nations sustainable development goals which are also endorsed by the Government of India.[9]
No-signalling (NOSIG) correlations, that are stronger than those allowed by quantum entanglement yet do not violate relativistic causality, are a valuable resource for understanding information processing systems. Such correlations can be achieved between non-communicating players in games when the players use what is called non-local strategies, and can give the players better odds at winning in these games. We propose definitions for non-local strategies in relativistic multi-player non-local games. We prove a conjecture by Crépeau stating that any non-local strategy that can be simultaneously produced by any pi-signalling strategy in a multi-player non-local game, has to be a NOSIG strategy. Pi-signalling strategies are achieved when 1-way signalling is allowed between players arranged on a line defined by some permutation. This result gives us a better understanding of how NOSIG strategies fit with the other non-local strategies, and can help in constructing novel NOSIG multi-player strategies and help prove they produce NOSIG correlations. Finally, we extend the definition of zero-knowledge proof systems to the relativistic multi-prover, multi-verifier setting, and propose definitions for what it means for a non-local strategy to have polynomial time complexity
At present, the industrial park as an effective mechanism for the implementation of the regional economy needs transformational transformations and modernization changes in industrial production, which will help increase the competitiveness and sustainable development of local communities. The purpose of this study is to develop proposals for institutional support for the formation and operation of industrial parks at the level of integrated territorial communities in a decentralized and smart specialization, taking into account existing international practice. To achieve this goal, methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, comparison, system approach, systematization, structural and logical generalization were used. The article studies and summarizes the international experience of creation and development of industrial parks. The tax and customs privileges provided to industrial parks in different countries of the world are defined. The legal aspects of creation and functioning of industrial parks in Ukraine are analyzed. The main barriers that hinder the formation and localization of industrial parks at the level of united territorial communities have been identified. The structural and logical scheme of the concept of creation and functioning of industrial parks in Ukraine is constructed. Regional development strategies for 2021-2027 are considered. Based on the analysis, it is established that in a significant number of strategic documents the priority areas include accelerating the achievement of competitiveness and innovation of the region’s economy on the basis of smart specialization. Regional strategies do not address the creation of appropriate conditions for the formation of the institutional environment for the development of industrial parks. Therefore, it is advisable to make changes and additions to the Strategies of regional development until 2027, the content of which is to include a set of measures to intensify the development of industrial production and the formation of a network of industrial parks. An analysis of the financing of industrial parks in Ukraine has been performed. Proposals are provided, the implementation of which will improve the institutional and investment-financial support for the creation and development of industrial parks at the level of territorial communities.
Abstract Why do common-pool problems persist over time in federations? The literature shows that macro institutional, economic, and political incentives facilitate bailouts through intergovernmental transfers and debt management. Little research, however, explores the legislative mechanisms that prevent common-pool problems from being effectively addressed. This article focuses on a most central mechanism: tax lawmaking. We argue that lawmakers, whose careers rest in the hands of provincial constituencies, administer the legislative process to promote bills that protect the federal transfers that finance vertical fiscal imbalances and to amend proposals that seek to change them. Using an expert-coded dataset designed to assess the direction and magnitude of tax policy change, as described by the amendments proposed by legislators to the full set of tax bills proposed to the Argentine Congress since 1983, we document the legislative dynamics underpinning the common-pool problems of decentralized fiscal federal arrangements.
Crises frequently weaken subnational governments but in some cases they lead to greater decentralization. Does this decentralization, however, support the search for optimal crisis response strategies? Generally speaking there are several arguments, which suggest that decentralized systems will manage crises better than centralized ones. This article, however, considers two scenarios (decentralization of weakness and decentralization of responsibility) where the apparently increasing autonomy of subnational governments leads to important problems. Decentralization of weakness emerges when the central government for certain reasons refuses to actively implement an anti-crisis policy. Under these conditions, regional measures, while to some extent compensating the inactivity of the central government, create a number of other problems - that of external effects, possible ideologization of politics and insufficient use of expert knowledge. Decentralization of responsibility emerges when regions accept responsibility for implementing anti-crisis measures, but the center keeps control over resources - thus, regions have to focus on competing for central financing. For the modern Russia, the risks of these two scenarios are substantial.
Accountability is a fundamental after-the-fact approach to detect and punish illegal actions during the execution of a warrant for accessing users’ sensitive data. To achieve accountability in a security protocol, a trusted authority is required, denoted as judge, to faithfully cooperate with the rest of the entities in the system. However, malicious judges or uncooperative protocol participants may void the accountability mechanism in practice, for example by fabricating fake evidence or by refusing to provide any evidence at all. To provide remediation to these issues, in this paper we propose Fialka, a novel accountable decryption system based on privacy-preserving smart contracts (PPSC). The neutrality that is inherent to a secure blockchain platform is inherited by PPSC which are then used in our approach as an accountable key manager as well as a transparent judge. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first PPSC-based accountable decryption system to increase the transparency of warrant execution with formal definitions and proofs. Furthermore, we provide and evaluate a prototype implementation using the PPSC-enabled platform Oasis Devnet, which additionally demonstrates the feasibility of Fialka.
Vladimir Soloviev, Сергій Олексійович Семеріков, Victoria Solovieva
The informational (Kolmogorov) measure of complexity in accordance with the Lempel-Ziv algorithm (LZC) is calculated for the logarithmic returns of daily Bitcoin/$ values. The calculations were carried out for a moving window with a variation in its size (50–250 days) in increments of one day in the framework of the implemented coarse graining procedure. It is shown that in both mono-and multi-scaling versions, LZC is sensitive to noticeable fluctuations in the Bitcoin price that occur as a result of critical events in the cryptocurrency market. In equilibrium, stable state, having a relatively low value, LZC rapidly increases immediately before the crisis, which proves the dominance of the chaotic component of the time series. The classification and periodization of crisis phenomena in the cryptocurrency market for the period 2010–2020 has been carried out. The results demonstrate the possibility of using the LZC measure as an indicator-precursor of crisis phenomena in the cryptocurrency market.
We explore the impact of investors’ beliefs on cryptocurrency demand and prices using three new individual-level surveys. We find that younger individuals with lower income and education are more optimistic about the future value of cryptocurrencies, as are late investors. We then estimate the cryptocurrency demand functions using a structural model with rich heterogeneity in investors’ beliefs and preferences. To identify the model, we combine observable beliefs with an instrumental variable strategy that exploits variation in the amount of energy required for the production of the different cryptocurrencies. We find that beliefs explain a large fraction of the cross-sectional variance of returns. A counterfactual exercise shows that banning entry of late investors leads to a decrease in the price of Bitcoin by about $3,500, or approximately 30% of the price during the boom in January 2018. Late investors’ optimism alone can explain about a third of the decline.