The paper is devoted to the legal regulation of smart contracts in French law. The question of the admissibility of the use of smart contracts in economic relations is considered. Particular attention is given to the French legal doctrine in the issue of formulating the definition of “smart contract” and identifying its characteristic features, the various points of view of French legal scholars are compared. Examples of the most effective use of a smart contract in economic relations are given. The problems of applying contractual legal obligations and obligations of French law to smart contracts are considered. The importance of the oracle for the implementation of the smart contract and the features of its legal status under French law are disclosed.
Michael J. Fell, Alexandra Schneiders, David Shipworth
Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading could help address grid management challenges in a decentralizing electricity system, as well as providing other social and environmental benefits. Many existing and proposed trading schemes are enabled by blockchain, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) relying on cryptographic proof of ownership rather than human intermediaries to establish energy transactions. This study used an online survey experiment (n=2064) to investigate how consumer demand for blockchain-enabled peer-to-peer energy trading schemes in the United Kingdom varies depending on how the consumer proposition is designed and communicated. The analysis provides some evidence of a preference for schemes offering to meet a higher proportion of participants’ energy needs, and for those operating at the city/region (as compared to national or neighbourhood) level. People were more likely to say they would participate when the scheme was framed as being run by their local council, followed by an energy supplier, community energy organization, and social media company. Anonymity was the most valued DLT characteristic and mentioning blockchain’s association with Bitcoin led to a substantial decrease in intended uptake. We highlight a range of important questions and implications suggested by these findings for the introduction and operation of P2P trading schemes.
Srinivas Jangirala, Ashok Kumar Das, Athanasios V. Vasilakos
Secure real-time data about goods in transit in supply chains needs bandwidth having capacity that is not fulfilled with the current infrastructure. Hence, 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) in mobile edge computing is intended to substantially increase this capacity. To deal with this issue, in this article, we design a new efficient lightweight blockchain-enabled radio frequency identification (RFID)-based authentication protocol for supply chains in 5G mobile edge computing environment, called lightweight blockchain-enabled RFID-based authentication protocol (LBRAPS). LBRAPS is based on bitwise exclusive-or (XOR), one-way cryptographic hash and bitwise rotation operations only. LBRAPS is shown to be secure against various attacks. Moreover, the simulation-based formal security verification using the broadly-accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool assures that LBRAPS is secure. Finally, it is shown that LBRAPS has better trade-off among its security and functionality features, communication and computation costs as compared to those for existing protocols.
Blockchain – a distributed and public database of transactions – has become a platform for decentralized applications. Despite its increasing popularity, blockchain technology faces a scalability problem: the throughput does not scale with the increasing network size. Thus, in this paper, we propose a scalable blockchain protocol to solve the scalability problem. The proposed method was designed based on a proof of stake (PoS) consensus protocol and a sharding protocol. Instead of transactions being processed by the whole network, the sharding protocol is employed to divide unconfirmed transactions into transaction shards and to divide the network into network shards. The network shards process the transaction shards in parallel to produce middle blocks. Middle blocks are then combined into a final BLOCK in a timestamp recorded on the blockchain. Experiments were performed in a simulation network consisting of 100 Amazon EC2 instances. The latency of the proposed method was approximately 27 s and the maximum throughput achieved was 36 transactions per second for a network containing 100 nodes. The results of the experiments indicate that the throughput of the proposed protocol increases with the network size. This confirms the scalability of the proposed protocol.
Cloud computing plays a critical role in modern society and enables a range of applications from infrastructure to social media. Such system must cope with varying load and evolving usage reflecting societies interaction and dependency on automated computing systems whilst satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Enabling these systems are a cohort of conceptual technologies, synthesized to meet demand of evolving computing applications. In order to understand current and future challenges of such system, there is a need to identify key technologies enabling future applications. In this study, we aim to explore how three emerging paradigms (Blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence) will influence future cloud computing systems. Further, we identify several technologies driving these paradigms and invite international experts to discuss the current status and future directions of cloud computing. Finally, we proposed a conceptual model for cloud futurology to explore the influence of emerging paradigms and technologies on evolution of cloud computing.
Tezos is a blockchain launched in June 2018. It is written in OCaml and supports smart contracts. Its smart contract language is called Michelson and it has been designed with formal verification in mind. In this article, we present Mi-Cho-Coq, a Coq framework for verifying the functional correctness of Michelson smart contracts. As a case study, we detail the certification of a Multisig contract with the Mi-Cho-Coq framework.
Stablecoins promise to bridge fiat currencies with the world of cryptocurrencies. They provide a way for users to take advantage of the benefits of digital currencies, such as ability to transfer assets over the internet, provide assurance on minting schedules and scarcity, and enable new asset classes, while also partially mitigating their volatility risks. In this paper, we systematically discuss general design, decompose existing stablecoins into various component design elements, explore their strengths and drawbacks, and identify future directions.
Carlos Rodrigues, Ana Campina, Graziela Meneghel de Moraes
The existence of cryptocurrency a decade ago is an inescapable reality that at the moment generates a high financial influence at global level, the fact that obliges us to know and to study them. Our questions are essentially at three levels: their acceptance, or not, by the States in the face of the paper-money issued by their Central Banks and how the Private Banks react to this virtual currency created in particular; what actions have Tax Administrations at the global level faced with the wealth they generate and the financial values that move in the real economy. Our study is based on the doctrine that already exists, but mainly financial reports produced by central banks and private banking as well as by tax administrations. Finally, we present our conclusions on the current state of analysis and financial studies of the banking system and tax administrations and, of course, our opinion. Keywords: Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, fiscal analysis, policies, perceptions.
This study unravels histories and locates meanings of specific Native and colonially imposed currencies from the 1850s to present day. Existing literature tends to reproduce colonial stereotypes of Native American peoples as technologically primitive, and has not addressed the shifts/integrations from land-based to emerging forms of digital currency. To intervene, this dissertation focuses on two case studies in which currencies–as communication technologies–are dynamic parts of much larger stories. The first case study focuses on land-based currencies–gold, coins, and beads–in the period of Oregon’s Gold Rush, specifically during the Rogue River War (1853-1856) between Native peoples and invaders/settlers. Additional chapters provide supplementary histories of related currencies and detail the political, social, and cultural shifts to digital currencies. The second case study centers on a limitedly used Indigenous cryptocurrency, or digital peer-to-peer currency, with a contested history and an explicit resistance to the U.S. dollar. Grounded in three theoretical areas, currency as communication and media, currency as entwined with nations, and de/post/settler colonialism, this dissertation works to answer a number of questions, mainly: What might the meanings embedded in land-based currency from the colonial past communicate about the present, and how does Indigenous digital currency of the present address the colonial past? Building on existing work, one finding of the first case study suggests that America’s democratic identity crisis was codified on currencies that were then used to dominate and shut out the various types of Native currencies in circulation. However, forms like shell and glass beads did not “vanish” after the Colonial Era, and remain as meaningful communicative forms that signify tribal identity present day. Findings of the second case study reveal how cryptocurrencies can be encoded with visions of tribal sovereignty, and can potentially serve tribal nations. However, they have proven problematic to implement. Further, this case study explicates the roles that racist discourses, circulated by journalistic media, play in contouring the meanings of Indigenous cryptocurrency. Native peoples have always found ways to challenge capitalism and settler colonialism. One way is through choices, re-articulation, and technological innovation around currencies.
Blockchains are distributed ledgers that use a tamper-sensitive, append-only data structure in conjunction with a consensus protocol to enable mutually distrusting parties to maintain a global set of states. A primary barrier to adoption of blockchain technology by industry is the current performance and scalability limitations of these systems, which lag far behind incumbent database systems. Of particular interest are “lottery-style” consensus algorithms, which are relatively scalable to many participants but suffer from low throughput (performance). Proof-of-Elapsed-Time (PoET) is one such algorithm with great promise for use in industry, though the parameters that govern its performance have not been well studied. This thesis explores, through simulation, key performance outcomes in PoET blockchain networks implemented with the Hyperledger Sawtooth framework. A better quantitative understanding of the interactions among these system parameters will be crucial for efficiently optimizing real world blockchain networks and facilitating adoption by industry.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
A blockchain is a database of sequential events that is maintained by a distributed group of nodes. A key consensus problem in blockchains is that of determining the next block (data element) in the sequence. Many blockchains address this by electing a new node to propose each new block. The new block is (typically) appended to the tip of the proposer's local blockchain, and subsequently broadcast to the rest of the network. Without network delay (or adversarial behavior), this procedure would give a perfect chain, since each proposer would have the same view of the blockchain. A major challenge in practice is forking. Due to network delays, a proposer may not yet have the most recent block, and may, therefore, create a side chain that branches from the middle of the main chain. Forking reduces throughput, since only one a single main chain can survive, and all other blocks are discarded. We propose a new P2P protocol for blockchains called Barracuda, in which each proposer, prior to proposing a block, polls $\ell$ other nodes for their local blocktree information. Under a stochastic network model, we prove that this lightweight primitive improves throughput as if the entire network were a factor of $\ell$ faster. We provide guidelines on how to implement Barracuda in practice, guaranteeing robustness against several real-world factors.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is an enabling technology for numerous initiatives worldwide such as manufacturing, smart cities, precision agriculture, and eHealth. The massive field data aggregation of distributed administered IoT devices allows new insights and actionable information for dynamic intelligent decision-making. In such distributed environments, data integrity, referring to reliability and consistency, is deemed insufficient and requires immediate facilitation. In this article, we introduce a distributed ledger (DLT)-based system for ensuring IoT data integrity which securely processes the aggregated field data. Its uniqueness lies in the embedded use of IOTA’s ledger, called “The Tangle”, used to transmit and store the data. Our approach shifts from a cloud-centric IoT system, where the Super nodes simply aggregate and push data to the cloud, to a node-centric system, where each Super node owns the data pushed in a distributed and decentralized database (i.e., the Tangle). The backend serves as a consumer of data and a provider of additional resources, such as administration panel, analytics, data marketplace, etc. The proposed implementation is highly modularand constitutes a significant contribution to the Open Source communities, regarding blockchain and IoT.
In this paper, we propose a scheme that implements a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based on Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to generate, validate, and confirm the electricity transaction in Smart Grid. The convergence of the Smart Grid and distributed ledger concept has recently been introduced. Since Smart Grids require a distributed network architecture for power distribution and trading, the Distributed Ledger-based Smart Grid design is a spotlighted research domain. However, only the Blockchain-based methods, which are a type of the distributed ledger scheme, are currently either being considered or adopted in the Smart Grid. Due to computation-intensive consensus schemes such as Proof-of-Work and discrete block generation, Blockchain-based distributed ledger systems suffer from efficiency and latency issues. We propose a DAG-based distributed ledger for Smart Grids, called PowerGraph, to resolve this problem. Since a DAG-based distributed ledger does not need to generate blocks for confirmation, each transaction of the PowerGraph undergoes the validation and confirmation process individually. In addition, transactions in PowerGraph are used to keep track of the energy trade and include various types of transactions so that they can fully encompass the events in the Smart Grid network. Finally, to ensure that PowerGraph maintains a high performance, we modeled the PowerGraph performance and proposed a novel consensus algorithm that would result in the rapid confirmation of transactions. We use numerical evaluations to show that PowerGraph can accelerate the transaction processing speed by over 5 times compared to existing DAG-based DLT system.
An ideal signature material and method, which can be used to prove the authenticity of a physical item and against forgery, should be immune to the fast developments in digital and engineering technologies. Herein, the design of signature material combining cryptographic hash function and DNA steganography is proposed. The encrypting materials are used to construct a series of time-stamped records (blockchain) associated with published hash values, while each DNA-encrypted block is associated with a set of DNA keys. The decrypted DNA information, as digital keys, can be validated through a hash function to compare with the published hash values. The blocks can also be cross-referenced among different related signatures. While both digital cryptography and DNA steganography can have large key size, automated brutal force search is far more labor intensive and expensive for DNA steganography with wet lab experiments, as compared to its digital counterpart. Moreover, the time-stamped blockchain structure permits the incorporation of new cryptographic functions and DNA steganographies over time, thus can evolve over time without losing the continuous history line.
The internationalized domain name (IDN) is a mechanism that enables us to use Unicode characters in domain names. The set of Unicode characters contains several pairs of characters that are visually identical with each other; e.g., the Latin character 'a' (U+0061) and Cyrillic character 'a' (U+0430). Visually identical characters such as these are generally known as homoglyphs. IDN homograph attacks, which are widely known, abuse Unicode homoglyphs to create lookalike URLs. Although the threat posed by IDN homograph attacks is not new, the recent rise of IDN adoption in both domain name registries and web browsers has resulted in the threat of these attacks becoming increasingly widespread, leading to large-scale phishing attacks such as those targeting cryptocurrency exchange companies. In this work, we developed a framework named "ShamFinder," which is an automated scheme to detect IDN homographs. Our key contribution is the automatic construction of a homoglyph database, which can be used for direct countermeasures against the attack and to inform users about the context of an IDN homograph. Using the ShamFinder framework, we perform a large-scale measurement study that aims to understand the IDN homographs that exist in the wild. On the basis of our approach, we provide insights into an effective counter-measure against the threats caused by the IDN homograph attack.
With the current rise in the demand and usage of the blockchain technology for a variety of purposes, ranging from finance, medical, identification amongst others, major focus has been dedicated towards its legal implications rather than leveraging on the practical applications in administration. In this paper, we discuss the concepts of blockchain and how it can be implemented as an efficient solution towards public voting while aiming to destroy the disadvantages of the current voting system in India, at the same time providing a better, more reliable, secure and transparent means of public governance. We also aim to provide an exemplified voting solution for India with the integration of the current Aadhaar identification system as implemented by UIDAI.
Open access
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tim K. Mackey, Hirofumi Bekki, Tokio Matsuzaki, Hiroshi Mizushima
Japan is undergoing a major population health transition as its society ages, and it continues to experience low birth rates. An aging Japan will bring new challenges to its public health system, highlighted as a model for universal health coverage (UHC) around the world. Specific challenges Japan's health care system will face include an increase in national public health expenditures, higher demand for health care services, acute need for elder and long-term care, shortage of health care workers, and disparities between health care access in rural versus urban areas. Blockchain technology has the potential to address some of these challenges, but only if a health blockchain is conceptualized, designed, localized, and deployed in a way that is compatible with Japan's centralized UHC-centric public health system. Blockchain solutions must also be adaptive to opportunities and barriers unique to Japan's national health and innovation policy, including its regulatory sandbox system, while also seeking to learn from blockchain adoption in the private sector and in other countries. This viewpoint outlines the major opportunities and potential challenges to blockchain adoption for the future of Japan's health care.
Mara Molina Naranjo, Freddy Alban Cedeño, Mercedes de los Ángeles Cedeño Barreto

 Este trabajo tiene como objetivo describir el modelo de Gestión Execution Premium aplicado en el Gobierno Autónomo Descentralizado (GAD) del cantón Portoviejo Ecuador: 2014 – 2018, para ello se aplicó una metodología descriptiva – histórica, realizando un recorrido analítico de los resultados de trabajos previos en el tema y concepciones ejecutadas en cuanto a la Gestión Execution Premium aplicado al GAD del cantón Portoviejo. En los resultados se queda en claro que este instrumento de gestión ha sido aplicado de manera exitoso en otras organizaciones tanto públicas como privadas nacionales e internacionales y en otros países como es el caso de Medellín en Colombia. Como conclusiones dentro del proceso se describe en particular el hecho de que éste permitió establecer un diagnóstico y conocimiento de la realidad local, así como de las potencialidades del territorio, estableciendo una visión de largo plazo; donde se enfoca las decisiones hacia un modelo de desarrollo: territorio moderno y planificado; economía activa y próspera; una sociedad diversa e inclusiva; y, todo apalancado en una institución eficiente y confiable.
 
 Palabras clave: planificación, coordinación y reforma, mercados de factores y de productos; precios; población
 
 ABSTRACT
 The objective of this work is to describe the Execution Premium Management Model applied in the Autonomous Decentralized Government (GAD) of the Portoviejo Canton, Ecuador: 2014 - 2018, for which a descriptive - historical methodology was applied, making an analytical digest of the results of previous works in this area and conceptions executed in terms of Execution Premium Management applied to the GAD of the Portoviejo Canton. The results make it clear that this management instrument has been applied successfully in other public and private national and international organizations and in other countries such as Colombia, specifically in the city of Medellin. As conclusions within the process, it is particularly described the fact that this made it possible to establish a diagnosis and knowledge of the local reality, as well as the potentials of the territory, establishing a long-term vision, where decisions are focused towards a development model: modern and planned territory; active and prosperous economy; a diverse and inclusive society; and, all leveraged in an efficient and reliable institution.
 
 Key words: planning, coordination and reform, mercados de factores y de productos; precios; población
 
Giancarlo Giudici, Alistair Milne, Dmitri Vinogradov
The papers in this special issue focus on the emerging phenomenon of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are digital financial assets, for which ownership and transfers of ownership are guaranteed by a cryptographic decentralized technology. The rise of cryptocurrencies’ value on the market and the growing popularity around the world open a number of challenges and concerns for business and industrial economics. Using the lenses of both neoclassical and behavioral theories, this introductory article discusses the main trends in the academic research related to cryptocurrencies and highlights the contributions of the selected works to the literature. A particular emphasis is on socio-economic, misconduct and sustainability issues. We posit that cryptocurrencies may perform some useful functions and add economic value, but there are reasons to favor the regulation of the market. While this would go against the original libertarian rationale behind cryptocurrencies, it appears a necessary step to improve social welfare.
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, use an approach called "metering" to assign a cost to smart contract execution, an approach which is designed to incentivise miners to operate the network and protect it against DoS attacks. In the past, the imperfections of Ethereum metering allowed several DoS attacks which were countered through modification of the metering mechanism. This paper presents a new DoS attack on Ethereum which systematically exploits its metering mechanism. We first replay and analyse several months of transactions, during which we discover a number of discrepancies in the metering model, such as significant inconsistencies in the pricing of the instructions. We further demonstrate that there is very little correlation between the execution cost and the utilised resources, such as CPU and memory. Based on these observations, we present a new type of DoS attack we call Resource Exhaustion Attack, which uses these imperfections to generate low-throughput contracts. To do this, we design a genetic algorithm that generates contracts with a throughput on average 200 times slower than typical contracts. We then show that all major Ethereum client implementations are vulnerable and, if running on commodity hardware, would be unable to stay in sync with the network when under attack. We argue that such an attack could be financially attractive not only for Ethereum competitors and speculators, but also for Ethereum miners. Finally, we discuss short-term and potential long-term fixes against such attacks. Our attack has been responsibly disclosed to the Ethereum Foundation and awarded a bug bounty reward of 5,000 USD.
Michela Moschella, Pietro Ferraro, Emanuele Crisostomi, Robert Shorten
In this article, we propose a stochastic decentralized algorithm to recommend the most convenient charging station (CS) to plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) that need charging. In particular, we use different cost functions to describe the possibly different priorities of PEV drivers, such as the preference to minimize charging costs, charging times, or the distance between them and the CS. For this purpose, we leverage on an Internet of Things architecture based on a permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) to enforce compliance of drivers and reduces the occurrence of detrimental misbehaviors of drivers. Extensive simulations performed with the mobility simulator SUMO in realistic city-wide networks have been provided to illustrate how the proposed PEV assignment procedure works in practice, and to validate its performance.
Ricardo Neisse, José L. Hernández-Ramos, Sara N. Matheu, Gianmarco Baldini · 5 authors
The goal of this paper is to propose a blockchain-based platform to enhance transparency and traceability of cybersecurity certification information motivated by the recently adopted EU Cybersecurity Act. The proposed platform is generic and intended to support the trusted exchange of cybersecurity certification information for any electronic product, service, or process. However, for the purposes of this paper, we focus on the case study of the cybersecurity certification of IoT devices, which are explicitly referenced in the recently adopted Cybersecurity Act as one of the main domains where it is highlighted the need for an increased level of trust.
The Holy Grail of a decentralised stablecoin is achieved on rigorous\nmathematical frameworks, obtaining multiple advantageous proofs: stability,\nconvergence, truthfulness, faithfulness, and malicious-security. These\nproperties could only be attained by the novel and interdisciplinary\ncombination of previously unrelated fields: model predictive control, deep\nlearning, alternating direction method of multipliers (consensus-ADMM),\nmechanism design, secure multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs.\nFor the first time, this paper proves:\n - the feasibility of decentralising the central bank while securely\npreserving its independence in a decentralised computation setting\n - the benefits for price stability of combining mechanism design, provable\nsecurity, and control theory, unlike the heuristics of previous stablecoins\n - the implementation of complex monetary policies on a stablecoin, equivalent\nto the ones used by central banks and beyond the current fixed rules of\ncryptocurrencies that hinder their price stability\n - methods to circumvent the impossibilities of Guaranteed Output Delivery\n(G.O.D.) and fairness: standing on truthfulness and faithfulness, we reach\nG.O.D. and fairness under the assumption of rational parties\n As a corollary, a decentralised artificial intelligence is able to conduct\nthe monetary policy of a stablecoin, minimising human intervention.\n