<p class="p1">In this article, we skim through an innovative technology that is being talked about throughout the World. This technology, known as blockchain, gives infrastructure to the most known virtual coin, the bitcoin, and it is thanks to this that the technology has gained lot of attention globally. However, the bitcoin is just one of an uncountable set of applications that can radically change thanks to blockchain. This change is basically a level of security substantially higher than everything previously known. With this, blockchain becomes one of the most disruptive technologies of the last years. In this article we also mention some of the points that must continue to evolve with respect to the technology, for transforming blockchain in something that lasts in the future.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
Prolific illegal timber trade between Russia and China cannot be stemmed by present certification schemes and Russian governmental strategies. Blockchain could present a new technological opportunity, simultaneously addressing illegal logging, regulating timber trade and meeting the needs of environmentally-sensitive markets. SWOT analysis of blockchain applicability in Russian-Chinese timber trade is presented. Decentralisation based on smart contracts could ensure timber supply chain transparency through each log cryptographic encryption. However, it is considered complicated as cryptocurrency (on which trade depends) is beyond the legislative sphere of both countries and energy demands are enormous. Beyond cryptocurrency prohibition, huge businesses and governments cannot accept blockchain for international trade because of transparency and cost risks. Digitalisation through blockchain implementation could provide a highly transparent, non-editable system to handle decentralised big data characteristic of the forestry economy, realise Industry 4.0 and develop the "China-Mongolia-Russia" economic corridor. Fundamentally, a workable Russian-Chinese Government-Science-Business model must be cultivated for effective blockchain implementation.
Rafaa Ibrahim Al-Hamdani, Laila Abdul Karim Mohammed, Jamal Hadash Mohammed
The purpose of research is focused on the insight into the future of Bitcoin on the financial situation, its implications and challenges. The problem of study is to investigate how to deal with a new type of digital currencies (such Bitcoin) that does not have a physical presence and there is no specific body to issue. Thus, this study aims to identify the nature of Bitcoin currency and what are the challenges associated with it as well as exchange rates with some currencies, as the research hypothesized the main hypothesis that Bitcoin will contribute to financial development in the future, the research also used the analytical rooted approach to present concepts and data, using financial technical analysis to display the results The research also came up with a number of conclusions and recommendations. The results of paper significantly contribute to the literature through providing evidence from financial data of Bitcoin.
Dimitrios G. Kogias, Helen C. Leligou, Michael G. Xevgenis, Maria Polychronaki · 8 authors
Crowdsourcing has been pursued as a way to leverage the power of the crowd for many different purposes in diverse sectors from collecting information, aggregating funds, and gathering employees to perform tasks of different sizes among other targets. Data integrity and nonrepudiation are of utmost importance in these systems and are currently not guaranteed. Blockchain technology has been proven to improve on these aspects. In this article, we investigate the benefits that the adoption of Blockchain technology can bring in crowdsourcing systems. To this end, we provide examples of real-life crowdsourcing use cases and explore the benefits of using Blockchain, mainly as a database.
Jawaid Iqbal, Arif Iqbal Umar, Noorul Amin, Abdul Waheed
In body sensor networks, both wearable and implantable biosensors are deployed in a patient body to monitor and collect patient health record information. The health record information is then transmitted toward the medical server via a base station for analysis, diagnosis, and treatment by medical experts. Advancement in wireless technology although improves the patient health–monitoring mechanism, but still there are some limitations regarding security, privacy, and efficiency due to open wireless channel and limited resources of body sensor networks. To overcome these limitations, we have proposed an efficient and secure heterogeneous scheme for body sensor networks, in which biosensor nodes use a certificate-less cryptography environment to resolve the key escrow and certificate-management problems, while MS uses a public key infrastructure environment to enhance the scalability of the networks. Furthermore, we design an online/offline signcryption method to overcome the burden on biosensor nodes. We split the signcryption process into two phases: offline phase and online phase. In the offline phase, the major operations are computed without prior knowledge of patient data. While in online phase, the minor operations are computed when patient data are known. Besides, we have used a new hybrid blockchain technology approach for the secure transmission of patient information along with attributes stored in the medical server toward the cloud that provides ease of patient data access remotely from anywhere by the authorized users and data backup in case of medical server failure. Moreover, hybrid blockchain provides advantages of interoperability, transparency traceability, and universal access. The formal security analysis of the proposed scheme is proved in the standard model, and informal security assures that our scheme provides resistance against possible attacks. As compared to other existing schemes, our proposed scheme consumes fewer resources and efficient in terms of processing cost, transmission overhead, and energy consumption.
Asma Lahbib, Khalifa Toumi, Anis Laouiti, Steven Martin
While smart factories are becoming widely recognized as a fundamental concept of Industry 4.0, their implementation has posed several challenges insofar that they generate, process, and exchange vast amounts of security critical and privacy sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks and unauthorized access. Security requirements in such scenario include integrity, confidentiality, traceability and notarization of exchanged data in the one hand plus access control, privacy and trust in the other one. In this context, we design a distributed resource management framework using the emerging smart contracts technology for Industry 4.0 applications and more specifically for smart factories environments. This last, named DRMF, utilizes three Ethereum smart contracts specifically a Governance Contract (GC), an Access Contract (AC) and a Lookup Contract (LC) that are respectively responsible for the registration of new joining entities as well as those requesting consensus partaking permissions, second the dynamic access authorization and third the mapping between the required services and contracts ensuring their management. Using the blockchain technology, this framework is expected to achieve distributed, flexible, verifiable and trustworthy access control in addition to a transparent, traceable and notarized resource usage and sharing. Results from a real implementation plus performance evaluation prove the proposed concept and demonstrate its feasibility.
Anselma Wörner, Arne Meeuw, Liliane Ableitner, Felix Wortmann · 6 authors
Abstract Due to environmental and resiliency benefits, distributed energy resources (DER) are a potential solution for meeting future electricity demand, but their integration into centralized power markets on the large scale is challenging. Many practitioners argue that blockchain technology can create new market structures for DER like local peer-to-peer energy markets which foster renewable generation. To get an understanding of the status quo of the research on blockchain-based energy exchange, we conducted a systematic literature review on the existing academic articles and industry projects. This article describes the design and technical specifications of the first real blockchain-based electricity market in Switzerland derived from this literature review and outlines the implementation of this market in the real world. The findings provide valuable guidelines for the integration of DER into future sustainable energy markets.
The rapid development of distributed energy resources (DER) in the distribution grid calls for novel control and coordination solutions. Optimal management of DER will enable end-users to decrease their electricity costs and provide crucial services to grid operators. In this paper, a decentralized Optimal Power Flow (OPF) model is used to locally coordinate DER in distribution networks, while considering the network constraints, in a distributed, transparent and secure fashion. To achieve that, a consensus-based distributed optimization algorithm is developed using the general form Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). To enable transparent and verifiable management of the network, the paper provides a comprehensive procedure for the implementation of the decentralized OPF on a private blockchain-smart contracts platform. The performance of the proposed framework is tested using real data from a case study in a residential neighborhood in Amsterdam with different varieties of DER. The implementation procedure on a blockchain-smart contracts platform may be adopted in other problems that require a smart contract to act as a virtual aggregator.
Marina Dehez-Clementi, Nicolas Larrieu, Emmanuel Lochin, Mohamed Ali Kâafar · 5 authors
The Aviation Industry has been booming for several decades and is expected to keep growing in the future. Therefore, Air Traffic Management (ATM) tools are likely to be soon overwhelmed by the demand. The Single European Sky ATM Research Program (SESAR) 2020, controlled by EUROCONTROL, intends to revisit the management of aeronautical information along its full lifecycle and across the whole European ATM system. The efficient sharing of information over large scale Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) is a non-trivial problem that raises several challenges including data lineage, data consistency, access rights management and privacy-preservation. Part of the SESAR initiative, System-Wide Information Management (SWIM) project defines standards to enhance the security of aeronautical data shared among stakeholders. Most of its propositions include centralized or partially centralized mechanisms in order to enforce data confidentiality, and privacy. In this paper, we intend to discuss how blockchains can improve the sharing of sensitive data over the ATM system. More specifically, we use the example of flight data and describe a high-level Blockchain-based concept that mimics the decentralized nature of existing A TM system to provide a reliable, distributed storage platform for flight information.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), also known as „Blockchain”, represents a new paradigm in how applications are designed and built. Even thoughthe blockchain emerged as a consumer-focused technology (form Bitcoin), it’s adoptionin the enterpriseenvironment has increased dramatically in the last years. The user’sfocus on privacy, security and transparency has motivated corporations to invest in distributed applications throughout their structure and operations. The main frameworks for enterprise blockchain solutions are coming from well established IT&C corporations like Microsoft (partnership with Ethereum), IBM (Hyperledger Fabric), JP Morgan (Quorum) and others.The blockchain technology is pretty new, and it cannot fully replace legacy centralized cloud-based solutions. The scalability issue of DLT is well-known, as the most advanced blockchain technologies can only process a few hundred transactions per second. This is nowhere near the speed of Visa’s payment system that can process more than 2000 transactions per second.
The processes of decentralization have shaped the overall vector of rural development through the establishment of the foundations of the inclusive approach, the practice of public administration and administration, as well as the enhancement of the community's internal capacity, self-development and self-sustainability. The aim of the article is to substantiate the prospects entrepreneurship and public administration development in rural areas in the context of decentralization. Objects of the study are: 1) consideration of the state, problems and trends of rural areas; 2) justification of mechanisms to enhance the processes of self-development and independence of territorial communities through the mechanism of social entrepreneurship and public administration. The research methodology is based on structural and logical design, system studies and synergetic analysis. Changing technological approaches in the system of public administration as a result of the latter's inability to prevent stagnation and focus on socio-environmental priorities of the country's development in the conditions of globalization intensified political processes in the regions through the activities of political parties and public organizations as bodies of public administration of territories. Participation of the process of development of the strategy of development of territorial communities gives an opportunity not only to increase the level of efficiency of management decisions, to expand the range of their influence (in particular, in the areas of ecologization of life, to develop start-ups, including among young people, spreading the practice of organic production, permaculture design, non-waste life, raising efficiency of the energy sector), but also contributes to the growing interest of members of society in implementing programs of development and enhancement of the social consciousness which in turn ensures the stability of the position areas as industrial and social activities. The emergence of family homestead and family homestead settlements has become the mechanism of sustainable development of the public sector on an ideological basis, which combines the responsibility and cooperation of individuals, representatives of state authorities and local self-government, including through the practice of public administration, empowerment of the population for decision-making and implementation of initiatives, improvement mechanisms of planning, coordination and financing of real changes, in particular on the basis of project and process approaches.
Climate change enforces the integration of distributed renewable energy sources and development of carbon price scheme. Whilst the energy is traded among distributed prosumers, the carbon responsibilities and corresponding allowances trading need to be transferred from large-scale energy suppliers to prosumers. During this transformation, the issues of energy imbalance, carbon reduction imbalance, and residential privacy leakage in centralised trading market present serious challenges. In this paper, we propose a fully decentralised blockchain-based peer-to-peer trading scheme coupling energy and carbon markets. We implement pay-to-public-key-hash with multiple signatures as a transaction standard to realise a more secure transaction and reduced storage burden of senders. A script is hashed during the wallet address generation for each new transaction to protect residential privacy. A novel carbon accounting method and corresponding incentive mechanism for carbon reduction are designed to evaluate emission behaviours of distributed prosumers. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed scheme leads a reduced costs and carbon emissions compared to centralised trading systems and existing blockchain-based trading schemes.
Traditional elections satisfy neither citizens nor political authorities in recent years. They are not fully secure since it is easy to attack votes. It threatens also privacy and transparency of voters. Additionally, it takes too much time to count the votes. This paper proposes a solution using Blockchain to eliminate all the disadvantages of conventional elections. Security and data integrity of votes are absolutely provided theoretically. Voter privacy is another requirement that is ensured in the system. Lastly, the waiting time for results decreased significantly in the proposed Blockchain voting system.
Zeyad Alsaqa, Ali Ibrahim Hussein, Saddam M. Mahmood
The objective of the research is to clarify what Blockchain technique is and the developments of its various uses, and identify the accounting perspective of this technique and the possibility of using it in accounting work. It also aims at demonstrating how to utilize its Blockchain technique in accounting information systems, and identify the most important potential effects of the use of technique in accounting information systems. To achieve the research objectives, a descriptive approach was adopted to discuss the fundamentals of Blockchain technique and its most important accounting implications, in addition, its significance for the usefulness and reliability of the development of automated computing accounting systems. The researchers concluded that the use of Blockchain technology for accounting work requires analysis of the related impact on the development of accounting information systems in terms of their implementations and modules, with the need to fully transition in the design of accounting information systems to electronic sophisticated programs and applications developed and technologically advanced.
This paper applies biomimetic engineering to the problem of permissionless Byzantine consensus and achieves results that surpass the prior state of the art by four orders of magnitude. It introduces a biologically inspired asymmetric Sybil-resistance mechanism, Proof-of-Balance, which can replace symmetric Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake weighting schemes.
The biomimetic mechanism is incorporated into a permissionless blockchain protocol, Key Retroactivity Network Consensus (KRNC), which delivers ~40,000 times the security and speed of today's decentralized ledgers. KRNC allows the fiat money that the public already owns to be upgraded with cryptographic inflation protection, eliminating the problems inherent in bootstrapping new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The paper includes two independently significant contributions to the literature. First, it replaces the non-structural axioms invoked in prior work with a new formal method for reasoning about trust, liveness, and safety from first principles. Second, it demonstrates how two previously overlooked exploits, book-prize attacks and pseudo-transfer attacks, collectively undermine the security guarantees of all prior permissionless ledgers.
Distributed ledger technology allows for data to be recorded, shared, and synchronized across multiple distributed data stores. This brought forth the idea of using this technology to build consensus. Implementing this technology within the Syndicated Loan Market through Smart Contracts allows for reduced manual labor and back-office workloads as well as the removal of reconciliation and corporate actions. As a result, counterparty risk and settlement times will be minimized, and performance and transparency for regular reporting will increase. However, an individual's embrace of this new technology will determine its successful implementation. To address this issue, this article examines the trust model, trust in technology drivers, and the revised unified theory of acceptance and use of the technology model to construct the trust and adoption of the technology model. This article culminates in guidelines for the implementation of Smart Contracts. Avenues for future work include the investigation of a multimotive information systems acceptance model.
The paper describes the linear model for Bitcoin price which includes regression features based on Bitcoin currency statistics, mining processes, Google search trends and Wikipedia pages visits. The pattern of deviation of regression model prediction from real prices is simpler comparing to price time series. It is assumed that this pattern can be predicted by an experienced expert. In such a way, using the combination of the regression model and expert correction, one can receive better results than with either regression model or expert opinion only. It is shown that Bayesian approach makes it possible to utilize the probabilistic approach using distributions with fat tails and take into account the outliers in Bitcoin price time series.
In a fully interconnected world where even network-related services are becoming more dependent on software, the management of license agreements is critical for the business of any software vendor and communication provider. Building, managing and protecting the infrastructure to handle software license validation and scalability for the provider and, on the other hand, assessing the correct use of the software licenses for the vendor can become an expensive part of the relationship costs. We propose a novel approach for decentralized software licensing that leverages blockchain and smart contracts as fundamental enabling technologies. Our proposal guarantees a secure and inexpensive system with no central point of failure that can regulate the relations among untrusted parties. We describe the main design choices and present a prototype experimentation that demonstrates the benefits of the proposal in the context of virtualized network infrastructures.
Abstract Background: Cryptocurrencies represent a specific technological innovation in financial markets that keeps getting more and more popular among investors around the world. Given the specific characteristics of the cryptocurrencies, this paper examines the possibility of their use as a diversification instrument. Objectives: This paper examines the direction and strength of the relationship between the selected cryptocurrencies and important financial indicators on the European Union market. Since cryptocurrencies are a novelty in the financial system, the empirical literature in this area is rather scarce. Methods/Approach: In order to assess diversification properties of cryptocurrencies for European traders, a comprehensive econometric analysis was carried out. The first part of the analysis refers to the estimation of the multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) model, whereas the second part focuses on wavelet transforms. Results: Bitcoin and Ripple proved as a possible diversification instrument on most of the observed European markets since corresponding coefficients of unconditional correlation are negative. Conclusions: The relationship between the value of the cryptocurrencies and selected indices is generally very weak and slightly negative, indicating that some cryptocurrencies can serve as a means of diversification. However, investors need to take into account the extreme volatility, exhibited in all existing cryptocurrencies.
Huan Zhou, Xue Ouyang, Jinshu Su, Cees de Laat · 5 authors
There lacks trust between the cloud customer and provider to enforce traditional cloud SLA (Service Level Agreement) where the blockchain technique seems a promising solution. However, current explorations still face challenges to prove that the off-chain SLO (Service Level Objective) violations really happen before recorded into the on-chain transactions. In this paper, a witness model is proposed implemented with smart contracts to solve this trust issue. The introduced role, "Witness", gains rewards as an incentive for performing the SLO violation report, and the payoff function is carefully designed in a way that the witness has to tell the truth, for maximizing the rewards. This fact that the witness has to be honest is analyzed and proved using the Nash Equilibrium principle of game theory. For ensuring the chosen witnesses are random and independent, an unbiased selection algorithm is proposed to avoid possible collusions. An auditing mechanism is also introduced to detect potential malicious witnesses. Specifically, we define three types of malicious behaviors and propose quantitative indicators to audit and detect these behaviors. Moreover, experimental studies based on Ethereum blockchain demonstrate the proposed model is feasible, and indicate that the performance, ie, transaction fee, of each interface follows the design expectations.
The potentiality of Blockchain technology is widespread and applied to diverse fields. Blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions that store immutable records in chronological order in an append-only mode. Hence, humongous data is stored on the blockchain and will continuously expand over time. Blockchain has been rapidly adopted by many businesses for storing the provenance data because of its salient features like immutability, robustness and tamperproof. Blockchain stores data provenance as transactions that are collected from sources like a centralized cloud or decentralized cloud that helps in identifying cybercrimes. This paper emphasizes on the different approaches of querying the data provenance transactions stored in Ethereum Blockchain based on various search parameters using REST API web services. The approach not only queries based on the first-class data elements like blocks, transactions, account address and contract address but also queries based on the provenance data stored on the Ethereum Blockchain explained with a use case LegalProv.
Ui-Jun Baek, Se-Hyun Ji, Jee- Tae Park, Min‐Seob Lee · 6 authors
Since the inception of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency to implement blockchain technology, the cryptocurrency market has experienced significant growth.However, this growth has also brought about numerous vulnerabilities and attacks that pose a threat to the Bitcoin ecosystem.These attacks are not only focused on the Bitcoin network itself but also extend to the services that utilize it.Recent surveys have indicated the need to analyze and identify Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, considering the interconnectedness between network-level data and service-level DDoS attacks within the Bitcoin system.Typically, the Bitcoin network is considered resilient against DDoS attacks due to the decentralized nature of its ledger.Nevertheless, there are potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited, such as message spoofing using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).Additionally, DDoS attacks often target services associated with Bitcoin usage rather than directly impacting the network's performance or stealing currency.Although these service-level attacks may not have an immediate impact, they can ultimately undermine the value of Bitcoin, leading to depreciation.The majority of DDoS attacks on Bitcoin-related services occur on exchanges and mining pools.Our approach involves evaluating experimental outcomes based on proposed metrics to establish a correlation between network-level data and service-level DDoS attacks in the Bitcoin system.By doing so, we aim to detect and analyze these attacks, thereby identifying potential associations.Furthermore, we posit that the methodology employed in this study could be applicable to other blockchain systems, extending its usefulness beyond the Bitcoin network.