The author reviews the peculiarities of digitalized learning process organisation in the hardware and software environment of learning management systems in the context of vocational education and training. The author notes the complexity of the transition to the Industry 4.0 and mentions the risks connected with the named process in the vocational education and training. In such conditions it is important to develop effective models of public and private partnership, to decentralize administration and financing and, above all, to assure the vocational education and training quality.At the same time the learning process taking place in such an environment becomes digitalized, which, on the one hand, gives it additional advantages (easy access to training data regardless of time and place, individualisation of students’ learning paths, broad multimedia resources, etc.) and, on the other hand, requires solving complex tasks in distance courses designing. The author focuses on the methodology of distance courses designing, so it is very important for vocational education and training institution to ensure the realisation of the following five main components: regulatory, financial, technical, personnel, teaching and methodological support. It is emphasised that distance course designing becomes the most important aspect of implementing the modern digitalized learning process. The structure of creative group in distance courses designing is grounded, which comprises: a specialist in the relevant vocational sphere, specialist in distance learning, technical specialist (system administrator or distance courses programmer) and digital content designer.
The premise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to interconnect not only sensors, mobile devices, and computers but also individuals, homes, smart buildings, and cities, as well as electrical grids, automobiles, and airplanes, to mention a few. However, realizing the extensive connectivity of IoT while ensuring user security and privacy still remains a challenge. There are many unconventional characteristics in IoT systems such as scalability, heterogeneity, mobility, and limited resources, which render existing Internet security solutions inadequate to IoT-based systems. Besides, the IoT advocates for peer-to-peer networks where users as owners intend to set security policies to control their devices or services instead of relying on some centralized third parties. By focusing on scientific challenges related to the IoT unconventional characteristics and user-centric security, we propose an IoT secure infrastructure enabled by the blockchain technology and driven by trustless peer-to-peer networks. Our IoT secure infrastructure allows not only the identification of individuals and collectives but also the trusted identification of IoT things through their owners by referring to the blockchain in trustless peer-to-peer networks. The blockchain provides our IoT secure infrastructure with a trustless, immutable and public ledger that records individuals and collectives identities, which facilitates the design of the simplified authentication protocol for IoT without relying on third-party identity providers. Besides, our IoT secure infrastructure adopts socialized IoT paradigm which allows all IoT entities (namely, individuals, collectives, things) to establish relationships and makes the IoT extensible and ubiquitous networks where owners can take advantage of relationships to set access policies for their devices or services. Furthermore, in order to protect operations of our IoT secure infrastructure against security threats, we also introduce an autonomic threat detection mechanism as the complementary of our access control framework, which can continuously monitor anomaly behavior of device or service operations.
The article analyzes the legal support of the reform of public authority decentralization in Ukraine. In this regard, we have indicated the normative legal acts, which laid the conceptual foundations of the municipal reform, in particular, the Concept for the Reform of Local Self-Government and Territorial Organization of Power in Ukraine, approved by the Decree of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine of April 1, 2014, the Law of Ukraine «On Principles of State Regional Policy» of February 5, 2015, «Strategy − 2020», approved by the Decree of the President of Ukraine of January 15, 2015, No. 5/2015. Also, attention is focused on the Draft Law of Ukraine «On Amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine (with regard to the decentralization of power)», previously approved by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on August 31, 2015, the final adoption of which is unjustifiably delayed. We have also indicated the legislative acts which created the legal basis for the formation of economically and financially viable territorial communities, as well as enhanced the process of community consolidation, in particular, the Law of Ukraine «On Cooperation of Territorial Communities» of June 17, 2014 and the Law of Ukraine «On Voluntary Association of Territorial Communities» of February 5, 2015, as amended. However, particular attention is paid to characterizing the draft legislative acts, which are to be addressed and adopted by the Parliament at the earliest possible time to successfully promote the local self-government reform, as well as to complete the process of association of territorial communities in Ukraine. In particular, it refers to the Law of Ukraine «On Principles of the Administrative and Territorial Order of Ukraine», the Law of Ukraine «On Amendments to the Law of Ukraine «On Voluntary Association of Territorial Communities (with regard to the perspective plans for the formation of territories of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, regions)», the Law of Ukraine «On Amendments to the Law «On Regulation of Urban Development», the Law of Ukraine «On the Amendments to the Law of Ukraine «On Service in Bodies of Local Self-Government», the Law of Ukraine «On Amendments to the Law of Ukraine «On Civil Registration» and some other legislative acts of Ukraine on decentralization and bringing administrative services in the civil registration sphere closer to citizens.» We have concluded that, based on the real configuration of affairs regarding the formation of capable communities in Ukraine and taking into account foreign experience, it is considered appropriate to complete the municipal reform by administrative means by the next local elections in 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic has made individuals and organizations to rethink the way of handling identity verification and credentials sharing particularly in quarantined situations. In this study, we investigate the inefficiencies of traditional identity systems, and discuss how a proper implementation of Blockchain technology would result in safer, more secure, privacy respecting and remote friendly identity systems. As a result, we propose a Blockchain based framework for digital identity verification, record attestation and record sharing, and we explain the framework in details with certain use cases. Our proposed framework promotes individuals to fully control their identity data and govern the level of the identity data sharing.
The 11th International Process Symposium Organizing in the Digital Age: Understanding the Dynamics of Work, Innovation, and Collective Action (PROS 2019), Chania, Crete, 19-22 June 2019
Yeray Mezquita, Alfonso González‐Briones, Roberto Casado‐Vara, Pablo Chamoso · 6 authors
Logistics services involve a wide range of transport operations between distributors and clients. Currently, the large number of intermediaries are a challenge for this sector, as it makes all the processes more complicated. This paper proposes a system that uses smart contracts and blockchain technology to remove intermediaries and speed up logistics activities. Our model combines smart contracts and a multi-agent system to improve the current logistics system by increasing organization, security, transparency and significantly improving distribution times.
Ride-sharing is a service that enables drivers to share trips with other riders, contributing to appealing benefits of shared travel cost and reducing traffic congestion. However, the majority of existing ride-sharing services rely on a central third party to organize the service, which make them subject to a single point of failure and privacy disclosure concerns by both internal and external attackers. Moreover, they are vulnerable to distributed denial of service (DDoS) and Sybil attacks launched by malicious users and external attackers. Besides, high service fees are paid to the ride-sharing service provider. In this paper, we propose a decentralized ride-sharing service based on public Blockchain, named B-Ride. B-Ride enables drivers to offer ride-sharing services without relying on a trusted third party. Both riders and drivers can learn whether they can share rides while preserving their trip data, including pick-up/drop-off location, departure/arrival date and travel price. However, malicious users exploit the anonymity provided by the public blockchain to submit multiple ride requests or offers, while not committing to any of them, in order to find a better offer or to make the system unreliable. B-Ride solves this problem by introducing a time-locked deposit protocol for a ride-sharing by leveraging smart contract and zero-knowledge set membership proof. In a nutshell, both a driver and a rider have to show their good will and commitment by sending a deposit to the blockchain. Later, a driver has to prove to the blockchain on the agreed pick-up time that he/she arrived at the pick-up location on time. To preserve rider/driver privacy by hiding the exact pick-up location, the proof is performed using zero-knowledge set membership proof. Moreover, to ensure fair payment, a pay-as-you-drive methodology is introduced based on the elapsed distance of the driver and rider. In addition, we introduce a reputation model to rate drivers based on their past behaviour without involving any third-parties to allow riders to select them based on their history on the system. Finally, we implement our protocol and deploy it in a test net of Ethereum. The experimental results show the applicability of our protocol atop existing real-world blockchains.
Team Rocket, Maofan Yin, Kevin Sekniqi, Robbert van Renesse · 5 authors
This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine adversaries while their concurrent and leaderless nature enables them to achieve high throughput and scalability. Unlike blockchains that rely on proof-of-work, they are quiescent and green. Unlike traditional consensus protocols where one or more nodes typically process linear bits in the number of total nodes per decision, no node processes more than logarithmic bits. It does not require accurate knowledge of all participants and exposes new possible tradeoffs and improvements in safety and liveness for building consensus protocols. The paper describes the Snow protocol family, analyzes its guarantees, and describes how it can be used to construct the core of an internet-scale electronic payment system called Avalanche, which is evaluated in a large scale deployment. Experiments demonstrate that the system can achieve high throughput (3400 tps), provide low confirmation latency (1.35 sec), and scale well compared to existing systems that deliver similar functionality. For our implementation and setup, the bottleneck of the system is in transaction verification.
The article proves the fact that current reforms take place in the system of education of Ukraine taking into account the latest social challenges and priority tasks of the legislative and executive branches of power, in particular, those which aimed to improve the efficiency of education, to overcome territorial differences in the quality of providing it, to modernize the content of education in accordance with relevant labour market demands, to support the process of implementing academic integrity in both educational and academic institutions. The goal of the study has been met, namely there has been conducted the analysis of the effectiveness of educational reforms in Ukraine by processing the data obtained from interviews with different stakeholders of the educational process, who were the students (future teachers), practicing teachers, and lecturers of higher education institutions. There were applied the further outlined research methods like: first, logical and system analysis was intended to summarize the views of the participants of the focus groups on the requests and expectations of the state, civil society and educators to reforms in the field of education; second, documents examination was supposed to identify the participants’ standpoints on the amendments made to the Law of Ukraine «On Education» (2017) and the Conceptual Principles of Secondary Education Reform «New Ukrainian School» (2016). The article reveals the requests and expectations of the state, civil society and educators from conducting the reforms in the field of education. Based on the opinions of the focus group participants on the strategic aspects of the Law of Ukraine «On Education» and the Conceptual Principles for the Reform of the Secondary School «New Ukrainian School», we performed the ranking of the respondents’ standpoints on the relevance of amendments, and we discovered those concepts needed further clarification (decentralization and effective management that will provide real autonomy to the school, a new school structure that allows mastering the new content and gaining competencies for life, the timeline for implementation of the reform). We revealed the prevailing attitudes of educators, their needs and expectations concerning outputs of educational reforms in Ukraine, namely: respect for their job from the society, trust for the teacher; decent fees, proper and transparent financing of educational institutions; real academic freedom, etc.
Ride-sharing is a service that enables drivers to share their trips with\nother riders, contributing to appealing benefits of shared travel costs.\nHowever, the majority of existing platforms rely on a central third party,\nwhich make them subject to a single point of failure and privacy disclosure\nissues. Moreover, they are vulnerable to DDoS and Sybil attacks due to\nmalicious users involvement. Besides, high fees should be paid to the service\nprovider. In this paper, we propose a decentralized ride-sharing service based\non public Blockchain, named B-Ride. Both riders and drivers can find rides\nmatch while preserving their trip data, including pick-up/drop-off location,\nand departure/arrival date. However, under the anonymity of the public\nblockchain, a malicious user may submit multiple ride requests or offers, while\nnot committing to any of them, to discover better offer or to make the system\nunreliable. B-Ride solves this problem by introducing a time-locked deposit\nprotocol for a ride-sharing by leveraging smart contract and zero-knowledge set\nmembership proof. In a nutshell, both a driver and a rider have to show their\ncommitment by sending a deposit to the blockchain. Later, a driver has to prove\nto the blockchain on the agreed departure time that he has arrived at the\npick-up location. To preserve rider/driver location privacy by hiding the exact\npick-up location, the proof is done using zero-knowledge set membership\nprotocol. Moreover, to ensure a fair payment, a pay-as-you-drive methodology is\nintroduced based on the elapsed distance of the driver and the rider. Also, we\nintroduce a reputation-based trust model to rate drivers based on their past\ntrips to allow riders to select them based on their history on the system.\nFinally, we implement B-Ride in a test net of Ethereum. The experiment results\nshow the applicability of our protocol atop the existing real-world blockchain.\n
This thesis analyzes the influence of cryptocurrencies in the context of risk management by considering the emerging risk factors of Bitcoin as a payment method. By means of an empirical analysis through an online survey, the current operational dealing of incoming Bitcoin funds, the risk awareness of the potential threats, and the corresponding control activities implemented by companies accepting Bitcoin payments have been examined. The results reveal that the risks of this new technology-based payment method have not been extensively evaluated and that there exists a partially significant lack of know-how. Therefore, the risks are either not at all or improperly addressed by a majority of the organizations. However, the exchange rate risk and the cyber risk, which is a strongly linked to the administration of cryptocurrencies, represent the most significant related risk factors associated with cryptocurrencies in recent times. To ensure an appropriate operational dealing with cryptocurrencies, the author presents a risk control matrix based on the results of the analysis and discusses control activities to mitigate these emerging threats. Finally, a holistic Cryptocurrency IC Framework (following the COSO 2013 IC Framework) is presented, with the objective of effectively and efficiently developing and maintaining systems of internal control with regard to cryptocurrencies. Keywords: Blockchain; digital assets; Bitcoin; cryptocurrency; IC framework; enterprise risk management.
There is considerable interest today in the use of blockchain technology to provide better visibility into shared information among a number of participants and systems arranged in a decentralized peer-to-peer topology. Several challenges in blockchain technology remain to be addressed, including the interoperability, survivability, and manageability of blockchain systems. Crucial to answering these challenges is the need to understand aspects of the Internet architecture that has made it scalable, resilient, and a commercial success as a global connectivity infrastructure. In this paper, we discuss a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems, using the design philosophy of the Internet architecture as the basis to identify key design principles. We recast some of the challenges faced in the design of the Internet architecture to that of the design of an interoperable blockchain architecture. We emphasize interoperability as a crucial requirement for the survivability and manageability of blockchain systems. The goal is to define an interoperable blockchain architecture, in which common components of the blockchain architecture can begin to be standardized, leading to lowering of development costs, better reusability, and higher degree of interoperability.
The underlying fundaments of blockchain are cryptography and cryptographic concepts that provide reliable and secure decentralized solutions. Although many recent papers study the use-cases of blockchain in different industrial areas, such as finance, health care, legal relations, IoT, information security, and consensus building systems, only few studies scrutinize the cryptographic concepts used in blockchain. To the best of our knowledge, there is no Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) that gives a complete picture of the existing cryptographic concepts which have been deployed or have the potential to be deployed in blockchain. In this paper, we thoroughly review and systematize all cryptographic concepts which are already used in blockchain. Additionally, we give a list of cryptographic concepts which have not yet been applied but have big potentials to improve the current blockchain solutions. We also include possible instantiations of these cryptographic concepts in the blockchain domain. Last but not least, we explicitly postulate 21 challenging problems that cryptographers interested in blockchain can work on.
Following in the footsteps of pioneer Bitcoin, many altcoins as well as coloured coins have been being developed and merchandised adopting blockchain as the core enabling technology. However, since interoperability and scalability, due to high and capped (in particular cases) transaction latency are deep-rooted in the architecture of blockchain technology, they are by default inherited in any blockchain based applications. Lightning Network (LN) is one of the supporting technologies developed to eliminate this impediment of blockchain technology by facilitating instantaneous transfers of cryptos. Since the potentials of LN is still relatively unknown, this paper investigates the current states of development along with possible non-monetary usage of LN, especially in settlement coloured coins such as securities, as well as creation of new business models based on Lightning Applications (LApps) and microchannel payments as well as micro-trades. The legal challenges that may act as impediment to the adoption of LN is also discussed.
BACKGROUND: In recent years, researchers have made significant efforts in advancing blockchain technology. This technology, with distinct features of decentralization and security, can be applied to many fields. In areas of health data and resource sharing, applications of blockchain technology are also emerging. OBJECTIVE: In this study, we propose a cloud health resource-sharing model based on consensus-oriented blockchain technology and have developed a simulation study on breast tumor diagnosis. METHODS: The proposed platform is built on a consortium or federated blockchain that possesses features of both centralization and decentralization. The consensus mechanisms generate operating standards for the proposed model. Open source Ethereum code is employed to provide the blockchain environment. Proof of Authority is selected as the consensus algorithm of block generation. RESULTS: Based on the proposed model, a simulation case study for breast tumor classification is constructed. The simulation includes 9893 service requests from 100 users; 22 service providers are equipped with 22 different classification methods. Each request is fulfilled by a service provider recommended by the weighted k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. The majority of service requests are handled by 9 providers, and provider service evaluation scores tend to stabilize. Also, user priority on KNN weights significantly affects the system operation outcome. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed model is feasible based on the simulation case study for the cloud service of breast tumor diagnosis and has the potential to be applied to other applications.
The Bitcoin market becomes the focus of the economic market since its birth, and it has attracted wide attention from both academia and industry. Due to the absence of regulations in the Bitcoin market, it may be easier to bring some kinds of illegal behaviors. Thus, it raises an interesting question: Is there abnormity or illegal behavior in Bitcoin platforms? To answer this question, we investigate the abnormity in five leading Bitcoin platforms. By analyzing the financial index, i.e. the normalized logarithmic price return, we find that the properties of price return in bitFlyer are completely different from others. To find the possible reasons, we find that the abnormal ask price and bid price appear simultaneously in bitFlyer, which may be potentially linked to either price manipulation or money laundering. It verifies our conjecture that there may be abnormity or price manipulation in Bitcoin platforms. Furthermore, our findings in price return could also provide an innovative and effective method to detect the abnormity in Bitcoin platforms.
Ziaul Haque Munim, Mohammad Hassan Shakil, Ilan Alon
This study analyzes forecasts of Bitcoin price using the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and neural network autoregression (NNAR) models. Employing the static forecast approach, we forecast next-day Bitcoin price both with and without re-estimation of the forecast model for each step. For cross-validation of forecast results, we consider two different training and test samples. In the first training-sample, NNAR performs better than ARIMA, while ARIMA outperforms NNAR in the second training-sample. Additionally, ARIMA with model re-estimation at each step outperforms NNAR in the two test-sample forecast periods. The Diebold Mariano test confirms the superiority of forecast results of ARIMA model over NNAR in the test-sample periods. Forecast performance of ARIMA models with and without re-estimation are identical for the estimated test-sample periods. Despite the sophistication of NNAR, this paper demonstrates ARIMA enduring power of volatile Bitcoin price prediction.
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers have proposed many mining attack models with one attacker, and optimized the attacker's strategy. During these mining attacks, an attacker pursues a higher relative revenue (RR) by wasting a large amount of computational power of the honest miners at the cost of a small amount of computational power of himself. In this paper, we propose a mining attack model with two phases: the original system and the multi-attacker system. It is the first model to provide both theoretical and quantitative analysis of mining attacks with two attackers. We explain how the original system turns into the multi-attacker system by introducing two attackers: the internal attacker and the external attacker. If both attackers take the attacking strategy selfish mining, the RR of the internal attacker in multi-attacker system will drop by up to 31.9% compared with his RR in original system. The external attacker will overestimate his RR by up to 44.6% in multiattacker system. Unexpected competitions, auctions between attackers and overestimation of attackers' influence factor are three main causes of both attackers' dropping RR. We propose a mining strategy named Partial Initiative Release (PIR) which is a semi-honest mining strategy in multi-attacker system. In some specific situations, PIR allows the attacker to get more block reward by launching an attack in multi-attacker system.
Ahmed Faeq Hussein, Abbas K. AlZubaidi, Qais Ahmed Habash, Mustafa Musa Jaber
A crucial role is played by personal biomedical data when it comes to maintaining proficient access to health records by patients as well as health professionals. However, it is difficult to get a unified view pertaining to health data that have been scattered across various health centers/hospital sections. To be specific, health records are distributed across many places and cannot be integrated easily. In recent years, blockchain has arisen as a promising solution that helps to achieve the sharing of individual biomedical information in a secure way, whilst also having the benefit of privacy preservation because of its immutability. This research puts forward a blockchain-based managing scheme that helps to establish interpretation improvements pertaining to electronic biomedical systems. In this scheme, two blockchains were employed to construct the base, whereby the second blockchain algorithm was used to generate a secure sequence for the hash key that was generated in first blockchain algorithm. This adaptive feature enables the algorithm to use multiple data types and also combines various biomedical images and text records. All data, including keywords, digital records, and the identity of patients, are private key encrypted with a keyword searching function so as to maintain data privacy, access control, and a protected search function. The obtained results, which show a low latency (less than 750 ms) at 400 requests/second, indicate the possibility of its use within several health care units such as hospitals and clinics.