In order to increase the level of global competitiveness and improve the performance of production system, a large number of manufacturing companies have implemented world class manufacturing (WCM) approach, which has developed based on the third industrial revolution and the need for mass production. The evolution in production equipment and communication technologies, and the demand of markets for personalized mass production, have forced manufacturing companies to transform their production systems and prepare for a revolution. This revolution, known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0), or the digital transformation, has been introduced as a new type of organization of manufacturing systems that is more flexible and agile, and is based on using large amounts of information and data in the decision-making process. One of the main characteristics of this concept is decentralization, which allows different subsystems to make decisions autonomously in order to have self-organization systems. There are some important differences between the principles of WCM and I4.0. World class manufacturing is mainly based on continuous improvement and cost reduction, without a global vision for profit optimization. Industry 4.0 is mainly based on using all accessible information and data of systems and making decentralized decisions, but it also involves a global vision and a systemic approach to global profit optimization. However, achieving these objectives takes a very long time, and the challenges are numerous. As with all projects, for a transformation project to succeed, it is very important to define the transition phase and the way to change and introduce these new principles. This paper presents part of our research project, in collaboration with the Fiat Powertrain Technologies company, concerning the transformation of their production system toward the factory of the future. We highlight the design principles of I4.0 and the potential of the WCM system for transformation and achieving development of the characteristics of I4.0. We focus on five of the principal technical pillars of WCM and the steps in their development, and present some modifications in adoption of the design principles of I4.0. An example of change in the professional maintenance pillar of WCM is also presented.
Insurance products can be optimized with emerging decentralized technology. We propose the use of cryptocurrencies as claims on future cash flows of an underwriting business operated by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The design of our DAO allows for decentralized collaboration (i) among DAO underwriters as well as (ii) between underwriters and consumers. In this decentralized system, the tokens essentially substitute for reputation. Financial distress or bankruptcy of an individual underwriter does not have to affect either customers or the DAO as the insurance contracts are backed by encumbered tokens. The structure of incentives embedded in the design has the potential to lower capital requirements and the related need for capital regulation.
The persistent development towards decreasing batch sizes due to an ongoing product individualization, as well as increasingly dynamic market and competitive conditions lead to new changeability requirements in production environments. Since each of the individualized products might require different base materials or components and manufacturing resources, the paths of the products going through the factory as well as the required internal transport and material supply processes are going to differ for every product. Conventional planning and control systems, which rely on predefined processes and central decision-making, are not capable to deal with the arising system’s complexity along the dimensions of changing goods, layouts and throughput requirements. The concepts of “self-organization” in combination with “autonomous control” provide promising solutions to solve these new requirements by using among other things the potential of autonomous, decentralized and target-optimized decision-making. A major enabler for the development towards autonomous changeable intralogistics systems are intelligent logistical objects (e.g. smart products, bins and conveyor systems) which are able to communicate and interact with each other as well as with human workers. To investigate the potential of automation and human-robot collaboration for intralogistics, a research project for the development of a collaborative tugger train has been started at the ESB Logistics Learning Factory in line with various student projects in neighboring research areas. This collaborative tugger train system in combination with other manual (e.g. handcarts) and (semi-)automated conveyor systems (e.g. automated guided forklift) will be integrated into a dynamic, self-organized scenario with varying production batch sizes to develop a method for target-oriented self-organization and autonomous control of intralogistics systems. For a structured investigation of self-organized scenarios a generic intralogistics model as well as a criteria catalogue has been developed. The ESB Logistics Learning will serve as a practice-oriented research, validation and demonstration environment for these purposes.
A variety of solutions, e.g., Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Burn (PoB), and Proof-of-Elapsed-Time (PoET), have been proposed to make consensus mechanism used by the blockchain technology more democratic, efficient, and scalable. However, these solutions have a number of limitations, e.g., PoW approach requires a huge amount of computational power, scales poorly, and wastes a lot of electrical energy. Recently, an innovative protocol called Algorand has been proposed to overcome these limitations. Algorand not only guarantees an overwhelming probability of linearity of the blockchain, but it also aims to solve the “blockchain trilemma” of decentralization, scalability, and security. In this paper, we present a security analysis of Algorand. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first security analysis as well as the first formal study on Algorand. We designed an attack scenario in which a group of malicious users tries to break the protocol, or at least limit it to a reduced partition of network users, by exploiting a security flaw in the messages validation process of the Byzantine Agreement (BA). Since the source code or an official simulator for Algorand was not available at the time of our study, we created a simulator (which is available on request) to implement the protocol and assess the feasibility of our attack scenario. Our attack requires the attacker to merely have the trivial capability of establishing multiple connections with targeted nodes, and it costs practically nothing to the attacker. Our results show that it is possible to slow down the message validation process on honest nodes - which eventually forces them to select default values on the consensus - leaving the targeted nodes behind in the chain as compared to the non-attacked nodes. Even though our results are subject to the real implementation of the protocol, the core concept of our attack remains valid.
Rewriting-history attacks can erase all valid records of blockchain-based systems, which is extremely devastating. To deter such attacks, we design a new smart contract-based secure model to make such attacks ineffective. Each node who creates a new block is required to register with the smart contract to get a voucher required for the subsequent block validation. We introduce the design idea and the structure of the proposed model in detail. We also present the algorithms of the smart contract and analyze the security performance of the proposed model in different cases. To prove the feasibility of the proposed model, we use the Solidity language to implement the smart contract in this model and simulate it on the Ethereum test network. We also show simulation results in terms of runtime and resource consumption.
Karl Wüst, Loris Diana, Kari Kostiainen, Ghassan Karame · 6 authors
In this paper, our main goal is to design a solution that adds expressive smart contract execution support as a subsystem to existing legacy blockchain systems. The primary usage of our solution is to enhance systems like Bitcoin that have no built-in smart contract capabilities. The secondary usage is to extend the contract execution capabilities of platforms like Ethereum that support contracts but have severe limitations on the complexity of allowed computations.
Smart contracts are self-executing contracts defining rules for negotiating, verifying the fulfillment of rules and executing the agreement using formal code. They run on top of a blockchain. Errors in smart contracts are costly and are mostly found too late after execution, which is too late for fixing. To improve the validation of executed smart contracts, this paper suggests a process mining based approach. For this, we present an approach for the extraction of meaningful event logs from a blockchain. The event log can be imported in any process mining tool and validation and verification techniques can be used allowing to diagnose (non)conformity in smart contracts by means of common quality measures and with low latency after smart contract execution.
The rise and continued implementation of cryptocurrencies and other cryptoassets is having, and will continue to have, a disruptive impact on the accounting, federal income taxation, and broader financial services industries. Much has been written, researched, and discussed about both cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology, but uncertainty remains as it pertains to how these items should be reported for accounting and tax purposes. What this research attempts to accomplish, through both a review of the literature and publicly available guidance issued by tax and accounting authorities, is to document and analyze what current guidance represents for financial reporting. Additionally, this research proposes how future iterations of cryptoassets and cryptocurrencies might be reported, with recommendations applicable for both practitioners and academics seeking to expand on this work.
We develop a general equilibrium model of cryptocurrency to study a double spending prevention mechanism without payment confirmations. Agents trade cryptocurrency using a digital wallet, and the cryptocurrency system provides a means to verify a wallet's double spending history. A digital wallet may obtain a good reputation for no double spending attempts based on its transaction history. If a buyer makes a payment with a digital wallet that does not have a good reputation, sellers provide goods after payment confirmations in the blockchain to prevent a double spending attack. On the other hand, sellers deliver goods immediately without payment confirmations if the payment is made through a digital wallet with a good reputation as long as the cost of losing a good reputation outweighs the short-run gain from double spending. As the time required for each confirmation increases, the utility loss from delayed delivery of goods increases so double spending incentives decrease.
The cryptocurrency market grew from a $1.5 billion market capitalization in early 2013 to over $795 billion in January 2018. Bitcoin, an exemplar cryptocurrency, gained value from $0.08 before 2010 to over $17,000 per bitcoin in December 2017. While cryptocurrencies have campaigned for revolutionizing financial transactions, the crypto-market is plagued by nefarious minds, fleecing investors in frauds and Ponzi schemes. This crypto-mania therefore presents numerous legal and regulatory challenges that demand prompt and efficient responses. Nevertheless, the decentralized, anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies magnifies these challenges and has constantly outpaced the law’s ability to respond. To understand the effects of different regulatory strategies, this Note compares regulatory landscapes on cryptocurrency between the U.S. and China. In a nutshell, while China explicitly banned any exchange or financing activities between fiat money and “coin substitution” in 2017, the U.S. has placed cryptocurrencies within its existing legal labyrinth. What explains the difference and what is its result? Rather than reducing the regulatory variances simply to differences in political ideologies, this Note attempts to explain the reasons behind the two countries’ drastically different regulatory approaches by understanding the regulators’ institutional capacities and objectives. This Note also identifies the interesting impacts of the two countries’ regulatory approach. Namely, China has attempted to substitute the crypto-market with state-led projects and even potential crypto-fiats, while the U.S. regulatory framework has maintained its consistency, but left some areas lawless while others potentially over- regulated. Part I of this Note introduces the background of cryptocurrency and its technological strengths and weaknesses. Part II surveys the existing regulatory landscapes of the U.S. and China. Part III explains the reasons why the two countries take drastically different approaches in regulating cryptocurrency. Part IV lists comparative strengths and weaknesses between the two regulatory frameworks. Part V concludes and cautiously makes policy recommendations.
Block-chain world is very dynamic and there is need for strong governance and underlying technology architecture to be robust to face challenges. This paper considers Ethereum, a leading block chain. We deep dive into the nature of this block chain, wherein for software upgrades forks are performed. They types of forks and impact is discussed. A specific Ethereum hack led to a hard fork and focus is provided on understanding the hack and overcoming it from a novel approach. The current model has been unable to handle multiple Ethereum attacks. Thus the current approach is compared against a novel approach providing a security and scaling solution. Here the architecture draws upon combining block-chain layers into operating system level. The approach can have tremendous benefits to block chain world and improve the way decentralized application teams perform. The benefits of the novel architecture is discussed. The approach helps safe guard block chain projects, making them safer and chain agnostic.
Blockchain is an emerging field which works on the concept of a digitally distributed ledger and consensus algorithm removing all the threats of intermediaries. Its early applications were related to the finance sector but now this concept has been extended to almost all the major areas of research includ-ing education, IoT, banking, supplychain, defense, governance, healthcare, etc. In the field of healthcare, stakeholders (provider, patient, payer, research organizations, and supply chain bearers) demand interoperability, security, authenticity, transparency, and streamlined transactions. Blockchain technology, built over the internet, has the potential to use the current healthcare data into peer to peer and interoperable manner by using a patient-centric approach eliminating the third party. Using this technology, applications can be built to manage and share secure, transparent and immutable audit trails with reduced systematic fraud. This study reviews existing literature in order to identify the major issues of various healthcare stakeholders and to explore the features of blockchain technology that could resolve identified issues. However, there are some challenges and limitations of this technology which are needed to be focused on future research.
David Allessie, Maciej Sobolewski, Lorenzino Vaccari
In less than ten years from its advent in 2008, the concept of distributed ledgers has entered into mainstream research and policy agendas. Enthusiastic reception, fuelled by the success of Bitcoin and the explosion of potential use cases created high, if not hyped, expectations with respect to the transformative role of blockchain for the industry and the public sector. Growing experimentation with distributed ledgers and the emergence of the first operational implementations provide an opportunity to go beyond hype and speculation based on theoretical use cases. This report looks at the ongoing exploration of blockchain technology by governments. The analysis of a group of pioneering developments of public services shows that blockchain technology can reduce bureaucracy, increase the efficiency of administrative processes and increase the level of trust in public recordkeeping. Based on the state-of-art developments, blockchain has not yet demonstrated to be either transformative or even disruptive an innovation for governments as it is sometimes portrayed. Ongoing projects bring incremental rather than fundamental changes to the operational capacities of governments. Nevertheless some of them offer clear value for citizens. Technological and ecosystem maturity of distributed ledgers have to increase in order to unlock the transformative power of blockchain. Policy agenda should focus on non-technological barriers, such as incompatibility between blockchain-based solutions and existing legal and organizational frameworks. This principal policy goal cannot be achieved by adapting technology to legacy systems. It requires using the transformative power of blockchain to be used to create new processes, organizations, structures and standards. Hence, policy support should stimulate more experimentation with both the technology and new administrative processes that can be re-engineered for blockchain.
Achieving data integrity verification for large-scale IoT data in cloud storage safely and efficiently has become one of the hot topics with further applications of Internet of Things. Traditional data integrity verification methods generally use encryption techniques to protect data in the cloud, relying on trusted Third Party Auditors (TPAs). Blockchain based data integrity schemes can successfully avoid the trust problem of TPAs, however, they have to face the problems of large computational and communication overhead. To address the issues above, we propose a Blockchain and Bilinear mapping based Data Integrity Scheme (BB-DIS) for large-scale IoT data. In our BB-DIS, IoT data is sliced into shards and homomorphic verifiable tags (HVTs) are generated for sampling verification. Data integrity can be achieved according to the characteristics of bilinear mapping in the form of blockchain transactions. Performance analysis of BB-DIS including feasibility, security, dynamicity and complexity is also discussed in detail. A prototype system of BB-DIS is then presented to illustrate how to implement our verification scheme. Experimental results based on Hyperledger Fabric demonstrate that the proposed verification scheme significantly improves the efficiency of integrity verification for large-scale IoT data with no need of TPAs.
Xintong Ling, Jiaheng Wang, Taha Bouchoucha, Bernard C. Levy · 5 authors
The relentless growth of wireless applications and data traffic continues to accentuate the long felt need for decentralized, self-managed, and cooperative network architectures. Enlightened by the power of blockchain technology, we propose a blockchain radio access network (B-RAN) architecture and develop decentralized, secure, and efficient mechanisms to manage network access and authentication among inherently trustless network entities. We further identify promising advanced functions made possible by adopting blockchain for open radio access networks. Our test results demonstrate the benefits of the B-RAN architecture. We also present a number of challenges and future research directions.
The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the explosive growth of valuable data produced by user equipment have led to strong demand for access control, especially hierarchical access control, which is performed from a group communication perspective. However, the key management strategies for such a future Internet are based mostly on a trusted third party that requires full trust of the key generation center (KGC) or central authority (CA). Recent studies indicate that centralized cloud centers will be unlikely to deliver satisfactory services to customers because we place too much trust in third parties; therefore, these centers do not apply to user privacy-oriented scenarios. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a novel blockchain-based distributed key management architecture (BDKMA) with fog computing to reduce latency and multiblockchains operated in the cloud to achieve cross-domain access. The proposed scheme utilizes blockchain technology to satisfy the decentralization, fine-grained auditability, high scalability, and extensibility requirements, as well as the privacy-preserving principles for hierarchical access control in IoT. We designed system operations methods and introduced different authorization assignment modes and group access patterns to reinforce the extensibility. We evaluated the performance of our proposed architecture and compared it with existing models using various performance measures. The simulation results show that the multiblockchain structure substantially improves system performance, and the scalability is excellent as the network size increases. Furthermore, dynamic transaction collection time adjustment enables the performance and system capacity to be optimized for various environments.
Previous research studies mostly focused on enhancing the security of radio frequency identification (RFID) protocols for various RFID applications that rely on a centralized database. However, blockchain technology is quickly emerging as a novel distributed and decentralized alternative that provides higher data protection, reliability, immutability, transparency, and lower management costs compared with a conventional centralized database. These properties make it extremely suitable for integration in a supply chain management system. In order to successfully fuse RFID and blockchain technologies together, a secure method of communication is required between the RFID tagged goods and the blockchain nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes a robust ultra-lightweight mutual authentication RFID protocol that works together with a decentralized database to create a secure blockchain-enabled supply chain management system. Detailed security analysis is performed to prove that the proposed protocol is secure from key disclosure, replay, man-in-the-middle, de-synchronization, and tracking attacks. In addition to that, a formal analysis is conducted using Gong, Needham, and Yahalom logic and automated validation of internet security protocols and applications tool to verify the security of the proposed protocol. The protocol is proven to be efficient with respect to storage, computational, and communication costs. In addition to that, a further step is taken to ensure the robustness of the protocol by analyzing the probability of data collision written to the blockchain.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has integrated the sensor network silos to the Internet and enabled the provision of value-added services across these networks. These smart devices are now becoming socially conscious by following the social Internet of Things (SIoT) model that empowers them to create and maintain social relationships among them. The Social Internet of Vehicle (SIoV) is one application of SIoT in the vehicular domain that has evolved the existing intelligent transport system (ITS) and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) to the next phase of Intelligent by adding socializing aspect and constant connectivity. SIoV generates a massive amount of real-time data enriched with context and social relationship information about vehicles, drivers, passengers, and the surrounding environment. Therefore, the role of privacy management becomes essential in SIoV, as data is collected and stored at different layers of its architecture. The challenge of privacy is aggravated because the dynamic nature of SIoV poses a major threat in its adoption. Motivated by the need to address these aspects, this paper identifies the challenges involved in managing privacy in SIoV. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the privacy issues and factors that are essential to be considered for preserving privacy in SIoV environments from different perspectives including the privacy of a person, behavior and action, communication, data and image, thoughts and feelings, location and space, and association. In addition, the paper discusses the blockchain-based solutions to preserve privacy for SIoV.