Through the Bitcoin application, the innovative technology was miraculously launched in the markets, influencing numerous industries. Bitcoin is nothing but a form of digital currency (cryptocurrency) that can be used for trading in place of fiat money, where the underlying infrastructure is called Blockchain. The Blockchain is an open ledger that provides decentralization, transparency, immutability, and confidentiality. Blockchain can be used in massive, beneficial applications such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, the Internet of Things (IoT), etc. Most of the industrial applications rely on the permissioned Blockchain. However, the permissioned Blockchain fails in some aspects, such as scalability and throughput. This paper suggests a system to solve the scalability issue of permissioned Blockchain by incorporating data science techniques. The scalability analysis of the proposed solution is done in the hyperledger fabric framework with a variable number of transactions and results in scalability improvement.
Abstract The progression of Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in generation of huge amount of data. Effective handling and analysis of such big volumes of data proposes a crucial challenge. Existing cloud-based frameworks of Big Data visualization are rising costs for servers, equipment, and energy consumption. There is a need for a green solution targeting lesser cost and energy consumption with tamper-proof record-keeping, storage, and interactive visualization with only demanded data. We have proposed a Blockchain-based Green big data Visualization (BGbV) solution using Hyperledger Sawtooth for optimum utilization of organization resources. BGbV will support current distributed data visualization platforms and guarantee benefits like security and data availability with lesser storage costs. It helps reduce costs by utilizing small resources that are already available and consume less energy, making it an environmentally friendly solution.
In 2008, the world was introduced to Blockchain. In 2009, the first open-source Blockchainbased cyber currency was introduced as Bitcoin. By 2025, studies indicate that Blockchain-based enterprise-wide application revenue will reach nearly $20 billion. Therefore, this study proposes to build on the success of Thailand's National Single Window (THAINSW) gateway document interchange architecture (DIA) and further expand its availability to a much larger network of e-Government participants using Blockchain architecture. Therefore, the authors set how to investigate how and where Blockchain technology could be implemented in order to support of Thailand's 4.0 and digital economy visions. In addition to the qualitative analysis of the literature, the authors used input from a panel of 25 Thai experts to develop a foundation for the analysis based on Sathosi Nakamoto’s seven Blockchain disciplines. This analysis was enhanced from the authors’ own experiences in real-world Blockchain implementations. Results revealed that Blockchain is a highly innovative approach to secure transaction execution, information storage, performing functions, and establishing trust in an open architectural environment.Blockchain has the potential to increase good governance, increase transparency and privacy, and reduce the chance of corruption.
Quan Nguyen, André Cronje, Michael Kong, Egor Lysenko · 5 authors
This paper consolidates the core technologies and key concepts of our novel Lachesis consensus protocol and Fantom Opera platform, which is permissionless, leaderless and EVM compatible. We introduce our new protocol, so-called Lachesis, for distributed networks achieving Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT)~\cite{lachesis01}. Each node in Lachesis protocol operates on a local block DAG, namely \emph{OPERA DAG}. Aiming for a low time to finality (TTF) for transactions, our general model considers DAG streams of high speed but asynchronous events. We integrate Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a DAG model in Lachesis protocol to improve performance and security. Our general model of trustless system leverages participants' stake as their validating power~\cite{stakedag}. Lachesis's consensus algorithm uses Lamport timestamps, graph layering and concurrent common knowledge to guarantee a consistent total ordering of event blocks and transactions. In addition, Lachesis protocol allows dynamic participation of new nodes into Opera network. Lachesis optimizes DAG storage and processing time by splitting local history into checkpoints (so-called epochs). We also propose a model to improve stake decentralization, and network safety and liveness ~\cite{stairdag}. Built on our novel Lachesis protocol, Fantom's Opera platform is a public, leaderless, asynchronous BFT, layer-1 blockchain, with guaranteed deterministic finality. Hence, Lachesis protocol is suitable for distributed ledgers by leveraging asynchronous partially ordered sets with logical time ordering instead of blockchains. We also present our proofs into a model that can be applied to abstract asynchronous distributed system.
The Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol is one of the consensus algorithms for blockchain, in which the integrity of a new block is validated according to voting by nodes called validators. However, due to validator-oriented voting, voting results are likely to be false when the number of validators with wrong votes increases. In the PoS protocol, validators are motivated to vote correctly by reward and penalty mechanisms. With such mechanisms, validators who contribute to correct consensuses are rewarded, while those who vote incorrectly are penalized. In this paper, we consider an incentivization mechanism based on the voting profile of a validator, which is estimated from the voting history of the validator. In this mechanism, the stake collected due to the penalties are redistributed to validators who vote correctly, improving the incentive of validators to contribute to the system. We evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism by computer simulations, investigating the impacts of system parameters on the estimation accuracy of the validator profile and the amount of validator's stake. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism can estimate the voting profile of a validator accurately even when the voting profile dynamically changes. It is also shown that the proposed mechanism gives more reward to validators who vote correctly with high voting profile.
Eranga Bandara, Sachin Shetty, Deepak K. Tosh, Xueping Liang
Enterprise-level energy delivery systems (EDSs) depend on different software or hardware vendors to achieve operational efficiency. Critical components of these systems are typically manufactured and integrated by overseas suppliers, which expands the attack surface to adversaries with additional opportunities to infiltrate into EDSs. Due to this reason, the risk management of the EDS supply chain is crucial to ensure that we are knowledgeable about the vulnerabilities in software and hardware components that comprise any critical part, quantifiable risk metrics to assess the severity and exploitability of the attack, and provide remediation solutions that can influence a prioritized mitigation plan. There is a need to realize cyber supply chain risk management for industrial control systems’ hardware, software, and computing and networking services associated with bulk electric system (BES) operations. This article proposes a blockchain-based cyber supply chain provenance platform (“Vind”) for EDSs to realize data provenance in a cyber supply chain ecosystem.
In this paper, we report the measuring outcomes of Hyperledger, a Distributed Ledger, which is the derivation Blockchain Technology. A technique to evaluate Hyperledger in a limited infrastructure is developed. The measured infrastructure consists of 8 nodes with a load of up to 20000 transactions/second. Hyperledger constantly runs all evaluation, namely, for 20,000 transactions, the run time 74.30s, latency 73.40ms latency, and 257 tps. This initial evaluation can provide an overview for practitioners in making choices about the adoption of blockchain technology in their IT systems.
Juan Boubeta-Puig, Jesús Rosa-Bilbao, Jan Mendling
Blockchain provides an immutable distributed ledger for storing transactions. One of the challenges of blockchain is the particular processing of dynamic queries due to accumulating costs. Complex Event Processing (CEP) provides efficient and effective support for this in a way, however, that is difficult to integrate with blockchain. This paper addresses the research challenges of integrating blockchain with CEP. More specifically, we envision an effective development environment in which (i) event-driven smart contracts are modeled in a graphical way, which are, in turn, (ii) automatically transformed into complementary code that is deployed in both a CEP engine and a blockchain network, and then (iii) executed on off-chain CEP applications which, connected to different data sources and sinks, automatically invoke smart contracts when event pattern conditions are met. We follow a classic systems engineering approach for defining the concepts of our system, called CEPchain, which addresses the described requirements. CEPchain was evaluated using a real-world case study for vaccine delivery, which requires an unbroken cold chain. The results demonstrate that our approach can be applied without requiring experts on event processing and smart contract languages. Our contribution simplifies the design of integrated CEP and blockchain functionality by hiding implementation details and supporting efficient deployment.
One of the requirements for mining cryptocurrency (Crypto) is that the secured ledger of the blockchain must be updated. However, updating the secured ledger requires that the miner develop and solve complex mathematical equations in higher orders hexadecimal 64-digit solution called a hash. In addition to this challenge, the mining processes of cryptocurrency are both resource and cost-intensive. The resources required include, but not limited to mining software, hardware, power (energy usage), CPU or compute cycles, and NP-hard problem. Apart from these numerous challenges that are associated with mining cryptocurrency, the amount of speed that is required to mine a single block is core. Cryptocurrency mining speed requirement is significantly important because only miners that can have the fastest mining device are most likely to get the reward (profit) from competing for a block. In this paper, we designed and implemented a model to speed up mining process which is capable of giving miners an advantage to arrive at a block earlier. The novelty of our architecture is that our design is based on high performance computing paradigm where we achieve processor speed up by parallelizing the number of processors p. We experimented by varying p = 4, 8, 16. Our experimental results where we used the MC6800 simulated on Easy68k emulator demonstrate feasibility of our proposed model and prove that speed was an essential key to cryptocurrency mining. Keywords: Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Architecture, Mining, Speedup, Bitcoin. CISDI Journal Reference Format Allenotor, D. & Oyemade, D. A. (2021): An Optimized Parallel Hybrid Architecture for Cryptocurrency Mining. Computing, Information Systems, Development Informatics & Allied Research Journal. Vol 12 No 1, Pp 95-104 DOI - https://doi.org/ 10.22624/AIMS/CISDI/V12N1P10. Available online at www.isteams.net/cisdijournal
Md. Arafatur Rahman, Mohd Saharudin Abuludin, Ling Xi Yuan, Md. Shohidul Islam · 5 authors
Massive data handling requirement in education Industry 4.0 has attracted interests in the research of microservice architectures due to their scalability, resilience, and elasticity characteristics. This development has been challenged by extensive data exchange required by a set of independent microservices to build a complete application, which could result in increasing risks and exposure to the security and privacy breaches of the data. It is imperative to see that educational data are highly sensitive, critical for ascertaining educational attainment and facilitating credentials for qualification verifications. This article puts forward a new proposal of devising a security and privacy-preserving design mechanism of data transactions in educational microservices leveraging the blockchain technology. The design comprises three phases, namely the blockchain framework, data sending–receiving, and confidentiality-integrity-availability over a secured platform with each phase having detailed mechanisms for algorithm implementation. The proposal is shown to exhibit favorable performance in terms of time cost of publishing, throughput, and latency, and shown to have high survey acceptance in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability with approximately 10% improvement from prior blockchain adoption.
Xu Wang, Wei Ni, Xuan F. Zha, Guangsheng Yu · 7 authors
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and consistency are only qualitative or rely on specific assumptions. This paper presents discrete-time Markov chain models to quantify the capacity of Proof-of-Work based public blockchains in non-ideal networks. The comprehensive model is collapsed to be ergodic under the eventual consistency of blockchains, achieving tractability and efficient evaluations of blockchain capacity. A closed-form expression for the capacity is derived in the case of two miners. Another important aspect is that we extend the ergodic model to analyze the capacity under strong consistency, evaluating the robustness of blockchains against double-spending attacks. Validated by simulations, the proposed models are accurate and reveal the effect of link quality and the distribution of mining rates on blockchain capacity and the ratio of stale blocks.
Flavio Corradini, Alessandro Marcelletti, Andrea Morichetta, Andrea Polini · 7 authors
As a disruptive technology, the blockchain is continuously finding novel application contexts, bringing new opportunities and radical changes. In this paper, we use blockchain as a communication infrastructure to support multi-party business processes. In particular, through smart contracts specifically generated by the mentioned business process, it is possible to derive a trustable infrastructure enabling the interaction among parties. Moreover, the emergence of different blockchain technologies, satisfying different characteristics, gives the possibility to support the same business process dealing with different non-functional needs. In this paper, we propose a novel engineering methodology supported by a practical framework called Multi-Chain. It permits to derive, using a model-driven strategy, a blockchain-based infrastructure, that can be deployed over a specific blockchain technology (e.g., Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric). The objective is to permit the single definition and multiple deployments of the business process, to deliver the same functionalities, but satisfying different non-functional needs. In such a way, organisations willing to cooperate can select the multi-party business process and the blockchain technology they would like to use to satisfy their needs. Using Multi-Chain, they will be able to automatically derive from a Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) choreography diagram a blockchain infrastructure ready to be used. This overcomes the need to get acquainted with many details of the specific technology.
Blockchain-based smart contract platforms have traditionally employed the transaction-driven execution model. This paper presents an alternate framework for blockchain-based smart contract execution called EDSC. Our platform design presents a novel approach to tackle the scalability and performance challenges facing the smart contract ecosystem. We base EDSC's design on the Ethereum template, and it can be readily implemented for other existing smart contract platforms. To evaluate our design, we perform an experimental implementation using the Ethereum client. Our experiments with performance modeling show, on average, a 2.2 to 4.6 times reduced total latency of event-triggered smart contracts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the design in supporting time-sensitive applications. Additionally, we comment on the design's potential security aspects and demonstrate its utility by discussing potential use cases.
Decentralized systems and protocols are becoming more popular every year. The main limitations of public permissionless blockchains are low bandwidth and high fees. There are various ways to reduce the load on the network to address these drawbacks, the majority of them were developed for Ethereum but stay valid for many other chains. The paper considers the following options for scaling decentralized systems: consensus modification and sharding that are embedded in the core of a blockchain, second layer solutions and sidechains that can be built on top of a network.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) high availability demands architectural, operational, and security considerations. Results show that Kubernetes cluster durability and performance under different workloads need multi-region failover, intelligent auto-scaling, and adequate networking. Cluster auto-scaler updates and vertical and horizontal autoscaling rules improve resource efficiency and computational overhead. High Kubernetes availability requires security. Least privilege enforcement, automatic certificate rotation, RBAC, and encryption reduce data breaches, compliance violations, and illegal access. AWS KMS, Secrets Manager, and service mesh-based mutual TLS authentication safeguarded cluster communication. Observability and performance benchmarking are critical for proactive system monitoring and resilience engineering. Companies use Prometheus and Grafana for metric collecting, Fluentd and OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing, and chaos engineering frameworks for fault injection to foresee and correct issues. These methods improve enterprise MTTR, downtime, and predictability. Industry case studies prove EKS installation works. Kubemetes' scalability, dependability, and affordability aid financial institutions, healthcare, e-commerce, and telecoms. Plenty of choice Best Kubernetes practices decrease latency, infrastructure costs, and downtime. Many themes are developing for Kubemetes' high availability. Rethinking workload orchestration with serverless Kubernetes solutions like AWS Fargate for EKS simplifies infrastructure administration and resource utilization. Without node provisioning, organizations can develop quickly and inexpensively. Kubernetes-based edge computing for latency-sensitive applications including real-time analytics, 10T device orchestration, and 5G network optimization is another trend. K3s and MicroK8s at the network edge and centralized multi-cluster control planes enable regionally distributed high availability with minimal latency. Istio, Linkerd, and Consul enhance interservice communication, traffic routing, and security. Massive Kubernetes systems benefit from progressive traffic shifting, zero-downtime rolling deployments, and autonomous circuit breaking. Another achievement is Kubernetes monitoring system machine learning-driven anomaly detection and predictive maintenance. Al-powered observability frameworks can identify infrastructure deterioration, forecast resource congestion, and automate preemptive scaling to avert failures and enhance workload allocation. Kubernetes high availability optimization has improved, however Al-driven auto-scaling and self-healing clusters need research. Traditional auto-scaling ümresholds disregard non-linear workloads, traffic surges, and unexpected failures. Analysis of reinforcement learning-based scaling algorithms that dynamically adjust cluster capacity in real time utilizing historical data, prediction analytics, and workload demand predictions. Kubernetes clusters that self-heal are another autonomous infrastructure management frontier. Complexities may prevent human intervention or failover. Al-driven failure detection, automatic node repair, and intelligent fault recovery can identify abnormalities, problematic nodes, shift workloads, and take real-time remedial action in Kubernetes clusters. Studying genetic algorithms and evolutionary computing for Kubemetes scheduler development is intriguing. Least-loaded node selection schedulers and computationally efficient bin packing are not adaptive. Al-driven evolutionary scheduling models may improve Kubernetes pod placement, inter-node communication cost, and workload allocation. Cross-cluster federation and Al-augmented multi-cluster load balancing are promising research areas. Dynamic workloads need real-time adaptive load balancing in Kubernetes Federation v2. Future Al-powered predictive load distribution models may improve federated cluster job allocation by factoring network latency, computational cost, and failure likelihood. Finally, blockchain-based decentralized cloud orchestration and Kubernetes high availability intrigue. Distributed ledger technology for secure state synchronization, federated identity management, and decentralized resource scheduling may make Kubernetes more resilient to cloud provider outages, security breaches, and infrastructure failures. Blockchain-based Kubernetes topologies may increase fault tolerance, frustless multi-cloud deployments, and data integrity across geographically distant clusters. High availability computing will be defined by Al-driven automation, self-healing infrastructure, and decentralized cloud-native designs as Kubernetes use grows. These improvements may improve Kubernetes workload orchestration, system resilience, and cloud-native application scalability.
Periklis Kostamis, Andreas Sendros, Pavlos S. Efraimidis
The cost of using a blockchain infrastructure as well as the time required to search and retrieve information from it must be considered when designing a decentralized application. In this work, we examine a comprehensive set of data management approaches for Ethereum applications and assess the associated cost in gas as well as the retrieval performance. More precisely, we analyze the storage and retrieval of various-sized data, utilizing smart contract storage. In addition, we study hybrid approaches by using IPFS and Swarm as storage platforms along with Ethereum as a timestamping proof mechanism. Such schemes are especially effective when large chunks of data have to be managed. Moreover, we present methods for low-cost data handling in Ethereum, namely the event-logs, the transaction payload, and the almost surprising exploitation of unused function arguments. Finally, we evaluate these methods on a comprehensive set of experiments.
Smart contract-based methods are used to implement the blockchain applications. While smart contracts have separate pre-deployed steps, which are suitable for applications that are deployed once and invoked many times. However, there are smart contracts that are used only one time (the disposable smart contract) or few times. Pre-deployment requires an additional step and additional transactions, which bring burdens (such as longer waiting time and more transaction fees) to users. In this paper, we propose a new Lifecycle model of smart contracts, which allows combining the pre-deployment with function invocations. This facilitates the usage of the disposable smart contract, as users are only required to send one transaction to perform both the pre-deployment and the function invocation. Together with the smart contract separation, it also allows participants to customize their special smart contracts at the request time. At last, we verify the proposed model and it shows the potential to save additional burden and to facilitate the usage of the smart contract.
Andrei Vladyko, Anastasia Spirkina, Vasiliy Elagin
Like multiservice networks, blockchain technology is currently experiencing significant development because of its decentralization and ability to organize secure, seamless, reliable data exchange and storage. Due to the significant demand for the technology, there is a need to analyze the impact of these technology processes on network characteristics to predict traffic behavior and ensure required quality indicators, as well as on the stability of public communication network elements when blockchain technology operates. Conducting a full-scale experiment is a time-consuming task that cannot always be accomplished, so in this paper, the authors propose considering approaches to modeling these systems and, as an example, propose to use a simulation system to assess the performance of the network and its elements.
Mahdi Fahmideh, John Grundy, Aakash Ahmad, Jun Shen · 11 authors
Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain-based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from the perspective of the software engineering discipline. We characterize BBS engineering based on the key aspects of theoretical foundations, processes, models , and roles . Based on these aspects, we present a rich repertoire of development tasks, design principles, models, roles, challenges, and resolution techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only give software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpin a starting point for further research in this field.
Anne Sofie Vingerhoets, Samedi Heng, Yves Wautelet
New blockchain-based projects do appear every day. The technology has indeed been popularized by cryptocurrencies but is now gaining interest in various domains and new types of applications are evaluated constantly. Understanding the impact of blockchain adoption on the organization and the internals of blockchain-related behavior nevertheless remains a challenge for managers but also for IT professionals. This article studies how two existing organizational and software modeling languages can be fit to document a blockchain development project in Supply Chain Management (SCM) at its earliest stages. These two frameworks are i* on the one side and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) use case and sequence diagrams on the other side. The real life project used as a case study in this application is ‘Farm-to-Fork’ where a blockchain solution for the Supply Chain (SC) of farm animals is developed. The application of the frameworks is intended to identify their strengths and weaknesses. An extension of i* is proposed to deal with blockchain privacy issues as well as laws and norms. We finally point to the complementarity of i* and UML use case and sequence diagrams in a Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering (BOSE) context. The i* framework indeed supports early requirements to understand the impact of the project on stakeholders while UML use case and sequence diagrams support the late requirements and the design by depicting the use of blockchain and some of its behavioral mechanisms.
The act of maintaining educational records both online and on paper have become a norm. With the enforcement of lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the education sector attempted to move their entire operations online. However with this move, various operations such as Verification of Documents, Approval of LORs have become harder to deal with in a legitimate manner. In this paper, we have compared various existing methods to deal with the problem at hand and proposed our system for the same.
B. Prabadevi, N. Deepa, Quoc‐Viet Pham, Dinh C. Nguyen · 8 authors
Blockchain is gaining momentum as a promising technology for many application domains, one of them being the Edge-of- Things (EoT) that is enabled by the integration of edge computing and the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Particularly, the amalgamation of blockchain and EoT leads to a new paradigm, called blockchain enabled EoT (BEoT) that is crucial for enabling future low-latency and high-security services and applications. This article envisions a novel BEoT architecture for supporting industrial applications under the management of blockchain at the network edge in a wide range of IoT use cases such as smart home, smart healthcare, smart grid, and smart transportation. The potentials of BEoT in providing security services are also explored, including access authentication, data privacy preservation, attack detection, and trust management. Finally, we point out some key research challenges and future directions in this emerging area.
Bishakh Chandra Ghosh, Tanay Bhartia, Sourav Kanti Addya, Sandip Chakraborty
With the increasing adoption of private blockchain platforms, consortia operating in various sectors such as trade, finance, logistics, etc., are becoming common. Despite having the benefits of a completely decentralized architecture which supports transparency and distributed control, existing private blockchains limit the data, assets, and processes within its closed boundary, which restricts secure and verifiable service provisioning to the end-consumers. Thus, platforms such as e-commerce with multiple sellers or cloud federation with a collection of cloud service providers cannot be decentralized with the existing blockchain platforms. This paper proposes a decentralized gateway architecture interfacing private blockchain with end-users by leveraging the unique combination of public and private blockchain platforms through interoperation. Through the use case of decentralized cloud federations, we have demonstrated the viability of the solution. Our testbed implementation with Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, with three service providers, shows that such consortium can operate within an acceptable response latency while scaling up to 64 parallel requests per second for cloud infrastructure provisioning. Further analysis over the Mininet emulation platform indicates that the platform can scale well with minimal impact over the latency as the number of participating service providers increases.