There has been a massive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications recently for both personal and organization use cases. But an IoT network is vulnerable to many privacy and security concerns. While some researchers have tried to define different access control models for IoT and tried to use blockchain in some cases, the solutions presented to date lacks a flexible and robust access control model that can be used for complex organization and cross-organization resource access scenarios and lacks the scalability and performance needed for IoT. This paper introduces a novel entitlement-based access control model that provides an efficient and secure way to delegate resource access rights to any entity. The solution uses service-oriented approach and a combination of public blockchain (with smart contracts) and local off-chain data for entitlements management and control. To analyze the proposed architecture, a large-scale cross-organization IoT scenario is taken into consideration and some qualitative evaluations are presented while implementation with Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts are currently in progress.
Anum Nawaz, Tuan Nguyen Gia, Jorge Peña Queralta, Tomi Westerlund
The edge and fog computing paradigms enable more responsive and smarter systems without relying on cloud servers for data processing and storage. This reduces network load as well as latency. Nonetheless, the addition of new layers in the network architecture increases the number of security vulnerabilities. In privacy-critical systems, the appearance of new vulnerabilities is more significant. To cope with this issue, we propose and implement an Ethereum Blockchain based architecture with edge artificial intelligence to analyze data at the edge of the network and keep track of the parties that access the results of the analysis, which are stored in distributed databases.
Peilin Zheng, Zibin Zheng, Jiajing Wu, Hong‐Ning Dai
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have received extensive attention recently. Massive data has been stored on permission-less blockchains. The analysis of massive blockchain data can bring huge business values. However, the absence of well-processed up-to-date blockchain datasets impedes big data analytics of blockchain data. To fill this gap, we collect and process the up-to-date on-chain data from Ethereum, which is one of the most popular permission-less blockchains. We name such well-processed Ethereum data as XBlock-ETH, which consists of transactions, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies (i.e., tokens). However, it is non-trivial to partition and categorize the collected raw Ethereum data to the well-processed datasets since the whole processing procedure requires sophisticated knowledge on software engineering as well as big data analytics. Moreover, we also present basic statistics and exploration for each of the well-processed datasets. Furthermore, we also outline the possible research opportunities based on XBlock-ETH, with the data and code released online.
Negli ultimi anni la tecnologia blockchain si sta diffondendo sempre più su larga scala in diversi settori di ricerca, inclusi i Beni Culturali. Esistono diverse tipologie di blockchain, che possono essere classificate sia in base al tipo di utenti che possono accedervi, sia in base alle funzionalità che offrono. Questo articolo descrive uno studio teorico in cui si confrontano due blockchain molto diverse tra di loro: Ethereum e Hyperledger, al fine di definire quale delle due è maggiormente indicata per la memorizzazione di beni culturali tangibili contenuti in archivi digitali. Dopo una breve descrizione delle due tecnologie, verrà descritto un possibile scenario di applicazione abbastanza generico per poter capire quale delle due tecnologie meglio soddisfa i requisiti. Verrà quindi effettuato il confronto tra le due blockchain sulla base di problematiche generali, requisiti architetturali e considerazioni varie. Come risultato del confronto, emergerà che Hyperledger Fabric è più adatta nel contesto degli archivi digitali.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
S. Ganesh Kumar, A. Murugan, B. Muruganantham, B. Sriman
Internet of Things (IoT) assumes a critical part in the advancement of different fields. The IoT data trusted exchange in recent year extend of uses influence an awesome request and increasing scale. In such a platform, exchange the data sets that they require and specialist organization can search. However, the enough trust as the third-party mediators for data exchange in centralized infrastructure cannot provide. This paper proposes a blockchain for IoT data trusted exchange based on decentralized solution. In particular, the fundamental standards of blockchain in verify manner, individuals can communicate with each other without a confided in mediator intermediary. Blockchain enable us to have a distributed, digital ledger. IoT (Internet of Things) sensor devices (zigbee) utilizing blockchain technology to assert public availability of temperature records, tracking location shipment, humidity, preventing damage, data immutability. The sensor devices looking the temperature, location, damage of each parcel during the shipment to completely guarantee directions. In blockchain all data is got moved from one position to another, where a smart contract assesses against the product attributes. Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts atlast it gets through knowledge a design to be copied and presents its decentralized distributed digital ledger, auditable, transparent, features visually.
From the ancient Lydians, who invented coins as a payment type, to the first paper money in China, money and payments have been evolving for centuries. In 2008, an anonymous person or group using Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper titled, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System . Since then, Bitcoin (BTC) has ushered in a new era of decentralized digital currencies and blockchain technology. As a result, digital currencies have exploded in popularity in recent years. There are around 20,000 cryptos, with a total market value of nearly $1.2 trillion. As the original and most valuable cryptocurrency, Bitcoin holds about 45% of the whole cryptocurrency market. The second-largest cryptocurrency is Ethereum, which holds a 16% market value. The price of Bitcoin has fluctuated over the years, but it has generally increased in the long term. In November 2021, Bitcoin reached its highest-ever price of $68,789.63.
Pavel V. Sukharev, Dmitry S. Silnov, Maxim O. Shishkin
In terms of cryptocurrency, mining is a process of creating a new transaction block to add it to the blockchain. The cryptocurrency protocol should ensure the reliability of new transaction blocks. One of the popular mining protocols is the Proof-of-Work protocol, which requires the miner to perform a certain work to verify its right to add a new block into the blockchain. To perform this work, high-performance hardware is used, such as GPU. On the program level, hardware needs special computing framework, for example, CUDA or OpenCL. In this article, we discuss Ethereum cryptocurrency mining using the OpenCL standard. The Ethereum cryptocurrency is the most popular cryptocurrency with GPU-based mining. There are several open-source implementations of the Ethereum cryptocurrency miners. The host-part of the OpenCL-miner is considered, which makes the research results independent of the mining algorithm and allows using the results of the research in the mining of other cryptocurrencies. During the research, we have found the problems, which lead to mining productivity loss, and we are looking for the ways to resolve these problems and thus increase mining performance. As part of solving these problems, we have developed the algorithm for the functioning of the miner and proposed the methodology of determining the optimal size of OpenCL work, which allows to reduce the impact of problems found and achieve maximum mining productivity using OpenCL framework.
Apart from the good utilization of the blockchain, there are different challenges that are there at the blockchain system. The problem is that despite several advantages of a blockchain, the current blockchain networks cannot support at large scale application system. Some of the major problems that blockchain technology suffering from are scalability, privacy, and interoperability. The major issue of blockchain technology is scalability. The problem of scalability means that the capacity to process a transaction on a blockchain is very limited and slow. If we think about financial transactions and we compare the ethereum blockchain or the Bitcoin blockchain to the financial transactions provided by Visa MasterCard or any other centralized company, then we would see a difference between them. The difference is that ten to fifteen transactions per second are performed by blockchain-based decentralized cryptocurrency systems in comparison to several thousand transactions per second by a centralized credit-card system.
Since 2013, Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) have allowed companies to attract financing with the help of cryptocurrencies. Statistics of ICO shows that the ICO market is increasing and demand for funds continues to grow with claims of over $ 15 billion raised in the first half of 2018. The increasing volumes of investment in ICO projects as an alternative method to venture capital or IPO are caused by, for example, the possibility of reselling the received tokens at a higher price after the launch of the project or obtaining the company’s services at lower prices. While the importance of the topic is growing, there is the absence of fundamental works emphasizing the determinants of an ICO’s success. The scientific novelty of the forthcoming research consists in the formation of the model evaluation of ICO success. Using econometric analysis based on data for 1392 projects, we show that the volatility of the main cryptocurrencies has a significant impact on the success of ICO. The constraints of the platform for Smart Contacts (ERC-20) and dependence on the Ethereum volatility overcome all other factors. Our data contributes to existing literature and shows the insignificance e of the sector of the project, almost all location region and fl of infl e of quality of the team. This result may be explained by the uncertainty of the investor about the project (weak signals), absence of the regulation and legal framework. This result is beneficial for owners of companies since it is an argument for decreasing costs for marketing.
This paper describes a decentralized electronic voting system using blockchain technology with peer-to-peer network rather than the centralized voting system of server-client structure. In the proposed system, an Ethereum-based private blockchain network is configured and decentralized applications are implemented to store and distribute voting data to all nodes participating in the network to create secure and reliable electronic voting system. Smart contracts for electronic voting are implemented using the Solidity language and distributed to a configured network so that all users can view and vote on elections, and voting data are shared and contrasted by all users in the network, which makes it possible to build a safer and more reliable electronic voting system without third party involvement.
Thomas Durieux, João F. Ferreira, Rui Abreu, Pedro E. D. Cruz
Over the last few years, there has been substantial research on automated analysis, testing, and debugging of Ethereum smart contracts. However, it is not trivial to compare and reproduce that research. To address this, we present an empirical evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art automated analysis tools using two new datasets: i) a dataset of 69 annotated vulnerable smart contracts that can be used to evaluate the precision of analysis tools; and ii) a dataset with all the smart contracts in the Ethereum Blockchain that have Solidity source code available on Etherscan (a total of 47,518 contracts). The datasets are part of SmartBugs, a new extendable execution framework that we created to facilitate the integration and comparison between multiple analysis tools and the analysis of Ethereum smart contracts. We used SmartBugs to execute the 9 automated analysis tools on the two datasets. In total, we ran 428,337 analyses that took approximately 564 days and 3 hours, being the largest experimental setup to date both in the number of tools and in execution time. We found that only 42% of the vulnerabilities from our annotated dataset are detected by all the tools, with the tool Mythril having the higher accuracy (27%). When considering the largest dataset, we observed that 97% of contracts are tagged as vulnerable, thus suggesting a considerable number of false positives. Indeed, only a small number of vulnerabilities (and of only two categories) were detected simultaneously by four or more tools.
Ethereum is a distributed blockchain that can execute smart contracts, which inter-communicate and perform transactions automatically. The execution of smart contracts is paid in the form of gas, which is a monetary unit used in the Ethereum blockchain. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) provides the metering capability for smart contract execution. Instruction costs vary depending on the instruction type and the approximate computational resources required to execute the instruction on the network. The cost of gas is adjusted using transaction fees to ensure adequate payment of the network. In this work, we highlight the "real" economics of smart contracts. We show that the actual costs of executing smart contracts are disproportionate to the computational costs and that this gap is continuously widening. We show that the gas cost-model of the underlying EVM instruction-set is wrongly modeled. Specifically, the computational cost for the SLOAD instruction increases with the length of the blockchain. Our proposed performance model estimates gas usage and execution time of a smart contract at a given block-height. The new gas-cost model incorporates the block-height to eliminate irregularities in the Ethereum gas calculations. Our findings are based on extensive experiments over the entire history of the EVM blockchain.
The number of IoT devices is growing at an exponential rate.It is expected that by 2020, there will be approximately 30 billion internet-connected devices and 500 billion by 2030.Not only, does it increase security concerns but will give rise to interoperability issues.In this paper, the recently introduced Ethereum network will be utilised with respect to Internet of Things to create an infrastructure compatible with IoT devices.With an addition of an automated, immutable smart contract that will aid the interoperability of various devices through the heterogenousfriendly Ethereum network.The true potential of Ethereum, when combined with IoT, will be explored and demonstrated.Demonstrated through an implementation in which power will be provided to a room embedded with various IoT devices upon payment (in the form of rent) into a landlord's smart contract [1].
<sec> <title>BACKGROUND</title> Personal health record (PHR) security, correctness, and protection are essential for health and medical services. Blockchain architecture can provide efficient data retrieval and security requirements. Exchangeable PHRs and the self-management of patient health can offer many benefits to traditional medical services by allowing people to manage their own health records for disease prevention, prediction, and control while reducing resource burdens on the health care infrastructure and improving population health and quality of life. </sec> <sec> <title>OBJECTIVE</title> This study aimed to build a blockchain-based architecture for an international health record exchange platform to ensure health record confidentiality, integrity, and availability for health management and used Health Level 7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource international standards as the data format that could allow international, cross-institutional, and patient/doctor exchanges of PHRs. </sec> <sec> <title>METHODS</title> The PHR architecture in this study comprised 2 main components. The first component was the PHR management platform, on which users could upload PHRs, view their record content, authorize PHR exchanges with doctors or other medical health care providers, and check their block information. When a PHR was uploaded, the hash value of the PHR would be calculated by the SHA-256 algorithm and the PHR would be encrypted by the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman encryption mechanism before being transferred to a secure database. The second component was the blockchain exchange architecture, which was based on Ethereum to create a private chain. Proof of authority, which delivers transactions through a consensus mechanism based on identity, was used for consensus. The hash value was calculated based on the previous hash value, block content, and timestamp by a hash function. </sec> <sec> <title>RESULTS</title> The PHR blockchain architecture constructed in this study is an effective method for the management and utilization of PHRs. The platform has been deployed in Southeast Asian countries via the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) and has become the first PHR management platform for cross-region medical data exchange. </sec> <sec> <title>CONCLUSIONS</title> Some systems have shown that blockchain technology has great potential for electronic health record applications. This study combined different types of data storage modes to effectively solve the problems of PHR data security, storage, and transmission and proposed a hybrid blockchain and data security approach to enable effective international PHR exchange. By partnering with the AeHIN and making use of the network’s regional reach and expert pool, the platform could be deployed and promoted successfully. In the future, the PHR platform could be utilized for the purpose of precision and individual medicine in a cross-country manner because of the platform’s provision of a secure and efficient PHR sharing and management architecture, making it a reasonable base for future data collection sources and the data analytics needed for precision medicine. </sec>
Investing into a new product or service is a high-risk, high-return activity. This is best symbolized by the observation that the return over investment distribution of startups is a power law. Introduction of new products or services to the market might fail to generate profit even though there is a demand. Early adopters are also penalized, as they often pay a high price for something which will end up being cheaper, and might lose their warranty if the firm goes bankrupt. Innovation is slowed down. We propose to equally redistribute part of the generated profit at the end of a predefined time period to previous customers using Ethereum smart contract. Because customers are aware of the amount they would get back, their behaviors will change. The return over investment distribution and therefore the risk and return balance of the firms will also be affected. We formally define both a classic market and a market that is using our proposed system, and present an architecture to deploy such system. A preliminary numerical simulation is provided.
Rantai pasok finansial (Supply Chain Finance/SCF) merupakan topik baru dalam penelitian manajemen rantai pasok (Supply Chain Management). SCF bertujuan melakukan diversifikasi sumber pendanaan dari perusahaan dengan modal terbatas dan meningkatkan efisiensi keuangan seluruh jaringan rantai pasok perusahaan. SCF telah menjadi sumber pendanaan jangka pendek bagi ribuan usaha mikro, kecil dan menengah (UMKM). Penelitian tentang SCF yang ada sekarang ini masih menggunakan framework keuangan konvensional dan belum ada penelitian SCF yang menggunakan framework keuangan Islam. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan framework dan system SCF berdasarkan prinsip- prinsip syariah Islam berupa platform crowdfunding syariah dengan menggunakan teknologi blockchain dan smart contract . Rancangan system yang dihasilkan pada penelitian ini menggunakan smart contract yang dijalankan menggunakan protocol Ethereum untuk mencegah adanya penipuan/penggelapan dan meningkatkan system keamanan dari platform yang dirancang, sesuai dengan karaktrist i k blockchain yang sangat sulit di - hack.
Blockchain is maintained as a global log between a network of nodes and uses cryptographic distributed protocols to synchronize the updates. As adopted by Bitcoin and Ethereum these update operations to the ledger are serialized, and executed in batches. To safeguard the system against the generation of conflicting sets of updates and maintain the consistency of the ledger, the frequency of the updates is controlled, which severely affects the performance of the system. This paper presents Converging Directed Acyclic Graph (CDAG), as a substitute for the chain and DAG structures used in other blockchain protocols. CDAG allows multiple parallel updates to the ledger and converges them at the next step providing finality to the blocks. It partitions the updates into non-intersecting buckets of transactions to prevent the generation of conflicting blocks and divide the time into slots to provide enough time for them to propagate in the network. Multiple simultaneous updates improve the throughput of CDAG, and the converging step helps to finalize them faster, even in the presence of conflicts. Moreover, CDAG provides a total order among the blocks of the ledger to support smart contracts, unlike some of the other blockDAG protocols. We evaluate the performance of CDAG on Google Cloud Platform using Google Kubernetes Engine, simulating a real-time network. Experimental results show that CDAG achieves a throughput of more than 2000 transactions per second and confirms them well in under 2 minutes. Also, the protocol scales well in comparison to other permissioned protocols, and the capacity of the network only limits the performance.
With the rise of cryptocurrency tokens as a new asset class, the question of the fair evaluation of a cryptocurrency token has become a question of increasing importance. We estimate the pricing kernel with which users price factors affecting their token holdings. We investigate how traditional risk factors such as market risk are evaluated, as well as how blockchain specific risk factors are priced in. In order to do so, we introduce an asset pricing model and modify its properties to make it applicable to cryptocurrency markets. We group the risk factors into market related and Bitcoin- and Ethereum blockchain specific risk factors. We find that blockchain specific risk factors are priced in. There is evidence that risk factors have moved from Bitcoin to Ethereum specific risk factors with an increasing importance of market factors, providing evidence for a decoupling of on-chain and off-chain trading activity.
Oliver James Scholten, Nathan Hughes, Sebastian Deterding, Anders Drachen · 6 authors
Ethereum crypto-games are a booming and relatively unexplored area of the games industry. While there is no consensus definition yet, 'crypto-games' commonly denotes games that store tokens, e.g. in-game items, on a distributed ledger atop a cryptocurrency network. This enables the trading of game items for cryptocurrency, which can then be exchanged for regular currency. Together with their chance-based mechanics, this makes crypto-games part of the recent convergence of digital gaming and gambling. In a first effort to scope the field, this paper surveys popular crypto-games, which use the Ethereum cryptocurrency, to tease out characteristic technical properties and gameplay. It then compares the games' features with criteria found in current legal and psychological definitions of gambling. We find that the popular crypto-games selected meet a combined legal and psychological definition of gambling, and conclude with ramifications for future research.
Iago Sestrem Ochôa, Luís Augusto Silva, Gabriel de Mello, Bruno Alves da Silva · 8 authors
With the popularization of the Internet-of-Things, various applications have emerged to make life easier. These applications generate a large amount of user data. Analyzing the data obtained from these applications, one can infer personal information about each user. Considering this, it is clear that ensuring privacy in this type of application is essential. To guarantee privacy various solutions exist, one of them is UbiPri middleware. This paper presents a decentralized implementation of UbiPri middleware using the Ethereum blockchain. Smart contracts were used in conjunction with a communication gateway and a distributed storage service to ensure users privacy. The results obtained show that the implementation of this work ensures privacy at different levels, data storage security, and performance regarding scalability in the Internet of Things environments.
Increasing penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) gives rise to the challenges in the secure operation of power systems. The EV charging loads should be distributed among charging stations in a fair and incentive-compatible manner while ensuring that power transmission and transformation facilities are not overloaded. This paper first proposes a charging right (or charging power ration) trading mechanism and model based on blockchain. Considering all kinds of random factors of charging station loads, we use Monte Carlo modeling to determine the charging demand of charging stations in the future. Based on the charging demand of charging stations, a charging station needs to submit the charging demand for a future period. The blockchain first distributes initial charging right in a just manner and ensures the security of facilities. Given that the charging urgency and elasticity differences vary by charging stations, all charging stations then proceed with double auction and peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction of charging right. Bids and offers are cleared via double auctions if bids are higher than offers. The remaining bids and offers are cleared via the P2P market. Then, this paper designs the charging right allocation and trading platform and smart contract based on the Ethernet blockchain to ensure the safety of the distribution network (DN) and the transparency and efficiency of charging right trading. Simulation results based on the Ethereum private blockchain show the fairness and efficiency of the proposed mechanism and the effectiveness of the method and the mechanism.
Michail Bampatsikos, Christoforos Ntantogian, Christos Xenakis, Stelios C. A. Thomopoulos
Today, an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) healthcare devices, crucial to a person's wellbeing and life, connects to the internet and consequently is exposed to a variety of threats. These devices possess low computational resources, and as a result they cannot use security tools such as antivirus or firewalls. Consequently, they become easy targets for cyber-attacks and malware infection, thus putting a person's life at risk. One way to protect these devices from malware infection is Remote Attestation (RA), a process by which a device with low computational power (prover) verifies its internal state to a party with higher computational resources (verifier) upon the latter's request. However, in case the verifier is malicious, it may constantly send numerous requests for RA to a prover to prevent it from performing the functions it was designed for. Thus, keeping it busy and rendering it unusable to its legit users as well as services. In short, the verifier performs a Computational Denial of Service (CDoS) attack against the prover. This paper proposes the BARRETT architecture which uses a Public Ethereum Network (PEN) in conjunction with an RA protocol to protect the prover from CDoS attacks. In particular, the PEN in BARRETT deters CDoS by forcing the verifier to pay a fee in Ether cryptocurrency every time they wish to send an Attestation Request (AR) to a prover. The verifier pays the fee since in BARRETT it can send the AR only via Ethereum transactions. Consequently, any attempt to perform a CDoS becomes prohibitively expensive.
Jonathan Passerat‐Palmbach, Tyler Farnan, Robert Miller, Marielle S. Gross · 6 authors
We propose a novel architecture for federated learning within healthcare consortia. At the heart of the solution is a unique integration of privacy preserving technologies, built upon native enterprise blockchain components available in the Ethereum ecosystem. We show how the specific characteristics and challenges of healthcare consortia informed our design choices, notably the conception of a new Secure Aggregation protocol assembled with a protected hardware component and an encryption toolkit native to Ethereum. Our architecture also brings in a privacy preserving audit trail that logs events in the network without revealing identities.
Blockchain platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum have introduced a distributed and decentralized cryptocurrency system with no third-party intermediation required. These peer to peer network systems allows Internet users to directly transact with each other. However due to the heavy emphasis on decentralization, scalability has taken a back seat. It has also become a key issue in the wider adoption of these technologies. The change to the underlying data organizing structure to Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAG) of the distributed ledger, has significantly increased transaction scalability. In this paper, we analyse some of the Distributed Ledger Technologies that use DAGs and have shown marked improved in transaction performance without weakening security.