Abstract In this paper, we propose one content-sharing system InnerLight based on IPFS and BlockChain, which is a creation and public discussion platform about mental health. InnerLight put copies of articles from creators on IPFS to achieve distributed storage of contents and complete the first step of returning the data to creators. At the same time, it also encourages creators and readers to maintain the sustainable development of the system through blockchain-based cryptocurrency. In addition to IPFS and Blockchain, ranking algoithms contribute to make Innerlight to be a decentralized autonomous ecosystem.
Domain Name System (DNS) is a widely used infrastructure for remote control and batch management of IoT devices. As a critical Internet infrastructure, DNS is structured as a tree‐like hierarchy with single root zone authority at the top, which puts the operation of DNS at risk from single point of failure. The current root zone management is lack of transparency and accountability, since only the root zone file is published as the final outcome of operations inside the root zone authority. Towards distributed root zone operation in DNS, this paper presents a blockchain‐based root operation architecture—RootChain, composed of multiple root servers. On the basis of maintaining the single root authority for top‐level domain (TLD), RootChain decentralizes TLD data publication by empowering delegated TLD authorities to publish authenticated data directly. The transparency and accountability of root zone operation are attained by smart‐contracting the whole life cycle of TLD operation and logging all operations on the chain. RootChain is transparent to recursive/stub resolver and DNS/DNSSEC‐compatible. A proof‐of‐concept prototype of RootChain has been implemented with Hyperledger Fabric and evaluated by experiments.
In order to improve the economy and safety of multi-microgrids (MMGs) scheduling, this paper proposes a research on MMGs scheduling strategy that takes into account dynamic electricity prices based on the blockchain. We first introduce the principle of blockchain, analyze the security and economy of the combination of blockchain and MMGs scheduling, and design the scheduling architecture and process based on the blockchain platform. Second, we set a dynamic electricity price model according to the total power supply and demand of MMGs, and set a load optimization model. Finally, we take optimal system economy and minimum environmental pollution as the objective function, then use the linear programming method and the improved krill herd algorithm (KHA) with nonlinear changes in weights to solve the problem. The simulation results show that: (1) The dynamic electricity prices can reflect the power supply and demand of microgrids and optimize the load; (2) Comparing the three scheduling schemes, the strategy in this paper can improve the economic and environmental protection of MMGs by 37.33% and 39.34%, while reduce the interactive power between the microgrid and the distribution network by 56.28%, and the curtailment rate by 63.22%; (3) The improved krill herd algorithm has higher convergence speed and convergence accuracy;(4) The blockchain technology can ensure the security of scheduling data.
A growing number of prosumers have entered the local power market in response to an increase in the number of residential users who can afford to install distributed energy resources. The traditional microgrid trading platform has many problems, such as low transaction efficiency, the high cost of market maintenance, opaque transactions, and the difficulty of ensuring user privacy, which are not conducive to encouraging users to participate in local electricity trading. A blockchain‐based mechanism of microgrid transactions can solve these problems, but the common single‐blockchain framework cannot manage user identity. This study thus proposes a mechanism for secure microgrid transactions based on the hybrid blockchain. A hybrid framework consisting of private blockchain and consortium blockchain is first proposed to complete market transactions. The private blockchain stores the identifying information of users and a review of their transactions, while the consortium blockchain is responsible for storing transaction information. The block digest of the private blockchain is stored in the consortium blockchain to prevent information on the private blockchain from being tampered with by the central node. A reputation evaluation algorithm based on user behavior is then developed to evaluate user reputation, which affects the results of the access audit on the private blockchain. The higher a user’s reputation score is, the more benefits he/she can obtain in the transaction process. Finally, an identity‐based proxy signcryption algorithm is proposed to help the intelligent management device with limited computing power obtain signcryption information in the transaction process to protect the transaction information. A system analysis showed that the secure transaction mechanism of the microgrid based on the hybrid blockchain boasts many security features, such as privacy, transparency, and imtamperability. The proposed reputation evaluation algorithm can objectively reflect all users’ behaviors through their reputation scores, and the identity‐based proxy signcryption algorithm is practical.
The smart city is a technological framework that connects the city’s different components to create new opportunities. This connection is possible with the help of the Internet of Things (IoT), which provides a digital personality to physical objects. Some studies have proposed integrating Blockchain technology with IoT in different use cases as access, orchestration, or replicated storage layer. The majority of connected objects’ capacity limitation makes the use of Blockchain inadequate due to its redundancy and its conventional processing-intensive consensus like PoW. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a NOVEL model of a lightweight Blockchain framework (IoT-SmartChain), with a lightweight consensus and a lightweight structure. The framework architecture presents a role hierarchy of connected objects according to their computational and storage capacity. This organization allows all things to be linked even indirectly via different interfaces and to benefit from the power of high-capacity objects such as Fog and Edge computing nodes. Data is validated and added to the blockchain ledger by running a lightweight consensus called Proof of Random Participation (PoRP), which reduces the blockchain nodes’ high computing power requirement. The TOPIC subscription-based data storage strategy called Assisted Selected Relevant Data in Local Ledger (ASRDLL) reduces the data size of a node’s local ledger and the entire network’s data size. This strategy is assisted by a centralized algorithm that optimizes the overall network size by adjusting the choice of TOPICS. The storage capacity, computational power, and energy consumption have been evaluated by a proof of concept implementation under NodeJS.
Carlos Santiago, Shuyang Ren, Choonhwa Lee, Minsoo Ryu
In this paper, we present a novel Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol for sharded blockchain networks that does not rely on expensive leader-driven communication. The proposed protocol selects a single block proposer at a time and uses threshold signatures as a voting mechanism to confirm the validity of the proposed block. By using a gossip-like communication scheme, each node can collect and recover the group signature within$\mathrm {O(log}N)$steps. With only one block proposer per consensus round, there is no possibility of conflicting blocks and resultant forks. Therefore, our consensus protocol requires only one round of one-way communication to achieve finality for each block. Our protocol guarantees safety and liveness while tolerating up to$f$faulty participants among$2f+1$nodes. Our performance study shows that the proposed protocol enables hundreds of nodes to participate in the agreement process, and can finalize large blocks in approximately 10 seconds.
To deal with a series of settlement problems such as the insufficient security for the user’s transaction, the complex process of settlement and the difficulty in data analysis within the sharing mode of the electric vehicles’ private piles, this paper proposed a new settlement mode for the shared private piles of electric vehicles. This mode took the shared charging network of the vehicle networking and the pile networking as the background, built a decentralized energy block chain, optimized the structure of the settlement mode by using distributed ledger technology, and used the intelligent contract algorithm to improve the settlement efficiency of charging orders. At the same time, this mode considered the transaction records and subsequent data analysis in its design, and used the evidence-storage and traceability technology to facilitate the integration of charging information data and to realize the configuration optimization of charging network.
Santeri Paavolainen, Christopher Carr, Essam Ghadafi
The Ethereum blockchain is one of the most popular permissionless blockchains. A consequence of its popularity has been the growth of processing and data storage requirements for any node participating in the Ethereum blockchain network. For constrained devices such requirements are often infeasible to meet. To cater for such nodes, a so-called light protocol has been proposed for Ethereum where the responsibility of maintaining a correct state representation is delegated to light protocol servers. Previous research has identified dependence on external state management as a potential security vulnerability that exclusively impacts light nodes. Although a simple mitigation strategy is available, it comes at the expense of increased latency. In this work, we propose a new Ethereum node type, which we call a subset node, as an extension of the light protocol. Our proposal allows subset nodes to gain a lower latency than a pure light node with comparable or even higher security assurances by tracking and evaluating only a subset of all of the transactions issued on the blockchain. We provide a formal proof on the correctness of the blockchain state used by the subset node under the proposed model. To evaluate the practical feasibility of the subset node model, we analyze one year of historical transaction data from Ethereum, and demonstrate that a subset node tracking the state of a single account can achieve a significant reduction in storage and computational requirements when compared to a full node.
Blockchain is considered one of the most disruptive technologies of our time and in the last 2 decades andhas drawn attention from research and industrial communities. Blockchain is basically a distributed ledger with immutable records, mostly utilized to perform the transactions across various nodes after achieving the mutual consensus between all the associated nodes. The consensus protocol is a core component of Blockchain technology, playing a vital role in Blockchain’s success, global emergence, and disruption capability.Many consensus protocols such as PoW, PoS, PoET, etc. have been proposed to make Blockchain more efficient to meet real-time application requirements. However, these protocols have their respective limitations of low throughput and high latency and sacrifice on scalability.These limitations have motivated this research team to introduce a novel review-based consensus protocol called Proof-of-Review, which is aimed to establish an efficient, reliable, and scalable Blockchain. The “review” in the proposed protocol is referring to the community trust on a node, which is entirely depending on the node’s previous behavior within the network which includes the previous transactions and interaction with other nodes. Those reviews eventually become the trust value gained by the node. The more positive the reviews the more trustworthyis the nodeto be considered in the network and vice versa. The most trustworthy node is selected to become the round leader and allows to publish a new block. The architecture of the proposed protocol is based on two parallel chains i.e. Transaction Chain and Review Chain. Both chains are linked to each other. The transaction chain stores the transaction whereas the review chain will store the reviews and be analyzed with an NLP algorithm to find the round leader for the next round.
Ammar Riadh Kairaldeen, Nor Fadzilah Abdullah, Asma Abu-Samah, Rosdiadee Nordin
Data security is a major issue for smart home networks. Yet, different existing tools and techniques have not been proven highly effective for home networks’ data security. Blockchain is a promising technology because of the distributed computing infrastructure network that makes it difficult for hackers to intrude into the systems through the use of cryptographic signatures and smart contracts. In this paper, an architecture for smart home networks that could guarantee data integrity, robust security, and the ability to protect the validity of the blockchain transactions has been investigated. The system model is tested using various sizes of realistic datasets (30, 3 k, and 30 k to represent a small, medium, and large number of transactions, respectively). Four different consensus algorithms were considered, the conventional schemes concatenated hash transactions (CHT) and Merkle hash tree (MHT), as well as the newly proposed odd and even modified MHT (O&E MHT) and modified MHT (MMHT). Moreover, 15 hash functions were also examined and compared to understand the effects of each consensus algorithms on the data integrity verification check execution time and the time optimization provided by the proposed MMHT algorithm. The results show that even though the CHT algorithm gives the lowest execution time, it is impractical for a blockchain implementation due to the requirement to copy the entire blockchain ledger in real time. Meanwhile, the O&E MHT does not give any tangible benefit in the execution time. However, the proposed MMHT offers a minimum of 30% gain in time optimization than the conventional MHT algorithm typically used in blockchains. This work shows that the proposed MMHT consensus algorithm not only can identify malicious codes but has an improved data integrity check performance in smart homes, all while ensuring network stability.
Sending bulk e-mail is commercially cheap and technically easy, making it profitable for spammers, even if a tiny percentage of recipients falls for the attacks or turn into customers. Some researchers have proposed making e-mail paid so that sending bulk e-mail becomes expensive, making spamming unprofitable and a futile exercise unless many victims respond to spam. On the other hand, the small sending fee is negligible for legitimate e-mail users. Making e-mail paid is a challenging task if implemented using a conventional payment system or developing new cryptocurrencies. Traditional payment systems are challenging to integrate with e-mail systems, and new cryptocurrencies will have challenges in adoption by users on the required scale. This work proposes using cryptocurrency payments to make e-mail senders pay for sending an e-mail without creating a new cryptocurrency or a new blockchain. In the proposed system, the recipients of the e-mail can collect the payments and use the collected revenues to send e-mail messages or even sell them on an exchange. The proposed solution has been implemented using Ropsten, an Ethereum Test Network and tested using enhanced E-mail Client and Server software.
Daniel Mago Vistro, Muhammad Shoaib Farooq, Attique Ur Rehman, Saroosh Malik
Blockchain emerges as a potential platform aim of providing efficient and robust infrastructure and the centre of the blockchain is the consensus protocol feature that shows the working of distributed ledger technology named the blockchain. However, existing blockchain systems do not satisfy the requirement of the transaction in pragmatic use due to their limited capacity. While several new ideas were suggested by experts as they faced either decentralization or security concerns. Although several scientists are working on the improvement of the new quantum-resistant, faulttolerant protocol, resource-efficient, and others focus on the development of multiple protocol versions, better adapted for particular use cases. Many researcher-made their own protocol to secure their work, instead of using traditional protocols. The paper represents a systematic literature review by accompanying a survey of blockchain technologies and their current utilization in different application domains in the IT industry. In this article, we first describe some previous and current consensus protocols of blockchain with the help of taxonomy which includes types and variants of protocols. Secondly, we have selected the most used protocols used up till now and write a comparative analysis with systematic review to find out which approach is the best suitable to use Lastly, we have analysed the strength and weaknesses of existing and previous protocols.
In recent years Fifth Generation (5G) technology is the most recent advancement in a wireless communication network. There is the advent of using the 5G with diverse data structures. The Blockchain (BC) has become an approving adoption for decentralized, peer-to-peer, distributed transparent ledger systems with a diverse data structure. The use of 5G with BC is an emerging trend in communication technology. The elasticity of 5G with BC enables many applications to reciprocity information molds it a fast, transparent, consequential, and safe for transportation of data in this smart era. Green computing (GC) is presently the intense optimistic tactic for the integration of smart technology in a diverse and distributed world of power consumption. This Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) has been analyzed by cautiously elected publications between 2016 and 2020 in well-putative venus. This study analyzed the advanced research on power consumption solutions for BC-based 5G communication, Moreover, a taxonomy of 5G based on green BC and GC in various areas is presented. Furthermore, Green energy renewable communication (GERC) problems are being observed in this research by integrating three discrete technologies such as 5G with green BC and GC also along with smart systems. Lastly, the research gaps had been bestowed to render future directions for the researchers in 5G with green BC and GC as the solution for rechargeable data packets.
Blockchain technology has advanced rapidly in recent years and is now widely used in a variety of fields. Blockchain appears to be one of the best solutions for managing massive heterogeneous devices while achieving advanced data security and data reputation, particularly in the field of large-scale IoT (Internet of Things) networks. Despite the numerous advantages, there are still challenges while deploying IoT applications on blockchain systems due to the limited storage, power, and computing capability of IoT devices, and some of these problems are caused by the consensus algorithm, which plays a significant role in blockchain systems by ensuring overall system reliability and robustness. Nonetheless, most existing consensus algorithms are prone to poor node reliability, low transaction per second (TPS) rates, and scalability issues. Aiming at some critical problems in the existing consensus algorithms, this paper proposes the Efficient Byzantine Reputation-based Consensus (EBRC) mechanism to resolve the issues raised above. In comparison to traditional algorithms, we reinvented ways to evaluate node reliability and robustness and manage active nodes. Our experiments show that the EBRC algorithm has lower consensus delay, higher throughput, improved security, and lower verification costs. It offers new reference ideas for solving the Internet of Things+blockchain+Internet court construction problem.
Arvind W. Kiwelekar, Pramod Patil, Laxman D. Netak, Sanjay U. Waikar
Fog computing is a paradigm for distributed computing that enables sharing of resources such as computing, storage and network services. Unlike cloud computing, fog computing platforms primarily support {\em non-functional properties} such as location awareness, mobility and reduced latency. This emerging paradigm has many potential applications in domains such as smart grids, smart cities, and transport management. Most of these domains collect and monitor personal information through edge devices to offer personalized services. A {\em centralized} server either at the level of cloud or fog, has been found ineffective to provide a high degree of security and privacy-preserving services. Blockchain technology supports the development of {\em decentralized} applications designed around the principles of immutability, cryptography, consistency preserving consensus protocols and smart contracts. Hence blockchain technology has emerged as a preferred technology in recent times to build trustworthy distributed applications. The chapter describes the potential of blockchain technology to realize security services such as authentication, secured communication, availability, privacy and trust management to support the development of dependable fog services.
As the typical peer-to-peer distributed networks, blockchain systems require each node to copy a complete transaction database, so as to ensure new transactions can by verified independently. In a blockchain system (e.g., bitcoin system), the node does not rely on any central organization, and every node keeps an entire copy of the transaction database. However, this feature determines that the size of blockchain transaction database is growing rapidly. Therefore, with the continuous system operations, the node memory also needs to be expanded to support the system running. Especially in the big data era, the increasing network traffic will lead to faster transaction growth rate. This paper analyzes blockchain transaction databases and proposes a storage optimization scheme. The proposed scheme divides blockchain transaction database into cold zone and hot zone using expiration recognition method based on Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm. It can achieve storage optimization by moving unspent transaction outputs outside the in-memory transaction databases. We present the theoretical analysis on the optimization method to validate the effectiveness. Extensive experiments show our proposed method outperforms the current mechanism for the blockchain transaction databases.
The deployment of small-scale renewable energy sources will transform the management of energy grids towards more decentralized solutions in which the prosumers will have a more active role. Regulatory and market barriers are driving the implementation of virtual aggregation models in which the small-scale prosumers work together on a larger scale to gain benefits that could not be obtained on an individual basis. In this paper, we propose to use public blockchain and self-enforcing smart contracts to construct Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) of prosumers to provide energy services. A model has been defined for capturing the prosumer level constraints in terms of available energy profiles and energy service requirements enabling their optimal aggregation in hierarchical structures. A lightweight decentralized solution for VPPs construction is implemented using smart contracts enabling its efficient running on the public blockchain. Smart contracts are encoding the model constraints and are defining functionalities for prosumers to initiate or join a VPP implementing the complete chain of Offer-Operate-Measure-Remunerate actions. The VPP will be managed on top of a distributed ledger technology offering decentralized functionality for tracking and validating the delivery of energy based on the blockchain transactions and for energy and financial settlement, the remuneration being done according to the amount of energy provided by individual prosumers. Experimental results show that the proposed solution runs successfully on the public blockchain with good execution time and can address Balancing Responsible Party requests for additional generation. The overhead in terms of gas consumption and transactional throughput stays within reasonable boundaries.
Blockchain consensus, which enables nodes on a peer-to-peer network to agree on the same ledger history, is the core element of blockchain systems. In many blockchain systems, a node chosen as a block proposer, in accordance with the consensus protocol, generates a block, and each node chooses a chain to extend by a fork-choice rule. This study introduces saving attacks, a new kind of attack that prevents nodes from reaching a consensus. In saving attacks, the adversary “saves” its rights to propose blocks during a temporal consensus failure and utilizes them later to cause another consensus failure. As a result, the blockchain suffers from poor performance and high latency to block finalization. We study the effect of saving attacks on various fork-choice rules, including those that Ethereum 2.0 plans to employ.We simulate saving attacks on the longest-chain rule, Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST), latest-message-driven (LMD) GHOST, and fresh-message-driven (FMD) GHOST.We show that the saving attack has a very large negative impact on the consensus. For example, we observe that under a certain condition, an adversary with 30% of the total stake that has saved its blocks for 32 minutes succeeds in preventing a consensus against LMD GHOST for 83 minutes in the context of Ethereum 2.0. We also show that FMD GHOST decreases the attack duration to approximately 6.4 minutes under the same conditions. Our results are applicable to all slot-based proof-of-stake blockchains, not just Ethereum 2.0.
Inna Romashkova, Mikhail Komarov, Aleksandr Ometov
One of the most promising enablers for the secure distributed operation of the Internet of Things (IoT) systems could be based on a mathematical construct widely known as blockchain that aims to neglect the system’s centralization and scalability properties. This paper aims to map the requirements and features of both systems, highlight the main integration challenges, and technological candidates for smoother integration of IoT and blockchain, as well as highlight the standartization outlook. This work has identified an architectural approach to an integrated solution based on classic literature review methodology aiming to consider the IoT versus blockchain characteristics mapping and outlining related integration challenges. Potential integration challenges of the proposed integrated approach are also identified and classified. Critical solutions to address the integration bottlenecks include moving from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Distributed Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus, adding a Fog overlay to the architecture model, and leveraging the synergies combining the benefits of blockchain and IoT technology are highlighted.
Jan 1, 2021·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Johannes Sedlmeir, Philipp Ross, André Luckow, Jannik Lockl · 6 authors
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) promise to revolutionize business ecosystems by permitting secure transactions without intermediaries. A widely recognized challenge that inhibits the uptake of DLT is scalability and performance. Hence, quantifying key metrics such as throughput and latency is crucial for designing DLT-based infrastructures, applications, and ecosystems. However, current benchmarking frameworks for blockchains do not cover the whole benchmarking process; impeding transparent comparisons of different DLT networks. In this paper, we present the Distributed Ledger Performance Scan (DLPS), an open-source framework for end-to-end performance characterizations of blockchains, addressing the need to transparently and automatically evaluate the performance of highly customizable configurations. We describe our new framework and argue that it significantly improves existing DLT benchmarking solutions. To demonstrate the capabilities of the DLPS, we also summarize the main results obtained from a series of experiments that we have conducted with it, giving a first comprehensive comparison of essential scalability properties of several commonly used enterprise blockchains.
Remigijus Paulavičius, Saulius Grigaitis, Ernestas Filatovas
In recent years, distributed ledger technologies, and especially blockchain, have gained tremendous interest from academia, government, and industry. Although various blockchain-based solutions were created, the lack of tools to evaluate these complex distributed systems may hinder the development of the field. Many advantages of blockchain systems can be demonstrated only at large scales, e.g., using thousands of nodes. An investigation of different implementations and design choices is complicated and hardly feasible on real systems. Meanwhile, blockchain simulators give the possibility to repeat the complex real-world processes at a low cost. This work provides the first and an up-to-date systematic review and empirical analysis of blockchain simulators. Simulators are easily extensible and can test the performance of distributed ledgers using different settings and parameters on a single computer. The features and limitations of selected simulators are summarized and experimentally validated. Finally, recommendations for potential future research directions in the field are provided.
Consensus mechanism plays an important role in blockchain. At present, mainstream consensus mechanisms include proof of work (PoW), proof of stake (PoS), and delegated proof of stake (DPoS). PoW, as is widely used in virtual currency, results in significant energy consumption; PoS and DPoS are proposed to reduce energy waste caused by PoW, but their disadvantage is that they tend to create Matthew Effect (ME): “the rich get richer.” In order to balance the discourse power of new nodes and elder ones, this paper proposes a flexible consensus mechanism called proof of engagement (PoE), based on the activity and contribution of network nodes. We analyze the incentive compatibility of PoE from the perspective of mechanism design. In our simulation experiments, we tested the profit changes under PoW, PoS, and PoE. The results illustrate it is easier for new nodes to accumulate their profits under PoE than under PoW or PoS, so as to reduce the negative impacts of ME.
Since the advent of distributed ledger technologies, they have provided diverse opportunities in a wide range of application domains. This article brings a comprehensive review of the fundamentals of distributed ledger and its variants. Analyzing 185 publications, ranging from academic journals to industry websites, it provides a comparative analysis of 130 consensus algorithms using a novel architectural classification. The distribution of the reviewed algorithms is analyzed in terms of the proposed classification and different application domains, along with the applicability of each class among the top 10 platforms in the most prominent blockchain application domains. Additional conclusions are drawn from the evolution of consensus mechanisms, and the analysis concludes envisaging future prospects for consensus as an important part of distributed ledger technology.