Blockchain Papers

Jonas Deterding, Noah Janzen, David Rohrschneider, Philipp Lösch · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Md. Mainul Islam, Hoh Peter In

Conventional copyright systems are governed nationally, and there is no global ledger for storing copyright data. Due to the lack of a global copyright monitoring system, it is difficult to provide cross-border copyright protection. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized copyright system based on a consortium blockchain, which ensures cross-border copyright protection of individuals’ digital content and solves existing challenges in international copyright management. The proposed system enables a synchronized platform to register and trade copyright globally without using a global cloud. Individual countries receive membership from a copyright federation and participate in block creation by executing the energy-efficient proof of authority consensus algorithm. These countries are regarded as the authorities of the platform. They validate transactions conducted by users and store them in the blockchain. Anyone, either registered or unregistered, can investigate a copyrighted work, but only registered users can make transactions. A token-based payment method is also proposed for paying copyright charges (i.e., transaction fees) to authorities through the federation. A prototype of the system was implemented, and its performance was evaluated. This paper provides direction and guidance towards international copyright management.

Osama A. Khashan, Sultan Alamri, Waleed Alomoush, Mutasem K. Alsmadi · 6 authors

In recent times, technology has advanced significantly and is currently being integrated into educational environments to facilitate distance learning and interaction between learners. Integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) into education can facilitate the teaching and learning process and expand the context in which students learn. Nevertheless, learning data is very sensitive and must be protected when transmitted over the network or stored in data centers. Moreover, the identity and the authenticity of interacting students, instructors, and staff need to be verified to mitigate the impact of attacks. However, most of the current security and authentication schemes are centralized, relying on trusted third-party cloud servers, to facilitate continuous secure communication. In addition, most of these schemes are resource-intensive; thus, security and efficiency issues arise when heterogeneous and resource-limited IoT devices are being used. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based architecture that accurately identifies and authenticates learners and their IoT devices in a decentralized manner and prevents the unauthorized modification of stored learning records in a distributed university network. It allows students and instructors to easily migrate to and join multiple universities within the network using their identity without the need for user re-authentication. The proposed architecture was tested using a simulation tool, and measured to evaluate its performance. The simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed architecture to significantly increase the throughput of learning transactions (40%), reduce the communication overhead and response time (26%), improve authentication efficiency (27%), and reduce the IoT power consumption (35%) compared to the centralized authentication mechanisms. In addition, the security analysis proves the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in resisting various attacks and ensuring the security requirements of learning data in the university network.

Minh Tung Tran, Petr Dzurenda

Blockchain technology, especially Bitcoin, has revolutionizedhow we think about and manage financial transactions.However, with the increasing demand and usage of blockchaintechnology, the security of cryptocurrency wallets has become acritical concern. Threshold signatures offer a promising solutionto this problem, allowing multiple parties to sign a transactionwithout revealing their private keys. This article presents an Androidmobile Bitcoin wallet application that uses Schnorr-basedthreshold signatures. The application also deploys smartwatchintegration for enhanced security and usability. This integrationprovides an additional layer of security by requiring physicalconfirmation from the user before approving any transaction.Our implementation provides a secure and efficient platform formanaging Bitcoin assets using threshold signatures while alsoproviding an intuitive and easy-to-use interface for interactingwith the application.

Aditya Pathak, Irfan Al‐Anbagi, Howard J. Hamilton

Recent research has focused on applying blockchain technology to solve security-related problems in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. However, implementing blockchain technology directly on IoT networks is prone to high overheads and energy-expensive operations. Therefore, in this paper, we use edge computing technology to avoid these problems. We also propose a novel Trust-based Access Control Mechanism for Edge-IoT Networks using Blockchain technology (named TABI) to implement end-to-end security in resource-constrained IoT networks. The TABI mechanism utilizes both access control and trust evaluation mechanisms to mitigate the impact of malicious IoT users and devices. Additionally, it incorporates permissioned Hyperledger blockchain technology to provide an added layer of security through authentication. The trust evaluation mechanism is implemented as a trust calculation contract (TCC) on the edge devices using Hyperledger Composer. The access control mechanism employs an Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) mechanism, which is implemented on the Hyperledger blockchain using two smart contracts: the attribute contract (AC) and the access control contract (ACC). We implement a proof-of-concept (PoC) implementation using Hyperledger Caliper (a benchmark testing tool) and Docker images. Our evaluation includes five analyses: Trust Evaluation Mechanism, Access Control Mechanism, Security, Blockchain, and IoT Applications. Through this evaluation, we highlight the effectiveness of TABI in terms of throughput, latency, detection of malicious IoT devices, and resource consumption of the IoT devices. Our analyses demonstrate that TABI is particularly useful in IoT applications that require low latency and resource efficiency.

Senay A. Gebreab, Khaled Salah, Raja Jayaraman, Mohamed Jamal Zemerly

Medical devices play a crucial role in the global healthcare system, but their high cost has led to the increasing adoption of refurbished medical devices as a sustainable alternative for hospitals and patients around the world. The repositioning of refurbished devices into the market, however, is accompanied by a number of challenges, including concerns about quality and safety, as well as the risk of fraudulent activities such as counterfeiting. To address these challenges, we propose an NFT-based solution for managing refurbished medical devices that creates a secure, transparent, and verifiable record of the refurbishment process to ensure the safety and quality of these devices. The proposed solution utilizes dynamic composable NFTs as digital representations of medical devices, with replacement parts and certificate documents embedded in a parent-child NFT hierarchy, and reprocessing steps captured and reflected through the evolution of the dynamic tokens. This serves to authenticate and track the movement of refurbished devices while also providing a trustworthy means of managing individual devices and their ownership. Furthermore, the integration of non-transferable NFTs as certificates of refurbishment acts as an effective mechanism for detecting suspect medical devices and instances of fraudulent labeling, thereby increasing buyer confidence and promoting user safety. We leverage the Interplanetary File System to store and keep track of the metadata of the tokenized components of the system. We present the system architecture and implementation details with tested algorithms. We develop a front-end decentralized application (DApp) to interact with the designed smart contracts and showcase their functionalities. We also conduct security analysis to demonstrate our system is resistant to common vulnerabilities and exploits. The smart contract code is made available on GitHub.

Zhenpeng Liu, Lele Ren, Yongjiang Feng, Shuo Wang · 5 authors

Cloud storage is an essential method for data storage. Verifying the integrity of data in the cloud is critical for the client. Traditional cloud storage approaches rely on third-party auditors (TPAs) to accomplish auditing tasks. However, third-party auditors are often not trusted. To eliminate over-reliance on third-party auditors, this paper designs a blockchain-based auditing scheme that uses blockchain instead of third-party auditors to ensure the reliability of data auditing. Meanwhile, our scheme is based on the audit method of the quad Merkle hash tree, using the root of the quad Merkle hash tree to verify the integrity of data, which significantly improves computing and storage efficiency. Automated verification of auditing activities by deploying smart contracts on the blockchain allows us to have a more up-to-date picture of data integrity. The performance of the scheme is evaluated through security analysis and experiments, which prove that the proposed scheme is secure and effective.

Jadhav Swati, Pise Nitin

Scholarship management is a crucial aspect of higher education systems, aimed at supporting deserving students and reducing financial barriers. However, traditional scholarship management processes often suffer from challenges such as a lack of transparency, inefficient communication, and difficulty tracking and verifying scholarship applications. Recently, Blockchain technology has emerged as a potential solution to address these issues, offering a decentralized, transparent, and secure framework for scholarship management. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to address the challenges faced in scholarship management. However, existing literature lacks comprehensive solutions in critical areas such as scholarship management, storage facilities, payment systems, monitoring and auditing, and experimental validation. This research introduces an innovative smart scholarship management system leveraging Blockchain technology to overcome these limitations. The research presents an Ethereum-based implementation utilizing Solidity for backend smart contracts and ReactJS for the front end. Experimental evaluation validates the transaction execution gas costs and deployment cost.

Raaj Anand Mishra, Anshuman Kalla, An Braeken, Madhusanka Liyanage

Internet of Things (IoT) has proved its applicability in numerous domains such as healthcare, agriculture, automobile, industrial production, logistics and supply chain management. Looking at the current trend, we expect massive proliferation of such IoT devices all around us. However, one of the issues with the widespread use of IoT is the increasing complexity of the underlying architecture, which lead to difficulty in ensuring security compliance. One of the critical security processes is key refreshment, which needs to be regularly executed in order to guarantee strong security management. However, in most of the cases, keys are not updated and if they are updated, the update-logs are not available for all the entities to verify and build trust. Furthermore, the rules for key refreshment are also not defined in a transparent way. In this paper, we propose secure, decentralized, and automatic key refreshment mechanism for an IoT system. The proposed mechanism enables users to verify the freshness of the security keys (being used) thereby relying on the data from IoT devices and establishing trust in an IoT system. The proposed mechanism is driven by blockchain technology and smart contract. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed solution we have implemented it using both Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric blockchains.

Leonardo da Costa, Billy Pinheiro, Weverton Cordeiro, Roberto Araújo · 5 authors

Storing and sharing health records through electronic systems pose security risks. To address them, several countries’ regulations have established that healthcare information systems must fulfill security properties (confidentiality, access control, integrity, revocation and anonymity) and complementary ones (emergency access and interoperability). Upon tackling these issues, several proposals present security limitations and/or address specific properties only. We propose Sec-Health, a blockchain-based protocol that secures health records, addressing all of the main security and complementary properties defined in current regulations. We show that Sec-Health is a suitable solution by analyzing it under several attack scenarios and describing how it overcomes the problems of existing solutions. Furthermore, we evaluate a Sec-Health Proof of Concept, showing that it can reduce from 26% up to 90% the time to access health records, and reduce up to 50% client-side memory overhead, compared to related work.

Eddy Kiomba Kambilo, Irina Rychkova, Nicolas Herbaut, Carine Souveyet

No abstract is available for this record.

AoXuan Li, Gabriele D'Angelo, Su-Kit Tang, F. F. Fang · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

B. Subashini, D. Hemavathi

Due to an increase in agricultural mislabeling and carelesshandling of non-perishable foods in recent years, consumers have been calling for the food sector to be more transparent. Due to information dispersion between divisions and the propensity to record inaccurate data, current traceability solutions typically fail to provide reliable farm-to-fork histories ofproducts. The three most enticing characteristics of blockchain technology areopenness, integrity, and traceability, which make it a potentially crucial tool for guaranteeing the integrity and correctness of data. In this paper, we suggest a permissioned blockchain system run by organizations, such as regulatory bodies, to promote the origin-tracking of shelf-stable agricultural products. We propose a four-tiered architecture, parallel side chains, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and Interplanetary File Systems (IPFS). These ensure that information about where an item came from is shared, those commercial competitors cannot get to it, those big storage problems are handled, and the system can be scaled to handle many transactions at once. Thesolution maintains the confidentiality of all transaction flows whenprovenance data is queried utilizing smart contracts and a consumer-grade reliance rate. Extensive simulation testing using Ethereum Rinkeby and Polygon demonstrates reduced execution time, latency, and throughput overheads.

Chaya Ganesh, Yashvanth Kondi, Claudio Orlandi, Mahak Pancholi · 6 authors

Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zkSNARKs) are becoming an increasingly fundamental tool in many real-world applications where the proof compactness is of the utmost importance, including blockchains. A proof of security for SNARKs in the Universal Composability (UC) framework (Canetti, FOCS’01) would rule out devastating malleability attacks. To retain security of SNARKs in the UC model, one must show their simulation-extractability such that the knowledge extractor is both black-box and straight-line , which would imply that proofs generated by honest provers are non-malleable . However, existing simulation-extractability results on SNARKs either lack some of these properties, or alternatively have to sacrifice witness succinctness to prove UC security. In this paper, we provide a compiler lifting any simulation-extractable NIZKAoK into a UC-secure one in the global random oracle model, importantly, while preserving the same level of witness succinctness. Combining this with existing zkSNARKs, we achieve, to the best of our knowledge, the first zkSNARKs simultaneously achieving UC-security and constant sized proofs.

Jing Deng, Xiaofei Xing, Guoqiang Deng, Ning Hu · 7 authors

As one of the major threats to the current DeFi (Decentralized Finance) ecosystem, reentrant attack induces data inconsistency of the victim smart contract, enabling attackers to steal on-chain assets from DeFi projects, which could terribly do harm to the confidence of the blockchain investors. However, protecting DeFi projects from the reentrant attack is very difficult, since generating a call loop within the highly automatic DeFi ecosystem could be very practicable. Existing researchers mainly focus on the detection of the reentrant vulnerabilities in the code testing, and no method could promise the non-existent of reentrant vulnerabilities. In this paper, we introduce the database lock mechanism to isolate the correlated smart contract states from other operations in the same contract, so that we can prevent the attackers from abusing the inconsistent smart contract state. Compared to the existing resolutions of front-running, code audit, and modifier, our method guarantees protection results with better flexibility. And we further evaluate our method on a number of de facto reentrant attacks observed from Etherscan. The results prove that our method could efficiently prevent the reentrant attack with less running cost.

Miaomiao Wang, Lanlan Rui, Siya Xu, Zhipeng Gao · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Prakhyat Khati, Ajay Kumar Shrestha, Julita Vassileva

In this paper, we propose a certificate sharing system based on blockchain that gives students authority and control over their academic certificates. Our strategy involves developing blockchain-based NFT certifications that can be shared with institutions or employers using blockchain addresses. Students may access the data created by each individual institute in a single platform, filter the view of the relevant courses according to their requirements, and mint their certificate metadata as NFTs. This method provides accountability of access, comprehensive records that are permanently maintained in IPFS, and verifiable provenance for creating, distributing, and accessing certificates. It also makes it possible to share certificates more safely and efficiently. By incorporating trust factors through data provenance, our system provides a countermeasure against issues such as fake and duplicate certificates. It addresses the challenge of the traditional certificate verification processes, which are lengthy manual process. With this system, students can manage and validate their academic credentials from multiple institutions in one location while ensuring authenticity and confidentiality using digital signatures and hashing for data protection against unauthorized access. Overall, our suggested system ensures data safety, accountability, and confidentiality while offering a novel approach to certificate distribution.

Soroush Farokhnia

Smart contracts are programs that are executed on the blockchain and can hold, manage and transfer assets in the form of cryptocurrencies. The contract's execution is then performed on-chain and is subject to consensus, i.e. every node on the blockchain network has to run the function calls and keep track of their side-effects. In most programmable blockchains, such as Ethereum, the notion of gas is introduced to prevent DoS attacks by malicious parties who might try to slow down the network by performing heavy computations. A fixed cost to each atomic operation, and the initiator of a function call pays the total gas cost as a transaction fee. This helps prevent DoS attacks, but the resulting fees are extremely high. For example, in 2022, on Ethereum alone, there has been a total gas usage of 1.77 Million ETH ~ 4.3 Billion USD. This thesis proposes "lazy contracts" as a solution to alleviate these costs. Our solution moves most of the computation off-chain, ensuring that each function call incurs only a tiny amount of gas usage, while preserving enough data on-chain to guarantee an implicit consensus about the state of the contract variables and ownership of funds. A complete on-chain execution of the functions will only be triggered in case two parties to the contract are in disagreement about the current state, which in turn can only happen if at least one party is dishonest. In such cases, our protocol can identify the dishonest party and penalize them by having them pay for the entire gas usage. Hence, no rational party has an incentive to act dishonestly. Finally, we perform extensive experiments over 160,735 real-world Solidity contracts that were involved in 9,055,492 transactions in January 2022--January 2023 on Ethereum and show that our approach reduces the overall gas usage by 55.4%, which amounts to an astounding saving of 109.9 Million USD in gas fees.

Balaźs Ádám Toldi, Imre Kocsis

Business process collaboration between independent parties is challenging when participants do not completely trust each other. Tracking actions and enforcing the activity authorizations of participants via blockchain-hosted smart contracts is an emerging solution to this lack of trust, with most state-of-the-art approaches generating the orchestrating smart contract logic from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) models. However, compared to centralized business process orchestration services, smart contract state typically leaks potentially sensitive information about the state of the collaboration, limiting the applicability of decentralized process orchestration. This paper presents a novel, collaboration confidentiality-preserving approach where the process orchestrator smart contract only stores encrypted and hashed process states and validates participant actions against a BPMN model using zero-knowledge proofs. We cover a subset of BPMN, which is sufficient from the practical point of view, support messagepassing between participants, and provide an open-source, endto-end prototype implementation that automatically generates the key software artifacts.

Mohsin Imam

No abstract is available for this record.

Shahla Atapoor, Karim Baghery, Daniele Cozzo, Robi Pedersen

No abstract is available for this record.

Miquel À. Cabot-Nadal, Macià Mut–Puigserver, M. Magdalena Payeras–Capellà, Rosa Pericàs-Gornals

Blockchain technology can be used in several e-commerce applications, like the creation of certified notifications. This kind of service allows a user, which acts as the sender, to prove that he has sent some data to a receiver. With the use of blockchain technology, we can take advantage of the fact that it offers a transparent and decentralized way to certify the authenticity and integrity of notifications. In this proposal, we combine the use of Soulbound tokens (SBTs), a special kind of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) whose owners cannot transfer or trade to other users, with an improvement of the ERC-721 standard to include the possibility that the receiver could reject a token, allowing the selective reception of SBTs. Representing the certified notifications as Rejectable SBTs (RejSBT), we can track when the sender sends a notification, and when the receiver accepts it, providing both non-repudiation of origin (NRO) and reception (NRR) proofs. The notification process require only two steps. Once the receiver has accepted the RejSBT that represents the ownership of a notification, we will use Identity-Based Cryptography to let the owner decrypt the confidential information represented by the RejSBT.

Siddhant Reddy, Dharmender Singh Kushwaha

This paper proposes a framework for privacy-preserving credential issuance and verification over the public blockchain. The credential used in this framework is a soulbound token (SBT), a non-transferrable non-fungible token (NFT) verifiable on the blockchain. Once the issuing organization issues the credential, this framework gives the holder complete control of the credential. This privacy-preserving property allows the holder to selectively disclose the credential attributes in the verification process. The framework proposed suggests a decentralized credential recovery mechanism if the credential holder loses their private key. This paper compares this framework’s efficiency with different schemes based on privacy-preserving, selective disclosure, and decentralized credential recovery. This paper also compares the overhead for credential issuance and verification with Merkle trees. This paper also discusses the real-world use cases where this framework can be applied.

Gongxian Zeng, Junzuo Lai, Zhengan Huang, Linru Zhang · 8 authors

No abstract is available for this record.