Currently, technologies are developing very quickly and the need for information security is constantly increasing. In this connection, Blockchain technology is becoming in demand, which allows us to keep information safety and integrity. In addition, the technology enables the creation of a decentralized environment where transactions and data are take place without any third party organization. We proposed a decentralized web resource based on the Ethereum platform for managing student credits. The decentralized application (Dapp), will process, manage and control tokens, which represent credits that students gain for completed certain courses. The credit system is a first step towards a more transparent and technologically advanced form which could be used by universities and students to manage credits. The novelty of this scientific research is the creation of a web-based information resource based on Blockchain technology. Thanks to this resource, it becomes possible to track students' grades and receive reliable information about higher education. This completely eliminates the possibility of making changes to existing records.
Yanhong Xu, Reihaneh Safavi–Naini, Khoa Nguyen, Huaxiong Wang
Policy-based signatures (PBS) were proposed by Bellare and Fuchsbauer (PKC 2014) to allow an {\em authorized} member of an organization to sign a message on behalf of the organization. The user's authorization is determined by a policy managed by the organization's trusted authority, while the signature preserves the privacy of the organization's policy. Signing keys in PBS do not include user identity information and thus can be passed to others, violating the intention of employing PBS to restrict users' signing capability. In this paper, we introduce the notion of {\em traceability} for PBS by including user identity in the signing key such that the trusted authority will be able to open a suspicious signature and recover the signer's identity should the needs arise. We provide rigorous definitions and stringent security notions of traceable PBS (TPBS), capturing the properties of PBS suggested by Bellare-Fuchsbauer and resembling the "full traceability" requirement for group signatures put forward by Bellare-Micciancio-Warinschi (Eurocrypt 2003). As a proof of concept, we provide a modular construction of TPBS, based on a signature scheme, an encryption scheme and a zero-knowledge proof system. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility of achieving TPBS from concrete, quantum-resistant assumptions, we give an instantiation based on lattices.
Jacob Swambo, Spencer Hommel, Bob McElrath, Bryan Bishop
A bitcoin covenant is a mechanism to enforce conditions on how the control of coins will be transferred in the future. This work introduces deleted-key covenants; using pre-signed transactions with secure key deletion. With this, a general class of covenants are possible without introducing new security risks to bitcoin. There is a range of security models for the key deletion process, but this is subject to a security-convenience trade-off and requires interactivity in a multi-party context. On the other hand, this work makes a compelling case for what can be gained through a soft-fork upgrade to the signature hash system [Dec17] which enables recovered-key covenants through elliptic curve key recovery. This has similar properties to script-based covenant mechanisms proposed previously [Rub20]. Key factors are discussed and compared for the three covenant mechanisms, including; the enforcement process, methods for proving accessibility of funds and whether or not they are bound by a covenant, methods for dynamic fee allocation, the underlying cryptographic assumptions, and their feasibility in single-party, hierarchical and adversarial multi-party contexts. Despite the relative downsides of deleted-key covenants, they are a practical tool for custody protocol design. The comparison shows precisely how soft-fork proposals improve the practicality of bitcoin covenants, through non-interactive enforcement and tighter cryptographic assumptions, to enhance custody protocols and enable some adversarial applications such as payment protocols.
As the blockchain 2.0 platform, Ethereum's turing complete programming language and smart contract components make it play an important role in the commercialization of blockchain. With the further development of blockchain applications, the privacy and security issues of Ethereum have gradually emerged. To solve this problem, we proposed a blockchain privacy protection model called RZcash in the previous work. It implements the dynamically updateable and verifiable hiding of the asset information in Ethereum, namely the account balance and transaction amount. However, RZcash does not pay attention to the key redundancy problem that may be caused by the creation of secret accounts. In addition, the large size of proofs gives it high communication costs. In response to these problems, we further improve RZcash. For the key redundancy problem, we construct a new signature scheme based on the ciphertext equivalent test commitment. Moreover, we use the Schnorr signature and bulletproof to improve the corresponding proof scheme in RZcash, thereby reducing the size of proof. Based on these improvements, we propose a decentralized payment system, called RZcoin, based on Ethereum. Finally, we implement the algorithm model of RZcoin and evaluate its security and performance. The results show that RZcoin has higher security and Lower communication cost than RZcash.
Due to the unique characteristics of decentralization and security, blockchain is believed to have considerable potential to provide a wide range of benefits for ed-ucation development. Its application in education is relatively new but increasing very quickly. This paper introduced the typical blockchain techniques and charac-teristics briefly. Then, recent applications of blockchain in education were sum-marized comprehensively, especially those regarding learning record keeper, cer-tificate issue and management, and decentralized education ecosystem. Finally, technical and non-technical challenges were discussed. It is hoped to provide an in-depth look at the perspectives of blockchain in evolving education and help to the development of new application systems.
Blockchain is a secure and distributed ledger structure and each block is a cryptographic hash of some other factors like a timestamp. The chain is formed by linking the blocks and distributed data is present on multiple computers. The blockchain made system are more fault-tolerant and has high availability even in times of database failures. Though Linux is considered a benchmark for security, it is susceptible to various attacks. With the use of blockchain, Linux logs can be made more transparent among multiple root users and secured by hosting the logs on a decentralized Ethereum blockchain which is customized as per the requirement. It has been observed that in a scenario with multiple root users working simultaneously on same system, transparency between multiple root users can be compromised if some appropriate changes are made in few lines containing the history, Hence, with the help of Ethereum blockchain and log monitoring using log monitors, it is much easier to track the intrusions to identify the source of unauthorized access to logs or changes in them.
Academic credentials are documents that attest to successful completion of any test, exam or act as a validation of an individual's skill. Currently, the domain of academic credential management suffers from large time consumption, high cost, dependence on third-party and a lack of transparency. A blockchain based solution tries to resolve these pain-points by allowing any recruiter or company to verify the user credentials without dependence on any centralized third party. Our decentralized application is based off of BlockCerts, an MIT project that acts as an open standard for blockchain credentials. The project talks about the implementation details of the decentralized application built for BlockCerts Wallet. It is an attempt to leverage the power of the blockchain technology as a global notary for the verification of digital records.
Mayra Samaniego, Sara Hosseinzadeh Kassani, Cristian Espana, Ralph Deters
Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have emerged to support clinicians in interpreting medical images. CAD systems are traditionally combined with artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and data augmentation to evaluate suspicious structures in medical images. This evaluation generates vast amounts of data. Traditional CAD systems belong to a single institution and handle data access management centrally. However, the advent of CAD systems for research among multiple institutions demands distributed access management. This research proposes a blockchain-based solution to enable distributed data access management in CAD systems. This solution has been developed as a distributed application (DApp) using Ethereum in a consortium network.
Blockchain technology allows the formation of a distributed record of a digital event in a decentralized manner where no third-party controls data and related transactions. This technology was used early for value transfer but now it has a wide range of applications in various fields such as healthcare, banking, the internet of things and many more. In the education sector, it gives numerous chances for decentralized management of records in educational institutions. Certificates distributed in colleges or universities are mostly hard copy. Students submit these certificates while applying for jobs at public or private sectors, where all these certificates are needed to be verified manually, it is very time-consuming process. There can be incidents where students may produce the fake certificate and it is difficult to identify them. This problem of fake academic certificates has been a longstanding issue in the academic community. There are chances that some may have produce the certificate which is not legit and that may get unnoticed by the verifier during the verification process. Because of the above situation, ineligible candidate will get a chance illegally. The key issues in Certificate verification for Workplace, banks and other businesses are in storage, retrieval and access to data with security. Blockchain technology can be enforced to solve these troubles in storing and accessing of data. This technology provides a common shared platform from where to store, retrieve and access documents securely. The very nature of the technology is in the distributed, shared, open ledgers, verifiable by all. This problem can be solved by storing the digital certificates on the Blockchain.
Daniël Reijsbergen, Paweł Szałachowski, Junming Ke, Zengpeng Li · 5 authors
We present Large-scale Known-committee Stake-based Agreement (LaKSA), a chain-based Proof-of-Stake protocol that is dedicated, but not limited, to cryptocurrencies. LaKSA minimizes interactions between nodes through lightweight committee voting, resulting in a simpler, more robust, and more scalable proposal than competing systems. It also mitigates other drawbacks of previous systems, such as high reward variance and long confirmation times. LaKSA can support large numbers of nodes by design, and provides probabilistic safety guarantees in which a client makes commit decisions by calculating the probability that a transaction is reverted based on its blockchain view. We present a thorough analysis of LaKSA and report on its implementation and evaluation. Furthermore, our new technique of proving safety can be applied more broadly to other Proof-of-Stake protocols.
Cloud of Things (CoT) refers to an IoT solution consuming the cloud services of a single cloud vendor. In this article, we have introduced the concept of a MultiCoT (http://www.MultiCoT.com) solution which refers to the collaborative execution of an IoT solution by multiple cloud vendors. Cloudlets and ad-hoc clouds are the extensions of centralized cloud services, closer to the user, in the form of fog and edge computing layers respectively and the Osmotic Computing (OC) serves as a glue by accomplishing the seamless compute sharing across these layers. The OC can also be integrated within a MultiCoT solution for extending it across three computational layers of cloud, fog and edge. However, this can only be achieved after establishing enough trust among all the vendors that are working in collaboration to simultaneously serve a particular MultiCoT solution. Blockchain has been already proven for establishing trust and supporting reliable interactions among independently operating entities. Hence, it can be used for establishing trust among the multiple cloud vendors serving a single MultiCoT solution. In this article, we have presented the importance of using the proactive Blockchain-enabled Osmotic Manager (B-OM) for improving the reliability of OC. We have also highlighted the blockchain features that can improve the reliability of OC by establishing trust among the independently operating vendors of a MultiCoT solution, followed by the challenges associated with the integration of blockchain and OC along with the future research directions for achieving the proposed integration.
This column delves into privacy risks of the IoT using risk concepts that are more native to the security domain in order to conceptually bridge our collective understanding, articulation, and management of privacy concerns in the IoT which otherwise might not be sufficiently considered or foreseen by existing legal and technical controls. Trustworthiness and privacy are of primary concern as companies connect their manufacturing and logistic infrastructures to the Internet of Things (IoT). They want to reap the benefit of automated asset management, process control and predictive maintenance. However, to do so effectively, companies need to facilitate information sharing among trustworthy partners while complying with data protection and privacy preserving regulations. In this respect, Distributed Ledgers (a.k.a. Blockchains) offer a viable solution by enabling their participants to discover one another and establish peer-to-peer trust relations without a centralized intermediary.
Abstract: Because of its accessibility and ease of use, cloud storage has become the most widely used type of storage on the market in recent years. However, the privacy and data security of cloud storage are at risk. The protection of data security and privacy is the main topic of this essay. We suggest a blockchain-based decentralised storage system. Since blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer system, any processing node connected to the internet can join and build peers' networks, maximising resource usage. Blockchain protects data security. The user's file is encrypted and shared among a number of network peers in the proposed system utilising the IPFS (Interplanetary File System) protocol. Hashes are generated by IPFS. The path of the file is indicated by the hash value, which is kept on the blockchain. This project is focused on decentralised secure data storage, high data availability, and effective storage resource usage.
In nuclear power plants, plant management systems are not only very important for operation and maintenance of the facilities, but also play a very important role in analyzing and reporting the events to the authorities when a failure or accident occurs in the facility. In addition, it is also important to ensure that event records are managed transparently so as not to cause any attempt to cover up events. Therefore, this paper proposes a tamper free plant operation system by applying blockchain technology to the integrated plant management system of Korea hydro and nuclear power (KHNP). As a result, this paper will contribute to improving public acceptance by eliminating distrust in safe operation of nuclear power plants.
Current cloud and network infrastructures do not employ privacy-preserving methods to protect their assets. Anonymous credential schemes are a cryptographic building block that enables the certification of data structures and prove properties over their representations without disclosing the innards of their data structures in zero-knowledge. The GRaph Signature (GRS) scheme enables the certification and proof methods to sign infrastructure topologies represented as graph data structures and use zero-knowledge to prove properties over their certificates. As such, they represent a powerful privacy-preserving method that proves properties over a signed topology graph to another party without disclosing the blueprint of its topology. In this paper, we report our efforts in designing, implementing and benchmarking a Graph Signature Library (GSL). GSL is a cryptographic library realized in Java that implements the graph signature scheme.
Myeonghyun Kim, Sungjin Yu, Joonyoung Lee, Yohan Park · 5 authors
In the traditional electronic health record (EHR) management system, each medical service center manages their own health records, respectively, which are difficult to share on the different medical platforms. Recently, blockchain technology is one of the popular alternatives to enable medical service centers based on different platforms to share EHRs. However, it is hard to store whole EHR data in blockchain because of the size and the price of blockchain. To resolve this problem, cloud computing is considered as a promising solution. Cloud computing offers advantageous properties such as storage availability and scalability. Unfortunately, the EHR system with cloud computing can be vulnerable to various attacks because the sensitive data is sent over a public channel. We propose the secure protocol for cloud-assisted EHR system using blockchain. In the proposed scheme, blockchain technology is used to provide data integrity and access control using log transactions and the cloud server stores and manages the patient's EHRs to provide secure storage resources. We use an elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC) to provide secure health data sharing with cloud computing. We demonstrate that the proposed EHR system can prevent various attacks by using informal security analysis and automated validation of internet security protocols and applications (AVISPA) simulation. Furthermore, we prove that the proposed EHR system provides secure mutual authentication using BAN logic analysis. We then compare the computation overhead, communication overhead, and security properties with existing schemes. Consequently, the proposed EHR system is suitable for the practical healthcare system considering security and efficiency.
Atomic Crosschain Transaction technology allows composable programming across permissioned Ethereum blockchains. It allows for inter-contract and inter-blockchain function calls that are both synchronous and atomic: if one part fails, the whole call graph of function calls is rolled back. This paper analyses the processing overhead of using this technique compared to using multiple standard non-atomic single blockchain transactions. The additional processing is analysed for three scenarios involving multiple blockchains: the Hotel - Train problem, Supply Chain with Provenance, and an Oracle. The technology is shown to reduce the performance of Hyperledger Besu from 375 tps to 39.5 tps if all transactions are instigated on one node, or approaching 65.2 tps if the transactions are instigated on a variety of nodes, for the Hotel-Train scenario.
Sean Cao, Lin William Cong, Meng Han, Qixuan Hou · 5 authors
Business transactions by public firms are required to be reported, verified, and audited periodically, which is traditionally a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. To streamline this procedure, we design FutureAB (Future Auditing Blockchain) which aims to automate the reporting and auditing process, thereby allowing auditors to focus on discretionary accounts to better detect and prevent fraud. We demonstrate how distributed-ledger technologies build investor trust and disrupt the auditing industry. Our multi-functional design indicates that auditing firms can automate transaction verification without the need for a trusted third party by collaborating and sharing their information while preserving data privacy (commitment scheme) and security (immutability). We also explore how smart contracts and wallets facilitate the computerization and implementation of our system on Ethereum. Finally, performance evaluation reveals the efficacy and scalability of FutureAB in terms of both encryption (0.012 seconds per transaction) and verification (0.001 seconds per transaction).
Summary Smart contracts can be implemented using either centralized or decentralized (blockchain) platforms. However, for a large class of applications, neither of these two alternatives on its own can provide adequate scalability, performance, quality of service, security, and trust requirements. We argue that for many applications, hybrid solutions that combine both on and off‐blockchain components are more adequate. In this article, we introduce the design and implementation of a novel hybrid smart contract architecture built using the Ethereum blockchain connected to a centralized smart contract management system developed by us. We then compare and evaluate the implementation of an asset tracking service using three different architectures: on‐chain, off‐chain, and hybrid. We demonstrate that using a hybrid architecture, we can substantially improve performance of applications while retaining security and trust for critical tasks.
Yuefeng Du, Huayi Duan, Anxin Zhou, Cong Wang · 6 authors
How to audit outsourced data in centralized storage like cloud is well-studied, but it is largely under-explored for the rising decentralized storage network (DSN) that bodes well for a billion-dollar market. To realize DSN as a usable service in a truly decentralized manner, the blockchain comes in handy -- to record and verify audit trails in forms of proof of storage, and based on that, to handle fair payments with necessary dispute resolution. Leaving the audit trails on the blockchain offers transparency and fairness, yet it 1) sacrifices privacy, as they may leak information about the data under audit, and 2) overwhelms on-chain resources, as they may be practically large in size and expensive to verify. Prior auditing designs in centralized settings are not directly applicable here. A handful of proposals targeting DSN cannot satisfactorily address these issues either. We present an auditing solution that addresses on-chain privacy and efficiency, from a synergy of homomorphic linear authenticators with polynomial commitments for succinct proofs, and the sigma protocol for provable privacy. The solution results in, per audit, 288-byte proof written to the blockchain, and constant verification cost. It can sustain long-term operation and easily scale to thousands of users on Ethereum.
IBM is one of the world’s leading American multinational technology company, always<br> innovative and experimenting for new things with constant new trials and hands on different<br> technologies. The company is recently focused its research and innovation on one of ICCT<br> underlying technology applications called Hyperledger fabric and blockchain. A business<br> blockchain presented by Linux foundation is hyper ledger fabric becoming the de facto<br> standard for enterprise it provides blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) and lets the usage of<br> blockchain components any possible business environment with ease. Blockchain has several<br> edges, together with decentralization, durability, transparency, and audit ability. The IBM goal<br> is to develop company-ready solutions that address existing technology limitations relating to<br> privacy, confidentiality, audit ability, performance, and measurability. Proven, scalable, and<br> built for running on any cloud Simplifies complexness quickly, unlocks new price, and<br> expands competitive edges. Hyperledger cloth system for companies might be thought to be a<br> public platform. Within which all transactions committed are held on in an exceeding<br> blockchain. The chain grows endlessly as new blocks are added. To figure towards a frictionfree<br> network by facilitating easy functionality this article illustrates Blockchain, IBM<br> blockchain, Hyperledger fabric its framework, tools, and blockchain-as-a service. The<br> secondary data was obtained from various scholarly journals and websites. We have analysed<br> the Hyperledger framework, tools and examined their blockchain services to different<br> industries using the ABCD analysis framework as a research case study.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cloud Data Security Solutions
Innovations and Analysis in Business and Education
Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has been widely utilized to formalize system artifacts and facilitate their development throughout the entire lifecycle. During complex system development, MBSE models need to be frequently exchanged across stakeholders. Concerns about data security and tampering using traditional data exchange approaches obstruct the construction of a reliable marketplace for digital assets. The emerging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), represented by blockchain, provides a novel solution for this purpose owing to its unique advantages such as tamper-resistant and decentralization. In this paper, we integrate MBSE approaches with DLT aiming to create a decentralized marketplace to facilitate the exchange of digital engineering assets (DEAs). We first define DEAs from perspectives of digital engineering objects, development processes and system architectures. Based on this definition, the Graph-Object-Property-Point-Role-Relationship (GOPPRR) approach is used to formalize the DEAs. Then we propose a framework of a decentralized DEAs marketplace and specify the requirements, based on which we select a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structured DLT solution. As a proof-of-concept, a prototype of the proposed DEAs marketplace is developed and a case study is conducted to verify its feasibility. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed marketplace facilitates free DEAs exchange with a high level of security, efficiency and decentralization.
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Systems Engineering Methodologies and Applications
is a problem that defines a mechanism for how to safely bring external data to the blockchain. Although there have been various research efforts to solve this problem, existing solutions are limited in that they do not support either data availability or data integrity. Furthermore, no solution has been proposed to minimize the response time when an oracle server is malicious or overloaded. This paper proposes a distributed oracle using Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). The proposed approach uses multiple oracle servers to support data availability. It also supports data integrity using Intel SGX and Transport Layer Security (TLS) communication. The reputation system, which favors oracle servers with short response times, minimizes the average response time even if some of the oracle servers are malicious. The benchmarking results show that the response time of the proposed approach with 3 oracle servers is only 14% slower than a centralized oracle called Town-crier and scales well even if the number of oracle servers is increased up to 9. The reputation system is also evaluated, and its feasibility is analyzed using various experiments.
Antonio Celesti, Armando Ruggeri, Maria Fazio, Antonino Galletta · 6 authors
In a pandemic situation such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. Leveraging the recent Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper aims at proposing a tele-medical laboratory service where clinical exams are performed on patients directly in a hospital by technicians through IoT medical devices and results are automatically sent via the hospital Cloud to doctors of federated hospitals for validation and/or consultation. In particular, we discuss a distributed scenario where nurses, technicians and medical doctors belonging to different hospitals cooperate through their federated hospital Clouds to form a virtual health team able to carry out a healthcare workflow in secure fashion leveraging the intrinsic security features of the Blockchain technology. In particular, both public and hybrid Blockchain scenarios are discussed and assessed using the Ethereum platform.