Tingting Song, Bo Cui, Ru Li, Jing Liu · 5 authors
Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new clean-slate architecture for the future Internet. Efficient content retrieval is the original intention of NDN design. The content retrieval process driven by content consumers in NDN includes the following challenges, consumers do not know whether the content exists and whether the content producer is reliable. Invalid interest packets could cause the occupation of limited network resources and DoS attack problem. To ensure the authenticity and integrity of the data packets, consumers need to pre-configure the trust schema, which is centralized and prone to the single point of failure problem. Blockchain has widespread attention to build trust in a distributed way, and Ethereum is a programmable blockchain, a decentralized smart contract platform. To lighten the burden of consumers, we proposed a Smart Contract-based Trusted Content Retrieval Mechanism (SCTCRM) for NDN in this paper. The mechanism contains a trustworthy information base for content and producers based on smart contracts, and provides content retrieval and name resolution services for content consumers. The purpose of this mechanism is to improve the efficiency and security of content retrieval process. We described the framework and the workflow of SCTCRM, and used Colored Petri Nets to create a formal mathematical model and analyze the security of the mechanism. Finally, the cost of storage and Gas in smart contracts are evaluated through the prototype deployment. From the results, we can see that the proposed mechanism is security and practicality.
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are electronically-stored highly sensitive and private information related to the diagnosis and treatment of patient, and needs to be frequently shared among peers. Sharing of medical records between participants is very challenging because the data might be revealed or tampered during the operational process. To address these challenges, a blockchain-based electronic medical records system is the key solution. In this research, we have discussed how blockchain technology can help in better healthcare data management. We have proposed a blockchain-based records management system for efficient management and sharing of electronic medical records (EMRs). We have implemented a prototype of Electronic Medical Records Management System using permissioned blockchain platform “Hyperledger”. This system ensures privacy, security and easy accessibility and availability of medical records.
We survey the state-of-the-art non-interactive zero-knowledge argument schemes and their applications in confidential transactions and private smart contracts on blockchain. The main goal of this paper is to serve as a reference for blockchain application developers in finding the most suitable scheme for a particular use case. We give an overview and compare the state-of-the-art protocols for confidential transactions and private smart contracts regarding the protection of the transaction graph and amounts, data and functionality. However, our main focus is on state-of-the-art zero-knowledge argument schemes. We briefly describe their backgrounds, proof lengths and computational complexities and discuss their cryptographic security models. Our focus is on seminal, otherwise notable and, especially, implemented methods that are ready to be applied in practice. We also survey the existing implementations of transforming computations into circuit representations required by those methods. We note that the existing schemes have different strengths and drawbacks regarding usability, setup, proof length and proving and verification costs.
In Internet of Things ecosystems, where various entities trade data and data analysis results, public key infrastructure plays an important role in establishing trust relationships between these entities to specify who trusts whose private keys. The owner of a private key is provided with a public key certificate issued by a certificate authority (CA) representing a trusted third party. Although this certificate ensures the reliability of the ecosystem by verifying the data source and preventing the denial of trading, it often causes an overconcentration of trust in a particular CA. Consequently, if that CA is infringed, all the related trust relationships become compromised. The paper proposes a distributed authentication infrastructure called Meta-PKI that decentralizes such overconcentration via a cross-certification procedure performed by multiple CAs. Although cross-certification is capable of establishing mutual trust relationships, it does not evaluate the trustworthiness of other CAs in a standardized manner. Therefore, this paper also proposes a new cross-certification method using a distributed ledger technology for building trust relationships based on unified criteria. It also describes the implementation of a Meta-PKI system for Hyperledger Fabric as a proof of concept. Once trust relationships have been established, it takes approximately 65.7 ms to validate them using the proposed system, which is secure against CA takeover and spoofing by outsider attackers.
OAuth 2.0 is the industry-standard protocol for authorization. It facilitates secure service provisioning, as well as secure interoperability among diverse stakeholders. All OAuth 2.0 protocol flows result in the creation of an access token, which is then used by a user to request access to a protected resource. Nevertheless, the definition of access tokens is transparent to the OAuth 2.0 protocol, which does not specify any particular token format, how tokens are generated, or how they are used. Instead, the OAuth 2.0 specification leaves all these as design choices for integrators. In this paper, we propose a new type of OAuth 2.0 token backed by a distributed ledger. Our construction is secure, and it supports proof-of-possession, auditing, and accountability. Furthermore, we provide added-value token management services, including revocation, delegation, and fair exchange by leveraging smart contracts. We realized a proof-of-concept implementation of our solution using Ethereum smart contracts and the ERC-721 token specification.
Electronic health record (EHR) management systems require the adoption of effective technologies when health information is being exchanged. Current management approaches often face risks that may expose medical record storage solutions to common security attack vectors. However, healthcare-oriented blockchain solutions can provide a decentralized, anonymous and secure EHR handling approach. This paper presents PREHEALTH, a privacy-preserving EHR management solution that uses distributed ledger technology and an Identity Mixer (Idemix). The paper describes a proof-of-concept implementation that uses the Hyperledger Fabric's permissioned blockchain framework. The proposed solution is able to store patient records effectively whilst providing anonymity and unlinkability. Experimental performance evaluation results demonstrate the scheme's efficiency and feasibility for real-world scale deployment.
Blockchain is widely recognized as a potential disruptive technology that has gained much popularity recently. Despite many promising results, the current blockchain landscape is fragmented, in which many blockchain systems exist in silos. Interoperability becomes a critical functionality to facilitate broad blockchain adoption and starts to attract attention in both industry and academia research. In this paper, we propose a new consensus protocol, Multi-tokens Proof of Stake (MPoS), for blockchain interoperability architecture. The MPoS protocol is able to strengthen the token network effects in a cross-chain ecosystem and grow the user base of blockchain systems dramatically. We also provide an analytical model to analyze and prove that the MPoS protocol can offer better security than traditional single-token PoS consensus protocols.
Alexandre Pinheiro, Edna Dias Canedo, Rafael T. de Sousa, Robson de Oliveira Albuquerque
The adoption of cloud computing solutions is an established reality in government agencies and in small, medium, and large companies due to procurement easiness and the variety of available services, as well as its low cost compared to the acquisition and management of own infrastructures. Among the most used services is cloud file storage, and the security of this storage has been an essential subject of recent research, particularly customer data integrity. Thus, this article proposes a solution for the monitoring of the integrity of files stored in the cloud, based on the use of smart contracts in Blockchain Networks, symmetric encryption, and computational trust. The proposed solution consists of a protocol that provides confidentiality, decentralization, audit availability, and the secure sharing of file integrity monitoring results, without overloading the services involved, as well as an unabridged reference implementation which was used to validate the proposal. The results obtained during the validation tests have shown that the solution is feasible and faultless in detecting corrupted files. These tests also confirmed that the sharing of integrity monitoring results, coupled with the application of computational trust techniques, significantly increased the efficiency of the proposed solution.
Mohammad Madine, Ammar Battah, Ibrar Yaqoob, Khaled Salah · 8 authors
Personal health records (PHRs) are valuable assets to individuals because they enable them to integrate and manage their medical data. A PHR is an electronic application through which patients can manage their health information. Giving patients control over their medical data offers an advantageous realignment of the doctor-patient dynamic. However, today's PHR management systems fall short of giving reliable, traceable, trustful, and secure patients control over their medical data, which poses serious threats to their authenticity and accuracy. Moreover, most of the current approaches and systems leveraged for managing PHR are centralized that not only make medical data sharing difficult but also poses a risk of single point of failure problem. In this paper, we propose Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts to give patients control over their data in a manner that is decentralized, immutable, transparent, traceable, trustful, and secure. The proposed system employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS), proxy re-encryption, and trusted reputation-based oracles to securely fetch, store, and share patients' medical data. We present algorithms along with their full implementation details. We evaluate the proposed smart contracts using two important performance metrics, such as cost and correctness. Furthermore, we provide security analysis and discuss the generalization aspects of our solution. We outline the limitations of the proposed approach. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), like Blockchain, are characterized by features such as transparency, traceability, and security by design. These features make the adoption of Blockchain attractive to enhance information security, privacy, and trustworthiness in very different contexts. This paper provides a comprehensive survey and aims at analyzing and assessing the use of Blockchain in the context of Distributed Trust and Reputation Management Systems (DTRMS). The analysis includes academic research as well as initiatives undertaken in the business domain. The paper defines two taxonomies for both Blockchain and DTRMS and applies a Formal Concept Analysis. Such an approach allowed us to identify the most recurrent and stable features in the current scientific landscape and several important implications among the two taxonomies. The results of the analysis have revealed significant trends and emerging practices in the current implementations that have been distilled into recommendations to guide Blockchain's adoption in DTRMS systems.
Dimitris Karakostas, Aggelos Kiayias, Mario Larangeira
Blockchain protocols based on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) depend—by nature—on the active participation of stakeholders. If users are offline and abstain from the PoS consensus mechanism, the system’s security is at risk, so it is imperative to explore ways to both maximize the level of participation and minimize the effects of non-participation. One such option is stake representation, such that users can delegate their participation rights and, in the process, form “stake pools”. The core idea is that stake pool operators always participate on behalf of regular users, while the users retain the ownership of their assets. Our work provides a formal PoS wallet construction that enables delegation and stake pool formation. While investigating the construction of addresses in this setting, we distil and explore address malleability, a security property that captures the ability of an attacker to manipulate the delegation information associated with an address. Our analysis consists of identifying multiple levels of malleability, which are taken into account in our paper’s core result. We then introduce the first ideal functionality of a PoS wallet’s core which captures the PoS wallet’s capabilities and is realized as a secure protocol based on standard cryptographic primitives. Finally, consider the wallet core in conjunction with a PoS ledger and investigate how delegation and stake pools affect a PoS system’s security.
Kentaroh Toyoda, Koji Machi, Yutaka Ohtake, Allan N. Zhang
Private Ethereum blockchain-based systems are demanded in many industry sectors. However, the throughput performance of these systems does not meet their expectations. Many researchers have analyzed the performance of private blockchains, but their studies have failed to analyze root causes. In this paper, we perform a deep function-level bottleneck analysis for the private Ethereum blockchain. As the Ethereum client application is developed with golang, we leverage pprof, which is a resource-profiling tool for golang, and custom golang functions to measure the time taken by functions. To easily configure parameters and conduct our test, we code a shell script that automates the building process of a private Ethereum blockchain with docker containers. We conducted a series of experiments and identified the bottleneck function that is called every time a transaction arrives at an Ethereum node. In addition, we also found that the multi-threading is not well utilized, meaning that there is much room for improvement.
Eman M. Abou-Nassar, Abdullah M. Iliyasu, Passent Elkafrawy, Oh-Young Song · 6 authors
Today, internet and device ubiquity are paramount in individual, formal and societal considerations. Next generation communication technologies, such as Blockchains (BC), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, etc. offer limitless capabilities for different applications and scenarios including industries, cities, healthcare systems, etc. Sustainable integration of healthcare nodes (i.e. devices, users, providers, etc.) resulting in healthcare IoT (or simply IoHT) provides a platform for efficient service delivery for the benefit of care givers (doctors, nurses, etc.) and patients. Whereas confidentiality, accessibility and reliability of medical data are accorded high premium in IoHT, semantic gaps and lack of appropriate assets or properties remain impediments to reliable information exchange in federated trust management frameworks. Consequently, We propose a Blockchain Decentralised Interoperable Trust framework (DIT) for IoT zones where a smart contract guarantees authentication of budgets and Indirect Trust Inference System (ITIS) reduces semantic gaps and enhances trustworthy factor (TF) estimation via the network nodes and edges. Our DIT IoHT makes use of a private Blockchain ripple chain to establish trustworthy communication by validating nodes based on their inter-operable structure so that controlled communication required to solve fusion and integration issues are facilitated via different zones of the IoHT infrastructure. Further, C# implementation using Ethereum and ripple Blockchain are introduced as frameworks to associate and aggregate requests over trusted zones.
Hamda Al Breiki, Muhammad Habib ur Rehman, Khaled Salah, Davor Svetinović
The essence of blockchain smart contracts lies in the execution of business logic code in a decentralized architecture in which the execution outcomes are trusted and agreed upon by all the executing nodes. Despite the decentralized and trustless architectures of the blockchain systems, smart contracts on their own cannot access data from the external world. Instead, smart contracts interact with off-chain external data sources, called oracles, whose primary job is to collect and provide data feeds and input to smart contracts. However, there is always risk of oracles providing corrupt, malicious, or inaccurate data. In this paper, we analyze and present the notion of trust in the oracles used in blockchain ecosystems. We analyze and compare trust-enabling features of the leading blockchain oracle approaches, techniques, and platforms. Moreover, we discuss open research challenges that should be addressed to ensure secure and trustworthy blockchain oracles.
Shoba, Prof. M. Shanmugam, Venkatapur, Dr. Rekha B
Blockchain has become one of the most pioneeringtechnologies, with the rise of Bitcoin, blockchain which is the core technology of Bitcoin has received increasing attention. There are multiple signature scheme based on digital signature schemes that supports making signatures on many different messages generated by many different users, the size of the signature could be shortened by compressing multiple signatures into a single signature. Based on the blockchain architecture and existing Merkle tree based signature schemes, In this paper, an analysis of how to enhance the signature schemes to secure the transactions on blockchain based on extensible post-quantum (PQ) resistant digital signature scheme best suited to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies is proposed.
Tadas Limba, Andrius Stankevičius, Antanas Andrulevičius
Cryptocurrency market is developing fast during the past few years. Cryptocurrency now is available as a form of payment for retail goods, as an instrument for a wholesale international transaction a mean of exchange for whatever goods and is available through ATM's. Moreover, it is developing as a possibility for fundraising a) as a private debt b) as seed capital. Companies like Facebook are discussing launching own cryptocurrency. Bank UBS is developing its blockchain based virtual currency as well. However, scientist agrees that cryptocurrency has an important impact to national security. It became a relevant instrument for illegal good transactions, a mean of exchange in the darknet and an instrument for money laundering or infrastructure for new kind of money-laundering practices (for example-"Smurfing" phenomena (EU Observer, 2019)) European Union is launching AML and KYC procedures for the cryptocurrency market. Would it be efficient? Why are we implementing KYC and AML procedures for cryptocurrency? Is it able to minimize risks?
Cloud computing is an information technology that enables different users to access a shared pool of configurable system resources and different services without physically acquiring them. Most industries nowadays such as banking, healthcare and education are migrating to the cloud due to its efficiency of services especially when it comes to data security and integrity. Cloud platforms encounter numerous challenges such as Data deduplication, Data Transmission, Data Integrity, VM Security, Data Availability, Bandwidth usage… etc. In this paper we have adopted the Blockchain technology - which is a relatively new technology - that emerged for the first time as the cryptocurrency Bitcoin and proved its efficiency in securing data and assuring data integrity. It is mostly a distributed public ledger that holds transactions data in case of Bitcoin. In our work blockchains are adopted in a different way than its regular use in bitcoin. Three of the major challenges in Cloud Computing and Cloud services are Data Deduplication, Storage and Bandwidth usage are discussed in this paper.
V. Brindha Devi, R. Skanda Gurunathan, N. Keerthivasan
The rapid growth in the population has lead to generation of large amount of data from each individual. Each and every individual holds several physically signed documents. Currently, the documents, certificates, and contracts are all printed in papers and manually signed. It is difficult for other party say a recruiter, or a government official or any other custom officer to verify the validity of the certificates and other documents of the individual. It consumes a tremendous amount of time for validating and verifying such documents manually. Thus we propose a system to develop a Decentralized application (DApp) for implementing a Blockchain[1] to store and verify the documents. By the nature of blockchain, the documents are securely stored with high integrity, and no further modifications can be done to the blocks in the chain which in turn reduces the creation of forged documents. Also using Distributed Ledger technology(DLT)[5] and IPFS the data is decentralised so that it is readily available with integrity. Also, using MultiSig[3] concepts, the system is more secured by two step authentication. Thus, blockchain creates trust and DLT provides integrity ease of access. And with use of IPFS the DApp is decentralized4]
In industrial automation, numerous devices are interconnected in smart factories for further monitor and control. Various infrastructure devices in industrial automation are usually used for control instruction distribution, data collection, and collaboration of the industrial applications. Recent security threats on industrial automation are more frequent and the industrial control systems lack trust mechanism. Blockchain has been introduced due to its decentralization and security promise, but the election results in the original designs could be biased without collaboration trust, which leads the blockchain-based industry applications invalid. In addition, in existing solutions, neither supernodes nor normal nodes in blockchain can transfer their control authorities for disaster backup. To address the aforementioned challenges, this article proposes a collaborative trust based unbiased control transfer mechanism (CTM), which realizes a dynamic assignment of industrial control. First, a collaborative trust based delegated proof of stake consensus is proposed for determining the authorities of control dynamically and unbiasedly, by designing a lightweight trust propagation protocol. Second, a CTM for checking, alarming, and restarting CTM is devised for the disaster backup. The simulation results demonstrate the CTM, which is feasible and effective for industrial automation security.
Amir Teshome Wonjiga, Sean Peisert, Louis Rilling, Christine Morin
Migrating an application from local compute resources to commercial cloud resources involves giving up full control of the physical infrastructure, as the cloud service provider (CSP) is responsible for managing the physical infrastructure, including its security. The reliance of a tenant on a CSP can create a trust issue around whether the CSP is upholding its end of the bargain. CSPs acknowledge this and provide a guarantee through a Service Level Agreement (SLA). SLAs need to be verified for satisfaction of the defined objectives. To avoid raising the trust issue again, such a verification procedure needs to be unbiased and independently achievable by both tenants and CSPs without one relying on the other party. In this paper, we consider an SLA offered by the provider that guarantees the integrity of tenants' data, and propose to verify the SLA using an integrity checking method based on a distributed ledger. Our proposed method allows both CSPs and tenants to perform integrity checking without one party relying on the other. The method uses a blockchain as a distributed ledger to store evidence of data integrity. Assuming the ledger as a secure, trusted source of information, the evidence can be used to resolve conflicts between providers and tenants. In addition, we present a prototype implementation and an experimental evaluation to show the feasibility of our verification method and to measure the time overhead.
Gaganjeet Singh Reen, Manasi Mohandas, S. Venkatesan
Electronic Health Records(EHR) are gaining a lot of popularity all over the world. The current EHR systems however have their fair share of problems related to privacy and security. We have proposed a mechanism which provides a solution to most of these problems. Using a permissioned Ethereum blockchain allows the hospitals and patients across the world to be connected to each other. Our mechanism uses a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography to ensure the secure storage and selective access of records. It gives patients full control over their health records and also allows them to grant or revoke a hospital's access to his/her records. We have used IPFS(inter planetary file system) to store records which has the advantage of being distributed and ensures immutability of records. The proposed model also maintains the statistics of diseases without violating the privacy of any patient.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques