Blockchain Papers

Avita Katal, Vitesh Sethi, Saksham Lamba

No abstract is available for this record.

Sanjib K. Deka, Subhasish Goswami, Abhinav Anand

Maintenance of immutable vaccination records and provision of accessing the records in order to prove immunity has been the need of the hour. The recent spread of Covid19 and related uncertainty over vaccinations and immunity have made the search for a secure trustable system for reporting vaccination data more essential. Multiple digital, as well as paper-based solutions have been tested but none has been reported successful enough. In this paper, a technique has been proposed to solve the problem by introducing blockchain-based solution to maintain records of vaccination and proof of immunity for individuals. The purpose has been to present a safe and efficient solution to the problem and hence the model proposed is based on concepts of smart contracts and built over Ethereum blockchain. The paper goes on to give a detailed study of the technique based on discussions of its various aspects like design, development and feasibility.

Jing Tang, Tao Jia, Haibo Chen, Wei Chuncheng

With the popularity of digital cryptocurrency such as bitcoin, blockchain, as a new distributed framework with decentralization, non rewriting and traceability, has sprung up rapidly and has been applied in many industries such as finance, medical treatment, information security, etc. In order to ensure the security of transaction data, all key information in the business needs to enter the blockchain network. In the field of artificial intelligence, model data (i.e. effective feature point data set) will be the key information and will be used frequently. However, these feature point datasets may be megabytes, auspicious, or even terahertz. Then, the performance of big data transaction in blockchain network will be a problem worthy of study. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain big data storage method based on IPFs. This method mainly solves the transaction performance problem of large text data in the blockchain network. The data larger than 100 megabytes are stored in IPFs to obtain the hash certificate of text. The hash code is the only transaction voucher in the blockchain network. It greatly improves the transaction efficiency of blockchain network. In this paper, a comparative experiment is set up to further prove the efficiency of our method.

Yizhong Liu, Jianwei Liu, Yiming Hei, Wei Tan · 5 authors

In permissionless blockchains, due to the corruption attack of an adversary, nodes participating the protocol need to be updated regularly. In the process of node selection and committee reconfiguration, there may exist some problems. First, a complicated secure randomness generation protocol is in need. Besides, an adversary might obtain a mining puzzle in advance and start mining in ahead of honest nodes. Moreover, an adversary usually has an advantage of network delay. In order to solve the above problems, we conduct the following research. Firstly, we propose a PoW solution withhold attack against PoW-based member selection methods. An adversary might withhold his mining results in an epoch to obtain the mining puzzle of the next epoch in advance of honest nodes. Secondly, a secure shard reconfiguration protocol is designed, which does not rely on any complicated randomness generation protocol. Our shard reconfiguration protocol is proved rigorously to be secure, which means that in each selected committee, the honest node fraction exceeds a predefined target value. Thirdly, we implement our shard reconfiguration protocol. By carefully setting related system parameters, our protocol could be applied easily to most sharding blockchains. To our best knowledge, the shard reconfiguration protocol proposed in this paper is the first protocol that could safely implement node selection and committee reconfiguration of a sharding blockchain without using a secure randomness, which greatly reduces the communication and time overhead caused by the generation of a randomness.

Zhihui Wu, Yang Xiao, Enyuan Zhou, Qingqi Pei · 5 authors

Cross-heterogeneous blockchain interactions have been attracting much attention due to their application in depository blockchains mutual access and cross-blockchain identity authentication. Trusted access across heterogeneous chains is gradually becoming a hot challenge. In order to ensure cross-blockchain trusted access, the majority of the current works focus on on-chain notaries and the relay chain model. However, these methods have the following drawbacks: 1) notaries on the chain are more vulnerable to attacks due to their high degree of centralization, which causes off-chain users to lose their trust and thus exacerbates the off-chain trust crisis; 2) although the relay model involves multiple parties in maintenance and supervision and enjoys a more robust trust, the paticipatant nodes are relatively fixed, which impose a terrible dilemma that invalid nodes cannot participate in consensus formation in a timely manner, thus progressively disrupting the connectivity of the relay across heterogeneous chains and eventually reducing the rate of trusted mutual access. In this article, we propose a novel general framework for cross-heterogeneous blockchain communication based on a periodical committee rotation mechanism to support information exchange of diverse transactions across multiple heterogeneous blockchain systems. Connecting heterogeneous blockchains through committees has a more robust trust than the notary method. In order to eliminate the impact of downtime nodes in a timely manner, we periodically reorganize the committee and give priority to replacing downed nodes to ensure the reliability of the system. In addition, a message-oriented verification mechanism is designed to improve the rate of trusted intervisit across heterogeneous chains. We have built a prototype of the scheme and conducted simulation experiments on the current mainstream blockchain for message exchange across heterogeneous chains. The results show that our solution has a good performance both in inter-chain access rate and system stability.

Mahmudul Hasan, Anichur Rahman, Md. Jahidul Islam

During the academic career, students achieve numerous academic credentials. These educational credentials are offered by the student while applying for a job or scholarship. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to propose a theoretical blockchain-based certificate verification system on the cloud that can offer a potential solution for academic certificate issuing and verification where cryptocurrencies are banned. By this regarding in this research, we address the Blockchain (BC) technology for solving these problems. This BC can be capable of providing immutability and publicly verifiable transactions. Moreover, these properties of BC are used to generate the digital academic credential, which is anti-counterfeited can be verified easily in a little time. In addition, the proposed “DistB-CVS” showed that cryptocurrencies banned country could leverage the BC technology. It satisfies all the requirements necessary for a modern academic certificate verification system. Furthermore, it tries to close the holes and difficulties in the existing systems to verify academic certificate authenticity.

Papon Datta, Avishek Bhowmik, Atanu Shome, Milon Biswas

Importance of data security differs from sector to sector. However, data of sensitive nature are increasing day by day and thereby, it requires utmost attention towards the protection of data. Organizations from all over the world are getting involved to deploy the best cyber defense mechanism. Primary concerns for the organizations includes three common factors: people, processes, and technology. Smart national identity cards (smart cards) are immensely sensitive in nature. In Bangladesh, smart cards are being used for 22 services, which include banking, passports, driving licenses, etc. In addition, smart cards also hold bio-metric details for the cardholder such as retina scan, ten finger impressions, picture, and so on. Most of them are confidential data and prone to privacy breach. To address this issue, this paper propose a model for smart card management system using blockchain technology. In recent years, blockchain earned popularity among researchers to protect data from unlawful altercation. Adaptation of our proposed model will help the government of Bangladesh to secure citizens' private information and bring transparency on their information management. Furthermore, it will provide access control capability to citizens in case of third-party information access requests.

Walid K. Hasan, Albahlool M Abood, Mostafa Habbal

Internet of Things is defined as the framework of interconnected computing systems, mechanical and digital appliances, objects, animals, or people that are equipped with specific identifiers as well as the ability to transfer data over networks. Such devices will not require human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. This technology has emerged with a Blockchain, which has been used in cryptocurrency, to enhance the performance of security and decrease costs. Although emerging Blockchain with IoT has improved the entire system design. It still faces a number of issues relevant to time latency, anonymity, power efficiency, and big data. Blockchain has been used in various applications such as Healthcare, smart homes, and smart cities. In this paper, we will briefly define the idea of Blockchain including the definition of Blockchain, its types, advantages, and disadvantages, and then present some challenges of Blockchain-based applications on the Internet of things where we focus on Healthcare, smart homes, and smart cities. Finally, some future work direction will be introduced.

Tharaka Hewa, Mika Ylianttila, Madhusanka Liyanage

No abstract is available for this record.

Richard Richard, Mahenda Metta Surya, Avenia Clarissa Wibowo

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain are two emerging concepts that explored exponentially in recent years. In software development, artificial Intelligence offers a sophisticated enhancement on the programming logic, while blockchain technology provides transparency and relief the obligation to trust in a central party. Both are two different technologies but considered a disruptive technology in recent years. Artificial Intelligence faces several issues related to the validity of data, algorithms, and policies, while blockchain is called so “friendly” with transparency, trust, and immutability. Both technologies are still in the early stages of their development age. Always, the opportunity for both technologies to converge in some ways would be an exciting area to be explored. This research elaborates on the technical possibilities of application development on the blockchain platform that communicate with AI to do prediction task. Oracle contract allows the data inside Ethereum blockchain to interact with the external data source.

Tharaka Hewa, Anshuman Kalla, Avishek Nag, Mika Ylianttila · 5 authors

Hitherto, the evolution of mobile networks have fulfilled the increasing demands for enhanced performance, availability, portability, elasticity, and energy efficiency posed by the ever growing network services. In line with the progression, 5G depicts the next generation of mobile networks that further promises remarkable performance improvements as well as creation of new value chain. In parallel to 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as another new paradigm for interconnection of massive communication-capable heterogeneous smart objects. 5G is envisaged to broaden IoT's scope and fields of applicability. However, since current mobile networks and also more general IoT systems are based on centralized models thus it is anticipated that they will face tremendous challenges to meet-up the requirements of future 5G-enabled-IoT use cases. To solve these inevitable issues Blockchain stands out as promising technology. Some of the offerings of Blockchain technology are immutability, non-repudiation, proof of provenance, integrity, privacy, etc. Blockchain's combination with 5G and IoT still requires essential insights with respect to concrete application domains, scalability, privacy issues, performance, and potential financial benefits. The paper aims to elaborate and emphasize the key aspects of the use of Blockchain for 5G and IoT.

Efe Bozkir, Shahram Eivazi, Mete Akgün, Enkelejda Kasneci

Eye tracking data collection in the virtual reality context is typically carried out in laboratory settings, which usually limits the number of participants or consumes at least several months of research time. In addition, under laboratory settings, subjects may not behave naturally due to being recorded in an uncomfortable environment. In this work, we propose a proof-of-concept eye tracking data collection protocol and its implementation to collect eye tracking data from remotely located subjects, particularly for virtual reality using Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts. With the proposed protocol, data collectors can collect high quality eye tracking data from a large number of human subjects with heterogeneous socio-demographic characteristics. The quality and the amount of data can be helpful for various tasks in data-driven human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence.

Anna Burzykowska

No abstract is available for this record.

Aritra Mukherji, N. R. Ganguli

Blockchain Technology has been relevant to the industry since the advent of Bitcoin in the year 2009. In recent years, it has been an important field of study and research as it has the potential to transform a wide range of industries. Recent studies reveal that Electronic Health Records (EHR) are susceptible to problems like Data Breaching, Interoperability and Information Asymmetry leading to poor accessibility of a patient's medical history. This paper focusses on the implementation of permissioned blockchain in EHR management by providing a decentralized, cost-efficient and a secure environment. The aim of our proposed architecture is to improve the scalability of Blockchain used in EHR to provide an improvised access to a patient's health record.

Rajesh Gupta, Urvish Thakker, Sudeep Tanwar, Mohammad S. Obaidat · 5 authors

Intelligent Telesurgery (TS) system with 6G-enabled Tactile Internet (TI) based on the blockchain has tremendous potential to deliver real-time and intelligent ultra-responsive healthcare services remotely with high quality and reliability. It would be significantly beneficial for the society in the prospect that high-quality medical service could be delivered to deprived areas and a highly promising surgical diagnosis could be achieved. However, the state-of-the-art TS systems have security, privacy, reliability, latency, and high-cost blockchain-based storage concerns, which limit the applicability of TS in surgical operations across the globe in the near future. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, we in this paper propose a novel approach named BITS an intelligent and blockchain-based TS framework. The issues pertaining to security, privacy, and lack of trust could be resolved through employing a smart contract. The issues related to the cost of data storage could be resolved by employing the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. Moreover, we incorporate Artificial Intelligent (AI) algorithms for training of surgical robots. The proposed scheme also prevents the execution of malicious commands transmitted by an intruder to a great extent. The 6G communication channel significantly mitigates the latency issues in exchanging surgical commands. Finally, we highlight some issues of the state-of-art TS systems and how the proposed BITS will be beneficial to combat those issues.

Nogol Memari, Saranaz Abdollahi, Mahdi Maghrouni Ganzagh, Mehrdad Moghbel

Diabetes is a serious medical condition and regular screening for diabetes is of great importance as treatment options are most effective in the early stages of diabetes. Digital imaging of retina is considered as a low-cost method for screening and could be used in conjunction with computer-based image processing techniques to automatically detect early signs of diabetes utilizing diabetes-related pathologies visible in retinal fundus images. This research proposes a novel computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) system for assisting with the screening of the population as up to 50% of the affected population are not aware of having diabetes. Moreover, these screenings are often carried out by an optometrist who receives some training with the patients being referred to an ophthalmologist if they show symptoms. Having a computer-assisted diagnosis system assisting the optometrist during the screening can greatly increase the detection rate for patients with diabetes by providing a second opinion and highlighting any suspicious pathologies. For achieving the highest detection rate possible, a hybrid machine learning approach is proposed in this research by combining Deep Learning with the AdaBoost classifier. The proposed computer-assisted diagnosis system starts with the segmentation of the blood vessels. Then, microaneurysms and exudates are segmentation from the image. Statistical and regional features are then extracted utilizing first, second, and higher-order image features. A Deep Learning framework will be utilized for extracting additional statistical image descriptors as a Deep Learning has superior contextual analysis capabilities compared to other machine learning techniques. Finally, the most informative features are selected by a minimal-redundancy maximal-relevance feature selection approach with an AdaBoost classifier analyzing all the features and informing the operator regarding the patient’s condition. Ethereum Swarm blockchain-based decentralized cloud file storage provides the proposed CAD users with a secure storage olution to access the patient information and related images. The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the classification will be measured under clinical conditions. Healthcare, government, and public users would receive the most benefit from this project.

Alessandra Pieroni, Noemi Scarpato, Lorenzo Felli

The Internet of Things (IoT) as a concept is fascinating and exciting, with an exponential growth just beginning. The IoT global market is expected to grow from 170 billion USD in 2017 to 560 billion USD by 2022. Though many experts have pegged IoT as the next industrial revolution, two of the major challenging aspects of IoT since the early days are having a secure privacy-safe ecosystem encompassing all building blocks of IoT architecture and solve the scalability problem as the number of devices increases. In recent years, Distributed Ledgers have often been referred to as the solution for both privacy and security problems. One form of distributed ledger is the Blockchain system. The aim of this paper consists of reviewing the most recent Blockchain architectures, comparing the most interesting and popular consensus algorithms, and evaluating the convergence between Blockchain and IoT by illustrating some of the main interesting projects in this research field. Furthermore, the paper provides a vision of a disruptive research topic that the authors are investigating: the use of AI algorithms to be applied to IoT devices belonging to a Blockchain architecture. This obviously requires that the devices be provided with adequate computational capacity and that can efficiently optimize their energy consumption.

René Thomas, V. S. Anitha

No abstract is available for this record.

Vipul Badhe, Pooja Nhavale, Sonal Todkar, Prajakta Shinde · 5 authors

While the number of universities, tertiary education students and number of graduates per year constantly increase, the need to easily verify degree certificates generates new business opportunities. In this paper we project two financial models balancing where the price for the service is balanced between the graduate and the employer as the main stakeholders of that service. Students demand a proof-of-certification at low cost and easy to check, employers also demand quick and trustable verification of degrees when recruiting. As large number of students graduate every year, the problem of fake certificates is a big issue. One can easily get fake certificates in India. Companies hiring thousands of fresher spend large amount of money to get the educational certificates and transcripts verified of applicants. A Digital Certificate using blockchain technology can address this problem. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed digital ledger collectively maintained by a network of computers, called nodes. The data in the blockchain cannot be modified by a person without the consent of everyone else who maintains the records. This makes the data secure.

Peiying Zhang, Xue Pang, Neeraj Kumar, Gagangeet Singh Aujla · 5 authors

With the advent of the Internet of things (IoT) era, more and more devices are connected to the IoT. Under the traditional cloud-thing centralized management mode, the transmission of massive data is facing many difficulties, and the reliability of data is difficult to be guaranteed. As emerging technologies, blockchain technology and edge computing (EC) technology have attracted the attention of academia in improving the reliability, privacy and invariability of IoT technology. In this paper, we combine the characteristics of the EC and blockchain to ensure the reliability of data transmission in the IoT. First of all, we propose a data transmission mechanism based on blockchain, which uses the distributed architecture of blockchain to ensure that the data is not tampered with; secondly, we introduce the three-tier structure in the architecture in turn; finally, we introduce the four working steps of the mechanism, which are similar to the working mechanism of blockchain. In the end, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can ensure the reliability of data transmission in the Internet of things to a great extent.

Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Anish Jindal

The in-house health monitoring sensors form a large network of Internet of things (IoT) that continuously monitors and sends the data to the nearby devices or server. However, the connectivity of these IoT-based sensors with different entities leads to security loopholes wherein the adversary can exploit the vulnerabilities due to the openness of the data. This is a major concern especially in the healthcare sector where the change in data values from sensors can change the course of diagnosis which can cause severe health issues. Therefore, in order to prevent the data tempering and preserve the privacy of patients, we present a decoupled blockchain-based approach in the edge-envisioned ecosystem. This approach leverages the nearby edge devices to create the decoupled blocks in blockchain so as to securely transmit the healthcare data from sensors to the edge nodes. The edge nodes then transmit and store the data at the cloud using the incremental tensor-based scheme. This helps to reduce the data duplication of the huge amount of data transmitted in the large IoT healthcare network. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the block preparation time, header generation time, tensor reduction ratio, and approximation error.

Y Supreet, Patil Mahesh Vasudev, H. Pavitra, Mouna Naravani · 5 authors

Blockchain, one of the modern technologies, has received significant attention recently. The blockchain is an immutable ledger which records the transaction in a decentralized manner that ensures high security. Blockchain-based applications are popular in numerous fields like financial services, cryptocurrencies, cybersecurity, supply chain, health care, E-Governance, asset management, Internet of Things (IoT), and so on. In order to validate a transaction within a ledger, blockchain uses the concept of consensus. Consensus guarantees fault tolerance, reliability and high security of the blockchain systems. The most widely used consensus algorithms in the modern blockchains are the Proof of Work (PoW), the Proof of Stake (PoS), the Proof of Activity(PoA) and the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance(PBFT). In this work, we conduct a performance evaluation of these four consensus algorithms using Naive implementation of a blockchain network. We also conduct experiments with two popular consensus mechanisms in Ethereum platform. We study the characteristics of transaction and query latencies by varying the number of complexity and transactions. Finally, we present the conclusion on the performance consensus algorithms.

Subhasish Mohapatra, Smita Parija

The blockchain is significantly adopted widely in all domains due to its open , decentralized , distributed form of public digital ledger where all transactions are put down between people across many nodes, so that the record cannot be made diverse retrospectively without the adaptation of all successive blocks and the consensus of the network infrastructure. Here we emphasize the beauty of blockchain which is regarded as a growing chain of records fastened by the robust cryptography technique. Cryptography rooted upon a written code that needs authorized decoding and standard format of encryption. Blockchain is governed by a network that sticks fast to protocols. It would bring off nodal communication and validation of new blocks. Miners can validate transactions, and a transaction log is to be inscribed into the blockchain. Mining step clings to the application of an algorithm to validate and retrieve data. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in digi-currency that is digital by nature in which encryption is involved for the regulation and generation of units of currency. Cryptocurrency uses cryptography for data security and blockchain technology for making transactions. This mechanism of adding valid transactions to a chain of records in its entirety is remarked as a blockchain algorithm. In blockchain, every node in the network culminates in the same conclusion; each one is capable of updating the record independently, with the most promising record conceptualized as the de-facto official record in lieu of a master copy. Specific transactions broadcast this message, and every node build’s its own updated version of events. This tremendous application makes enigmatic blockchain technology totally unique. It is regarded as a revolution in recording and distributing information, because it eliminates the need of a third party to accelerate digital relationships. Blockchain technology is extensively designed to meet in various emerging aspects. It is built using emerging protocols that provide right framing for a peer-to-peer network, which is a pile of records, based on private key cryptography to verify agents’ identification. Algorithms play a vital role in the blockchain technology. A blockchain is a series of transactional interactions that do not need a trusted third-party verification for authenticity. The marshaling of digital relationships is secured by an inherent mechanism. Subsequently, it makes the application robust, simple, and sophisticated. Considering its most popular and successful application, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that constructs upon a consensus network algorithm called proof of work . Bitcoin was the front release of an electronic money system that assembles a peer-to-peer network to prevent double spending and validate transactions. It is completely decentralized without any central authority. In this chapter, we focus upon blockchain algorithm and its impact upon cloud-connected ecosystem.

Ashok Kumar Yadav, Karan Singh

No abstract is available for this record.