The blockchain's cross-chain atomic exchange uses smart contracts to replace trusted third parties, but atomic exchange cannot guarantee the anonymity of transactions, and it will inevitably increase the risk of privacy leakage. Therefore, this paper proposes an atom based on zero-knowledge proof. Improved methods of exchange to ensure the privacy of both parties in a transaction. The anonymous improvement scheme in this article uses the UTXO unconsumed model to add a new anonymous list in the blockchain. When sending assets to smart contracts, zero-knowledge proof is used to provide self-certification of ownership of the asset, and then the transaction is broken down. Only the hash value of the transaction is sent to the node, and the discarded list is used to verify the validity of the transaction, which achieves the effect of storing assets anonymously in the smart contract. At the same time, a smart contract is added when the two parties in the transaction communicate to exchange the contract address of the newly set smart contract between the two parties in the transaction. This can prevent the smart contract address information from being stolen when the two parties in the transaction communicate directly.
This demonstration presents vChain, a blockchain system that ensures query integrity. With the proliferation of blockchain applications and services, there has been an increasing demand for querying the data stored in a blockchain database. However, existing solutions either are at the risk of losing query integrity, or require users to maintain a full copy of the blockchain database. In comparison, by employing a novel verifiable query processing framework, vChain enables a lightweight user to authenticate the query results returned from a potentially untrusted service provider. We demonstrate its verifiable query operations, usability, and performance with visualization for better insights. We also showcase how users can detect falsified results in the case that the service provider is compromised.
Confidentiality is an indispensable requirement in financial applications of blockchain technology, and supporting it along with high performance and friendly programmability is technically challenging. In this paper, we present a system design called CONFIDE to support on-chain confidentiality by leveraging Trust Execution Environment (TEE). CONFIDE's secure data transmission protocol and data encryption protocol, together with a highly efficient virtual machine run in TEE, guarantee the confidentiality in the life cycle of a transaction from end to end. CONFIDE proposes a secure data model along with an application-driven secure protocol to guarantee data confidentiality and integrity. Its smart contract language extension offers users the flexibility to define complex confidentiality models. CONFIDE is implemented as a plugin module to Antfin Blockchain's proprietary platform, and can be plugged into other blockchain platforms as well with its universal interface design. Nowadays, CONFIDE is supporting millions of commercial transactions daily on consortium blockchain running financial applications including supply chain finance, ABS, commodity provenance, and cold-chain logistics.
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.
As a new promising distributed technology, blockchains have been widely applied since its inception. Its decentralization feature reduces the reliance on the trusted authorities and third parties. It can well solve the problem of data being tampered and increase data sharing. However, a blockchain system faces various security and trust issues, such as attacks against consensus mechanisms and propagation processes, which may make it store malicious information or delay data propagation. The work discusses the basic architecture of blockchains as well as its potential security and trust issues at data, network, consensus, smart contract, and application layers. Then, the related literature work is analyzed in terms of the issues at these layers. Some open issues are presented and discussed.
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).
With the rise of blockchain technology, data sharing between organizations is often established in a distributed blockchain ledger that is decentralized and tamperproof and has a low trust cost. However, traditional blockchain technology does not adequately support the on-chain storage of massive data, and all the on-chain stored data are completely open and transparent to participants; consequently, it is impossible to meet the user's needs for privacy protection. In this study, we designed a scalable data access control method for blockchains; this method extends the storage forms of the blockchain to support the chaining and sharing of large files, ensures that the traceable data in the chaining process cannot be tampered with, and introduces the attribute authority mechanism in peer nodes to improve the reliability and efficiency of attribute authorization. To verify the correctness and security of the method, we built a complete prototype system based on the Hyperledger Fabric license chain and performed rigorous evaluations on the indicators of physical resource consumption and performance using the Hyperledger Caliper evaluation model. The results showed that the proposed method achieved a good balance in terms of performance, safety, and resource consumption indicators.
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.
The security of the Internet of things(IoT) has become a very critical and sensitive issue. In the limited network based on COAP, due to the limited ability of nodes and the lack of reliable authentication and access control mechanism in the Resource Directory (RD), devices are easy to be attacked and cause data leakage. This paper proposes a method to enhance the security of COAP nodes by using blockchain. By extending the business capability of the CoAP RD, the semantics of the security attributes are added; and a security service access agent is defined to be responsible for the blockchain operation; the RD can be involved in the authentication/access control of the blockchain when the CoAP node resource access is parsed. The CoAP node can transfer the device and service data to the blockchain for secure storage. In this paper, the Californium COAP framework and Ethereum are used as the verification platform to realize the software and security service access agent software that extend the RD security semantics. The authentication / access control is carried out in combination with the blockchain, and the COAP node provides the security storage capacity in combination with the blockchain. The work of this paper shows that it is feasible to use blockchain technology to improve the security capability of COAP nodes in the IoT.
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.
With the development of IoT, a large amount of valuable data is stored in remote cloud services by enterprises or individuals, which raises concerns about the security of data. In order to ensure the integrity of the data in the cloud, scholars have proposed various auditing scheme, among which Third Party Auditor (TPA) is a distinctive feature of a class of scheme. But the security of a centralized TPA is difficult to ensure, and blockchain technology makes up for this shortcoming. In order to solve this, we propose a secure auditing scheme based on the consortium blockchain. Our scheme owns following feature: anonymity, fairness, accountability, security. The experiment results show that our scheme is efficient.
Daily lots of data is exchanged and loaded on a cloud into different sectors one of which is the health sector. Data exchanged between the patient and doctors need to be secured to gain patients' trust. Blockchain is a mechanism invented to secure data in a more advanced way. Blockchain stores data into chunks that make it hard to decode, which will help provide an extra layer of security. Hash chain is the most reliable part of the blockchain that will help keep the data unreadable. This data can be secured by using a blockchain mechanism at the backend of any hospital website to store the reports of the patients and maintain a two-way authentication for doctor's access to the reports. Using the concepts of dividing data into chunks and establishing an inter-link between each chunk is one of the aspects of blockchain which is implemented on the hospital generated data to inherit blockchain mechanism. In this paper, we have discussed the benefits of using this mechanism to secure patients' reports and how it increases trust in the stored data.
The content of information is expanding very colossal, due to the advancement of web innovation. To deal with huge information, the capacity limit of the client's terminal has to be extended, with the assistance of the cloud stage (platform). Stringent security measures needed for storing information in the cloud platform. To address the above issue, a Blockchain for cloud storage and security is proposed in this paper. The decentralized and disseminated nature of the blockchain procedure ensure security prerequisites and persuade the improvement of giving security to cloud storage. In this paper, we discuss the concept of blockchain technology and its hot research trends is discussed.
Blockchain technology has been applied in different fields with the advantages of decentralization, anonymity, immutability and reliability. There are quite a lot of problems, such as data decentralization, low utilization rate, high cost and unguaranteed security when managing students' study records. Therefore, we design a blockchain-based system for students' comprehensive quality assessment. This system adopts a solution of combining “onchain and offchain” data, where we use the smart contract, the interplanetary file system (IPFS) and Web Service to ensure that data flow is efficient, safe and reliable. In this paper, a network architecture based on education consortium blockchain is proposed, where we design a blockchain data structure and storage model to conveniently access to students' quality assessment data. And a data flow mechanism is designed for student data's trusted sharing and authentication protection, in which we combine the advantages of RBFT-based Hyperchain consortium blockchain and traditional data persistence. Then we use the microservices architecture to build the whole system and propose a performance optimization scheme to ensure high availability of the system. Sharing student data for research purposes will boost research innovation in education.
Markus Luecking, Christian Fries, Robin Lamberti, Wilhelm Stork
Today, Internet of Things (IoT) devices mostly operate in enclosed, proprietary environments. To unfold the full potential of IoT applications, a unifying and permissionless environment is crucial. All IoT devices, even unknown to each other, would be able to trade services and assets across various domains. In order to realize those applications, uniquely resolvable identities are essential. However, quantifiable trust in identities and their authentication are not trivially provided in such an environment due to the absence of a trusted authority. This research presents a new identity and trust framework for IoT devices, based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). IoT devices assign identities to themselves, which are managed publicly and decentralized on the DLT's network as Self Sovereign Identities (SSI). In addition to the Identity Management System (IdMS), the framework provides a Web of Trust (WoT) approach to enable automatic trust rating of arbitrary identities. For the framework we used the IOTA Tangle to access and store data, achieving high scalability and low computational overhead. To demonstrate the feasibility of our framework, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation and evaluate the set objectives for real world applicability as well as the vulnerability against common threats in IdMSs and WoTs.