Certificate Authorities (CAs) are important components for digital certificate issuances in Public Key Infrastructure(PKI). However, current CAs have some intrinsic weaknesses due to the CA-centric implementation. And when browser and operating system vendors contain a CA in the software, they place complete trust in the CA. In this paper, we utilize natural characteristics of tamper-proof and transparency of smart contracts in blockchain platforms to design an independent entity, named the CA proxy, to manage life cycle of digital certificates. This management will achieve the certificate transparency. We propose a new system architecture easy to integrate the CA proxy with current CAs through applying the blockchain oracle service. In this architecture, the CA proxy, CAs, and even professional identity verification parties can accomplish life cycle management of certificates, signature of certificates, identity verification for certificates correspondingly. The achievement of the certificate transparency through life cycle management of digital certificates in blockchain platforms, when compared with traditional CAs, solves traditional CAs' trust model weaknesses and improve the security.
Benedikt Bünz, Lucianna Kiffer, Loi Luu, Mahdi Zamani
To validate transactions, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum require nodes to verify that a blockchain is valid. This entails downloading and verifying all blocks, taking hours and requiring gigabytes of bandwidth and storage. Hence, clients with limited resources cannot verify transactions independently without trusting full nodes. Bitcoin and Ethereum offer light clients known as simplified payment verification (SPV) clients, that can verify the chain by downloading only the block headers. Unfortunately, the storage and bandwidth requirements of SPV clients still increase linearly with the chain length. For example, as of July 2019, an SPV client in Ethereum needs to download and store about 4 GB of data.Recently, Kiayias et al. proposed a solution known as noninteractive proofs of proof-of-work (NIPoPoW) that allows a light client to download and store only a polylogarithmic number of block headers in expectation. Unfortunately, NIPoPoWs are succinct only as long as no adversary influences the honest chain, and can only be used in chains with fixed block difficulty, contrary to most cryptocurrencies which adjust block difficulty frequently according to the network hashrate.We introduce FlyClient, a novel transaction verification light client for chains of variable difficulty. FlyClient is efficient both asymptotically and practically and requires downloading only a logarithmic number of block headers while storing only a single block header between executions. Using an optimal probabilistic block sampling protocol and Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) commitments, FlyClient overcomes the limitations of NIPoPoWs and generates shorter proofs over all measured parameters. In Ethereum, FlyClient achieves a synchronization proof size of less than 500 KB which is roughly 6,600x smaller than SPV proofs. We finally discuss how FlyClient can be deployed with minimal changes to the existing cryptocurrencies via an uncontentious velvet fork.
Lodovica Marchesi, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli, Maria Ilaria Lunesu
Blockchain and the programs running on it, called smart contracts, are increasingly applied in all fields where trust and strong certifications are required. Our work focuses on industrial applications of blockchains and not on cryptocurrencies or tokens. We use frameworks to compare public and permissioned blockchains specifically suited for industrial applications. We also propose a complete solution based on Ethereum to implement a decentralized application, putting together in an original way, components and patterns already used and proven. This solution is characterized by a set of validator nodes running the blockchain using Proof-of-Authority or similar efficient consensus algorithms, by the use of an explorer enabling users to check the blockchain state, and the source code of the smart contracts running on it. From time to time, the hash digest of the last mined block is written into a public blockchain to guarantee immutability. The right to send transactions is granted by validator nodes to users by endowing them with the Ethers mined locally. Overall, the proposed approach has the same transparency and immutability as a public blockchain, largely reducing its drawbacks.
Blockchain is an evolving technology which helps in keeping records and process transactions in decentralized manner. Blockchain is considered as safest medium because of its decentralized nature and many protocols, algorithms which it follows to make sure that transaction are immutable. Blockchain concept basically uses BZT theorem, this is considered as one of secured algorithm to predict secure results. however formal verification approach for the smart contract is still the best way to perform verification. In our paper, we have depicted various algorithm according to which we can verify the smart contract in best possible way.
Smart contract is a decentralized application that operates on a blockchain platform, providing secure and reliable capabilities to contract participants. Smart contracts play an important role in decentralized application scenarios. They are widely used in many fields, such as equity crowdfunding, games, insurance, and the Internet of Things, making them attractive to attackers. Compared to traditional programs, the security of smart contracts affects not only the fairness of contracts but also the safety of high volume digital assets on the blockchain managed by contracts. Therefore, analyzing the security of smart contracts and associated vulnerabilities is crucial. In this paper, we analyzed the characteristics of smart contracts and new security risks they bring. We propose a three-layer threat model, i.e., threats from high-level languages, virtual machines, and the blockchain, for characterizing smart contract security. We use the world′s largest smart contract platform Ethereum as an example to illustrate 15 types of common vulnerabilities in smart contracts. We then summarize the main challenges and progress of smart contract security research on vulnerability, including automated vulnerability detection, automated exploit generation and mitigations for smart contracts. At the end of this paper, we highlight the future of smart contract security research, and proposed two potential research directions.
Rafael Brundo Uriarte, Huan Zhou, Kyriakos Kritikos, Zeshun Shi · 6 authors
Summary The current cloud market is dominated by a few providers, which offer cloud services in a take‐it‐or‐leave‐it manner. However, the dynamism and uncertainty of cloud environments may require the change over time of both application requirements and service capabilities. The current service‐level agreement (SLA) management solutions cannot easily guarantee a trustworthy, distributed SLA adaptation due to the centralized authority of the cloud provider who could also misbehave to pursue individual goals. To address the above issues, we propose a novel SLA management framework, which facilitates the specification and enforcement of dynamic SLAs that enable one to describe how, and under which conditions, the offered service level can change over time. The proposed framework relies on a two‐level blockchain architecture. At the first level, the smart SLA is transformed into a smart contract that dynamically guides service provisioning. At the second level, a permissioned blockchain is built through a federation of monitoring entities to generate objective measurements for the smart SLA/contract assessment. The scalability of this permissioned blockchain is also thoroughly evaluated. The proposed framework enables creating open distributed clouds, which offer manageable and dynamic services, and facilitates cost reduction for cloud consumers, while it increases flexibility in resource management and trust in the offered cloud services.
Panait, Andreea-Elena, Ruxandra F. Olimid, Alin Ştefănescu
In the last years, identity management solutions on blockchain were proposed as a possible solution to the digital identity management problem. However, they are still at an early stage and further research needs to be done to conclude whether identity systems could benefit from the use of blockchain or not. Motivated by this, we investigate identity management solutions on blockchain intending to give the reader an overview of the current status and provide a better understanding of the pros and cons of using such solutions. We conduct an analysis on ten of the most known implementations, with a focus on privacy and security aspects. Finally, we identify existing challenges and give new directions for research.
Transactions represent a fundamental component in blockchains as they are the primary means for users to change the blockchain state. Current blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum require users to constantly observe the state changes of interest or the events taking place in a blockchain and requires the user to explicitly release the required transactions to respond to the observed events in the blockchain. This paper proposes EventWarden, a decentralized event-driven proxy service for users to outsource transactions in Ethereum-like blockchains. EventWarden employs a novel combination of smart contracts and blockchain logs. EventWarden allows a user to create a proxy smart contract that specifies an interested event and also reserves an arbitrary transaction to release. Upon observing the occurrence of the prescribed event, anyone in the Blockchain network can call the proxy contract to earn the service fee reserved in the contract by proving to the contract that the event has been recorded into blockchain logs, which then automatically triggers the proxy contract to release the reserved transaction. We show that the reserved transaction can only get released from the proxy contract when the prescribed event has taken place. We also demonstrate that as long as a single member in the Blockchain network is incentivized by the service fee to call the proxy contract after the prescribed event has taken place, the reserved transaction is guaranteed to get released. We implement EventWarden over the Ethereum official test network. The results demonstrate that EventWarden is effective and is ready-to-use in practice.
Manoharan Ramachandran, Niaz Chowdhury, Allan Third, John Domingue · 6 authors
Over-centralisation of data leads to tampering and sharing user information without the consent of the owners. This problem has been studied extensively in recent times providing separate solutions involving distributed storage, Blockchain technology and Solid Pods. Individually these solutions are not sufficient to build realistic applications in a decentralised environment; however, a combination of them can effectively provide more powerful and useful use-cases. In this paper, we propose the methods of combining Solid Pods and distributed ledgers in introducing complete decentralisation of data with total user-control, keeping the integrity of the stored information intact through Blockchain-based verification. We demonstrated multiple configurations of our solutions, offering several new use-cases in various sectors. These configurations introduce new dimensions on the Web and mobile applications’ data storage that developers can benefit from building Distributed Applications (DApps) in a complete decentralised environment.
The application of blockchain technology in e-certificates in the open journal system is needed to validate and distribute managed e-certificates in each journal issue. With tools in the form of conceptualized and managed blockcerts allows users to use and verify the authenticity of e-certificates that are closely linked to the blockchain. Observation on the open journal system and applied blockchain tools in the form of blockcerts as a place to issue e-certificates with guaranteed security so that e-certificates are verified as well as managed data. Issuance of e-certificates is still considered unsafe because it can be easily forged. Specifically, this study produced two benefits, namely: (1) Issuance of e-certificates in an open journal system is more verified, data is managed and there will not be duplications or even falsification of e-certificates. (2) The reputation of the open journal system is better with a sense of trust. This research uses library study method by implementing e-certificate in an open journal system with blockchain technology tools such as blockcerts. In order that the results of the e-certificate issuance go well and to avoid any crime that threatens the authenticity of the e-certificate, this blockchain is used to guarantee that the e-certificate is safe and not easily falsified, duplicated or even easily replaced by those not granted access rights. By using blockchain technology, the data collected will be well managed and not easily falsified.
The prosperity of cloud computing has driven an increasing number of enterprises and organizations to store their data on private or public cloud platforms. Due to the limitation of individual data owners in terms of data volume and diversity, data sharing over different cloud platforms would enable third parties to take advantage of big data analysis techniques to provide value-added services, such as providing healthcare services for customers by gathering medical data from multiple hospitals. However, it remains a challenging task to design effective incentives that encourage secure and collaborative data sharing in multiple clouds. In this paper, we propose a reliable collaboration model consisting of three types of participants, which include data owners, miners, and third parties, where the data is shared via blockchain and recorded by a smart contract. In general, these participants may acquire and store the sharing of data using their private or public clouds. We analyze the topological relationships between the participants and develop some Shapley value models from simple to complicate in the process of revenue distribution. We also discuss the incentive effect of sharing security data and rationality of the designed solution through analysis towards distribution rules.
Resource constraints have prevented comprehensive cryptography and multifactor authentication in numerous Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity scenarios. Existing IoT systems generally adopt lightweight security protocols that lead to compromise and privacy leakage. Edge computing enables better access control and privacy protection, furthermore, blockchain architecture has achieved a trusted store of value by open-source and distributed consensus mechanisms. To embrace these new paradigms, we propose a scheme that employs one-time association multitasking proofs for peer to local authentication (OTMP-P2L). The scheme chooses relevant nondeterministic polynomial (NP) problem tasks, and manages localized trust and anonymity by using smart devices such as phones and pads, thereby enabling IoT devices to autonomously perform consensus validation with an enhanced message authentication code. This nested code is a one-time zero-knowledge proof that comprises multiple logic verification arguments. To increase diversity and reduce the workload of each one, these arguments are chained by a method that establishes some of the inputs of the following task from the output of previous tasks. We implemented a smart lock system and confirmed that the scheme outperforms IoT authentication methods. The result demonstrates superior flexibility through dynamic difficulty strategies and succinct non-interactive peer-to-peer (P2P) verification.
Intan Permatasari, Meryam Essaid, Hyeonwoo Kim, Hongtaek Ju
A good archive management system must consider information security aspects, such as availability, confidentiality, and integrity. The Cilegon E-Archive (CEA) system is a centralized system for managing the lifecycle of archives. The existing CEA system has several problems, including a single point of failure, low data availability, and difficulty in proving the originality of files. This paper introduces a prototype for a new CEA system that integrates IPFS and the Ethereum private network. In addition, CEA DApp is developed as an interface for users in interacting with CEA system, and its functionality is managed by a smart contract. The results show that the conducted improvements into the CEA system highly improved the system security in terms of preventing archival forgeries.
Tobias Sund, Claes Lööf, Simin Nadjm‐Tehrani, Mikael Asplund
One of the major areas of interest for deployment of blockchains is in the supply chain sector where decentralisation combined with immutability is expected to enhance the transparency and robustness of transaction processing drastically. In this work we contribute to a feasibility study for permissioned blockchains in the context of a major international retail company. First, we characterise the types, relationships, and volumes of events that are created in the life cycle of a product from creation to ownership transfer. We use the created event model and the data from the company operations to identify the load that such an event processing system would have to manage. Then we create a prototype based on Quorum that deals with a significant subset of the events and expose the blockchain-based prototype to variations in load to identify the maximum throughput and average transaction processing time. This system can then form the basis of understanding the bottlenecks, configuration settings and platform choices needed in future potential deployment.
Outsourced storage enables data owners to host their data on remote storage resources without keeping a local copy so as to target their core business. However, a serious problem is data integrity in the sense that data owners lose their physical control over the remote-stored data. Existing provable data possession protocols are overwhelmingly designed for centralized storage such as cloud, in which the server is assumed dishonest but the client is reliable. Moreover, the centralized storage suffers single-point-of-failure threat. In this paper, to deal with these issues, we propose the notion of IntegrityChain, a decentralized storage framework supporting provable data possession (PDP) based on blockchain. We formalize the system model, in which a data owner can store files to the peers in a blockchain network and check the integrity of the outsourced data periodically by paying some cryptocurrencies while the hosts can earn money if honestly provide storage service and will be punished by losing the pre-made deposit if data loss happens. In the security model, we consider the fairness in trading between a host and a data user and the soundness of the underlying decentralized PDP in this system. We come up with a concrete construction by borrowing the idea of multi-replica PDP and proof-of-retrievability and present the security analysis of the proposal. The evaluation for the construction contain two segments: the offchain part, in which we implement the algorithms locally to test the time consumption, and onchain part, in which we program a smart contract and launch it in a test network to test the gas cost for the functions.
Muhammed Siraj, Mohd Izuan Hafez Ninggal, Nur Izura Udzir, Muhammad Daniel Hafiz Abdullah · 5 authors
Sensitive records stored in the cloud such as healthcare records, private conversation and credit card information are targets of hackers and privacy abuse. Current information and record management systems have difficulties achieving privacy protection of such sensitive records in a secure, transparent, decentralized and trustless environment. The Blockchain technology is a nascent and a promising technology that facilitates data sharing and access in a secure, decentralized and trustless environment. The technology enables the use of smart contracts that can be leveraged to complement existing traditional systems to achieve security objectives that were never possible before. In this paper, we propose a framework based on Blockchain technology to enable privacy-preservation in a secured, decentralized, transparent and trustless environment. We name our framework SmartCoAuth. It is based on Ethereum Smart Contract functions as the secure, decentralized, transparent authentication and authorization mechanism in the framework. It also enables tamper-proof auditing of access to the protected records. We analysed how SmartCoAuth could be integrated into a cloud application to provide reliable privacy-preservation among stakeholders of healthcare records stored in the cloud. The proposed framework provides a satisfactory level of data utility and privacy preservation.
Multi-tenant cloud computing is crucial in cloud service providers because they could gain benefit from allocating many users or tenants with the small amount of physical resource. However, multi-tenant could also cause some serious damaged due to the same location which tenant are placed. One of the problems is data leakage performing through co-resident attack from malicious tenant which result in the data to be stolen and caused business to loss the profit. Malicious tenants could modify their request or transaction for preventing anyone to trace back to them. After studying from related paper which show some implementation of Blockchain and cloud computing, we decide to use Blockchain to support cloud computing system. In order to observe and investigate in bad activity without any modification of activities, we introduce Blockchain which will help in auditing of transactions between tenants and cloud provider any provide strong integrity of transactions log. Moreover, we also integrate the Smart Contract which help on simulation on the allocation mechanism, policy checking and other functions between cloud provider and tenants for easily integrating cloud computing system on Blockchain. Our expected result would be that cloud computing could be implemented on Blockchain together with other functional features of cloud computing.
Sina Rafati Niya, Eryk Schiller, Ile Cepilov, Burkhard Stiller
In Industry 4.0 (I4), the Industrial Internet of Things (I2oT) data streams are prone to significant data manipulation risks. The integration of Blockchains (BC) with I2oT may become a solution preventing from this problem. This paper provides a blockchain-agnostic Blockchain I2oT (BI2oT) architecture called BIIT that allows developing a broad range of BC applications fully integrating Internet of Things (IoT). The mechanisms introduced in BIIT aim at solutions that provide data reliability, limit the computational overhead, and enhance energy efficiency. BIIT is evaluated through real-world experimentation.
Personal data are important information assets. Data sharing has potential of creating value to data owners as well as causing security and privacy concerns. Distributed storage solutions have emerged as an approach adhering to the Privacy-by-Design principles and in combination with blockchain technologies enable data and value exchange within communities of Internet users. The paper elaborates an approach for efficient distributed data storage and sharing, where access control is provided using the blockchain technologies and data searching and retrieval are facilitated using a knowledge base. A conceptual model and data management processes are elaborated and a prototype is developed. The prototype is used in experimental studies to compare data storage usage and data retrieval speed for the proposed approach and on-chain storage.
Ahmed Taha, Ahmed Zakaria, Dong‐Seong Kim, Neeraj Suri
Cloud computing offers a model where resources (storage, applications, etc.) are abstracted and provided “as-a- service” in a remotely accessible manner. Although there are numerous claimed benefits of the Cloud to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the stored data, the number of security breaches is still on the rise. The lack of security assurance and transparency prevented customers/enterprises from trusting the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Unless the customer’s security requirements are identified and documented by the CSPs, customers can not be assured that the CSPs will satisfy their requirements. Furthermore, the customer’s compensation upon a violation is a manual time intensive process. In this paper we address the aforementioned challenges by proposing a decentralized customer-based monitoring approach running over Ethereum blockchain. The proposed approach allows the customer(s) to validate the compliance of CSP(s) to the contracted services in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and “autonomsly” compensate customers in case of security breaches. At the same time, the proposed approach prevents customers from misreporting for financial gain. The approach builds upon the Ethereum blockchain infrastructure in order to securely store monitoring logs and incorporate SLAs as smart contracts. The compliance validation framework is implemented and its functionality is evaluated on Amazon EC2 and Ethereum Blockchain.
Flavio Corradini, Alessandro Marcelletti, Andrea Morichetta, Andrea Polini · 6 authors
The adoption of model-driven engineering methodologies contributes to reduce the complexity of developing distributed systems. A key point to master such complexity is the use of modelling languages, such as the BPMN standard. This permits to specify choreography diagrams describing, from a global point of view, the interactions that should occur among distributed components in order to reach given goals. Even though BPMN choreographies are promising to increase business possibilities, their concrete adoption has been challenging and faced complex hurdles. On the one hand, there is a lack of concrete support to the different phases of the choreography life-cycle, especially in relation to the choreography execution. Another obstacle consists in the lack of distributed infrastructures allowing the participants involved in the cooperation to trust each other, and in particular to get enough guarantees that all of them will behave as prescribed by the choreography model.
Vincent Reniers, Yuan Gao, Ren Zhang, Paolo Viviani · 11 authors
Our main use case features multiple companies that iteratively optimize on the architectural properties of aircraft components in a decentralized manner. In each optimization step of the so-called multi-disciplinary optimization (MDO) process, sensitive data is exchanged between organizations, and we require auditability and traceability of actions taken to assure compliance with signed legal agreements.
Sina Rafati Niya, Fabio Maddaloni, Thomas Bocek, Burkhard Stiller
Blockchains (BCs) are back-linked chain of records termed as blocks. To establish decentralized trusted systems, BCs employ consensus mechanisms. During the past ten years, there have been various proposals of BC design and implementations. However, most of the developed sate of the art BCs suffer from scalability issues. In order to enhance the scalability of the BCs, this paper proposes a transaction aggregation mechanism on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS)-based BC. Having developed the transaction aggregation and double linked blocks, efficient prevention and control of the BC's size growth is observed in the evaluated scenarios.