Sai Bharadwaj Atreyapurapu, K Amarendra, Mohammed Muzamil Alishah
Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned distributed ledger framework for developing solutions and applications that works at the enterprise grade. It is one of the latest blockchain framework that is built as foundation for developing products, solutions, and applications based on blockchain. Lately, the pandemic has changed a lot in the medical system throughout the world. Patients required immediate attention where doctors were scarce. This has led to the implementation of blockchain technologies for designing online applications to provide patients with better and secure services. The private blockchain is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric that records the patients' data. This provides better security and prevents loss of data through redundancy. Blockchain has gained popularity lately due to the rise of the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum etc. Their value has sky-rocketed with the amount of attention they gained during the pandemic. An application of blockchain technology i.e. Distributed Ledger Protocol (DLT) called Hyperledger Fabric developed by Linux Foundation is used to solve many business use cases like storing health records, managing financial transactions etc.
Due to the unavailability of issuing entities, the increasing number of valuable documents that are still being issued in printed form has an impact on forgery and cannot be verified. Academic certification is an achievement that everyone desires because it has a positive effect and has a continuity in their social life. These activities are listed as being able to identify, analyze, and try out any of the ledger options that are available. arise to provide greater efficiency, reliability, and a level of independence. By implementing a prototype that could issue, verify, and distribute certificates, the fact of the concept was proposed. The experimental test results are given, as well as the use of blockchain technology for the purpose of analyzing. Finally, this work outlines the current growth and maturity of equipment encountered, reports progress and limitations, and reveals issues that still need to be addressed.
The interest in cryptocurrency investing is constantly growing. Cryptocurrency may be the currency of the future, but it is also the heaven for con artists to scam investors from their money. Crypto transactions are irreversible. If the underlying blockchain technology has privacy or mixer capabilities it can be virtually untraceable, which creates a new avenue for criminals to scam victims with ease. Social media impersonation is one of the top scams currently performed by criminals. This study presents an example of a social media impersonation scam and the characteristics of the scam. The qualitative data is gathered from communication between the scammer and the potential victim. This study also indicates that cryptocurrency awareness should be included in cyber security training curriculums.
Dor Bitan, Ran Canetti, Shafi Goldwasser, Rebecca Wexler
The use of hidden investigative software to collect evidence of crimes presents courts with a recurring dilemma: On the one hand, there is often clear public interest in keeping the software hidden to preserve its effectiveness in fighting crimes. On the other hand, criminal defendants have rights to inspect and challenge the full evidence against them, including law enforcement's investigative methods. In fact, in the U.S. adversarial legal system, the defendant's rights to scrutinize the government's tools are crucial to the truth-seeking process and to keeping law enforcement conduct lawful and constitutional. Presently, courts balance these conflicting interests on a case-by-case basis through evidentiary privilege law, often voicing their frustration with the challenging dilemma they face. We demonstrate how judicious use of a sophisticated cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) could help to mitigate this dilemma: Based on actual court cases where evidence was collected using a modified version of a peer-to-peer software, we demonstrate how law enforcement could, in these cases, augment their investigative software with a ZKP-based mechanism that would allow them to later provide full responses to challenges made by a defense expert -- and allow a defense expert to independently verify law enforcement claims -- while keeping the software hidden. We demonstrate the technical feasibility of our mechanism via a proof-of-concept implementation. We also propose legal analysis that justifies its use, discusses its merits, and considers the legal implications that the very existence of such a mechanism might have, even in cases where it has not been used. Our proof-of-concept may also extend to other verification dilemmas in the legal landscape.
The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market has been exploding in the past years. The notion of NFT originated with Ethereum's token standard, which aimed to differentiate each token using distinguishing signals. Tokens of this type can be associated with virtual or digital properties to serve as unique identifiers. Using NFTs Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a new technology gaining traction in the Blockchain industry. In this article, we examine state-of the art NFT systems that have the potential to reshape the market for digital virtual assets. We will assess the security of existing NFT systems and expand on the opportunities and prospective uses for the NFT idea. Finally, we discuss existing research challenges that must be overcome before mass-market penetration may occur. We hope that this paper provides an up-to-date analysis and summary of existing and proposed solutions and projects, making it easier for newcomers to stay current.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have gained considerable media attention and sparked growing public interest. NFTs are unique units of data recorded on a permanent ledger or blockchain. NFTs are used to record ownership of both physical and digital goods. Prominent sport organizations have embraced NFTs for innovative growth opportunities such as generating revenue via novel digital products (e.g., digital collectibles). For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) launched NBA Top Shot, an online marketplace to buy and sell digital sports highlights. Sport organizations are exploring future innovation opportunities where there is a need to reliably track and verify authenticity or ownership of digital or digitizable assets. This includes existing sport products (e.g., tickets) and novel fan engagement initiatives. To benefit from NFTs, sport managers need to reconceptualize how sport is marketed and managed in a digital domain. The purpose of this research primer is to acquaint readers with key concepts related to NFTs. Specifically, we provide an overview of NFTs, offer a review of the brief history of NFTs, conceptualize NFTs via parallels with collectibles, and address the speculative nature of the NFT market. We conclude by outlining innovative growth opportunities of NFTs for sport managers and future research directions for sport management scholars.
Open access
5 source records
Digital Games and Media
Sports Analytics and Performance
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Blockchain technology in forensic science can have meaningful changes and improvements in digital forensics, forensic investigation, evidence management, and chain of evidence. The consolidation of research on the application of blockchain technology on forensic management, basing Scopus database was conducted and the research trends of bibliometric analysis were visualized. The prominent funding agencies, leading research organizations, authors, countries, journals, and keywords were mentioned in this research. The future scope of research on this research domain can be on enhancing the privacy, authenticity, reliability, and evidence handling in forensic science by the implementation of blockchain technology.
Electronic evidence is the electronic data generated based on electronic technology and stored in digital form. Aiming at the problems of data authenticity and integrity in the traditional storage methods of electronic evidence, and the existing blockchain storage schemes fail to give good consideration to the storage cost and efficiency. This paper proposes a model for electronic evidence storage, which uses directed acyclic graph to optimize the efficiency of on-chain storage of electronic evidence. Experimental results show that the proposed model is effective and practical.
Abstract We report our experience in the formal verification of the reference implementation of the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain is the backbone component of the new Proof-of-Stake Ethereum 2.0 network: it is in charge of tracking information about the validators , their stakes , their attestations (votes) and if some validators are found to be dishonest, to slash them (they lose some of their stakes). The Beacon Chain is mission-critical and any bug in it could compromise the whole network. The Beacon Chain reference implementation developed by the Ethereum Foundation is written in Python, and provides a detailed operational description of the state machine each Beacon Chain’s network participant (node) must implement. We have formally specified and verified the absence of runtime errors in (a large and critical part of) the Beacon Chain reference implementation using the verification-friendly language Dafny. During the course of this work, we have uncovered several issues, proposed verified fixes. We have also synthesised functional correctness specifications that enable us to provide guarantees beyond runtime errors. Our software artefact with the code and proofs in Dafny is available at https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny .
Detection of fabricated or manipulated audio content to prevent, e.g., distribution of forgeries in digital media, is crucial, especially in political and reputational contexts. Better tools for protecting the integrity of media creation are desired. Within the paradigm of the Internet of Audio Things(IoAuT), we discuss the ability of the IoAuT network to verify the authenticity of original audio using distributed ledger technology. By storing audio recordings in combination with associated recording-specific metadata obtained by the IoAuT capturing device, this architecture enables secure distribution of original audio footage, authentication of unknown audio content, and referencing of original audio material in future derivative works. By developing a proof-of-concept system, the feasibility of the proposed architecture is evaluated and discussed.
Edward Henry Young, Christos Chrysoulas, Nikolaos Pitropakis, Pavlos Papadopoulos · 5 authors
Little or no research has been directed to analysis and researching forensic analysis of the Bitcoin mixing or ‘tumbling’ service themselves. This work is intended to examine effective tooling and methodology for recovering forensic artifacts from two privacy focused mixing services namely Obscuro which uses the secure enclave on intel chips to provide enhanced confidentiality and Wasabi wallet which uses CoinJoin to mix and obfuscate crypto currencies. These wallets were set up on VMs and then several forensic tools used to examine these VM images for relevant forensic artifacts. These forensic tools were able to recover a broad range of forensic artifacts and found both network forensics and logging files to be a useful source of artifacts to deanonymize these mixing services.
Paul Black, Iqbal Gondal, Richard R. Brooks, Lu Yu
News media often contain reports that raise doubt related to policing operations. We examine the question of how to improve policing integrity during the execution of search warrants and provide an outline for law enforcement search warrants and digital forensic analysis procedures. Existing techniques for improving the integrity of search warrants are reviewed, limitations are noted, and we propose an Advanced Forensic Evidence System (AFES) to address these limitations.AFES provides an immutable record and biometric authentication of the officers present during the execution of a search warrant, time and location, video recording, seizure record, contemporaneous notes, and photographs. AFES records digital evidence items, imaging details, evidence hashes, provides an access control system, and an immutable record of access to all stored items. AFES uses a permissioned distributed ledger prototype, called Scrybe, developed under NSF aegis, to ensure evidence seizure integrity. Scrybe is run as multiple blockchain instances at law enforcement, prosecution, judicial, and defence organisations to ensure that an immutable record is maintained.
Dinesh P Srivasthav, Lakshmi Padmaja Maddali, R. Vigneswaran
Cryptocurrencies have elicited tremendous interest in the recent past due to their ability to enable financial transactions without the need for a central authority. The most appealing aspect of cryptocurrencies that garnered significant attention is its potential to enable (pseudo) anonymous transactions on the blockchain ledger. Unsurprisingly, this has led to rapid adoption of cryptocurrencies for unlawful activities by malicious actors in several ways. Hence, to detect these unlawful activities, it is essential to analyze the blockchain ledgers to derive insights by investigating anonymous transactions and activities, which is where blockchain forensics comes in. In this paper, we present a taxonomy mapping the identified high-level forensics features with the supporting forensics tools that we surveyed. We provide a comparison of the surveyed tools using three practical parameters (number of cryptocurrencies supported, number of features provided and ease of accessing services) and give an overview of their theoretical effectiveness in general with some open challenges identified.
Alexandre Pinheiro, Edna Dias Canedo, Robson de Oliveira Albuquerque, Rafael T. de Sousa
The management practicality and economy offered by the various technological solutions based on cloud computing have attracted many organizations, which have chosen to migrate services to the cloud, despite the numerous challenges arising from this migration. Cloud storage services are emerging as a relevant solution to meet the legal requirements of maintaining custody of electronic documents for long periods. However, the possibility of losses and the consequent financial damage require the permanent monitoring of this information. In a previous work named "Monitoring File Integrity Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts", the authors proposed an architecture based on blockchain, smart contract, and computational trust technologies that allows the periodic monitoring of the integrity of files stored in the cloud. However, the experiments carried out in the initial studies that validated the architecture included only small- and medium-sized files. As such, this paper presents a validation of the architecture to determine its effectiveness and efficiency when storing large files for long periods. The article provides an improved and detailed description of the proposed processes, followed by a security analysis of the architecture. The results of both the validation experiments and the implemented defense mechanism analysis confirm the security and the efficiency of the architecture in identifying corrupted files, regardless of file size and storage time.
Cloud computing technologies have dominated more that a decade. Wider adoption of cloud based processing has given rise to different architectural patterns. Cloud native applications have emerged out ensuring application agility and scalability. But they have their own challenges in terms of security. In the last few years, blockchain technology has found its applicability in non-cryptocurrency areas as well. This paper illustrates how blockchain can be used to address security challenges for the cloud native applications. This work focuses challenges and possible blockchain based solution in the areas of network security, identity management, authentication, container security and audit log for forensics.