RBAC is a traditional approach of controlling who wants to access resources in a computer system through a permission to a role. Blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can permanently record transactions. Smart Contract facilitates negotiations for a trustless transaction by enabling automatic payment. It is currently being applied to various kinds of business applications. In a smart contract that requires payment with cryptocurrency, if access control is performed only without individual authentication, progress for applications to various fields will be restricted. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based RBAC with an authentication mechanism that can provides role-based access control while also providing individual account-based authentication. We have defined three interfaces based on blockchain to realize it. The proposed mechanism provides anonymity-based authentication by using a hash function with a pass that is indistinguishable from the owner. This was simulated on an Ethereum-based test network and compared with existing methods. The proposed mechanism not only added authentication methods, but also was more efficient in gas use and performance time than the existing RBAC model.
The intelligent vehicle (IV) has become a promising technology that could revolutionize our life in smart cities sooner or later. However, it yet suffers from many security vulnerabilities. Traditional security methods are incapable to secure the IV data sharing against malicious attacks. Blockchain, as expected by both research and industry communities, has emerged as a good solution to address these issues. The major issues in IV data sharing are trust, data accuracy and reliability of data sharing in the communication channel. Blockchain technology, previously working for the cryptocurrency, has recently applied to build trust and reliability in peer-to-peer networks with similar topologies of IV data sharing. In this chapter, we present a new framework, namely biometric blockchain (BBC), for secure IV data sharing. In our new scheme, biometric information is exploited as a cue to record who is responsible in the data sharing activities, while the proposed BBC technology serves as the backbone of the IV data-sharing architecture. Hence, the proposed BBC technology provides a more reliable trust environment between the vehicles while personal identities are traceable in the proposed new scheme.
Marcos Vinicius M. R. Souza, Hélio Crestana Guardia
Advances in ubiquitous computing and in the Internet of things (IoT) bring new challenges to access control systems, such as not having to rely on a centralized trusted party, and the ability to use contextual data. Such characteristics may be required to enable IoT services in smart homes and cities, and in electronic health systems. In these environments, service-based device to device interactions reinforce the need for flexible and scalable authenticity and confidentiality mechanisms. This work presents an access control model to address such challenges using a blockchain infrastructure. In the proposed model, services and contextual data are defined using smart contracts, and blockchain logs are used for reliable information management. Assets are associated with permissions, and their transfers prove access control rights in service invocation requests. A reference implementation on Hyperledger shows the viability of the model.
Zoltán Lux, Felix Beierle, Sebastian Zickau, Sebastian Göndör
Self-sovereign Identity (SSI) powered by distributed ledger technologies\nenables more flexible and faster digital identification workflows, while at the\nsame time limiting the control and influence of central authorities. However, a\nglobal identity solution must be able to handle myriad credential types from\nmillions of issuing organizations. As metadata about types of digital\ncredentials is readable by everyone on the public permissioned ledger with\nHyperledger Indy, anyone could find relevant and trusted credential types for\ntheir use cases by looking at the records on the blockchain. To this date, no\nefficient full-text search mechanism exists that would allow users to search\nfor credential types in a simple and efficient fashion tightly integrated into\ntheir applications. In this work, we propose a full-text search framework based\non the publicly available metadata on the Hyperledger Indy ledger for\nretrieving matching credential types. The proposed solution is able to find\ncredential types based on textual input from the user by using a full-text\nsearch engine and maintaining a local copy of the ledger. Thus, we do not need\nto rely on information about credentials coming from a very large candidate\npool of third parties we would need to trust, such as the website of a company\ndisplaying its own identifier and a list of issued credentials. We have also\nproven the feasiblity of the concept by implementing and evaluating a prototype\nof the full-text credential metadata search service.\n
Oleksandr Anyshchenko, Ivan Bohuslavskyi, Stanislav Kruglik, Yash Madhwal · 6 authors
Blockchain technology has a lot of applications including but not limited to cryptotokens. For example, permissioned blockchains for state registries can include no money logic inside. But the creation of cryptotoken is a typical example of blockchain application and is a popular model to measure performance. In this paper, we described how to construct an account-based cryptotoken using Exonum, an open-source framework for creating blockchain applications, and by the means of performance tests shown that the proposed solution meets real-life throughput requirements for many applications. The proposed approach can be used to create cryptocurrencies in other open-source frameworks focused on permissioned blockchain applications.
In the context of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), smart vehicles have become increasingly complex. Electronic Control Units (ECU) within smart vehicles are now capable of performing intricate operations which ensures reliable functioning of the smart vehicle even in emergency situations. However, these ECU(s) lack a trusted execution/storage environment (TEE/TSE). This makes it vulnerable to many security issues. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain and Secure Element(SE) based framework for smart vehicles called SaFe in which ECU(s) use SE for TEE and TSE. We justify the use of blockchain by showing how it securely facilitates application management on SE when ECU needs are changed. Leveraging on SaFe, we introduce the concept of non-repudiable responsibility. We present our realized framework and testbed based on NXP IMX6Q, Multos M5-P19, MultiChain. Finally, we show through our experimental results that how SaFe improves the performance of safety-critical operations within ECU by as much as 85%, all this while guaranteeing increased security, tamperproofness, immutability and reduced memory, storage, processing overhead.
Cloud storage today depends entirely on large storage providers. Such storage providers function as untrusted third parties that process data for storing, sending and receiving data from an entity. This style of system has many problems, such as high operating costs, software quality and data security. In this paper, we present a model of a multi-user access control system for databases that use blockchain technology to provide stable, distributed data processing. The system allows the data owner to upload the data via a web portal. So, the user who has the secret key to the particular data that has been uploaded to Cloud in encrypted form can only access the folder. Eventually, the system promotes data privacy by maintaining the immutability of the blockchain by processing it in the cloud. We have proposed a secure, blockchain-based data storage and access control system to increase the security of cloud storage.
Asma Lahbib, Khalifa Toumi, Anis Laouiti, Steven Martin
While smart factories are becoming widely recognized as a fundamental concept of Industry 4.0, their implementation has posed several challenges insofar that they generate, process, and exchange vast amounts of security critical and privacy sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks and unauthorized access. Security requirements in such scenario include integrity, confidentiality, traceability and notarization of exchanged data in the one hand plus access control, privacy and trust in the other one. In this context, we design a distributed resource management framework using the emerging smart contracts technology for Industry 4.0 applications and more specifically for smart factories environments. This last, named DRMF, utilizes three Ethereum smart contracts specifically a Governance Contract (GC), an Access Contract (AC) and a Lookup Contract (LC) that are respectively responsible for the registration of new joining entities as well as those requesting consensus partaking permissions, second the dynamic access authorization and third the mapping between the required services and contracts ensuring their management. Using the blockchain technology, this framework is expected to achieve distributed, flexible, verifiable and trustworthy access control in addition to a transparent, traceable and notarized resource usage and sharing. Results from a real implementation plus performance evaluation prove the proposed concept and demonstrate its feasibility.
Huan Zhou, Xue Ouyang, Jinshu Su, Cees de Laat · 5 authors
There lacks trust between the cloud customer and provider to enforce traditional cloud SLA (Service Level Agreement) where the blockchain technique seems a promising solution. However, current explorations still face challenges to prove that the off-chain SLO (Service Level Objective) violations really happen before recorded into the on-chain transactions. In this paper, a witness model is proposed implemented with smart contracts to solve this trust issue. The introduced role, "Witness", gains rewards as an incentive for performing the SLO violation report, and the payoff function is carefully designed in a way that the witness has to tell the truth, for maximizing the rewards. This fact that the witness has to be honest is analyzed and proved using the Nash Equilibrium principle of game theory. For ensuring the chosen witnesses are random and independent, an unbiased selection algorithm is proposed to avoid possible collusions. An auditing mechanism is also introduced to detect potential malicious witnesses. Specifically, we define three types of malicious behaviors and propose quantitative indicators to audit and detect these behaviors. Moreover, experimental studies based on Ethereum blockchain demonstrate the proposed model is feasible, and indicate that the performance, ie, transaction fee, of each interface follows the design expectations.
A decentralized private Blockchain implementation for academic document storage and document verification can add self-sovereignty to the process. It can dramatically minimize the time and cost of verification at various layers of verification. Blockchain would remove all the layers at all and it will provide immediate auditing of any document. So, the request and response will be truly real time in our case.Apart from speeding up the verification process, it will also increase the security of personal education data and will check all kind of misuse also. Putting documents on Blockchain would increase the security, because all the data would only be accessible by private key and proper authentication to that private key.We are proposing a private Blockchain that would be managed by some private vendors and only those vendors will take part in consensus. So, we are using proof of stake consensus in our case. We are using private IPFS database server for storing our documents over Blockchain. We are considering Ethereum Blockchain ecosystem in our case. Alternatively we can also use Hyperledger Fabric for implementation but that discussion is out of the scope for current document.
Hamza Baqa, Nguyen B. Truong, Noël Crespi, Gyu Myoung Lee · 5 authors
The emerging Blockchain (BC) and Distributed Ledger technologies have come to impact a variety of domains, from capital market sectors to digital asset management in the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result, more and more BC-based decentralized applications for numerous cross-domain services have been developed. These applications implement specialized decentralized computer programs called Smart Contracts (SCs) which are deployed into BC frameworks. Although these SCs are open ato public, it is challenging to discover and utilize such SCs for a wide range of usages from both systems and end-users because such SCs are already compiled in form of byte-codes without any associated meta-data. This motivates us to propose a solution called Semantic SC (SSC) which integrates RESTful semantic web technologies in SCs, deployed on the Ethereum Blockchain platform, for indexing, browsing and annotating such SCs. The solution also exposes the relevant distributed ledgers as Linked Data for enhancing the discovery capability. To achieve this goal, the OWL-S service ontology is extended by incorporating some domain specific terminologies, which are used in the development of the proposed SSCs. As a result, SSC can be utilized to enrich queries for a domain-specific terms across multiple distributed ledgers, which greatly increases the discovery capability of decentralized IoT applications and services. Contribution in standardization is also discussed. We believe that our research work takes the first steps towards connecting BC-based decentralized services with semantic web services in order to provide better IoT ecosystems.
Abstract South Korea invests a budget of trillions in national R&D projects every year, and has achieved excellent performance doing so each year. However, since the projects are planned, evaluated, and managed by different departments and institutions, duplicate planning and submission leads to insufficient sharing of research results. Currently, the National Technology Information Service (NTIS) inspects project duplication based on keywords, which leads to duplicate planning among departments and closed management of research results. Since the NTIS builds in centralized systems, the inspection systems supports one-way management for duplication checking and information sharing. Therefore, we propose a new platform, called the Trusted Information Project Platform (TIP-Platform), for easily checking for project duplication, sharing research results, and updating research results. TIP-Platform adopts a new concept for user authority setting, the distributed ledger structure, transaction structure, and service. For the adaption, the TIP-Platform uses blockchain technology that performs recording and management via blocks by distributing the right to record and managing transactions. This platform makes it easy for anyone to view and use project-related information such as research results and duplication review. In this paper, we describe how the TIP-Platform can achieve excellent research results through information sharing of a project. This platform needs to be based on trust, because it shares information and continually updates information.
In December 2015, a bounty emerged to establish both reliable communication and secure transfer of value between the Dogecoin and Ethereum blockchains. This prized "Dogethereum bridge" would allow parties to "lock" a DOGE coin on Dogecoin and in exchange receive a newly minted WOW token in Ethereum. Any subsequent owner of the WOW token could burn it and, in exchange, earn the right to "unlock" a DOGE on Dogecoin. We describe an efficient, trustless, and retrofitting Dogethereum construction which requires no fork but rather employs economic collateral to achieve a "lock" operation in Dogecoin. The protocol relies on bulletproofs, Truebit, and parametrized tokens to efficiently and trustlessly relay events from the "true" Dogecoin blockchain into Ethereum. The present construction not only enables cross-platform exchange but also allows Ethereum smart contracts to trustlessly access Dogecoin. A similar technique adds Ethereum-based smart contracts to Bitcoin and Bitcoin data to Ethereum smart contracts.
The Cloud Computing Paradigm simplified the IT infrastructure management thereby making the organiza-tions and enterprises to rapidly migrate from conventional model to service driven model. The service driven model allows the users to access, maintain and backup the files from remote location over the internet through the central-ized cloud service providers. Inspite of major advantages, there are some concerns for the safety and privacy risks of organizational and users sensitive information in cloud stor-age. The existing service oriented model uses distributed key management which encrypts the data and stores it in cloud servers to provide the authentication to data, but it addresses challenges in identifying ownership of data, boot-strapping problem and securing the keys. The proposed system uses block chain, a distributed ledger for user authentication in cloud server and Hash graph with asynchronous byzantine fault tolerance algorithm is proposed for replicat-ed state machines with guaranteed Byzantine fault-tolerance and it can be utilized in the IT Infrastructure envi-ronment which solves the hassles of maintaining security keys
Identity management is a core building block for the majority of software solutions and landscapes. Competing with existing identity-managing solutions, blockchain-based concepts and products have evolved in the context of verified claims and self-sovereign identities. The contribution of this paper is a systematic, criteria-driven survey of the solutions and technologies for this growing field and their comparison with the capabilities of established solutions. By including an extensive set of requirements covering ecosystem aspects, end-user functionality, mobility and overhead aspects, compliance/liability, EU regulations, standardization, and integration, this paper shows the highlights and the deficits of a wide array of solutions.
Nadine Havelange, Michel Dumontier, Birgit Wouters, Jona Linde · 7 authors
In this paper we present our preliminary work on monitoring data License accoUntability and CompliancE (LUCE). LUCE is a blockchain platform solution designed to stimulate data sharing and reuse, by facilitating compliance with licensing terms. The platform enables data accountability by recording the use of data and their purpose on a blockchain-supported platform. LUCE allows for individual data to be rectified and erased. In doing so LUCE can ensure subjects' General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) rights to access, rectification and erasure. Our contribution is to provide a distributed solution for the automatic management of data accountability and their license terms.
With rapid development of computing technologies, large amount of data are gathered from edge terminals or Internet of Things (IoT) devices, however data trust and security in edge computing environment are very important issues to be considered, especially when the gathered data are fraud or dishonest, or the data are misused or spread without any authorization, which may lead to serious problems. In this article, a blockchain-based trusted data management scheme (called BlockTDM) in edge computing is proposed to solve the above problems, in which we proposed a flexible and configurable blockchain architecture that includes mutual authentication protocol, flexible consensus, smart contract, block and transaction data management, blockchain nodes management, and deployment. The BlockTDM scheme can support matrix-based multichannel data segment and isolation for sensitive or privacy data protection, and moreover, we have designed user-defined sensitive data encryption before the transaction payload stores in blockchain system, and have implemented conditional access and decryption query of the protected blockchain data and transactions through smart contract. Finally, we have evaluated the proposed BlockTDM scheme security, availability, and efficiency with large amount of experiments. Analysis and evaluations manifest that the proposed BlockTDM scheme provides a general, flexible, and configurable blockchain-based paradigm for trusted data management with tamper-resistance, which is suitable for edge computing with high-level security and creditability.
Summary This paper presents a blockchain‐based architecture for our current electronic health record (EHR) systems. Being built on top of existing databases maintained by health providers, the architecture implements a blockchain solution to ensure the integrity of data records and improve interoperability of the systems through tracking all events that happen to the data in the databases. In this proposed architecture, we also introduce a new incentive mechanism for the creation of new blocks on the blockchain. The architecture is independent of any specific blockchain platforms and open to further extensions; hence, it potentially fits in with other electronic record systems that require protection against data misuse.
In recent years, the Ethereum platform has rapidly emerged, but its privacy issue has become the largest obstacle to the implementation of Ethereum projects. Unlike UTXO-based Bitcoin, Ethereum, the account-based blockchain, requires realtime updates of the account balance. Therefore, its corresponding hidden operation has certain difficulties. We propose a privacy protection scheme called RZcash to solve this problem. It implements the hiding of account balances that are updated in real time, and uses rangeproofs to ensure that the amount of each transaction does not exceed the payer's existing balance. For hiding the payee, we improve the related technology of Monero by using the ciphertext equivalent commitment scheme. We also provide the conversion mechanism and trading method between hidden coins and open coins and describe how RZcash can be combined with an existing account-based blockchain system (such as Ethereum). Finally, we implement the core model of RZcash and evaluate its performance. The evaluation results show that the scheme not only guarantees the privacy and security of the blockchain, but also has good performance in practical applications.