Ample acceptance of Blockchain Technology in today's business world has increased number of use cases tremendously beyond cryptocurrencies for which it was originally developed. Hyperledger Fabric, as an enterprise-grade permissioned Blockchain platform, offers a secure and scalable infrastructure for diverse applications, including financial services. Since performance evaluation of the platform play major role in acceptability of the technology for various applications, in this research article we are presenting a comprehensive performance analysis of the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain platform with the help of standard benchmarking tool-Hyperledger Caliper for Cross-Border Fund Transfer (CBFT) application and results are validated using existing queuing theory based theoretical model for Hyperledger Fabric. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the most popular Blockchain platform's performance under various workloads and network conditions. By capturing the interactions between network participants and consensus mechanisms, we have presented latency analysis along with the insights into the platform's scalability and efficiency. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of Blockchain technology and aids in the design of more efficient and robust Blockchain-based applications.
As a result of the ubiquitous network applications and services, exacerbated by the overarching digital revolution the need and demand for efficient and dependable connectivity solutions have surged to unprecedented levels. Quality of Service (QoS)-based routing has emerged as a critical solution, enabling service differentiation, efficient resource allocation, and improved network performance. In this study, we introduce a novel Genetic Algorithm-powered QoS-aware Cross-Network Traffic Engineering framework,GATE-BC, at the confluence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Blockchain (BC) technologies.GATE-BCorchestrates end-to-end (E2E) QoS traffic, providing resource-efficient, reliable, and latency-tolerant delivery of intelligent network services in BC-enabled SDNs. Leveraging BC features such as decentralization, transparency, and immutability,GATE-BCeliminates the need for centralized entities in QoS-supported cross-network routing models. We compareGATE-BCframework with three other traffic management and engineering approaches: QoSChain (QC), Hierarchical Routing Approach (HRA), and Distributed Routing Approach (DRA). The extensive simulations reveal thatGATE-BCoutperforms the other routing strategies in terms of Path Setup Time (PST), Network Message Overhead (NMO), Request Acceptance Ratio (RAR), Network Bandwidth Consumption (NBC), Average Path Length (APL), and Average Network Length (ANL) metrics under various network topologies. Furthermore,GATE-BCemploys three different feasible path selection strategies based on bandwidth (GATE-BC_BW), delay (GATE-BC_D), and reliability (GATE-BC_R) QoS parameters to satisfy the service levels requested.
Immutability is widely recognized as one of the blockchain’s key security attributes. However, in recent years, incidents involving the use of blockchain for disseminating illegal or malicious information have raised concerns over its strict immutability. To address these issues, redactable blockchains are proposed as a novel solution, permitting authorized content redactions without compromising the structural integrity of the blockchain. Unfortunately, current solutions are unable to restrict the abuse of redaction privilege, except for relying on a trusted authority or committee, which contradicts the trustlessness principle of blockchain. In this paper, we propose a controlled redactable blockchain protocol that allows for a limited number of redactions and supports a transparent setup. The cryptographic tools enabling this functionality are our proposed t-times chameleon hash (t-CH) and signature (t-CS) schemes, where generating more than t collisions will expose the trapdoor. We present security models, discrete logarithm-based instantiations, and formal security proofs for both t-CH and t-CS. Subsequently, we present the construction of our redaction protocol in both permissioned and permissionless settings. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol in practice.
In the emerging and well-rooted field of Vehicular Adhoc-Networks (VANETs), the imperative of secure content exchange via Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication for better safety emphasizes the importance of strong communication protocols. Implementing Information-Centric Networking (ICN) in VANETs allows for more efficient resource utilization via name-based content requests and delivery techniques. However, the dynamic and open nature of VANETs creates major security risks, necessitating rigorous defence against malicious attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel trust-aware VANET framework that integrates ICN and Blockchain for content security. Our method uses authenticated vehicle data to ensure content integrity across the network, resulting in effective and efficient security measures. Through precise simulation, our technique exhibits resilience against malicious assaults by improving bandwidth utilization, throughput transactions, network content utilization, and content delivery in the face of hostile scenarios. The experimental results confirm the efficacy and feasibility of our proposed technique, highlighting its potential to improve VANET content security in real-world applications.
In modern cities, consumers with distributed energy resources (DERs) can trade energy by managing their consumption and supply. Blockchain is considered to provide technical support for establishing a distributed energy market, while the current mainstream blockchain technology cannot meet the requirement of efficiency and scalability under such a transaction scenario. In addition, the potential defaults of market players also hinder market implementation. Therefore, a reputation-based distributed energy trading mechanism and the corresponding blockchain consensus method considering reputation management are proposed in this paper. Firstly, a distributed reputation management mechanism is designed to systematically evaluate the user’s behavior in the market. Secondly, to address the limitations of traditional consensus methods in the distributed energy market distributed reputation control is introduced into the node model of blockchain, and a new energy blockchain consensus method named DPoR is proposed to solve the technical bottleneck under the distributed energy trading scenario. We also present a corresponding transaction mechanism to encourage market participants to maintain their reputations. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed transaction mechanism in this paper, and the presented blockchain consensus mechanism can meet the performance requirements under distributed energy trading scenarios in terms of high efficiency, low consumption, and openness.
Blockchain makes heavy use ofcryptographic hashingto achieve integrity and consensus in a peer-to-peer network, but hashing causes some inefficiencies. For example, blockchain stores data with their hash digest as a key in the database, so the blockchain always reads and writes data in arandomorder. This can affect blockchain performance, especially for account-based blockchains such as Ethereum, which must maintain a huge, hash-based data structure for accounts, called thestate trie. Also, Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm requires the miners to find a nonce that makes the block hash lower than a difficulty threshold, but ASICs with parallel hashing have made PoW use a large dataset such as theEthashDAG for memory-hardness and ASIC-resistance. Unfortunately, verification of the nonce is not easy for many light clients, which cannot deal with the overhead caused by the dataset. This paper proposes a novel PoW mining algorithm namedTrie-Hashimototo address these issues. Trie-Hashimoto adds a nonce field in a state trie node. It then makes the miners find a nonce of every newly-created trie node for a new block such that each node has a hash digest whoseprefixis equal to the block number. This can accelerate the database performance by storing the trie nodes in asequentialorder. The way for Trie-Hashimoto to achieve memory-hardness is also different. It uses the block headers that any client must maintain, obviating a separate dataset. Furthermore, it allows partial verification using a few Merkle proofs of accounts, so that a client with minimal resources or even a smart contract in another interoperable blockchain can verify a block with a high probability. Finally, Trie-Hashimoto discourages big mining pools by increasing the network overhead among the miners. Our experiment on the Geth client with 500K blocks and 100M accounts shows that Trie-Hashimoto improves the transaction execution time tangibly, reducing the full synchronization time by half. It also shows that Trie-Hashimoto has enough memory-hardness as Ethash. Lastly, a Trie-Hashimoto mining pool should exchange messages highly frequently, proportional to the total number of miners.
This work explores security vulnerabilities within financial network transactions, specifically addressing the challenges associated with utilizing blockchain technology (BCT) on mobile terminal devices. Firstly, the definition and functions of Supply Chain Finance (SCF) are introduced, and a theoretical framework for risk mitigation of financial network transactions is established, combining BCT with Edge Computing (EC). Secondly, an anonymous storage protocol for financial network transaction data and a trusted data synchronization system based on BCT and EC are proposed. These two methods are anticipated to yield advancements in bolstering the security landscape of financial network transactions to a notable extent. At the same time, it shows the application of risk control of financial network transactions based on EC and BCT in the SCF field. Finally, the experimental design validates the protocol's efficacy and the system's operational capabilities. The experimental findings unveil that the Round-Trip Time (RTT) for the system workflow remains under 215ms, exhibiting negligible latency within the system. Remarkably, the anonymous storage protocol applied to financial network transaction data substantially mitigates the temporal overhead associated with encrypting and transmitting information. Besides, it can effectively resist external attacks, EC device attacks, Man-in-the-Middle attacks, and replay attacks, with high security. On the Desktop, the average system initialization time is noted as 124.65ms, surpassing the efficiency of Raspberry Pi's 148.81ms. Regarding data synchronization, the Desktop exhibits relative speed, with an average time of 55.68ms compared to 67.54ms for the Raspberry Pi. In addition, multi-node collaboration on the Edge Computing Platform (ECP) shows a gradual increase in average time in edge environments, while rsync presents higher efficiency in incremental file and folder synchronization experiments. Consequently, in financial network transactions, using rsync for data synchronization is recognized for enhancing efficiency, while leveraging ECP multi-node collaboration in an EC environment effectively supports task execution. This innovation is particularly applicable to data synchronization in management technologies, offering potential value for improving the security and efficiency of financial network transactions. The primary contribution of this work lies in the innovative combination of information technology (IT) to propose an effective method to enhance the security of financial network transactions. Furthermore, these methods find practical application in the SCF domain, which provides practical support for improving the security and efficiency of financial transactions. This work contributes valuable ideas and methodologies for risk control management and the SCF field of financial network transactions.
The last decade has changed the trends of using peering networks. One of the areas of use of P2P networks is communication between people. Today, it is very important that communication is as protected as possible, especially if it is carried out between employees of the enterprise, because the number of cyber threats is constantly increasing. Modern approaches to the security of peering networks consist of data encryption, node authentication, detection and prevention of malicious nodes, access restriction, traffic monitoring, etc. However, one of the very first steps is the exchange of identification data itself, and this process must be as secure and secure as possible. The article proposes a method of secure exchange of identification data between peering network nodes, based on the use of NFC technology in combination with proof of zero knowledge. NFC is used for direct data exchange over the radio interface, which, thanks to its short range, makes it impossible to intercept data. To establish a connection, nodes must exchange identifiers, public encryption keys, and network addresses. In order to find out whether a node is not malicious, mutual verification of nodes using zero-knowledge proof is assumed. A unique identifier of the GUID type generated by each of the nodes acts as a secret that is not disclosed. Nodes first exchange public keys that encrypt and exchange identifiers. After decryption with their private keys, the nodes check whether the received value is equal to the initial one. In case of equality of values, the nodes are mutually verified and exchange identification data. The method proposed in the article is aimed at ensuring fault tolerance and confidentiality. It also provides protection against traffic interception attacks and the reliability of the verification process.
This study investigates the impact of Zlib compression on gas consumption within blockchain systems, focusing particularly on Ethereum transactions. By employing the Ethereum simulator Ganache, we simulate 100 realistic home delivery system datasets to evaluate the performance of compressed versus uncompressed data. The methodology encompasses rigorous statistical analysis to ensure robust results. Our findings reveal that using the Zlib algorithm to compress textual data exceeding 141 bytes before submitting transactions on the Ethereum network reduces the gasUsed while maintaining the system time unchanged. This demonstrates the effectiveness of data compression in optimizing transaction costs without affecting operational efficiency. Additionally, our research extends to analyzing real gasPrice trends on the Ethereum network. We propose a non-linear regression model that accurately predicts hourly gasPrice variations based on the day of the week and the specific time. This provides a valuable tool for users to plan transactions strategically. These insights enhance the understanding of blockchain dynamics and offer practical solutions for improving economic and system efficiency in blockchain operations.
The rapid increase in mobile users, the IoT, and data-hungry applications have brought forth unprecedented demand on the spectrum, which is scarce; on top of that, the existing static spectrum allocation schemes have resulted in a heavily underutilized spectrum which can be mitigated with a Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) scheme with unlicensed users gaining access to the idle spectrum bands of licensed spectrum users opportunistically. Such a DSA and Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) scheme would significantly increase spectral efficiency while facilitating new services and applications beyond 5G (B5G) networks. Even with access to new spectrum bands like terahertz (THz) and Visible light communication and enabling technologies such as Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Cognitive Radio (CR), implementing a fully realized DSM requires rapid sensing, coordination, and management, and sharing of idle spectrum bands in a fair manner while preserving the security and privacy aspects, limiting interferences. With their decentralized, immutable nature, blockchains promise the execution of spectrum access and sharing in a fully transparent, fair manner while preserving privacy and security. Furthermore, blockchain-based Smart Contracts (SCs) allow automation of DSM, cryptocurrencies, and tokens to facilitate the trading of spectrum and related resources. In addition to that, blockchains act as an interface for integrating AI and Machine Learning (ML) techniques into DSM, which provides a certain level of intelligence to the underlying architecture. Although several attempts have been carried out to analyze the research gaps in DSM, a comprehensive analysis addressing the blockchains as the primary solution to address DSM has not been carried out. In this survey, we address the potential of a blockchain-based approach toward realizing a decentralized DSM while presenting future directives to improve the use of blockchains for DSM.
Gabriel Antonio F. Rebello, Gustavo F. Camilo, Lucas Airam C. de Souza, Maria Potop-Butucaru · 7 authors
Despite the great success of blockchain systems in recent years, blockchains still struggle to provide the same level of latency and throughput as centralized financial systems. The core of this problem lies in the inefficiency of consensus protocols. In this paper, we provide a survey on recent efforts to improve the scalability of blockchains. We focus on layer-two protocols, such as payment channel networks and transaction rollups, which process computations off-chain and only use consensus for dispute resolution. Layer-two protocols are expected to process microtransactions with sub-second latency and reduced fees, allowing blockchains to scale. Much of this work addresses the open challenges of payment channel networks, such as payment routing, channel rebalancing, network design strategies, security and privacy, payment scheduling, congestion control, simulators, and support for light nodes. We also dedicate a section to the existing implementations of smart-contract-based transaction rollups. Our work systematizes the state-of-the-art layer-two protocols, paving the way for future advances.
Chen-Da Liu-Zhang, Christian Matt, Søren Eller Thomsen
Messages in large-scale networks such as blockchain systems are typically disseminated using flooding protocols, in which parties send the message to a random set of peers until it reaches all parties. Optimizing the communication complexity of such protocols and, in particular, the per-party communication complexity is of primary interest since nodes in a network are often subject to bandwidth constraints. Previous flooding protocols incur a per-party communication complexity of $$\varOmega (l\cdot \gamma ^{-1} \cdot (\log (n) + \kappa ))$$ bits to disseminate an l-bit message among n parties with security parameter $$\kappa $$ when it is guaranteed that a $$\gamma $$ fraction of the parties remain honest. In this work, we present the first flooding protocols with a per-party communication complexity of $$O(l\cdot \gamma ^{-1})$$ bits. We further show that this is asymptotically optimal and that our protocols can be instantiated provably securely in the usual setting for proof-of-stake blockchains. To demonstrate that one of our new protocols is not only asymptotically optimal but also practical, we perform several probabilistic simulations to estimate the concrete complexity for given parameters. Our simulations show that our protocol significantly improves the per-party communication complexity over the state-of-the-art for practical parameters. Hence, for given bandwidth constraints, our results allow to, e.g., increase the block size, improving the overall throughput of a blockchain.
The current explosion in user traffic necessitates the placement of edge servers in proximity to the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, allowing computation tasks to be offloaded to edge servers. This strategy aims to minimize the average delay of traffic requests by enabling user/IoT devices to locally execute time-sensitive tasks or offload them to edge servers within the mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm. This new paradigm will also allow to cache contents at edge servers, but considering such an increasing number of user requests and limited storage capability of edge servers, selection in edge caching decisions is challenging. In addition, while there is general consensus that this technology may provide a variety of benefits, there are serious questions about its security implications. This is because malicious users can manipulate the caching decisions of the edge servers by sending fake traffic requests, which reduces the caching efficiency of the resource-constrained edge servers. Driven by these issues, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based content caching and computation strategy to validate the authenticity of cached content and thus prevent unauthorized requests from malicious users. Specifically, the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is presented to handle low computational work, validate the process of blocks, and manage the transactions between edge servers and legitimate users. Then, a Deep Q Network (DQN)-based solution is proposed to intelligently develop an effective content caching and computation strategy. According to performance evaluation, the proposed model significantly outperforms the conventional methods. It improves the cache hit rate by up to 8.2% on average and reduces the response delay by up to 7.45% on average.
Open access
Caching and Content Delivery
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques