Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that represent real-world objects like art, music and videos. However, NFTs according to current standards have no provisions for the copyright traceability of the off-chain data, which greatly hinders the sustainability of the NFT community. In this paper, we propose a new NFT model, which is a synergy of a new economic mechanism backed by game theory and two supplementary algorithms to handle the off-chain data. The economic mechanism is first proposed to motivate participants to maintain the off-chain raw data. Then, the model includes two supplementary algorithms, the version algorithm and validation algorithm, to verify the NFT’s ownership and copyright. We implement our model in Solidity on Ethereum and conduct experiments based on the real-world dataset from the largest NFT marketplace OpenSea. Our evaluation demonstrates that our model is a promising attempt towards the copyright traceability of the off-chain data for NFTs.
Rad obrađuje nekolicinu odabranih ranjivosti u implementaciji pametnih ugovora na platformi Ethereum. Za svaku razrađuje uzroke i preventivne tehnike. U nastavku analizira problem generiranja slučajnih brojeva i osvrće se na loše prakse u tom procesu. Uz to prezentira rješenje za pronalaženje loših praksi u implementaciji ugovora. Navedeno rješenje se potom testira kroz nekolicinu primjera i razmatraju se daljnje nadogradnja. Na kraju se predlažu dobre prakse za dobivanje slučajnih brojeva.
Managing royalty fees in the music business is the task that is done by record labels, music retailers, and performance-right organization firms. Royalty fees are mostly distributed in a centralized manner. A centralized-based approach may be straightforward for managing a music business. However, a centralized-based approach prevents artists to be able to set their revenue model for their music and getting paid promptly. To allow an artist to have freedom in setting their revenue model, a decentralized-based approach may need to be proposed. In this work, we propose to apply Blockchain and Smart Contract in the music business to propose a decentralized-based music streaming service that allows artists can independently design their royalty fee model and get paid promptly. Our proposal is based on an extension of ERC20 and ERC721 standards on writing a smart contract. Our proposal is deployed and tested in a private Ethereum-based blockchain in a laboratory-controlled environment to determine the feasibility and gas fee required. The result suggests that the business logic required in our contract does not consume a high amount of gas fee. Hence, it can be deemed that our contract design is suitable for deploying in an actual decentralized-based music streaming service.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Song Huang, Zhen Yang, Changyou Zheng, Yan Wang · 7 authors
In the process of crowdsourced testing service, the intellectual property of crowdsourced testing has been faced with problems such as code plagiarism, difficulties in confirming rights and unreliability of data. Blockchain is a decentralized, tamper-proof distributed ledger, which can help solve current problems. This paper proposes an intellectual property right confirmation system oriented to crowdsourced testing services, combined with blockchain, IPFS (Interplanetary file system), digital signature, code similarity detection to realize the confirmation of crowdsourced testing intellectual property. The performance test shows that the system can meet the requirements of normal crowdsourcing business as well as high concurrency situations.
Eldair F. Dornelles, Fernando Parahyba, Rafael Z. Frantz, Fabrícia Roos-Frantz · 8 authors
Several languages have been developed for writing smart contracts for specific domains, such as health, finance, and business processes. However, none of them includes the constructors needed for writing smart contracts used in application integration processes which have their own particularities. Such smart contracts are responsible for monitoring the communication between the process and the applications to guarantee that the rights of the parties involved in the integration process are observed. To cover the gap, this paper discusses a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts in the application integration domain. It provides constructors to write smart contracts with a level of abstraction close to the natural language used in conventional contracts.
Many implementations of smart contracts available in NFT marketplaces today allow the modification of NFT token attributes, without any specific mechanism to control the consistency with off-chain metadata. We believe this is a weakness in overall design of NFTs today. We propose a computation model called the Asset Proxy NFT that guarantees the consistency between the NFT token (on-chain) and its corresponding asset metadata (off-chain). In general, the proposed model can be applied to any type of NFT that requires immutability or controlled mutability of metadata. A second contribution of this paper is the notion of the NFT design patterns which recognizes that a coherent framework for dealing with hybrid assets is required, and that for specific hybrid-asset deployments, suitable technological components must be utilized under the framework.
Blockchain has been relevant in the document management process, serving as a storage solution with the potential to guarantee the relevant requirements needed for any document storage and validation solution. However, due to the distributed nature of blockchain, we may face implementation difficulties and high operational costs, for example. To facilitate this process, we propose a customizable blockchain-based document registration service that makes it possible to create different types of gen-eralized documents for various application domains and store them in one or more blockchains integrated in an Application Programming Interface (API).
Cryptoassets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are widely traded around the world. Cryptocurrencies are also transferred between investors. Cryptocurrency has become a new and attractive means of remittance. Thus, blockchain-based smart contracts also attract attention when central banks design digital currencies. However, it has been discovered that a significant amount of cryptoassets on blockchain are lost or stranded for a variety of reasons, including the loss of the private key or the owner's death. To address this issue, we propose a method for recoverable transactions that would replace the traditional transaction by allowing cryptoassets to be sent to a backup account address after a deadline has passed. We provide the computational workload required for our method by analyzing the prototype. The method proposed in this paper can be considered as a good model for digital currency design, including central bank digital currency (CBDC).
This research study explores the use of near-miss clone detection to support the characterization of domain models of smart contracts for each of the popular domains in which smart contracts are being rapidly adopted. In this paper, we leverage the code clone detection techniques to detect similarities in functions of the smart contracts deployed onto the Ethereum blockchain network. We analyze the clusters of code clones and the semantics of the code fragments in the clusters in an attempt to categorize them and discover the structural models of the patterns in code clones.
César Soto-Valero, Martin Monperrus, Benoît Baudry
The rise of blockchain technologies has triggered tremendous research interest, coding efforts, and monetary investments in the last decade. Ethereum is the single largest programmable blockchain platform today. It features cryptocurrency trading, digital art, and decentralized finance through smart contracts. So-called Ethereum nodes operate the blockchain, relying on a vast supply chain of third-party software dependencies maintained by diverse organizations. These software suppliers have a direct impact on the reliability and the security of Ethereum. In this article, we perform an analysis of the software supply chain of Java Ethereum nodes and distill the challenges of maintaining and securing this blockchain technology.
The hyperledger fabric is a modular blockchain framework used by private companies to develop blockchain-based products, solutions, and applications using plug-and-play components. The smart contracts operating in this framework is created by implementing a chaincode. When implementing a chaincode, there may be a security weakness inside the code, which is the root cause of the security vulnerability. However, when the contract is completed and the block is created, the chaincode cannot be arbitrarily modified, so the security weakness must be analyzed before execution. This paper conducted a study on chaincode intermediate code generation for security weakness analysis of chaincode operating in hyperledger fabric blockchain framework. Analysis of security weaknesses at the source code level is not easy because the code logic is not clear and the complexity is high. On the other hand, security weakness analysis at the intermediate code level is easy to analyze because the code logic of the source code is clearly represented and the complexity is lower than that of the source code.
As the popularity of e-commerce grows, an electronic coupon (e-coupon) is widely used due to its convenience and portability. In most e-coupon services, the information of e-coupons is managed on a centralized server. However, e-coupon services are often vulnerable to security issues because of centralization. For example, when the e-coupon information which is stored in a centralized e-coupon server is forged, it becomes difficult to match the user and the e-coupon’s owner, and an expired e-coupon can be used repetitively (i.e., double-spending). To handle this issue, we propose a new e-coupon service by exploiting a blockchain system to improve the security of the service. To do this, we first design a server to enable the e-coupon service and communicate with the blockchain system. Second, we devise a smart contract on the blockchain system to provide integrity of the e-coupon business logic and the e-coupon’s information. We implemented the proposed service on an Ethereum-based blockchain system. The experimental results show that our proposed service improves higher security with a minor performance overhead compared with an existing e-coupon service.
Creating digital content and distributing them has become much easier and convenient nowadays, where the digital content creator can create the content and also distribute their work to others from anywhere with the help of internet. This also has the risk as the content is distributed using internet, the risk being copyright infringement and illegal distribution of the content. To avoid these types of risks the content creators are opting towards the help of digital rights management. The digital rights management team provides help and support to the content creators in cases where their work is illegally copied or distributed. To get the digital content copyrighted is also not an easy task as it consumes time and money. The proposed model overcomes these issues by integrating digital signature, structure similarity index measurement (SSIM) and blockchain technology in the digital rights management life cycle. The digital signature is used to uniquely identify the user and the related information can be traced back to the user using digital signature, and the copyright is provided using the SSIM method. The SSIM value can be in the range of -1 to 1 where 1 denotes that both the media files are identical and the system updates this information so that all the participant can view this information. If the SSIM value after comparing both the media files is -1 then the both images are unique and authentic, then the copyright is provided for the media file and this information is updated in the system as well as Ethereum blockchain. This makes the system more secure, robust and transparent.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The DSM Directive preserves, on the one hand, the public domain, by restricting copyright in faithful reproductions of public domain works. On the other hand, there are copyright opportunities for digital art and non-fungible tokens. The Directive also creates opportunities for preservation and digitization for cultural heritage institutions. There are opportunities there that can be put to good and productive use in the interest of all parties involved. Extended collective licensing and measures for out-of-commerce works can also play a role here. And moral rights will not be a hindrance in that respect if industry standards of the digital era are observed. It is therefore important to continue and to strengthen the dialogue between the cultural heritage institution community on the one hand and the copyright and related rights community on the other hand.
With the rapid development of digitization technology, digital copyright of museum has become more and more valuable. Its collections can be opened to and shared with the people through the Internet. However, centralized authorization, untransparent transaction information and risk of tampering data in traditional digital rights management have a strong impact on system normal operation. In this paper, we proposed a blockchain-based digital rights management scheme (BMDRM) that realizes a distributed digital rights management and authorization system by introducing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts. To ensure the security and efficiency of transactions and authorization, we store all processing data in a high-security distributed ledger based on cryptographic signatures. We test our scheme on Ethereum private network and the experimental results show that BMDRM is feasible and secure for digital rights management in museums.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The paper aims at determining the utility of NFTs within the current EU framework of copyright, specifically from the authors' perspective. The issues of technical feasibility and scale of adoption remain beyond the scope of the paper; the focus lies rather on the legal aspects, particularly the case law of the CJEU. For authors, the NFT landscape is currently filled with potential economic benefits, as well as perils. With this in mind, the paper anticipates future legislative and judicial interventions in the new area. The paper's answer to whether NFTs could be relevant for copyright law is a resounding "yes", potentially allowing the effortless dissemination of content to finally work in the authors' favor, instead of incurring enforcement costs. Interestingly enough, the answer is justified with the example of tokenized internet memes.