Blockchain Papers

Darwish Al Neyadi, Deepak Puthal, Joy Dutta, Ernesto Damiani

No abstract is available for this record.

Geunyoung Kim, Jae‐Cheol Ryou

Anonymity forms the basis of decentralized ecosystems, leading to an increase in criminal activities such as money laundering and illegal currency trading. Especially in blockchain-based metaverse services, activities such as preventing sexual crimes and verifying the identity of adults are becoming essential. Therefore, avatar authentication and the KYC (Know Your Customer) process have become crucial elements. This paper proposes a mechanism to achieve the KYC process by verifying user identity using smart contracts. Users obtain an SBT (Soul Bound Token) from the metaverse service provider through the DID (Decentralized Identity) credential issued during the KYC process. The identity verification of avatars occurs within smart contracts, ensuring user privacy and protection through ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof). Tools for generating ZKP are also provided, enabling users, even those who are unfamiliar with ZKP, to use them conveniently. Additionally, an integrated wallet is offered to seamlessly manage DID credentials and SBTs. Furthermore, in case of avatar identity issues, users can request an audit by the issuer through the associated DID tokens.

Omid Mirzamohammadi, Kristof Jannes, Laurens Sion, Dimitri Van Landuyt · 6 authors

This paper provides an in-depth security and privacy analysis of the Solid protocol. Solid is a specification that allows user data to be stored decentralized in a personal online datastore (pod) independent from the application. This allows users to easily migrate to a different service and have more control over who data is shared with. We provide a comprehensive overview of the authentication, identification, and authorization protocols within Solid. We make use of the SPARTA threat modeling tool to assess the security and privacy aspects of Solid by modeling a realistic finance analytics application envisioned by the Solid community. This concrete use case allowed us to prioritize the residual threats in Solid. We employ methodologies such as STRIDE and LINDDUN for robust security and privacy threat modeling. The findings highlight the existence of several critical threats in the Solid specification. This is especially the case for privacy threats, which although it is an essential aspect of Solid, has so far not yet received enough attention, as our results indicate. These findings can be employed in future work to prioritize which residual threats to address and mitigate first.

Ziyan Cai, Xin Chang, Li Ping

Healthcare chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, but with their use comes the issues of excessive personal information collection and privacy leakage. To address this issue, we propose a Healthcare Chatbot-based Privacy Preserving (HCPP) Framework that adopts a data-oriented approach to reduce the excessive disclosure of personal information. HCPP consists of two main components: the Healthcare Chatbot-based Minimized Personal Information (HCMPI) method and the Healthcare Chatbot-based Zero Knowledge Proof (HCZKP) method. HCMPI leverages large language models (LLMs) to minimize the acquisition of unnecessary personal health information without significantly affecting healthcare service. HCZKP further encrypts a part of the minimized information, making the data available but invisible. The experimental evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach.

Yogesh Kisan Mali, Vijay U. Rathod, Nilesh P. Sable, Rahul Ramkishan Rathod · 6 authors

Any wireless network is built on the mutually reinforcing pillars of privacy and security. Security measures often cover data connections, physical security, outside threats, and internal node operations. Whereas privacy covers the selective exchange of data among a network’s various entities. To provide privacy to networks, a large number of algorithms have been proposed by researchers in the past. Most of these algorithms utilize Graph-based anonymization approaches like l-diversity, k-anonymity, etc. These models do not scale well. Thus, this text proposes a machine learning-based block chain-powered privacy preservation protocol. The proposed protocol will perform attribute-based privacy with high efficiency due to the use of block chain architecture and will improve the overall Quality of Service of the network due to the integration of machine learning in the system.

Jorge Castillo, Phillip Rieger, Hossein Fereidooni, Qian Chen · 5 authors

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning process that uses a trusted aggregation server to allow multiple parties (or clients) to collaboratively train a machine learning model without having them share their private data. Recent research, however, has demonstrated the effectiveness of inference and poisoning attacks on FL. Mitigating both attacks simultaneously is very challenging. State-of-the-art solutions have proposed the use of poisoning defenses with Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) and/or Differential Privacy (DP). However, these techniques are not efficient and fail to address the malicious intent behind the attacks, i.e., adversaries (curious servers and/or compromised clients) seek to exploit a system for monetization purposes. To overcome these limitations, we present a ledger-based FL framework known as FLEDGE that allows making parties accountable for their behavior and achieve reasonable efficiency for mitigating inference and poisoning attacks. Our solution leverages crypto-currency to increase party accountability by penalizing malicious behavior and rewarding benign conduct. We conduct an extensive evaluation on four public datasets: Reddit, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10. Our experimental results demonstrate that (1) FLEDGE provides strong privacy guarantees for model updates without sacrificing model utility; (2) FLEDGE can successfully mitigate different poisoning attacks without degrading the performance of the global model; and (3) FLEDGE offers unique reward mechanisms to promote benign behavior during model training and/or model aggregation.

Maria José Sousa

Blockchain architecture, originally designed for Bitcoin, has revolutionized finance through decentralized transactions and secured data management. It has been utilized to maintain private citizen records, allowing data owners to grant access via the blockchain for direct communication. Despite its potential, this technology remains relatively unexplored by both citizens and the public sector. By carrying out a thorough literature review, this article aims to shed light on this field. The research focus encompasses two key elements: (1) analyzing blockchain dimensions and (2) exploring its transformative impact on the public sector. The methodology involves an extensive meta-analysis of existing research on blockchain's analytical aspects and its role in reshaping public administration. Additionally, a questionnaire is administered to Information Technologies (IT) experts in public services, comparing their perceptions with established scientific studies. The research's core findings address various analysis dimensions, including regulatory risks, data management challenges, privacy concerns, and technological limitations. On the transformation front, organizations adopting blockchain technology anticipate enhanced networked services, fortified data security, operational efficiency, informed decision-making, and novel public services. The potential of blockchain to drive innovative services and safeguard data is widely acknowledged, yet organizations with blockchain are cautiously optimistic about its practical implications compared to those without.

Y.H. Gui Q. Tan R.W. Lu, Huilin Li, Le Gao, Jiaxin Yu · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

K Shruthi, A.S Poornima

As they can change and alter data governance, blockchain technologies are advancing at a faster rate and are regarded as one of the greatest technologies. These technologies are utilized in a variety of sectors, including the public sector, the supply chain, and e-government. Blockchain offers a reliable and secure method. The technology offers a framework for considerably better re-deployment of the current systems. Several nations have already embraced the use of blockchain in a variety of government operations. This research paper introduces the dApp of a blockchain-based job recruitment platform in light of the significance and influence of blockchain technology. The blockchain-based framework presented in this research study will speed up the current time-consuming hiring procedure.

Adam Poulsen, Eduard Fosch‐Villaronga

Most algorithms deployed in healthcare do not consider gender and sex despite the effect they have on individuals' health differences. Missing these dimensions in healthcare information systems is a point of concern, as neglecting these aspects will inevitably perpetuate existing biases, produce far from optimal results, and may generate diagnosis errors. An often-overlooked community with distinct care values and needs are LGBT+ older adults, which has traditionally been under-surveyed in healthcare and technology design. This paper investigates the implications of missing gender and sex considerations in distributed ledger technologies for LGBT+ older adults. By using the value sensitive design methodology, our contribution shows that many value meanings dear to marginalized communities are not considered in the design of the blockchain, such as LGBT+ older adults' interpretations of trust, privacy, and security. By highlighting the LGBT+ older population values, our contribution alerts us to the potential discriminatory implications of these technologies, which do not consider the gender and sex differences of marginalized, silent populations. Focusing on one community throughout - LGBT+ older adults - we emphasize the need for a holistic, value sensitive design approach for the development of ledger technologies for healthcare, including the values of everyone within the healthcare ecosystem.

Wei Du, Hanxu Liu, Guannan Luo, Jiyuan Zhang · 5 authors

Procuratorates, as the prosecutor in public interest litigation (PIL), need to obtain evidence from other PIL stakeholders including citizens, companies, governmental agencies, IoT monitoring devices and so on. However, the evidence sharing is not smooth due to the lack of secure data sharing and privacy protection during case investigation and evidence collection. Therefore, the authors propose a consortium blockchain-based secure data sharing and privacy protection scheme named PILChain. The involved organizations are connected as peers in PILChain. The safety of uploaded evidence and user privacy can be guaranteed with a fine-grained access control and zero-knowledge identity proof. InterPlanetary File System is introduced to store large evidence files off-chain, further enhancing the data security and system scalability. The security of PILChain is analyzed in terms of access control, evidence confidentiality, evidence integrity, traceability, privacy, and scalability. Last, the authors evaluate the performance of the developed prototype system by implementing PILChain on Hyperledger Fabric.

Allison Sinnott, Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique cryptographic assets representing the ownership of digital media. NFTs have soared in popularity and trading prices. However, there exists a large gap in the literature regarding NFTs, especially regarding the stakeholders and online communities that have formed around NFT projects. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is one of the most influential NFT projects. Through an observational study of online BAYC communities across social media platforms and semi-structured interviews with four participants who owned BAYC NFTs, we explored the experiences of NFT collectors within the online NFT community. Positive community experiences, i.e., personal expression and identity, mutual support among BAYC holders, and exclusive access to online and offline events, were expressed. Encountered challenges included scams and "cash grab" NFT projects as well as trolling. The results of this study point towards the welcoming, positive nature of the NFT community, which is a possible causation factor of the initial rise in popularity of NFTs. Demotivators, on the other hand, countered the established trustworthiness of NFT technology among its consumers.

Manisha Guduri, Chinmay Chakraborty, V. Uma Maheswari, Martin Margala

This study introduces a blockchain-based lightweight encryption strategy with federated learning to address the scalability and trust concerns of electronic health records (EHR). After implementing lightweight encryption, the EHR data is stored in a decentralized cloud system. The importance of protecting the privacy and security of distant patients’ health records is explored. Now that stakeholders have a secure portal and cloud data is inaccessible, assaults on electronic healthcare records should decrease. The study guarantees full encryption throughout the whole conversation with federated learning. Deprived of the essential for a trusted third party, the system sets up active smart contracts at runtime between the sensor and the data user to facilitate the transfer of EHR data. To ensure that the data is private between the owner and user during the contract’s execution, it employs a very effective proxy re-encryption mechanism with federated learning. To examine the performance of the proposed system, it has been built and deployed on an Ethereum-based testbed. It is observed that the PSNR and MSE of the proposed model are 39 (1.07×) and 229.6 (1.02×) respectively. The entropy of the image is assessed to be 7.8 for the proposed model. This is also compared with existing algorithms and proved to be a secured model.

Davide Carmelo Calderone

This paper explores the transformative potential of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in sports event management. NFTs, based on blockchain technology, offer unique digital assets with inherent immutability, distinguishing them from traditional cryptocurrencies. The surge in NFT popularity during late 2021 and early 2022 opened new possibilities for blockchain adoption beyond finance. However, utilizing NFTs as a managerial tool faced challenges, including user experience and the lack of standardization. The bear market presented an opportunity for blockchain innovations, such as layer-two solutions, token standards like ERC-1155, and decentralized identity solutions. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how NFTs can revolutionize sports event management, combat ticket speculation, and enhance fan engagement. The research methodology involves a comparative analysis, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Firstly, an examination of current sports ticketing practices and potential NFT use cases is performed, followed by an evaluation of existing blockchain solutions and emerging technologies. The paper proposes NFTs as a new frontier in sports event management due to blockchain's properties: immutability, transparency, programmability, and interoperability. Use cases of NFTs in sports ticketing include Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAPs) for fan engagement, NFT-tickets with smart contract capabilities to combat scalping, subscription models with royalties for fans, and solutions for unsold tickets that reward loyal fans. The technological framework for NFT adoption in event management includes the ERC-1155 token standard for efficient ticketing, layer-two solutions for scalability, and decentralized identity solutions for secure verification. Considering environmental impact, blockchain solutions with Proof of Stake consensus algorithms are favored. In conclusion, NFTs offer a disruptive approach to sports event management, combating ticket speculation, and enhancing fan engagement. Gradual adoption and public education are crucial, and the choice of blockchain and platform will depend on specific needs. The potential benefits are promising for the sports industry's future. By employing a comparative research methodology, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, this paper provides comprehensive insights into the transformative impact of NFTs on sports event management.

Zhuoliang Qiu, Zhijun Xie, Xianliang Jiang, Chuan Ran · 5 authors

It is crucial to ensure the privacy and authenticity of the owner’s information in car insurance claims. However, the current traditional car insurance claims scenario suffers from inefficiency, complex service, unreliable data, and data leakage. Therefore, considering the privacy and sensitivity of insurance information and car owner data, we can use blockchain, smart contracts, and zero-knowledge proof technology to improve the current problems. This paper proposes a novel car insurance claim scheme based on smart contracts, blockchain, and zero-knowledge proof. Our scheme focuses on preserving privacy in the car insurance authorization and claim process. We design a private smart contract for the creation and revocation of car insurance and public smart contract for the authorization and validation of car insurance. By using ZoKrates, generating zero-knowledge proofs off chain and verifying the proofs on chain reduces the amount of data storage and computation on chain and provides privacy protection for sensitive information. Experimental results confirm the efficacy of our scheme in terms of security and performance.

Abeer Al Alubaidi

Objective: In the ongoing digital era, digital rights are a major concern and demand measures to address challenges that encompass the management of effective law implementation. The following study aims at the contrivance and administration of international law to address digital rights. Method: Legal aspects of digital technology, also known as information technology law, is a practical field of law that has established a strong position among other legal fields in recent years, both in legal firms and educational institutions. Fresh technological advancements like massive data, the Web of Things, quantum computation, distributed ledger technology, and advanced formulas provoke inquiries concerning the governance of these technologies, such as the entitlements and safeguards that individuals possess or ought to possess. The growing utilization of electronic technologies by corporations and governments prompts various inquiries concerning the management of these technologies, specifically concerning the privileges and lawful safeguards individuals have a claim to. Result: The emphasis is primarily on the utilization and possible alteration of current (basic) entitlements. Nevertheless, the argument and lawful exploration in this domain needs a more extensive conversation regarding the novel entitlements that individuals ought to possess in the digital epoch. Occasionally, novel ideas emerge, like the concept of the 'right to erasure'. Conclusion: This piece of writing discusses the inquiry of what fresh, supplementary entitlements could be envisioned in the age of technology if we were to compose them anew, without being restricted to a predetermined collection of essential liberties. To initiate a more extensive lawful discussion on this matter, several novel entitlements for individuals in the electronic sphere are suggested.

Muhammad Irfan Khalid, Mansoor Ahmed, Jungsuk Kim

Dynamic consent management allows a data subject to dynamically govern her consent to access her data. Clearly, security and privacy guarantees are vital for the adoption of dynamic consent management systems. In particular, specific data protection guarantees can be required to comply with rules and laws (e.g., the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)). Since the primary instantiation of the dynamic consent management systems in the existing literature is towards developing sustainable e-healthcare services, in this paper, we study data protection issues in dynamic consent management systems, identifying crucial security and privacy properties and discussing severe limitations of systems described in the state of the art. We have presented the precise definitions of security and privacy properties that are essential to confirm the robustness of the dynamic consent management systems against diverse adversaries. Finally, under those precise formal definitions of security and privacy, we have proposed the implications of state-of-the-art tools and technologies such as differential privacy, blockchain technologies, zero-knowledge proofs, and cryptographic procedures that can be used to build dynamic consent management systems that are secure and private by design.

Soo Jung Oh, Shufeng Xiao, Byung Il Park, Taewoo Roh

No abstract is available for this record.

Sasha Shilina

This chapter explores the potential of the novel Web 3 phenomenon – decentralized social networks – to address the growing concerns over privacy, censorship, and user control on centralized social media platforms. Offering an alternative to traditional social media, decentralized social platforms utilize distributed ledger technologies like blockchain where data is stored on multiple nodes and controlled by the users, rather than a central authority. Such systems are designed to enable trust and transparency in online interactions, provide the ability to communicate without censorship or interference, and empower users with greater control over their personal data. This chapter discusses the benefits and challenges of blockchain-based social networks, as well as existing initiatives working towards a more decentralized, democratic, and user-centric model of social networking.

Youyang Qu, Lichuan Ma, Wenjie Ye, Xuemeng Zhai · 7 authors

The popularization of intelligent healthcare devices and big data analytics significantly boosts the development of Smart Healthcare Networks (SHNs). To enhance the precision of diagnosis, different participants in SHNs share health data that contain sensitive information. Therefore, the data exchange process raises privacy concerns, especially when the integration of health data from multiple sources (linkage attack) results in further leakage. Linkage attack is a type of dominant attack in the privacy domain, which can leverage various data sources for private data mining. Furthermore, adversaries launch poisoning attacks to falsify the health data, which leads to misdiagnosing or even physical damage. To protect private health data, we propose a personalized differential privacy model based on the trust levels among users. The trust is evaluated by a defined community density, while the corresponding privacy protection level is mapped to controllable randomized noise constrained by differential privacy. To avoid linkage attacks in personalized differential privacy, we design a noise correlation decoupling mechanism using a Markov stochastic process. In addition, we build the community model on a blockchain, which can mitigate the risk of poisoning attacks during differentially private data transmission over SHNs. Extensive experiments and analysis on real-world datasets have testified the proposed model, and achieved better performance compared with existing research from perspectives of privacy protection and effectiveness.

Pouyan Esmaeilzadeh, Tala Mirzaei

BACKGROUND: Blockchain is an emerging technology that enables secure and decentralized approaches to reduce technical risks and governance challenges associated with sharing data. Although blockchain-based solutions have been suggested for sharing health information, it is still unclear whether a suitable incentive mechanism (intrinsic or extrinsic) can be identified to encourage individuals to share their sensitive data for research purposes. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to investigate how important extrinsic incentives are and what type of incentive is the best option in blockchain-based platforms designed for sharing sensitive health information. METHODS: In this study, we conducted 3 experiments with 493 individuals to investigate the role of extrinsic incentives (ie, cryptocurrency, money, and recognition) in data sharing with research organizations. RESULTS: The findings highlight that offering different incentives is insufficient to encourage individuals to use blockchain technology or to change their perceptions about the technology's premise for sharing sensitive health data. The results demonstrate that individuals still attribute serious risks to blockchain-based platforms. Privacy and security concerns, trust issues, lack of knowledge about the technology, lack of public acceptance, and lack of regulations are reported as top risks. In terms of attracting people to use blockchain-based platforms for data sharing in health care, we show that the effects of extrinsic motivations (cryptoincentives, money, and status) are significantly overshadowed by inhibitors to technology use. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that before emphasizing the use of various types of extrinsic incentives, the users must be educated about the capabilities and benefits offered by this technology. Thus, an essential first step for shifting from an institution-based data exchange to a patient-centric data exchange (using blockchain) is addressing technology inhibitors to promote patient-driven data access control. This study shows that extrinsic incentives alone are inadequate to change users' perceptions, increase their trust, or encourage them to use technology for sharing health data.

M. L. Dhore, Soham Ratnaparkhi, Rohan Sasne, Om Surase · 5 authors

Social media has revolutionized global communication, business contracts, and the diffusion of ideas. However, there are several potential drawbacks to this, including the spread of false information, data breaches, identity fraud, effective content monitoring, and digital piracy. Using blockchain protocols and Web3 philosophies, it is possible to protect data privacy, data security, and fraudulent identities. By replacing traditional email/name-password authentication with Metamask authentication, user privacy is strengthened. Storing application media on the Ethereum blockchain, a proof-of-concept for application data can be established, thereby preventing data breaches. According to our research results, blockchain technology has the potential to provide tamper resistance, traceability, and transparency. As a result, this proposed research provides a social media platform that is truly decentralized and built on a network, enhancing its users' privacy.

Md Al Amin, Amani Altarawneh, Sumantra Sarkar, Indrajit Ray

Access to an electronic health record (EHR) is very heavily regulated through many different types of policies: federal-level policies, state-level statutes, and even local and organizational-level policies, which may, for example, include procedures to follow at the organization level to ensure compliance with other policies. In addition, individual patients can also establish agreements with their healthcare providers to express their consent related to access to or sharing their protected health records. When such policies are adequately specified and implemented, they go a long way toward protecting EHR data. However, research has shown that there are often significant problems or gaps in policy compliance that are not identified until after a breach. Further, a recent study shows that subcultures within a healthcare organization influence whether employees violate policies, perhaps unintentionally. These observations motivate us to revisit the compliance and provenance aspects of policies. This paper proposes a blockchain-powered contract-based access control model for enforcing patient-provider agreements (PPAs) and other applicable policies and attributes for policy compliance and provenance in the healthcare sector. Blockchain smart contracts appear to be a promising new technology that can potentially ensure that policies are enforced. In addition, the immutable storage property of blockchains and strong integrity guarantees give hope that an adequate trail for policy compliance (or non-compliance) can be maintained, thus facilitating provenance. The average PPA integrity writing cost for the deployed smart contract is 0.00059 Ether (1.06666 USD). The average reading time is 0.152864 seconds to verify PPA integrity on the blockchain network. Writing gas consumption and reading time are feasible for the proposed approach.

Amjad Qashlan, Priyadarsi Nanda, Manoranjan Mohanty

No abstract is available for this record.