The potentiality of Blockchain technology is widespread and applied to diverse fields. Blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions that store immutable records in chronological order in an append-only mode. Hence, humongous data is stored on the blockchain and will continuously expand over time. Blockchain has been rapidly adopted by many businesses for storing the provenance data because of its salient features like immutability, robustness and tamperproof. Blockchain stores data provenance as transactions that are collected from sources like a centralized cloud or decentralized cloud that helps in identifying cybercrimes. This paper emphasizes on the different approaches of querying the data provenance transactions stored in Ethereum Blockchain based on various search parameters using REST API web services. The approach not only queries based on the first-class data elements like blocks, transactions, account address and contract address but also queries based on the provenance data stored on the Ethereum Blockchain explained with a use case LegalProv.
Visualization is a widely used in different fields of studies such as supply chain management when there is a need to communicate information to general users. However, there are multiple limitations and problems with visualizing information within traditional systems. In traditional systems, data is in control of one single authority; so data is mutable and there is no guarantee that system administer does not change the data to achieve a desired result. Besides, such systems are not transparent and users do not have any access to the data flow. In this thesis, the main goal was to visualize information that has been saved on top of a new technology named blockchain to overcome the aforementioned problems. All the records in the system are saved on the blockchain and data is pulled out from blockchain to be used in visualization. To have a better insight, a review has been done on relevant studies about blockchain, supply chain and visualization. After identifying the gap in literature review, an architecture was proposed that was used in the implementation. The implementation contains, a system on top of ethereum blockchain and front-end which allows users to interact with the system. In the system, all the information about products and all the transactions that ever happened in the system, are recorded on the blockchain. Then, data was retrieved from the blockchain and used to visualize provenance of products on Google Map API. After implementing the system, the performance was evaluated to make sure that it can handle different situations where various number of clients sending request to the system simultaneously. The performance was as expected in which system responds longer when number of clients sending requests were growing. \nThe proposed solution fill the gap that was identified in the literature review. By adding provenance visualization users can explore previous owners and locations of a product in a trustable manner. Future research can focus on analysis of data which will allow organizations to make informed decisions on choosing popular products to sell.
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.
Cloud datacenter reengineering has become an emerging technical term along with the rapid growth of cloud computing. There are a few reasons for implementing cloud reengineering. One of the key driven forces of adopting cloud reengineering is that securing data provenance is a major restriction for most contemporary applications. Many cloud-based applications require multiple cloud vendors' collaborations, such that data usage can be rarely controlled or governed during the data life cycle. This work focuses on the issue of data provenance in cloud computing and proposes an approach that uses blockchain techniques to achieve data tracing for a full data life cycle. The proposed method em- phasizes tracing data transfers between cloud datacenter. The data regeneration also is concerned by the proposed approach. Our experiment evaluation has assessed the efficiency performance of our approach.
Syed Saud Hasan, Nazatul Haque Sultan, Ferdous Ahmed Barbhuiya
Cloud is widely used for data storage. A user who has uploaded his/her private or commercial data to the cloud is always keen to know whether the data that he/she has stored is secure or not. Access logs of stored data can be used to trace the integrity of the data. Access logs are also known as provenance data. Provenance data contains private information of users. As provenance data can be used to check the integrity so, it becomes very important to securely store the provenance data. The stored provenance data should be immutable and also unreachable to adversaries, as it contains private information of users. Cloud users will be assured of their stored data, and Cloud Storage Providers can use this implementation to improve their brand value and performance. This paper aims at providing an efficient way to store provenance data securely using Blockchain technology and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) so that it is out of reach of adversaries. This paper also proposed a framework through which a user can verify the integrity of its own data. This model is implemented, tested and analyzed using IPFS which is a decentralized storage mechanism backed by blockchain to store cloud provenance data and uses publicly available Tierion api to store the hash value of the provenance entries.
Electronic Health Records have proven to be indispensable yet continue to present a host of problems. One of the most pressing concerns is how to share patient information freely and efficiently. Hospitals and clinics may share data internally, but there is an inability due to the lack of infrastructure or an unwillingness to share data between systems. Implementing a peer-to-peer distributed digital ledger, known as a blockchain, to record and transmit transactional data in conjunction with Cloud based technologies may be a solution to bridge the communication gap. This paper sets forth a new approach for a blockchain and cloud computing network utilizing Amazon Web Services and Ethereum blockchain to facilitate semantic level interoperability of Electronic Health Records systems without standardized data forms and formatting.
Deepak K. Tosh, Sachin Shetty, Xueping Liang, Charles Kamhoua · 5 authors
Ubiquitous adoption of cloud computing and virtualization technology has necessitated the need for strong security mechanisms. Multiple entities are involved in creating, exchanging, and altering data objects in the cloud environment, making it challenging to track malicious activities and security violations. To address these issues, there is a need for a data provenance framework, with which each data object in the federated cloud environment can be tracked and recorded. Although log-based provenance provides the ability to track operations conducted on digital assets, the provenance data are not transparent and immutable. Blockchain technology offers a promising mechanism for building a tamper-proof information system backed by strong cryptographic primitives. In this article, we propose BlockCloud, a blockchain-empowered data provenance architecture for the cloud computing platform. In addition, we present a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism for BlockCloud to alleviate the overhead of computational requirements that the traditional proof-of-work (PoW) consensus needs. Finally, we discuss several research challenges and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed to realize BlockCloud.
With data intensive computing helping advance state-of-the-art in varied fields, data provenance and lineage continue to remain formidable challenges in assisting with integrity and reproducibility in research and applications. This is particularly challenging for distributed scenarios, where data may be originating from decentralized sources without any centralized control by a single trusted entity. To date most of the data provenance systems are specific to particular domains, and are often centralized. Distributed ledgers such as blockchains have proved quite popular and effective in addressing trust and consensus without central control. There are a few recent proposals to employ blockchains for data provenance, however, they rely on currency in order to propose transactions using public blockchains.\n\nWe present HyperProv, a general framework for data provenance based on the permissioned blockchain Hyperledger Fabric (HLF), and to the best of our knowledge, the first provenance system that is ported to ARM based devices such as Raspberry Pi (RPi). HyperProv records the operation history and data lineage by tracking checksums, editors, timestamps, data pointers, dependencies, and more. Provenance data is retrieved and stored through a NodeJS client library to simplify interactions with the blockchain. HyperProv has a set of built-in queries using smart contracts that enable lightweight retrieval of large collections of provenance data. We evaluate the throughput, latency and resource consumption of HyperProv on x86-64 desktop machines, as well as RPi, demonstrating the feasibility of using HyperProv on RPi for tamperproof data provenance, useful in particular for Internet of Things use cases.
Marten Sigwart, Michael Borkowski, Marco Peise, Stefan Schulte · 5 authors
As more and more applications and services depend on data collected and provided by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, it is of importance that such data can be trusted. Data provenance solutions together with blockchain technology are one way to make data more trustworthy. However, current solutions do not address the heterogeneous nature of IoT applications and their data. In this work, we identify functional and non-functional requirements for a generic IoT data provenance framework, and conceptualise the framework as a layered architecture. Using a proof-of-concept implementation based on Ethereum smart contracts, data provenance can be realised for a wide range of IoT use cases. Benefits of a generic framework include simplified adoption and a more rapid implementation of data provenance for the IoT.
Maribel Acosta, Tim Berners‐Lee, Stefan Dietze, Anastasia Dimou · 9 authors
Decentralised data solutions bring their own sets of capabilities, requirements and issues not necessarily present in centralised solutions. In order to compare the properties of different approaches or tools for management of decentralised data, it is important to have a common evaluation framework. We present a set of dimensions relevant to data management in decentralised contexts and use them to define principles extending the FAIR framework, initially developed for open research data. By characterising a range of different data solutions or approaches by how TRusted, Autonomous, Distributed and dEcentralised, in addition to how Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, they are, we show that our FAIR TRADE framework is useful for describing and evaluating the management of decentralised data solutions, and aim to contribute to the development of best practice in a developing field.
David Hawig, C. Zhou, Sebastian Fuhrhop, Andre S Fialho · 5 authors
BACKGROUND: Distributed ledger technology (DLT) holds great potential to improve health information exchange. However, the immutable and transparent character of this technology may conflict with data privacy regulations and data processing best practices. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper is to develop a proof-of-concept system for immutable, interoperable, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant exchange of blood glucose data. METHODS: Given that there is no ideal design for a DLT-based patient-provider data exchange solution, we proposed two different variations for our proof-of-concept system. One design was based purely on the public IOTA distributed ledger (a directed acyclic graph-based DLT) and the second used the same public IOTA ledger in combination with a private InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) cluster. Both designs were assessed according to (1) data reversal risk, (2) data linkability risks, (3) processing time, (4) file size compatibility, and (5) overall system complexity. RESULTS: The public IOTA design slightly increased the risk of personal data linkability, had an overall low processing time (requiring mean 6.1, SD 1.9 seconds to upload one blood glucose data sample into the DLT), and was relatively simple to implement. The combination of the public IOTA with a private IPFS cluster minimized both reversal and linkability risks, allowed for the exchange of large files (3 months of blood glucose data were uploaded into the DLT in mean 38.1, SD 13.4 seconds), but involved a relatively higher setup complexity. CONCLUSIONS: For the specific use case of blood glucose explored in this study, both designs presented a suitable performance in enabling the interoperable exchange of data between patients and providers. Additionally, both systems were designed considering the latest guidelines on personal data processing, thereby maximizing the alignment with recent GDPR requirements. For future works, these results suggest that the conflict between DLT and data privacy regulations can be addressed if careful considerations are made regarding the use case and the design of the data exchange system.
Ashar Ahmad, Muhammad Saad, Laurent Njilla, Charles Kamhoua · 6 authors
Blockchain-based audit trails provide a consensus-driven and tamper-proof trail of system events that are helpful in creating provenance in enterprise solutions. However, taking into account the transaction bulk generated by these applications and the throughput limitations of existing blockchains, a single ledger for record keeping can be inefficient and costly. To that end, we see an imperative need for a new blockchain design that is capable of addressing current challenges, without compromising security and provenance. Hence, we propose BlockTrail, a scalable and efficient blockchain solution for auditing applications. BlockTrail fragments the legacy blockchain systems into layers of co-dependent hierarchies, thereby reducing the time and space complexity, and increasing the throughput. BlockTrail is prototyped on "Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance" (PBFT) protocol with a custom-built blockchain. Experiments with BlockTrail show that compared to the conventional schemes, BlockTrail is more efficient, and has less storage footprint.
Sina Rafati Niya, Lucas Pelloni, Severin Wullschleger, Andreas Schaufelbuhl · 7 authors
Out casting, sharing, and publishing the collected knowledge, experiences, and outputs of scientific works, regardless of being empirical or purely theoretical, has always been one of the key assets of human evolution. However, on one hand, re-usability of published work depends on accessibility, and, on the other hand, om the correctness of published work. Studies on the traditional scientific publishing platforms reveal many deficits with those systems, which had been addressed with the proposed blockchain-based solution called Eureka. Eureka enables high quality reviews of tthe published work, while incentivizing authors and reviewers to participate in this decentralized, open, and public scientific publishing platform.
Andreas Schaufelbuhl, Sina Rafati Niya, Lucas Pelloni, Severin Wullschleger · 7 authors
Today's number of reputable academical publishers is dominated by few key players. This imbalance of supply and demand in publishing academic work makes the entire process inefficient. EUREKA is a blockchain-based scientific publishing platform, developed to address this imbalance. It offers the opportunity of a fair reward distribution for all contributors and immediate ownership rights to authors of an article. For the demonstration, the platform including the back-end and frontend integrated into the Ethereum blockchain is shown, and the interaction processes of users i.e., authors and reviewers are presented.
Pingcheng Ruan, Gang Chen, Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Qian Lin · 6 authors
The success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies bring enormous interest to blockchains. A blockchain system implements a tamper-evident ledger for recording transactions that modify some global states. The system captures entire evolution history of the states. The management of that history, also known as data provenance or lineage, has been studied extensively in database systems. However, querying data history in existing blockchains can only be done by replaying all transactions. This approach is applicable to large-scale, offline analysis, but is not suitable for online transaction processing. We present LineageChain , a fine-grained, secure and efficient provenance system for blockchains. LineageChain exposes provenance information to smart contracts via simple and elegant interfaces, thereby enabling a new class of blockchain applications whose execution logics depend on provenance information at runtime. LineageChain captures provenance during contract execution, and efficiently stores it in a Merkle tree. LineageChain provides a novel skip list index designed for supporting efficient provenance query processing. We have implemented LineageChain on top of Hyperledger and a blockchain-optimized storage system called ForkBase. Our extensive evaluation of LineageChain demonstrates its benefits to the new class of blockchain applications, its efficient query, and its small storage overhead.
Daniel R. Wong, Sanchita Bhattacharya, Atul J. Butte
Monitoring and ensuring the integrity of data within the clinical trial process is currently not always feasible with the current research system. We propose a blockchain-based system to make data collected in the clinical trial process immutable, traceable, and potentially more trustworthy. We use raw data from a real completed clinical trial, simulate the trial onto a proof of concept web portal service, and test its resilience to data tampering. We also assess its prospects to provide a traceable and useful audit trail of trial data for regulators, and a flexible service for all members within the clinical trials network. We also improve the way adverse events are currently reported. In conclusion, we advocate that this service could offer an improvement in clinical trial data management, and could bolster trust in the clinical research process and the ease at which regulators can oversee trials.
The confirmation of data property rights is one of the most important functions of big data trading institutions. This paper builds a specialized classifier which aims to the normalization process of data property confirmation in the process of big data transaction and proposes the mechanism of confirming big data property rights based on Smart Contract.
Donna N. Dillenberger, Petr Novotny, Qurui Zhang, Praveen Jayachandran · 12 authors
Blockchain records track information about financial payments, movements of products through supply chains, identity verification information, and many other assets. Analytics on this data can provide provenance histories, predictive planning, fraud identification, and regulatory compliance. In this paper, we describe analytics engines connected to blockchains to provide easy-to-use configurable dashboards, predictive models, provenance histories, and compliance checking. We also describe how blockchain data can be combined with external data sources for secure and private analytics, enable artificial intelligence (AI) model creation over geographically dispersed data, and create a history of model creation enabling provenance and lineage tracking for trusted AI.
Jan 1, 2019·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Antonio Tenorio-Fornés, Viktor Jacynycz, David Llop-Vila, Antonio A. Sánchez‐Ruiz · 5 authors
The current processes of scientific publication and peer review raise concerns around fairness, quality, performance, cost, and accuracy. The Open Access movement has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and a few middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits. This paper, using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, proposes a decentralized publication system for open science. The proposed system would provide (1) a distributed reviewer reputation system, (2) an Open Access by-design infrastructure, and (3) transparent governance processes. A survey is used to evaluate the problems, proposed solutions and possible adoption resistances, while a working prototype serves as a proof-of-concept. Additionally, the paper discusses the implementation, in a distributed context, of different privacy settings for both open peer review and reputation systems, introducing a novel approach supporting both anonymous and accountable reviews. The paper concludes reviewing the open challenges of this ambitious proposal.
We present a decentralised solution for managing scientific communication, based on distributed ledger technologies, also called blockchains. The proposed system aims to solve incentive problems displayed by traditional systems in scientific communication and publication. A minimal working model is presented, defining roles, processes, and expected results from the novel system. The proposed solution is viable, given the current status of blockchain technology, and should lead to a rethinking of current practices and their consequences for scientific communication.
In the previous chapter, you learned how to create your own private Ethereum test network so that you can try out the various Ethereum transactions, such as transferring Ethers to different accounts and performing mining. You also learned how to create accounts so that you can hold your own Ethers. In this chapter, you will learn how to use a Chrome extension known as the MetaMask. The MetaMask Chrome extension is an Ethereum wallet that allows you to hold your Ethereum account, and it will be an essential tool to help you develop and test Smart Contracts in the next few chapters.
신뢰하는 중앙기관 없이 노드간 합의를 통해 신뢰성 있는 데이터 공유를 지원하는 블록체인은 비트코인을 시작으로 다양한 분야에서 활용되고 있다. 다양한 블록체인 플랫폼 중 스마트 컨트랙트를 지원하는 이더리움은 다양한 블록체인 서비스 구축에 활발히 활용되고 있지만 아직까지 이더리움 네트워크의 동작 방식이나 특징을 분석한 연구는 미비하다. 본 논문에서는 이더리움 네트워크 구성시 반드시 필요한 노드 탐색 과정을 분석한다. 이더리움 네트워크의 특징과 주요 프로토콜 및 노드 탐색 과정을 설명하고, Go언어로 작성된 이더리움 구현물인 geth의 네트워크 동작에 따른 함수 콜 그래프 분석 결과를 제공한다.