Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although the blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using Blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records. In this work, we leverage Blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and management. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance model (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed framework can securely capture and validate provenance data that prevents any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the majority of the participants are honest.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
The purpose of this thesis was to investigate and study the various issues faced by educational and technological researchers while raising the funds for their respective projects and the issues faced by the fund’s providers. Multiple existing traditional fundraising platforms were identified, and their advantages and disadvantages were studied to check if it was suitable for educational and technological researchers to carry on their funding campaign using the existing platforms. Finally, the goal was to develop a decentralized research funding application which would replace the existing traditional methods of raising funds by providing the researchers the ability to create a fundraising campaign on Ethereum blockchain while ensuring the transparent and auditable usage of the funds provided for the development of the project by the stakeholders.\n\nThe research funding application was developed and deployed to Ethereum blockchain. During the development process, the technologies used were Solidity, HTML, CSS, Javascript and React. The requirements for the Minimum Viable Product of the research funding application were finalized and the project was implemented by following the Waterfall software development model. \n\nAs a result, the requirements set for the research funding application were accomplished and the application was deployed to the blockchain and can be accessed by the general public. Furthermore, additional features such as the ability to create and manage multiple funding campaigns by a single entity were also developed successfully.
We study distributed declarative workflow execution in an adversarial setting.In this setting, parties to an agreed-upon workflow do not trust each other to follow that workflow, or suspect the other party might misrepresent proceedings at a later time.We demonstrate how distributed declarative workflow execution can be implemented as smart contracts, guaranteeing (I) enforcement of workflow semantics, and (II) an incontrovertible record of workflow execution history.Crucially, we achieve both properties without relying on a trusted third party.The implementation is based on the Ethereum blockchain, inheriting the security properties (I) and (II) from the guarantees given by that chain.A recurring challenge for both the implementation and the analysis is the cost of operations on Ethereum: This cost must be minimised for honest parties, and an adversary must be prevented from inflicting extra cost on others.
So far we have discussed the Ethereum architecture, Solidity programming, and the Ethereum client, including setting it up and compiling, running, and debugging Dapps. That’s a lot of work, isn’t it? In this chapter, let’s discuss two leading frameworks, Truffle and Embark, that will provide a set of tools and boilerplate code for scaffolding Dapps for Ethereum. The frameworks will do much of the work themselves and leave you with only a few tasks.
We present a proof of concept implementation of an integration strategy for connecting CAD with Blockchain. We explain the components of most blockchains and the value they bring to the built environment ecosystem, the potential impact a complete integration might have and we demonstrate the first two of four levels of integration we have identified between CAD and blockchain technologies. For the purposes of the paper we use Rhino / Grasshopper and Ethereum as the two components of integration.
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the WWW 2018 3rd International Workshop on Linked Data and Distributed Ledgers (LD-DL). We envision the workshop as a forum for researchers and practitioners from Distributed Ledgers and Linked Data to come together to discuss common challenges; propose solutions to shortcomings of existing architectures; and identify synergies for joint initiatives. The ultimate goal is the creation of a Web of Interoperable Ledgers. We received 6 submissions from all around the world. We evaluated them regarding relevance, quality, and novelty, selecting 3 short papers and 1 long paper (66% acceptance rate) --ScienceMiles - Digital currency for researchers--Can Blockchains and Linked Data Advance Taxation? --A distributed database with explicit semantics and chained RDF graphs--When trust saves energy: A Reference Framework for Proof of Trust (PoT) Blockchains. We hope that you will find the tutorial program interesting, providing you with a valuable opportunity to learn and share ideas with other researchers and practitioners from institutions around the world.
Jan 1, 2018·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Blockchains permit to store information in a tamper-resistant and irrevocable manner by reverting to distributed computing and cryptographic technologies. The primary purpose is to keep track of the ownership of tangible and intangible assets. In the paper at hand we apply these concepts and technologies to the domain of knowledge management. Based on the explication of knowledge in the form of enterprise models this permits the application of so-called knowledge proofs for a. enabling the transparent monitoring of knowledge evolution, b. tracking the provenance, ownership, and relationships of knowledge in an organization, c. establishing delegation schemes for knowledge management, and d. ensuring the existence of patterns in models via zero-knowledge proofs. To validate the technical feasibility of the approach a first technical implementation is described and applied to a fictitious use case.
Yu Zhuang, Lincoln Sheets, Zon‐Yin Shae, Jeffrey J. P. Tsai · 5 authors
"Blockchain" is a distributed ledger technology originally applied in the financial sector. This technology ensures the integrity of transactions without third-party validation. Its functions of decentralized transaction validation, data provenance, data sharing, and data integration are a good fit for the needs of health information exchange and clinical trials. We investigated the current workflow of Health Information Exchange and clinical trials; conducted design thinking processes with clinicians, trial managers, informaticians, and blockchain professionals; and implemented a private blockchain model to tackle known issues. We used coded Smart Contract regulations to simulate several scenarios in healthcare processes. This proof-of-concept work provides a feasible simulation for potential solutions to monitor clinical trials across different census regions persistently. Various levels of data access privileges have been designed to utilize a suite of customized Smart Contract settings. These settings emulate the workflow protocols for the monitoring entities, trial sponsors, clinical sponsors and participating subjects. Keywords: Blockchain, Smart Contract, Health Information Exchange, Clinical Trial, Persistent Monitoring.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
This chapter walks you through the setup and installation of tools required to run the Ethereum blockchain. We cover hardware requirements, operating system requirements, and software requirements. After covering the installation of the software, we provide the basic commands required to interact with the Ethereum network.
Because of the distributed nature of cloud computing, the data of cloud may be stored and processed across jurisdictional borders. In such case, collecting digital evidence from cloud computing requires multiparty cooperation. However, as far as we known, there is still no available technic approach for improving the trustworthy of the interaction records of all stakeholders in cloud forensics. This work proposed a process provenance, which provides proof of existence and privacy preservation for process records by using technologies of blockchain and cryptography group signature. The process provenance enhances the trustworthy of the chain of custody for cloud forensics.
Deepak K. Tosh, Sachin Shetty, Xueping Liang, Charles Kamhoua · 5 authors
Blockchain has recently attracted tremendous interest due to its ability to enhance security and privacy through a immutable shared distributed ledger. Blockchain's ability to detect integrity violations are particularly key in providing assured data provenance in cloud platform. The practical adoption of blockchain will largely hinge on consensus protocols meeting performance and security guarantees. In this paper, we present the design issues for consensus protocols for blockchain based cloud provenance. We present the blockchain based data provenance framework for cloud. We find that there are performance and security challenges in adopting proof-of-work consensus protocol within this framework. We present unique design challenges and opportunities in developing proof-of-stake for data provenance in cloud platform.
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of\ntransactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive the environment\nfor building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology\nhas been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the\nprevious work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable\nscientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the\nprovenance records. In this work, we leverage blockchain as a platform to\nfacilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and\nmanagement. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance\nmodel (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed\nframework can efficiently and securely capture and validate provenance data,\nand prevent any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the\nmajority of the participants are honest.\n
Cesare Furlanello, Manlio De Domenico, Giuseppe Jurman, Nicole Bussola
Publishing reproducible analyses is a long-standing and widespread challenge for the scientific community, funding bodies and publishers. Although a definitive solution is still elusive, the problem is recognized to affect all disciplines and lead to a critical system inefficiency. Here, we propose a blockchain-based approach to enhance scientific reproducibility, with a focus on life science studies and precision medicine. While the interest of encoding permanently into an immutable ledger all the study key information-including endpoints, data and metadata, protocols, analytical methods and all findings-has been already highlighted, here we apply the blockchain approach to solve the issue of rewarding time and expertise of scientists that commit to verify reproducibility. Our mechanism builds a trustless ecosystem of researchers, funding bodies and publishers cooperating to guarantee digital and permanent access to information and reproducible results. As a natural byproduct, a procedure to quantify scientists' and institutions' reputation for ranking purposes is obtained.
Béla Gipp, Corinna Breitinger, Norman Meuschke, Joeran Beel
Manuscript submission systems are a central fixture in scholarly publishing. However, with existing systems, researchers must trust that their yet unpublished findings will not prematurely be disseminated due to technical weaknesses and that anonymous peer reviewers or committee members will not plagiarize unpublished content. To address this limitation, we present CryptSubmit - a system that automatically creates a decentralized, tamperproof, and publicly verifiable timestamp for each submitted manuscript by utilizing the blockchain of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The publicly accessible and tamperproof infrastructure of the blockchain allows researchers to independently verify the validity of the timestamp associated with their manuscript at the time of submission to a conference or journal. Our system supports researchers in protecting their intellectual property even in the face of vulnerable submission platforms or dishonest peer reviewers. Optionally, the system also generates trusted timestamps for the feedback shared by peer reviewers to increase the traceability of ideas. CryptSubmit integrates these features into the open source conference management system OJS. In the future, the method could be integrated at nearly no overhead cost into other manuscript submission systems, such as EasyChair, ConfTool, or Ambra. The introduced method can also improve electronic pre-print services and storage systems for research data.
Jonathan Bell, Thomas D. LaToza, Foteini Baldmitsi, Angelos Stavrou
The scientific community is facing a crisis of reproducibility: confidence in scientific results is damaged by concerns regarding the integrity of experimental data and the analyses applied to that data. Experimental integrity can be compromised inadvertently when researchers overlook some important component of their experimental procedure, or intentionally by researchers or malicious third-parties who are biased towards ensuring a specific outcome of an experiment. The scientific community has pushed for "open science" to add transparency to the experimental process, asking researchers to publicly register their data sets and experimental procedures. We argue that the software engineering community can leverage its expertise in tracking traceability and provenance of source code and its related artifacts to simplify data management for scientists. Moreover, by leveraging smart contract and blockchain technologies, we believe that it is possible for such a system to guarantee end-to-end integrity of scientific data and results while supporting collaborative research.
Xueping Liang, Sachin Shetty, Deepak K. Tosh, Charles Kamhoua · 6 authors
Cloud data provenance is metadata that records the history of the creation and operations performed on a cloud data object. Secure data provenance is crucial for data accountability, forensics and privacy. In this paper, we propose a decentralized and trusted cloud data provenance architecture using blockchain technology. Blockchain-based data provenance can provide tamper-proof records, enable the transparency of data accountability in the cloud, and help to enhance the privacy and availability of the provenance data. We make use of the cloud storage scenario and choose the cloud file as a data unit to detect user operations for collecting provenance data. We design and implement ProvChain, an architecture to collect and verify cloud data provenance, by embedding the provenance data into blockchain transactions. ProvChain operates mainly in three phases: (1) provenance data collection, (2) provenance data storage, and (3) provenance data validation. Results from performance evaluation demonstrate that ProvChain provides security features including tamper-proof provenance, user privacy and reliability with low overhead for the cloud storage applications.
Evidence-based clinical sciences are currently suffering from a paralyzing reproducibility crisis. From clinical psychiology to cancer biology, recent metaresearch indicates a rise in researchers failing to replicate studies published by their peers. This problem is not just limited to benchwork that happens in a lab; it also plagues translational research where the transformation from bench to bedside happens. Treatments, tests, and technologies are converted from simple lab experiments to government-approved devices and assays that affect hundreds of lives. Therefore, replicability is crucial to converting scientific breakthroughs into pragmatic remedies.
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Christopher Munro, Philip Couch, Jon Johnson, John Ainsworth · 5 authors
Discovery of useful relationships between scholarly assets on the web is challenging, both in terms generating the right metadata around the assets, and in connecting all relevant digital entities in chain of provenance accessible to the whole community. This paper reports the development of a framework and tools enabling scholarly asset relationships to be expressed in a standard and open way, illustrated with use-cases of discovering new knowledge across cohort studies. The framework uses Research Objects for aggregation, distributed databases for storage, and distributed ledgers for provenance. Our proposal avoids management by a single central platform or organization, instead leveraging the use of existing resources and platforms across natural partnerships. Our proposed infrastructure will support a wide range of users from system administrators to researchers.