The utilisation of blockchain has moved beyond digital currency to other fields such as health, the Internet of Things, and education. In this paper, we present a systematic mapping study to collect and analyse relevant research on blockchain technology related to the higher education field. The paper concentrates on two main themes. First, it examines state of the art in blockchain-based applications that have been developed for educational purposes. Second, it summarises the challenges and research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies.
We model and analyze blockchain miners who seek to maximize the compound return of their mining businesses. The analysis of the optimal strategies finds a new equilibrium point among the miners and the mining pools, which predicts the market share of each miner or mining pool. The cost of mining determines the share of each miner or mining pool at equilibrium. We conclude that neither miners nor mining pools who seek to maximize their compound return will have a financial incentive to occupy more than 50% of the hash rate if the cost of mining is at the same level for all. However, if there is an outstandingly cost-efficient miner, then the market share of this miner may exceed 50% in the equilibrium, which can threaten the viability of the entire ecosystem.
Global digitalization has given birth to the explosion of digital services in approximately every sector of contemporary life. Applications of artificial intelligence, blockchain technologies, and internet of things are promising to accelerate digitalization further. As a consequence, the number of data centers, which provide the services of data processing, storage, and communication services, is also increasing rapidly. Because data centers are energy-intensive with significant and growing electricity demand, an energy model of data centers with temporal, spatial, and predictive analysis capability is critical for guiding industry and governmental authorities for making technology investment decisions. However, current models fail to provide consistent and high dimensional energy analysis for data centers due to severe data gaps. This can be further attributed to the lack of the modeling capabilities for energy analysis of data center components including IT equipment and data center cooling and power provisioning infrastructure in current energy models. In this research, a technology-based modeling framework, in hybrid with a data-driven approach, is proposed to address the knowledge gaps in current data center energy models. The research aims to provide policy makers and data center energy analysts with comprehensive understanding of data center energy use and efficiency opportunities and a better understanding of macro-level data center energy demand and energy saving potentials, in addition to the technological barriers for adopting energy efficiency measures.
Blockchain has received much attention recently, due to its promises of verifiable, permanent, decentralized, and efficient data handling. In 2017-2019 blockchain and associated technologies such as smart contracts has progressed beyond cryptocurrencies, and has been adopted in banking, retail, healthcare, and other fields. This study critically examines recent applications of blockchain in science, touching upon different stages of research cycle, from data management to publishing, peer review, research evaluation and funding. The paper is based upon a review of blockchain projects, relevant literature, a set of interviews and focus groups with startup founders, scholars, librarians, IT experts from the EU, USA, Russia, and Belarus. Proponents of blockchain for science present this technology as a tool to make science free from bias, red tape, data fraud, as well as provide innovative means to secure financial backing for new ideas. However, these projects face a set of challenges. One issue concerns introducing crypto economy, with its financial incentives, into science, a field that emphasizes disinterested and non-pecuniary pursuit of truth. Another source of concern relates to the ongoing conflict between the principle of decentralization inherent to blockchain and the practice of forcing it from above, by the state and other centralized entities.
Jun 8, 2020·Third IEEE International Conference on Trust, Privacy and Security in Intelligent Systems and Applications (TPS-ISA), 2021}, pages: 303-306
In this paper, we have studied how the text of an ancient literature on how their integrity has been preserved for several centuries. Specifically, The Vedas is an ancient literature, which has its text remained preserved without any corruption for thousands of years. As we studied the system that protects the integrity of the text, pronunciation and semantics of the The Vedas, we discovered a number of similarities it has with the current concept of blockchain technology. It is surprising that the notion of de-centralized trust and mathematical encodings have existed since thousands of years in order to protect this work of literature. We have presented our findings and analysis of the similarities. There are also certain technical mechanisms that The Vedic integrity system uses, which can be used to enhance the current digital blockchain platforms in terms of its security and robustness.
Ancient Romans called 'urbs' the set of buildings and infrastructures, and 'civitas' the Roman citizens. Today instead, while the society is surfing the digital tsunami, 'urbs' and 'civitas' tend to become much closer, almost merging, that we might attempt to condensate these into a single concept: 'smart grid'. Internet of things, artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum cryptography is only a few of the paradigms that are likely to contribute to determining the final portrait of the future smart grid. However, to understand the effective sustainability of complex grids, specific tools are required. To this end, in this article, a systematic review of the emerging paradigms is presented, identifying intersectoral synergies and limitations with respect to the `smart grid' concept. Further, a taxonomic framework for assessing the level of sustainability of the grid is proposed. Finally, from the scenario portrayed, a set of issues involving engineering, regulation, security, and social frameworks have been derived in a theoretical fashion. The findings are likely to suggest the urgent need for multidisciplinary cooperation to wisely address engineering and ontological challenges gravitating around the smart grid concept.
As the pioneer of blockchain technology, Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency to date. Given its dramatic price spikes (and crashes) along with the never-ending news from SEC regulations to security breaches, there seems to be a lack of understanding about the dynamics of cryptocurrencies. These dynamics are believed to be affected by various political, security, financial, and regulatory events. In this paper, we present an efficient framework for holistic analysis of cryptocurrency fluctuations by introducing the Impact-Score metric to distinguish event-induced changes from normal variations. We have applied our framework to 16 major worldwide events and the Bitcoin blockchain network (defined as Bitcoin transaction and users, blockchain data, and memory pool data) from 2016-2018. The results show that a majority of the events are correlated with substantial network changes. We observed roughly generalizable correlations between event types (e.g. financial events) and sub-structures of the Bitcoin blockchain network. Subgroups of these events have strongly consistent temporal impacts on specific facets (e.g. activity or fees) of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of our process by correlating a majority of spikes in network/subnetwork change with major events.
Ethereum is the largest public blockchain by usage. It applies an account-based model, which is inferior to Bitcoin's unspent transaction output model from a privacy perspective. Due to its privacy shortcomings, recently several privacy-enhancing overlays have been deployed on Ethereum, such as non-custodial, trustless coin mixers and confidential transactions. In our privacy analysis of Ethereum's account-based model, we describe several patterns that characterize only a limited set of users and successfully apply these quasi-identifiers in address deanonymization tasks. Using Ethereum Name Service identifiers as ground truth information, we quantitatively compare algorithms in recent branch of machine learning, the so-called graph representation learning, as well as time-of-day activity and transaction fee based user profiling techniques. As an application, we rigorously assess the privacy guarantees of the Tornado Cash coin mixer by discovering strong heuristics to link the mixing parties. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and implement Ethereum user profiling techniques based on quasi-identifiers. Finally, we describe a malicious value-fingerprinting attack, a variant of the Danaan-gift attack, applicable for the confidential transaction overlays on Ethereum. By incorporating user activity statistics from our data set, we estimate the success probability of such an attack.
Thomas K. Dasaklis, Fran Casino, Constantinos Patsakis
As the digitization of information-intensive processes gains momentum in nowadays, the concern is growing about how to deal with the ever-growing problem of cybercrime. To this end, law enforcement officials and security firms use sophisticated digital forensics techniques for analyzing and investigating cybercrimes. However, multi-jurisdictional mandates, interoperability issues, the massive amount of evidence gathered (multimedia, text etc.) and multiple stakeholders involved (law enforcement agencies, security firms etc.) are just a few among the various challenges that hinder the adoption and implementation of sound digital forensics schemes. Blockchain technology has been recently proposed as a viable solution for developing robust digital forensics mechanisms. In this paper, we provide an overview and classification of the available blockchain-based digital forensic tools, and we further describe their main features. We also offer a thorough analysis of the various benefits and challenges of the symbiotic relationship between blockchain technology and the current digital forensics approaches, as proposed in the available literature. Based on the findings, we identify various research gaps, and we suggest future research directions that are expected to be of significant value both for academics and practitioners in the field of digital forensics.
Thomas K. Dasaklis, Fran Casino, Constantinos Patsakis
Human beings produce electronic waste (e-waste) at an unprecedented pace. Mobile phones and other inter-connected smart devices make a significant contribution to the generation of e-waste. Reverse logistics (RL) activities play an essential role in managing mobile phones during their end-of-life. However, remanufacturing and/or refurbishing of mobile phones might prove difficult not only from an operational point of view but also from a data management and privacy perspective (due to privacy-related regulatory frameworks like the EU General Data Protection Regulation directive). In this paper, we propose a distributed trustless and secure framework for electronic equipment RL activities based on blockchain technology. We consider the remanufacturing/refurbishing recovery option for mobile phones, and we develop an autonomous and effective back-end data sharing architecture based on smart contracts/blockchain technology for keeping track of all the remanufacturing/refurbishing processes. For demonstrating the applicability of our approach, we develop a functional set of smart contracts and a local private blockchain. The benefits of our framework are further discussed, along with fruitful areas for future research.
In order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries enforced extended social distancing measures for several weeks, effectively pausing the majority of economic activities. In an effort to resume economic activity safely, several Digital Contact Tracing applications and protocols have been introduced with success. However, DCT is a reactive method, as it aims to break existing chains of disease transmission in a population. Therefore DCT is not suitable for proactively preventing the spread of a disease; an approach that relevant to certain use cases, such as international tourism, where individuals travel across borders. In this work, we first identify the limitations characterising DCT related to privacy issues, unwillingness of the public to use DCT mobile apps due to privacy concerns, lack of interoperability among different DCT applications and protocols, and the assumption that there is limited, local mobility in the population. We then discuss the concept of a Health Passport as a means of verifying that individuals are disease risk-free and how it could be used to resume the international tourism sector. Following, we present the DHP Framework that uses a private blockchain and Proof of Authority for issuing Digital Health Passports. The framework provides a distributed infrastructure supporting the issuance of DHPs by foreign health systems and their verification by relevant stakeholders, such as airline companies and border control authorities. We discuss the attributes of the system in terms of its usability and performance, security and privacy. Finally, we conclude by identifying future extensions of our work on formal security and privacy properties that need to be rigorously guaranteed via appropriate security protocols.
This book discusses the necessity and perhaps urgency for the regulation of algorithms on which new technologies rely; technologies that have the potential to re-shape human societies. From commerce and farming to medical care and education, it is difficult to find any aspect of our lives that will not be affected by these emerging technologies. At the same time, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, cognitive computing, blockchain, virtual reality and augmented reality, belong to the fields most likely to affect law and, in particular, administrative law. The book examines universally applicable patterns in administrative decisions and judicial rulings. First, similarities and divergence in behavior among the different cases are identified by analyzing parameters ranging from geographical location and administrative decisions to judicial reasoning and legal basis. As it turns out, in several of the cases presented, sources of general law, such as competition or labor law, are invoked as a legal basis, due to the lack of current specialized legislation. This book also investigates the role and significance of national and indeed supranational regulatory bodies for advanced algorithms and considers ENISA, an EU agency that focuses on network and information security, as an interesting candidate for a European regulator of advanced algorithms. Lastly, it discusses the involvement of representative institutions in algorithmic regulation.
The tokenization of assets deployed to distributed ledger technology is increasingly cited to revolutionize financial services by allowing traditionally illiquid assets to be bought and sold on primary and secondary markets increasing asset liquidity, transparency and reducing transaction completion time. To realize these benefits it is important the token is transferrable, that is, portable from one distributed ledger to another. In this paper we survey current interoperability architectures and smart contract languages, identifying factors affecting the portability of tokenized assets. We propose a portability maturity model that can be used to help assess the current state of technology and supporting market infrastructure.
May 10, 2020·International Conference on Innovation and Intelligence for Informatics, Computing, and Technologies (3ICT), University of Bahrain, Kingdom of Bahrain, September 2019
Citizen records are scattered between different state organizations. It wastes time, effort, and resources for both citizen and organization to collect, maintain, and update records to fulfill citizen services. Interoperability is a key element that enables seamless collaboration between different entities. It requires non-conventional methods to overcome interoperability challenges such as lack of trust, centralization, and policy and technology differences. Blockchain is a disruptive technology with the potential to overcome these challenges. The technology designed to enable peer-to-peer transactions with elimination of intermediary in a trustless environment through the control of consensus mechanisms. This research aims to explore the status of interoperability in Bahrain, design an interoperable framework, and then test the validity of the framework by implementation of a prototype using blockchain technology. The research will be divided into four phases; I: Information collection, II: Design and modeling the framework, III: Implementation of a prototype, and Phase IV: Measuring the performance of the prototype. This research is in progress and it is expected, once is it complete, to enhance the e-government's plan in the Kingdom of Bahrain to provide better services to citizens and help in the transition from e-government to seamless government, which will lead to sustainable citizen services. On the other hand, the findings of the study is expected to improve the social, economical, and environmental sustainability by the increase in process optimization, reduction of cost and complexity.
Privacy-seeking cryptocurrency users rely on anonymization techniques like CoinJoin and ring transactions. By using such technologies benign users potentially provide anonymity to bad actors. We propose overlay protocols to resolve the tension between anonymity and accountability in a peer-to-peer manner. Cryptocurrencies can adopt this approach to enable prosecution of publicly recognized crimes. We illustrate how the protocols could apply to Monero rings and CoinJoin transactions in Bitcoin.
Massimo La Morgia, Alessandro Mei, Francesco Sassi, Julinda Stefa
In the last years, cryptocurrencies are increasingly popular. Even people who are not experts have started to invest in these securities and nowadays cryptocurrency exchanges process transactions for over 100 billion US dollars per month. However, many cryptocurrencies have low liquidity and therefore they are highly prone to market manipulation schemes. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of pump and dump schemes organized by communities over the Internet. We observe how these communities are organized and how they carry out the fraud. Then, we report on two case studies related to pump and dump groups. Lastly, we introduce an approach to detect the fraud in real time that outperforms the current state of the art, so to help investors stay out of the market when a pump and dump scheme is in action.
Victoria L. Lemieux, Darra Hofman, Hoda Hamouda, Danielle Batista · 11 authors
This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a prototype blockchain solution for private and secure individual omics health data management and sharing. This solution is one output of a multidisciplinary project investigating the social, data and technical issues surrounding application of blockchain technology in the context of personalized healthcare research. The project studies potential ethical, legal, social and cognitive constraints of self-sovereign healthcare data management and sharing, and whether such constraints can be addressed through careful user interface design of a blockchain solution.
Alaa Awad Abdellatif, Abeer Z. Al-Marridi, Amr Mohamed, Aiman Erbad · 6 authors
The future of healthcare systems is being shaped by incorporating emerged technological innovations to drive new models for patient care. By acquiring, integrating, analyzing, and exchanging medical data at different system levels, new practices can be introduced, offering a radical improvement to healthcare services. This article presents a novel smart and secure Healthcare system (ssHealth), which, leveraging advances in edge computing and blockchain technologies, permits epidemics discovering, remote monitoring, and fast emergency response. The proposed system also allows for secure medical data exchange among local healthcare entities, thus realizing the integration of multiple national and international entities and enabling the correlation of critical medical events for, for example, emerging epidemics management and control. In particular, we develop a blockchain-based architecture and enable a flexible configuration thereof, which optimize medical data sharing between different health entities and fulfil the diverse levels of Quality of Service (QoS) that ssHealth may require. Finally, we highlight the benefits of the proposed ssHealth system and possible directions for future research.
In cryptocurrencies, transaction fees are typically exclusively paid in the native platform currency. This restriction causes a wide range of challenges, such as deteriorated user experience, mandatory rent payments by decentralized applications, and blockchain community rivalries (e.g., coinism). Ideally, in a truly permissionless blockchain, transaction fees should be payable in any other cryptocurrency via so-called metatransactions. In this paper, we formalize metatransactions, review existing ideas, and describe novel metatransaction design approaches. Under the assumption of sufficient market liquidity, we argue that metatransactions do not lower the security of cryptocurrency platforms. However, without changing the underlying blockchain, metatransaction designs typically increase transaction costs and reduce the blockchain transaction throughput.
Securing the traceability of products in the supply chain is an urgent issue. Recently, supply chain systems that use public blockchain (PBC) have been proposed. In these systems, PBC is used as a common database shared between supply chain parties to secure the integrity and reliability of distribution information such as ownership transfer records. Thus, these systems secure a high level of traceability in the supply chain. However, the distribution information, which can be private information, is made public since the information recorded in PBC can be read by anyone. In this paper, we propose a method for preserving privacy while securing traceability in a supply chain system using PBC. The proposed method preserves privacy by concealing the distribution information via encryption. In addition, the proposed method ensures distribution among legitimate supply chain parties while concealing their blockchain address by using a zero-knowledge proof to prove their authenticity. We implement the proposed method on Ethereum smart contracts and evaluate cost performance based on transaction fees. The results show that the fee per party is at most 2.6 USD.
The world is becoming more interconnected every day. With the high technological evolution and the increasing deployment of it in our society, scenarios based on the Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered a reality nowadays. However, and before some predictions become true (around 75 billion devices are expected to be interconnected in the next few years), many efforts must be carried out in terms of scalability and security. In this study we propose and evaluate a new approach based on the incorporation of Blockchain into current IoT scenarios. The main contributions of this study are as follows: i) an in-depth analysis of the different possibilities for the integration of Blockchain into IoT scenarios, focusing on the limited processing capabilities and storage space of most IoT devices, and the economic cost and performance of current Blockchain technologies; ii) a new method based on a novel module named BIoT Gateway that allows both unidirectional and bidirectional communications with IoT devices on real scenarios, allowing to exchange any kind of data; and iii) the proposed method has been fully implemented and validated on two different real-life IoT scenarios, extracting very interesting findings in terms of economic cost and execution time. The source code of our implementation is publicly available in the Ethereum testnet.
Blockchain technology is one of the most contemporary and disruptive technologies in the world. It has gained considerable attention in numerous applications such as financial services, cybersecurity applications, Internet of Things (IoT), network data management. Now its range of applications is beyond the financial services as the healthcare industry has also adopted blockchain technology in its various subdomains such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), medical supply chain management system, genomic market, neuroscience technology, clinical research, and pharmaceutical medicine. Blockchain is considered a secure and viable solution for storing and accessing patients medical records and the patients can diagnosed and treated with safe and secure data sharing. Blockchain technology will revolutionize the healthcare systems with personalized, authentic, and secure access to the clinical data of patients and that data can be used for further health improvements and clinical researches. In this paper, we conduct a contemporary research on existing applications and developments in healthcare industry with the use of blockchain technology. We also discuss some robust applications and various existing companies that are using blockchain solutions for securing their data along with some current challenges and future perspectives.
Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic failures, how can we avoid asking whether mainstream macroeconomic principles are actually compatible with democratic principles such as equality or the protection of human rights and dignity? This idea paper takes a constructive look at this question, by exploring how alternate monetary principles might result in a form of money more compatible with democratic principles -- dare we call it "democratic money"? In this alternative macroeconomic philosophy, both the supply of and the demand for money must be rooted in people, so as to give all people both equal opportunities for economic participation. Money must be designed around equality, not only across all people alive at a given moment, but also across past and future generations of people, guaranteeing that our descendants cannot be enslaved by their ancestors' economic luck or misfortune. Democratic money must reliably give all people a means to enable everyday commerce, investment, and value creation in good times and bad, and must impose hard limits on financial inequality. Democratic money must itself be governed democratically, and must economically facilitate the needs of citizens in a democracy for trustworthy and unbiased information with which to make wise collective decisions. An intriguing approach to implementing and deploying democratic money is via a cryptocurrency built on a proof-of-personhood foundation, giving each opt-in human participant one equal unit of stake. Such a cryptocurrency would have both interesting similarities to, and important differences from, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) denominated in an existing currency.
Blockchain governance is a subject of ongoing research and an interdisciplinary view of blockchain governance is vital to aid in further research for establishing a formal governance framework for this nascent technology. In this paper, the position of blockchain governance within the hierarchy of Institutional governance is discussed. Blockchain governance is analyzed from the perspective of IT governance using Nash equilibrium to predict the outcome of different governance decisions. A payoff matrix for blockchain governance is created and simulation of different strategy profiles is accomplished for computation of all Nash equilibria. The paper elaborates upon payoff matrices for different kinds of blockchain governance, which are used in the proposition of novel mathematical formulae usable to predict the best governance strategy that minimizes the occurrence of a hard fork as well as predicts the behavior of the majority during protocol updates. The paper also includes validation of the proposed formulae using real Ethereum data.