The use of low-cost sensors in IoT over high-cost devices has been considered less expensive. However, these low-cost sensors have their own limitations such as the accuracy, quality, and reliability of the data collected. Fog computing offers solutions to those limitations; nevertheless, owning to its intrinsic distributed architecture, it faces challenges in the form of security of fog devices, secure authentication and privacy. Blockchain technology has been utilised to offer solutions for the authentication and security challenges in fog systems. This paper proposes an authentication system that utilises the characteristics and advantages of blockchain and smart contracts to authenticate users securely. The implemented system uses the email address, username, Ethereum address, password and data from a biometric reader to register and authenticate users. Experiments showed that the proposed method is secure and achieved performance improvement when compared to existing methods. The comparison of results with state-of-the-art showed that the proposed authentication system consumed up to 30% fewer resources in transaction and execution cost; however, there was an increase of up to 30% in miner fees.
Despite decades of development progress, the current e-voting systems still suffer several challenges especially in terms of security and privacy. Some of the key reasons behind this issue include lack of transparency in the process and inadequate privacy guarantee for the voters. To address these issues, we propose and construct zVote, a blockchain-based e-voting platform that aims to create a transparent and secure system for remote e-voting. With the use of blockchain, the voting result can be verifiable by the public, thereby eliminating the trust in the election authorities. Furthermore, we leverage homomorphic encryptions and zero-knowledge proofs to protect the privacy of users, especially in terms of anonymity and membership privacy, while retaining the correctness and verifiability of the votes. We provide formal definitions and proofs of the construction’s security. Our proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates the feasibility and practicality of zVote.
Ana Sousa, Eva Calçada, Paula Rodrigues, Ana Pinto Borges
Purpose Cryptocurrencies put consumers at the heart of a potential revolution by shifting central authority to a distributed peer-to-peer monetary system. This study aims to perform a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis within the topic of cryptocurrencies and consumer trust. Design/methodology/approach The Web of Science database has been selected, and the analyses performed allowed us to identify five research trends obtained from the bibliographic coupling analysis: (1) Understanding consumer's (non)acceptance of cryptocurrencies, (2) Ethical aspects and trust in cryptocurrencies, (3) Blockchain technology as a trust-free technology, (4) The blockchain/trust economy, and (5) Blockchain technology: challenging trust. Findings Findings uncover the intellectual structure in the field of cryptocurrencies and consumers' trust and offer insights on the pros and cons of consumers' willingness to trust the digital currency. Originality/value The study proved a great gap in the current literature in linking cryptocurrencies and trust theories in a consumer context. The authors also outline several gaps that allowed us to propose future research guidelines.
Abstract Emerging technologies permeate and potentially disrupt a wide spectrum of our social, economic, and political relations. Various state institutions, including education, law enforcement, and healthcare, increasingly rely on technical components, such as automated decision-making systems, e-government systems, and other digital tools to provide cheap, efficient public services, and supposedly fair, transparent, disinterested, and accountable public administration. The increased interest in various blockchain-based solutions from central bank digital currencies, via tokenized educational credentials, and distributed ledger-based land registries to self-sovereign identities is the latest, still mostly unwritten chapter in a long history of standardized, objectified, automated, technocratic, and technologized public administration. The rapid, (often) unplanned, and uncontrolled technologization of public services (as happened in the hasty adoption of distance-learning and teleconferencing systems during Corona Virus Disease (COVID) lockdowns) raises complex questions about the use of novel technological components, which may or may not be ultimately adequate for the task for which they are used. The question whether we can trust the technical infrastructures the public sector uses when providing public services is a central concern in an age where trust in government is declining: If the government’s artificial intelligence system that detects welfare fraud fails, the public’s confidence in the government is ultimately hit. In this paper, we provide a critical assessment of how the use of potentially untrustworthy (private) technological systems including blockchain-based systems in the public sector may affect trust in government. We then propose several policy options to protect the trust in government even if some of their technological components prove fundamentally untrustworthy.
Mwrwan Abubakar, Zakwan Jaroucheh, Ahmed Al Dubai, Xiaodong Liu
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is commonly used in Internet of Things (IoT) authentication to provide multi-layer protection. Tokens, often known as One-Time Passwords (OTP), are used to offer additional information. While this technique provides flexible verification and an additional layer of security, it still has a number of security issues. This is because it relies on third-party services to produce tokens or OTPs, which leads to serious information leakage issues. Additionally, relying on a third party to provide authentication tokens significantly increases the risk of exposure and attacks, as tokens can be stolen via Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks. In trying to rectify this issue, in this paper, we propose and develop a blockchain-based two-factor authentication method for web-based access to sensor data. The proposed method provides a lightweight and user-centric authentication that makes use of Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts technologies. Then we provided performance and security analysis of our system. Based on the evaluation results, our method has proven to be effective and has the ability to facilitate reliable authentication.
The Coronavirus disease 2019 has manifested into a global pandemic spreading into almost all the countries and territories in the world. Contact tracing, followed by testing and isolation, have been identified as important tools in containing the proliferation of the disease. Because of manual contact tracing limitations, smartphone apps for digital contact tracing have been deployed by authorities in multiple countries. However, many of these apps have faced criticism because of interoperability, privacy and security issues. This paper proposes an open architecture based on blockchain technology that addresses some of these criticisms. It enables interoperability through a publicly-readable consortium blockchain database, preserving privacy by distributing users’ partial identities among multiple decentralised authorities and providing security through digital signature and asymmetric key encryption. In addition, the architecture provides a fast proof-of-authority based consensus algorithm using reputation as a stake to add and validate blocks on the blockchain efficiently and a swift contact tracing algorithm using Spatio-temporal and key-valued databases.
Komal Gilani, Fariba Ghaffari, E. Bertin, Noël Crespi
In centralized infrastructures, users are not capable of authenticating themselves, in identity management systems, beyond their application’s domain. Users are forced to trust their service providers for identification and data management. Such solutions have experienced large-scale data breaches and are cumbersome for users to remember the credentials for multiple sites. Furthermore, users have very little control over their data. The concept of decentralized identity has raised the possibility of better managing these concerns. It allows users to share only the relevant part of their personal information with a service provider to verify their digital identity. We propose OrgID, a decentralized identity and user-centric data management platform including identity registration and authorization procedures. Our approach supports self-sovereign identity architecture leveraged by blockchain. This method consists of a one-time proof-verification mechanism that facilitates the secure access and credibility of digital information. Moreover, users can maintain their identities associated with specific attributes and rely on a proof mechanism using smart contracts. It deploys a platform where user registration and authorization no longer involve a central service provider. We implemented the proposed solution using smart contracts on a private Ethereum blockchain. We further analyzed the performance of these processes regarding the system’s scalability to evaluate how they manage latency and the number of users. The results state that the system is highly scalable to manage a large number of users and the system’s latency is adjustable based on the application needs.
Internet of Things is a recent potential advancement in an IT arena, consists of multiple smart things (devices) which are connected through a physical network. Cisco incorporation predicts that IoT network will connect 50 billion devices by 2020. Most of the industries are adopting IoT technology and because of its fast spreading, immense adoption and deployment current authentication mechanisms have serious disadvantages. For numerous reasons the security issues are the major hurdle in adoption and deployment of IoT on a large scale since it is highly vulnerable to attacks. In this paper we propose a Blockchain based authentication mechanism i.e. Ethereum which is a public blockchain as it has emerged as a technology that possess great capabilities of providing secure authentication, management and access control for IoT devices in a decentralized, trusty and flexible manner by creating a secure environment where the devices can identify and trust each other and only authenticated users are given permission to access them.
The rapid growth of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) shows an urgent demand for driving and transportation-related data, which gives rise to vehicular crowdsensing systems (VCSs). Nevertheless, the existing centralized VCS framework mainly faces the system reliability problem while the decentralized one cannot satisfy the management flexibility. In addition, when the privacy preservation scheme that prevents information leakage encounters the user selection scheme that desires detailed information of participants, how to balance this seemingly irreconcilable contradiction is inevitable for VCS. To remedy that, we take the first research attempt and explore the balance point between the system management, privacy preservation, and quality of experience (QoE) of participants. By fully exploiting the characters of participating entities, a blockchain-enabled conditional decentralized VCS is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we propose a privacy-preserving scheme where the zk-SNARK proof combines with the mixed-task smart contract to guarantee the interaction process will not reveal any private information of participants. Secondly, we propose an efficient reputation management mechanism that renders certain the participants can get a satisfactory QoE even under the condition that the private information of users is secured. And also, the malicious operations in the system will be effectively supervised. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations demonstrate the security and efficiency properties of privacy preservation and indicate the effectiveness of reputation management.
There is a rising concern about authorization in IoT environments to be appropriately designed and applied, due to smart things surge to be part of people's daily lives on one hand, and the amount of personal/private information they utilize, on the other hand. Different access control systems have been proposed for different IoT environments, many are remaining only at a conceptual level. In this paper, we propose a decentralized, ledger-based, publish-subscribe based architecture for the administration of access in a smart home IoT environment to preside at the assignments of underlying operational authorizations. Proposed architecture is endorsed by a proof-of-concept implementation, which utilizes smart contracts to ensure the integrity of administration supplemented by intrinsic benefits of blockchain to be distributed and transparent. Despite the rising hype around the blockchain technology that stokes its utilization in different domains, utilizing it for access control purposes is not yet promising. Our implementation results assure using blockchain for administrative access control is propitious, while is not yet appropriate for operational access control, which have been mainly the focus of previously proposed blockchain-based access control works.
Researchers are highly interested in research data management to derive excellent research results. This study analyzes the determinants affecting the acceptance of blockchain-based electronic lab notebooks service as research data management service. A research model was established based on the technology acceptance model. The sample is collected by 585 researchers from universities and research institutes in Korea. The main research results showed that the usefulness and ease of use lowered the perceived risk and increased the intention to use. Social norms also decreased perceived risk factors and increased intention to use. Research implications are that managers should seek ways to lower the technical risks of blockchain when developing blockchain-based services. In addition, they have to allow users to easily use blockchain-based services and recommend them to other users around them.
Muhammad Asif, Zeeshan Aziz, Maaz Bin Ahmad, Adnan Khalid · 6 authors
Security has always been the main concern for the internet of things (IoT)-based systems. Blockchain, with its decentralized and distributed design, prevents the risks of the existing centralized methodologies. Conventional security and privacy architectures are inapplicable in the spectrum of IoT due to its resource constraints. To overcome this problem, this paper presents a Blockchain-based security mechanism that enables secure authorized access to smart city resources. The presented mechanism comprises the ACE (Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments) framework-based authorization Blockchain and the OSCAR (Object Security Architecture for the Internet of Things) object security model. The Blockchain lays out a flexible and trustless authorization mechanism, while OSCAR makes use of a public ledger to structure multicast groups for authorized clients. Moreover, a meteor-based application is developed to provide a user-friendly interface for heterogeneous technologies belonging to the smart city. The users would be able to interact with and control their smart city resources such as traffic lights, smart electric meters, surveillance cameras, etc., through this application. To evaluate the performance and feasibility of the proposed mechanism, the authorization Blockchain is implemented on top of the Ethereum network. The authentication mechanism is developed in the node.js server and a smart city is simulated with the help of Raspberry Pi B+. Furthermore, mocha and chai frameworks are used to assess the performance of the system. Experimental results reveal that the authentication response time is less than 100 ms even if the average hand-shaking time increases with the number of clients.
The vehicular social network (VSN) is an emerging mobile communication system combining a vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) with a social network. It provides a new means of sharing, disseminating, and delivering data for passengers, drivers, and vehicles. However, a VSN may expose users’ private information, such as identities, location information, and trajectories, and tampering with shared data may lead to security and safety problems in vehicle systems. Considering the security and privacy preservation of shared data, we propose a lightweight decentralized multiauthority access control scheme based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) and blockchain, by which a decentralized multiauthorization node supports vehicle users by performing lightweight calculations with the assistance of the vehicle cloud service provider (VCSP). We use blockchain to record storage and access transactions, achieving self-verification by users and tamper-resistance of ciphertexts. An improved smart contract reduces the workload of verification by users and achieves privacy preservation by hiding the policy. It supports user revocation and outsourced decryption, enabling more flexibility and better performance. A security and performance analysis shows that our scheme has clear advantages over existing schemes.
This paper examines the effects of inherent risks in the emerging technology of non-fungible tokens and proposes an actionable set of solutions for stakeholders in this ecosystem and observers. Web3 and NFTs are a fast-growing 300 billion dollar economy with some clear, highly publicized harms that came to light recently. We set out to explore the risks to understand their nature and scope, and if we could find ways to mitigate them. In due course of investigation, we recap the background of the evolution of the web from a client-server model to the rise of Web2.0 tech giants in the early 2000s. We contrast how the Web3 movement is trying to re-establish the independent style of the early web. In our research we discover a primary set of risks and harms relevant to the ecosystem, and classify them into a simple taxonomy while addressing their mitigations with solutions. We arrive at a set of solutions that are a combination of processes to be adopted, and technological changes or improvements to be incorporated into the ecosystem, to implement risk mitigations. By linking mitigations to individual risks, we are confident our recommendations will improve the security maturity of the growing Web3 ecosystem. We are not endorsing, or recommending specifically any particular product or service in our solution set. Nor are we compensated or influenced in any way by these companies to list these products in our research. The evaluations of products in our research have to simply be viewed as suggested improvements.
Johannes Sedlmeir, Jonathan Lautenschlager, Gilbert Fridgen, Nils Urbach
Abstract This position paper discusses the challenges of blockchain applications in businesses and the public sector related to an excessive degree of transparency. We first point out the types of sensitive data involved in different patterns of blockchain use cases. We then argue that the implications of blockchains’ information exposure caused by replicated transaction storage and execution go well beyond the often-mentioned conflicts with the GDPR’s “right to be forgotten” and may be more problematic than anticipated. In particular, we illustrate the trade-off between protecting sensitive information and increasing process efficiency through smart contracts. We also explore to which extent permissioned blockchains and novel applications of cryptographic technologies such as self-sovereign identities and zero-knowledge proofs can help overcome the transparency challenge and thus act as catalysts for blockchain adoption and diffusion in organizations.
The possibility of establishing a transparent public procurement process through the inclusion of protected transparent digital technologies or platforms, such as blockchain technology, represents a significant step forward in the field of public procurement. Furthermore, if we add to this idea the Ethereum network and the ability to create applications that run on this network, such as smart contracts, the procurement process can be made much more objective and transparent to all participants in the process. The proposed model presented in this paper consists of two smart contracts. Each one of them has its own basic building blocks used for different phases of the public procurement process, from the definition of security access polices for different parts of procurement contract, public procurement procedure, bidding by interested bidders, evaluation of bids and the final publication of the results. Elements of the proposed system have been analyzed and presented and some of the further development plans have been formulated.
Raja Majid Ali Ujjan, Khalid Hussain, Sarfraz Nawaz Brohi
Implementation of blockchain with e-government has raised several complexities. When an area has satisfied the requirements for e-government implementation, new challenges will appear. As a result of the information technology revolution, governments and industries are being forced to deliver more effective and secure internet services. Every government in the world attempts to provide the public with electronic services that are fast, quick, and beneficial for the users. Blockchain is considered to have significant potential benefits for the government since it is a combination of technologies such as distributed ledgers, privacy, authentication, and consensus mechanisms. However, this advanced technology is still in its development, and e-government faces a number of difficulties and challenges. The goal of this chapter is to evaluate this advanced technology in the context of high-level e-government security and privacy implementation measures and other technical issues during the adaption of blockchain technology.
Abstract Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control over their personal data and allows them to share their data with others using a sort of “digital safe.” Fundamentally, people have the sole ownership of their identity data and control when and how it is shared, protecting their privacy. As these data need to be validated to be trusted, they may become a more important data source for digital information sharing and transactions than the formal source of identity controlled by governments. Furthermore, SSIs can be used for interacting digitally with any organization. These developments change the relationship between government, companies, and individuals. We explore information sharing and governance in the digital society using blockchain-based SSIs. In addition, the impact of SSIs on data storage in the digital world is assessed. Technology enactment might result in no greater control or privacy and might only reinforce current practices. Finally, we argue that regulation and a combination of centralized and decentralized governance are still required to avoid misuse and ensure that envisaged benefits are realized.
Abstract Blockchain technology enables new kinds of decentralized systems. Thus, it has often been advocated as a “disruptive” technology that could have the potentiality of reshaping political, economic, and social relations, “solving” problems like corruption, power centralization, and distrust toward political institutions. Blockchain has been gradually gaining attention beyond finance and is thus applied by a range of different actors. This includes local, regional, and national governments interested in the potentiality of experimenting with blockchain-supported governance. This article contributes to identifying blockchain as a contested socio-political object prone to contradictory political imaginaries regarding its potentialities, particularly when applied to policy. The article explores some of the most praised of blockchain’s affordances (e.g., decentralization and transparency) in the context of Estonia, one of the most cited examples of blockchain governmental applications. Estonia has received international attention as the alleged first national infrastructure integrating blockchain. However, so far, few have asked: what kind of blockchain-based tools have been built by the Estonian government in practice and why? And to what extent do blockchain-based governmental applications reflect the original promises of disruption of the crypto-community? This article draws on a qualitative approach to explore several blockchain-based socio-technical objects to identify the narratives that have emerged in Estonia. The research shows clear contrasting views between stakeholders and technical experts from inside and outside the institutional sphere. The conflict revolves around two different social imaginaries associated with permissioned vs. public blockchains. The paper concludes with an analysis of the profound political implications of each vision.
In the same way that personal data provide irrefutable information about individuals, they sometimes reveal the legal identity of contracts as well as other specific information. The data a contract generates could represent a competitive advantage. This study's focus was to develop a template of the factors associated with smart contracts data breaches. This model was based on the following variables: smart contracts, exposure level, security level, and structural inputs. The outcome variable was the binary value for a data breach/no data breach. This study covers more than 6000 smart contracts, operating on Etheurm and imported as tables into the study database, the contracts have been selected randomly from the databases of various safety tools such as OYENTE, MAIAN, GASPER, Securify, Solcove, and SmartCheck, These tools are designed to find code vulnerabilities in the smart contracts. 50% of all samples were selected from one source (Securify). Binary logistic regression was employed to examine the data breach model. The findings demonstrate more than 500 cases of actual breaches, with several factors being significantly associated with smart contract data breaches.
Today’s online voting systems pose security concerns and cannot be used for public elections, while offline voting costs significantly more. As a result, a decentralized electronic voting system is emerging, backed by blockchain technology. With blockchain technology applied to online voting, the system can guarantee transparency and confidentiality because individual voter information and aggregate information are stored in a distributed fashion. Due to its decentralized nature, a blockchain-based voting system is more secure than the existing central server-based online voting system. In this study, an Ethereum-based electronic voting system was developed. This system resolves the issue of fraudulent voting by enhancing the safety and reliability of the electronic voting system.