It is crucial that smart contracts are tested thoroughly due to their immutable nature. Even small bugs in smart contracts can lead to huge monetary losses. However, testing is not enough; it is also important to ensure the quality and completeness of the tests. There are already several approaches that tackle this challenge with mutation testing, but their effectiveness is questionable since they only considered small contract samples. Hence, we evaluate the quality of smart contract mutation testing at scale. We choose the most promising of the existing (smart contract specific) mutation operators, analyse their effectiveness in terms of killability and highlight severe vulnerabilities that can be injected with the mutations. Moreover, we improve the existing mutation methods by introducing a novel killing condition that is able to detect a deviation in the gas consumption, i.e., in the monetary value that is required to perform transactions. This paper has a replication package at https://github.com/pieterhartel/Mutation-at-scale
Scott Thiebes, Matthias Schlesner, Benedikt Brors, Ali Sunyaev
Modern life sciences with their highly sensitive omics data face several challenges regarding data storage and sharing [ 1 , 2 ]. On the one hand data must be protected to preserve the privacy of those individuals who contributed their data to research. On the other hand, omics data’s true value is only to be realized if shared with as many researchers as possible. In an ideal world, patients can flexibly control access to their personal data on a case-by-case basis [ 3 ]. However, granting and revoking access to data is a slow and tedious process within the current life sciences research paradigm, where most data is either stored on central controlled-access data repositories or kept locally within the respective research groups [ 3 ].
Open access
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Supply chain in industry is a flow of information and goods traversal through multiple suppliers such as raw material suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users. Supply chain management (SCM) helps in smooth monitoring and accounting of information and goods traversal among multiple users. However, the existing supply chain management processes lack in offering transparency of information, user's privacy, timely updates on demand peaks, improper tracing of information, quality management, deal repudiation and trust among users. To address these problems, we propose a novel framework for pharmaceutical supply chain management which uses an ethereum blockchain, a distributed ledger technology. We propose different smart contracts to manage pharmaceutical supply chain processes over an ethereum blockchain. This framework helps in achieving user privacy, transparency of the supplied drug, tracking of drugs, quality management, non-repudiation and demand supply management with the improved trust among the users. At the end, we analyze the proposed framework in terms of fulfilling the pharmaceutical supply chain management requirements.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Cryptocurrencies have recently gained a lot of attention because their high security and easy transaction. Among the current cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is the most well-known one. Application-specific ICs (ASICs) have been developed in order to deliver high throughput for Bitcoin mining. However, power dissipation is an important issue considering it causes increased mining cost and creates excessive heat. This paper presents three optimization techniques in the micro-architecture level for Bitcoin mining: deep pipelining, speculative computation, and approximate addition. The computations for Bitcoin mining are dominated by SHA-256, which can be realized by two-way 32-stage pipelines. Deep pipelining reduces the critical-path delay, resulting in less power due to architecture transformation and transistor sizing. The iterations of SHA-256 can be early terminated by leveraging speculative computation to prevent unnecessary switches. Approximate addition is adopted to reduce the critical-path delay of the compressor and expander at the cost of negligible precision loss. From the synthesis estimates at a 40-nm technology node, an overall 59.3% power reduction is achieved by applying these three techniques.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Mikael Beyene, Kannengießer, Niclas, Pandl, Konstantin D, Thiebes, Scott · 5 authors
A concept for distributed gene-drug interaction data sharing based on Ethereum Smart Contracts. The data is stored in a map with, both, keys and values utilizing a mixed-radix integer encoding that relies on the finiteness of the domains of given genes, drugs, and interactions. Thus, we get random access and, further, data queries are reduced to cheap bit comparisons.
Open access
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Abdullah Al-Mamun, Tonglin Li, Mohammad Sadoghi, Dongfang Zhao
The state-of-the-art approaches for tracking data provenance on high-performance computing (HPC) systems are either supported by file systems or relational databases. These techniques shared the same critique on the provenance data’s fidelity and the associated I/O overhead. This paper envisions to track the HPC data provenance using a distributed in-memory ledger—the core technique leveraged by blockchains and proven to be highly trustworthy by many large-scale applications. We pinpoint two system challenges—storage architecture and consensus protocol—for adopting blockchains to HPC and make the following contributions: (i) We design a new in-memory blockchain architecture for HPC systems, exploiting the high-performance network infrastructure InfiniBand and greatly reducing the I/O overhead; and (ii) We develop a new consensus protocol, namely proof-of-reproducibility (PoR), crafted for the new architecture, which takes into account both proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanisms. The correctness of PoR is both theoretically proven and experimentally verified. A prototype system is implemented and evaluated with more than one million transactions, showing 32× speedup compared to the filesystem-based provenance service and four orders of magnitude speedup compared to the database-based provenance service.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Davi R. Ortega, Catherine M. Oikonomou, H. Ding, Prudence Rees-Lee · 6 authors
Abstract Three-dimensional electron microscopy techniques like electron tomography provide valuable insights into cellular structures, and present significant challenges for data storage and dissemination. Here we explored a novel method to publicly release more than 11,000 such datasets, more than 30 TB in total, collected by our group. Our method, based on a peer-to-peer file sharing network built around a blockchain ledger, offers a distributed solution to data storage. In addition, we offer a user-friendly browser-based interface, https://etdb.caltech.edu , for anyone interested to explore and download our data. We discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of this system and provide tools for other groups to mine our data and/or use the same approach to share their own imaging datasets.
Open access
2 source records
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Growing consumer awareness as well as manufacturers' internal quality\nrequirements lead to novel demands on supply chain traceability. Existing\ncentralized solutions suffer from isolated data storage and lacking trust when\nmultiple parties are involved. Decentralized blockchain-based approaches\nattempt to overcome these shortcomings by creating digital representations of\nphysical goods to facilitate tracking across multiple entities. However, they\ncurrently do not capture the transformation of goods in manufacturing\nprocesses. Therefore, the relation between ingredients and product is lost,\nlimiting the ability to trace a product's provenance. We propose a\nblockchain-based supply chain traceability system using smart contracts. In\nsuch contracts, manufacturers define the composition of products in the form of\nrecipes. Each ingredient of the recipe is a non-fungible token that corresponds\nto a batch of physical goods. When the recipe is applied, its ingredients are\nconsumed and a new token is produced. This mechanism preserves the traceability\nof product transformations. The system is implemented for the Ethereum Virtual\nMachine and is applicable to any blockchain configuration that supports it. Our\nevaluation reveals that the gas costs scale linearly with the number of\nproducts considered in the system. This leads to the conclusion that the\nsolution can handle complex use cases.\n
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Seo-Joon Lee, Gyoun-Yon Cho, Fumiaki Ikeno, Tae-Ro Lee
Due to the development of high-throughput DNA sequencing technology, genome-sequencing costs have been significantly reduced, which has led to a number of revolutionary advances in the genetics industry. However, the problem is that compared to the decrease in time and cost needed for DNA sequencing, the management of such large volumes of data is still an issue. Therefore, this research proposes Blockchain Applied FASTQ and FASTA Lossless Compression (BAQALC), a lossless compression algorithm that allows for the efficient transmission and storage of the immense amounts of DNA sequence data that are being generated by Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). Also, security and reliability issues exist in public sequence databases. For methods, compression ratio comparisons were determined for genetic biomarkers corresponding to the five diseases with the highest mortality rates according to the World Health Organization. The results showed an average compression ratio of approximately 12 for all the genetic datasets used. BAQALC performed especially well for lung cancer genetic markers, with a compression ratio of 17.02. BAQALC performed not only comparatively higher than widely used compression algorithms, but also higher than algorithms described in previously published research. The proposed solution is envisioned to contribute to providing an efficient and secure transmission and storage platform for next-generation medical informatics based on smart devices for both researchers and healthcare users.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Halil Ibrahim Ozercan, Atalay Mert Ileri, Erman Ayday, Can Alkan
Genomics data introduce a substantial computational burden as well as data privacy and ownership issues. Data sets generated by high-throughput sequencing platforms require immense amounts of computational resources to align to reference genomes and to call and annotate genomic variants. This problem is even more pronounced if reanalysis is needed for new versions of reference genomes, which may impose high loads to existing computational infrastructures. Additionally, after the compute-intensive analyses are completed, the results are either kept in centralized repositories with access control, or distributed among stakeholders using standard file transfer protocols. This imposes two main problems: (1) Centralized servers become gatekeepers of the data, essentially acting as an unnecessary mediator between the actual data owners and data users; and (2) servers may create single points of failure both in terms of service availability and data privacy. Therefore, there is a need for secure and decentralized platforms for data distribution with user-level data governance. A new technology, blockchain, may help ameliorate some of these problems. In broad terms, the blockchain technology enables decentralized, immutable, incorruptible public ledgers. In this Perspective, we aim to introduce current developments toward using blockchain to address several problems in omics, and to provide an outlook of possible future implications of the blockchain technology to life sciences.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Nanocluster Synthesis and Applications
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Drug traceability system is essentially important for public drug security and business of pharmaceutical companies, which aims to track or trace where the drug has been and where it has gone along the drug supply chain. Traditional centralized server-client technical solutions have been far from satisfying for their bad performances in data authenticity, privacy, system resilience and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a scenario-oriented blockchain system for drug traceability and regulation called Drugledger, which reconstructs the whole service architecture by separating service provider into three independent service components and ensures the authenticity and privacy of traceability data. Drugledger is more resilient than traditional solutions with its p2p architecture. Furthermore, Drugledger could efficiently prune its storage, achieving a finally stable and acceptable blockchain storage. Besides, algorithms reflecting the real drug supply chain logic (e.g, package, repackage, unpackage, etc.) are designed based on the expanded UTXO workflow in Drugledger. To our knowledge, it is the first systematic work from both a technical and practical perspective on how blockchain system could be designed for drug traceability and regulation.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Sharing provenance across workflow management systems automatically is not currently possible, but the value of such a capability is high since it could greatly reduce the amount of duplicated workflows, accelerate the discovery of new knowledge, and verify the integrity of past and present analyses. Although numerous technological challenges exist to efficiently share provenance information across workflow management systems, permissioned distributed ledgers could surmount many of them. The primary benefit of permissioned distributed ledgers over other technologies is that their distribution is over a peer-to-peer network that encodes transactions across the network into an immutable hash list and achieves consensus on the validity of the new data through a common consensus mechanism. This work discusses provenance and distributed ledgers on their own and then presents an argument that distributed ledgers naturally satisfy many of the requirements of workflow provenance, that provenance information can exist in the ledger in multiple ways, and that a number of novel research areas exist based on this strategy.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
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
Olugbemi T. Olaniyan, Mayowa J. Adeniyi, Charles Oluwaseun Adetunji, Omosigho Omoruyi Pius · 7 authors
Abstract Objectives To introduce blockchain technologies, including their benefits, pitfalls, and the latest applications, to the biomedical and health care domains. Target Audience Biomedical and health care informatics researchers who would like to learn about blockchain technologies and their applications in the biomedical/health care domains. Scope The covered topics include: (1) introduction to the famous Bitcoin crypto-currency and the underlying blockchain technology; (2) features of blockchain; (3) review of alternative blockchain technologies; (4) emerging nonfinancial distributed ledger technologies and applications; (5) benefits of blockchain for biomedical/health care applications when compared to traditional distributed databases; (6) overview of the latest biomedical/health care applications of blockchain technologies; and (7) discussion of the potential challenges and proposed solutions of adopting blockchain technologies in biomedical/health care domains.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Digital PCR (dPCR) exploits limiting dilution of a template into an array of PCR reactions. From this array the number of reactions that contain at least one (as opposed to zero) initial template is determined, allowing inferring the original template concentration. Here we present a novel protocol to efficiently infer the concentration of a sample and its optimal dilution for dPCR from few targeted qPCR assays. By taking advantage of the real-time amplification feature of qPCR as opposed to relying on endpoint PCR assessment as in standard dPCR prior knowledge of template concentration is not necessary. This eliminates the need for serial dilutions in a separate titration and reduces the number of necessary reactions. We describe the theory underlying our approach and discuss experimental moments that contribute to uncertainty. We present data from a controlled experiment where the initial template concentration is known as proof of principle and apply our method on directly monitoring transcript level change during cell differentiation as well as gauging amplicon numbers in cDNA samples after pre-amplification.
Open access
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
A short, 30cm, test section was used to study the effect of electrohydrodynamic (EHD) forces on flow redistribution in a horizontal, shell and tube heat exchanger subject to both boiling and condensation. The use of a short test section allows for a consistent flow pattern across the test section length which provides further insight into the true effect of EHD. It was found that the voltage polarity of the applied voltages influences the flow distribution. For the current geometry studied, it was found that positive polarity voltages tend to pull liquid away from heat transfer surface and that negative voltages tended to repel more liquid toward the heat transfer surface. Using this knowledge we were able to show that positive voltages were more effective for convective condensation heat transfer enhancement, whereas negative voltages were more effective for convective boiling heat transfer enhancement. A twofold enhancement of convective boiling heat transfer was achieved for positive voltages and a 4fold enhancement was achieved for negative voltages. Similar pressure drop penalties were seen for both cases, approximately twice that of the no EHD case. Furthermore, the effect of DC level, peak to peak voltage, frequency and duty cycle waveform parameters on convective boiling enhancement were studied to explore the range of controllability for the current set of flow parameters. It was found that these various waveform parameters can induce different flow patterns and consequently different heat transfer and pressure drop configurations. In general the heat transfer is enhanced by EHD, but different pressure drop penalties can be achieved for a given enhancement ratio using different waveforms. High heat transfer for relatively low pressure drop was achieved using either negative DC signals or 50%duty cycle pulse waveforms. In some cases the enhancement is quite little compared to the pressure drop, for example the zero DC level, varying peak to peak voltage data. It is suggested that in a system where the heat exchanger pressure drop due to EHD is more dominant than the system pressure drop, it may be possible to use EHD as a method of retarding the system rather than enhancing it thereby broadening the scope of controllability. Finally we showed the proof of concept of using DC EHD as a rapid control mechanism for the load conditions. Using -8kVDC the water side heat flux could be varied by approximately ±3.2 kW/m<sup>2</sup> within 5 seconds. As a comparison, the same experiment was repeated using the refrigerant flow rate to control the load. Response times were similar for both experiments and although the power required for the flow rate control was less, the minimal variability in flow parameters for the EHD control make it a more attractive method of load control.
Open access
Membrane-based Ion Separation Techniques
Currency Recognition and Detection
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation