Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Marco Steger · 7 authors
There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience and non-repudiation in a decentralized, and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing for fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block to avoid large sized blocks is proposed. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
Growing consumer awareness as well as manufacturers' internal quality requirements lead to novel demands on supply chain traceability. Existing centralized solutions suffer from isolated data storage and lacking trust when multiple parties are involved. Decentralized blockchain-based approaches attempt to overcome these shortcomings by creating digital representations of physical goods to facilitate tracking across multiple entities. However, they currently do not capture the transformation of goods in manufacturing processes. Therefore, the relation between ingredients and product is lost, limiting the ability to trace a product's provenance. We propose a blockchain-based supply chain traceability system using smart contracts. In such contracts, manufacturers define the composition of products in the form of recipes. Each ingredient of the recipe is a non-fungible token that corresponds to a batch of physical goods. When the recipe is applied, its ingredients are consumed and a new token is produced. This mechanism preserves the traceability of product transformations. The system is implemented for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is applicable to any blockchain configuration that supports it. Our evaluation reveals that the gas costs scale linearly with the number of products considered in the system. This leads to the conclusion that the solution can handle complex use cases.
Staying abroad during their studies is increasingly popular for students. However, there are various challenges for both students and universities. One important question for students is whether or not achievements performed at different universities can be taken into account for either enrolling at a foreign university or for completing the studies at their home university. In addition to university achievements, an increasing proportion of the 195 million students worldwide increasingly receive certificates from MOOCs or other social media services. The integration of such services into university teaching is still in the initial stages and presents some challenges. In this paper we describe the idea to manage all these study achievements worldwide in a blockchain, which might solve the national and international challenges regarding the recognition of student achievements. The aim of this paper is to encourage discussion in the global community instead of presenting a finished concept. Some of the open research questions are: How to ensure student data protection, how to deal with fraud and how to deal with the possibility that students can analytically calculate the easiest way through their studies?
Jun 20, 2018·Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computing, Electronics & Communications Engineering 2018 (IEEE iCCECE '18), to be held between 16-17 August 2018, at University of Essex, Southend, UK, published by IEEE
Securities exchange being digitalised and online, security of information and data has become a major concern. Blockchain (BC) technology, being distributed and immutable in nature, has proved to the "Trust Machine" eliminating the need for third-parties. Authors of this paper investigate how Blockchain can be used to secure stock exchange transactions, with an especial focus to the technological as well as legal aspects of such applications. Considering the intricate operational structure of the securities exchange, the research proposes to design, develop and implement a hybrid BC, customised according to the need of the respective stock exchange. The study suggests that the use of such BC can bring many benefits which the other technologies currently being used cannot offer. However, during the design process of any such application using BC, the relevant laws and regulations of the corresponding country need to be considered.
The popularity of blockchain technology continues to grow rapidly in both industrial and academic fields. Most studies of blockchain focus on the improvements of security, usability, or efficiency of blockchain protocols, or the applications of blockchain in finance, Internet of Things, or public services. However, few of them could reveal the concerns of front-line developers and the situations of blockchain in practice. In this article, we investigate how developers use and discuss blockchain with a case study of Stack Overflow posts. We find blockchain is a relatively new topic in Stack Overflow but it is rising to popularity. We detect 13 types of questions that developers post in Stack Overflow and identify 45 blockchain relevant entities (e.g., frameworks, libraries, or tools) for building blockchain applications. These findings may help blockchain project communities to know where to improve and help novices to know where to start.
Chuka Oham, Raja Jurdak, Salil S. Kanhere, Ali Dorri · 5 authors
In this paper, we propose a partitioned BlockChain based Framework for Auto-insurance Claims and Adjudication (B-FICA) for CAVs that tracks both sensor data and entity interactions with two-sided verification. B-FICA uses permissioned BC with two partitions to share information on a need to know basis. It also uses multi-signed transactions for proof of execution of instructions, for reliability and auditability and also uses a dynamic lightweight consensus and validation protocol to prevent evidence alteration. Qualitative evaluation shows that B-FICA is resilient to several security attacks from potential liable entities. Finally, simulations show that compared to the state of the art, B-FI CA reduces processing time and its delay overhead is negligible for practical scenarios and at marginal security cost.
Blockchain technology has recently gained widespread attention by media, businesses, public sector agencies, and various international organizations, and it is being regarded as potentially even more disruptive than the Internet. Despite significant interest, there is a dearth of academic literature that describes key components of blockchains and discusses potential applications. This paper aims to address this gap. This paper presents an overview of blockchain technology, identifies the blockchain's key functional characteristics, builds a formal definition, and offers a discussion and classification of current and emerging blockchain applications.
Digital identity is unsolved: after many years of research there is still no trusted communication over the Internet. To provide identity within the context of mutual distrust, this paper presents a blockchain-based digital identity solution. Without depending upon a single trusted third party, the proposed solution achieves passport-level legally valid identity. This solution for making identities Self-Sovereign, builds on a generic provable claim model for which attestations of truth from third parties need to be collected. The claim model is then shown to be both blockchain structure and proof method agnostic. Four different implementations in support of these two claim model properties are shown to offer sub-second performance for claim creation and claim verification. Through the properties of Self-Sovereign Identity, legally valid status and acceptable performance, our solution is considered to be fit for adoption by the general public.
Open access
3 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Blockchain technologies, such as smart contracts, present a unique interface for machine-to-machine communication that provides a secure, append-only record that can be shared without trust and without a central administrator. We study the possibilities and limitations of using smart contracts for machine-to-machine communication by designing, implementing, and evaluating AGasP, an application for automated gasoline purchases. We find that using smart contracts allows us to directly address the challenges of transparency, longevity, and trust in IoT applications. However, real-world applications using smart contracts must address their important trade-offs, such as performance, privacy, and the challenge of ensuring they are written correctly.
With the Internet of Things (IoT), Things are expected to live in different “domains” and “contexts” during their lifetime. Information generated by and associated with Things should be manageable by multiple, diverse stakeholders accordingly. Moreover, the scope of the information related to Things can range from private and confidential to public and auditable. Identification, security, and interoperability in this vivid environment are expected to be challenging. In this paper we discuss how smart contracts and blockchain technologies create the potential for a viable solution. To this end, we present smart contract-based solutions that improve security and information management, we identify new opportunities and challenges, and we provide security recommendations and guidelines.
Van Hoa Nguyen, Yvon Bésanger, Quoc Tuan Tran, Minh Tri Le
As more and more distributed renewable energy resources are integrated to the grid, the traditional consumers have become the prosumers who can sell back their surplus energy to the others who are in energy shortage. This peer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction framework benefits the end users, financially and in term of energy security; and the network operators, in term of flexibility in DRES management, peak load shifting and regulation of voltage/frequency. Environmentally, P2P energy transaction also helps to reduce carbon footprint, reduces DRES payback period and incentivizes the installation of DRES. The current centralized market model is no longer suitable and it is therefore necessary to develop an adapted decentralized architecture for the advanced P2P energy transaction framework intra/inter-micro grid. In this paper, we discuss several distributed ledger approaches for such framework: Blockchain, Block Lattice and Directed Acyclic Graph (the Tangle). The technical advantages of these architectures as well as the persistent challenges are then considered.
Mohammad A. Salahuddin, Ala Al-Fuqaha, Mohsen Guizani, Khaled Shuaib · 5 authors
We propose an agile softwarized infrastructure for flexible, cost effective, secure and privacy preserving deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart healthcare applications and services. It integrates state-of-the-art networking and virtualization techniques across IoT, fog and cloud domains, employing Blockchain, Tor and message brokers to provide security and privacy for patients and healthcare providers. We propose a novel platform using Machine-to-Machine (M2M) messaging and rule-based beacons for seamless data management and discuss the role of data and decision fusion in the cloud and the fog, respectively, for smart healthcare applications and services.
Freya Sheer Hardwick, Apostolos Gioulis, Raja Naeem Akram, Konstantinos Markantonakis
Technology has positive impacts on many aspects of our social life. Designing a 24hour globally connected architecture enables ease of access to a variety of resources and services. Furthermore, technology like Internet has been a fertile ground for innovation and creativity. One of such disruptive innovation is blockchain -- a keystone of cryptocurrencies. The blockchain technology is presented as a game changer for many of the existing and emerging technologies/services. With its immutability property and decentralised architecture, it is taking centre stage in many services as an equalisation factor to the current parity between consumers and large corporations/governments. One of such potential applications of the blockchain is in e-voting schemes. The objective of such a scheme would be to provide a decentralised architecture to run and support a voting scheme that is open, fair and independently verifiable. In this paper, we propose potentially a new e-voting protocol that utilises the blockchain as a transparent ballot box. The protocol has been designed with adhering to the fundamental e-voting properties in mind as well as offering a degree of decentralisation and allowing for the voter to change/update their vote (within the permissible voting period). The paper highlights the pros and cons of using blockchain for such a proposal from practical point view in both development/deployment and usage contexts. Concluding the paper with a potential roadmap for blockchain technology to be able to support complex applications.
Blockchain technology has been transforming the financial industry and has created a new crypto-economy in the last decade. The foundational concepts such as decentralized trust and distributed ledger are promising for distributed, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the applications of Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies in this domain are few and far between because of the lack of understanding and inherent architectural challenges. In this paper, we describe the opportunities for applications of blockchain for the IoT and examine the challenges involved in architecting Blockchain-based IoT applications.
Kevin Liu, Harsh Desai, Lalana Kagal, Murat Kantarcıoğlu
As more and more data is collected for various reasons, the sharing of such data becomes paramount to increasing its value. Many applications ranging from smart cities to personalized health care require individuals and organizations to share data at an unprecedented scale. Data sharing is crucial in today's world, but due to privacy reasons, security concerns and regulation issues, the conditions under which the sharing occurs needs to be carefully specified. Currently, this process is done by lawyers and requires the costly signing of legal agreements. In many cases, these data sharing agreements are hard to track, manage or enforce. In this work, we propose a novel alternative for tracking, managing and especially enforcing such data sharing agreements using smart contracts and blockchain technology. We design a framework that generates smart contracts from parameters based on legal data sharing agreements. The terms in these agreements are automatically enforced by the system. Monetary punishment can be employed using secure voting by external auditors to hold the violators accountable. Our experimental evaluation shows that our proposed framework is efficient and low-cost.
Arlindo Flávio da Conceição, Flávio Soares Corrêa da Silva, Vladimir Rocha, Angela Locoro · 5 authors
Data privacy refers to ensuring that users keep control over access to information, whereas data accessibility refers to ensuring that information access is unconstrained. Conflicts between privacy and accessibility of data are natural to occur, and healthcare is a domain in which they are particularly relevant. In the present article, we discuss how blockchain technology, and smart contracts, could help in some typical scenarios related to data access, data management and data interoperability for the specific healthcare domain. We then propose the implementation of a large-scale information architecture to access Electronic Health Records (EHRs) based on Smart Contracts as information mediators. Our main contribution is the framing of data privacy and accessibility issues in healthcare and the proposal of an integrated blockchain based architecture.
The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs).
Immigrants usually are pro-social towards their hometowns and try to improve them. However, the lack of trust in their government can drive immigrants to work individually. As a result, their pro-social activities are usually limited in impact and scope. This paper studies the interface factors that ease collaborations between immigrants and their home governments. We specifically focus on Mexican immigrants in the US who want to improve their rural communities. We identify that for Mexican immigrants having clear workflows of how their money flows and a sense of control over this workflow is important for collaborating with their government. Based on these findings, we create a blockchain based system for building trust between governments and immigrants. We finish by discussing design implications of our work and future directions.
Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Maged M. Eljazzar, Mohamed Amr, Sally Kassem, Mohamed Ezzat
Technology has been playing a major role in our lives. One definition for technology is all the knowledge, products, processes, tools,methods and systems employed in the creation of goods or in providing services.This makes technological innovations raise the competitiveness between organizations that depend on supply chain and logistics in the global market. With increasing competitiveness, new challenges arise due to lack of information and assets tractability. This paper introduces three scenarios for solving these challenges using the Blockchain technology. In this work, Blockchain technology targets two main issues within the supply chain, namely, data transparency and resource sharing. These issues are reflected into the organizations strategies and plans.
The blockchain technology has achieved tremendous success in open (permissionless) decentralized consensus by employing proof-of-work (PoW) or its variants, whereby unauthorized nodes cannot gain disproportionate impact on consensus beyond their computational power. However, PoW-based systems incur a high delay and low throughput, making them ineffective in dealing with real-time applications. On the other hand, byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithms with better delay and throughput performance have been employed in closed (permissioned) settings to avoid Sybil attacks. In this paper, we present Sybil-proof wirelEss Network coordinAte based byzanTine consEnsus (SENATE), which is based on the conventional BFT consensus framework yet works in open systems of wireless devices where faulty nodes may launch Sybil attacks. As in a Senate in the legislature where the quota of senators per state (district) is a constant irrespective with the population of the state, "senators" in SENATE are selected from participating distributed nodes based on their wireless network coordinates (WNC) with a fixed number of nodes per district in the WNC space. Elected senators then participate in the subsequent consensus reaching process and broadcast the result. Thereby, SENATE is proof against Sybil attacks since pseudonyms of a faulty node are likely to be adjacent in the WNC space and hence fail to be elected.
Percival Lucena, Alécio Pedro Delazari Binotto, Fernanda da Silva Momo, Henry Kim
One of the key processes in Agriculture is quality measurement throughout the transportation of grains along its complex supply chain. This procedure is suitable for failures, such as delays to final destinations, poor monitoring, and frauds. To address the grain quality measurement challenge through the transportation chain, novel technologies, such as Distributed Ledger and Blockchain, can bring more efficiency and resilience to the process. Particularly, Blockchain is a new type of distributed database in which transactions are securely appended using cryptography and hashed pointers. Those transactions can be generated and ruled by special network-embedded software -- known as smart contracts -- that may be public to all nodes of the network or may be private to a specific set of peer nodes. This paper analyses the implementation of Blockchain technology targeting grain quality assurance tracking in a real scenario. Preliminary results support a potential demand for a Blockchain-based certification that would lead to an added valuation of around 15% for GM-free soy in the scope of a Grain Exporter Business Network in Brazil.
Recently, there has been a growing interest in using online technologies to design protocols for secure electronic voting. The main challenges include vote privacy and anonymity, ballot irrevocability and transparency throughout the vote counting process. The introduction of the blockchain as a basis for cryptocurrency protocols, provides for the exploitation of the immutability and transparency properties of these distributed ledgers. In this paper, we discuss possible uses of the blockchain technology to implement a secure and fair voting system. In particular, we introduce a secret share-based voting system on the blockchain, the so-called SHARVOT protocol. Our solution uses Shamir's Secret Sharing to enable on-chain, i.e. within the transactions script, votes submission and winning candidate determination. The protocol is also using a shuffling technique, Circle Shuffle, to de-link voters from their submissions.
Alexandra Covaci, Simone Madeo, Patrick Motylinski, Stéphane Vincent
Blockchain-driven technologies are considered disruptive because of the availability of dis-intermediated, censorship-resistant and tamper-proof digital platforms of distributed trust. Among these technologies, smart contract platforms have the potential to take over functions usually done by intermediaries like banks, escrow or legal services. In this paper, we introduce a novel protocol aiming to execute smart contracts as part of a blockchain transaction validation. We enable extensions in the execution of smart contracts while guaranteeing their privacy, correctness and verifiability. Man-in-the-middle attacks are prevented, since no communication between participants is requested, and contract validations do not imply the re-execution of the code by all the nodes in the network. However, proofs of correct execution are stored on the blockchain and can be verified by multiple parties. Our solution is based on programming tools which optimize the time execution and the required memory while preserving the embedded functionality.