Blockchain Papers

Advait Deshpande, Katherine Stewart, Louise Lepetit, Salil Gunashekar

No abstract is available for this record.

Val A. Red

Existing distributed ledger implementations – specifically, several blockchain implementations – embody a cacophony of divergent capabilities augmenting innovations of cryptographic hashes, consensus mechanisms, and asymmetric cryptography in a wide variety of applications. Whether specifically designed for cryptocurrency or otherwise, several distributed ledgers rely upon modular mechanisms such as consensus or smart contracts. These components, however, can vary substantially among implementations; differences involving proof-of-work, practical byzantine fault tolerance, and other consensus approaches exemplify distinct distributed ledger variations. Such divergence results in unique combinations of modules, performance, latency, and fault tolerance. As implementations continue to develop rapidly due to the emerging nature of blockchain technologies, this paper encapsulates a snapshot of sensor and internet of things (IoT) specific implementations of blockchain as of the end of 2016. Several technical risks and divergent approaches preclude standardization of a blockchain for sensors and IoT in the foreseeable future; such issues will be assessed alongside the practicality of IoT applications among Hyperledger, Iota, and Ethereum distributed ledger implementations suggested for IoT. This paper contributes a comparison of existing distributed ledger implementations intended for practical sensor and IoT utilization. A baseline for characterizing distributed ledger implementations in the context of IoT and sensors is proposed. Technical approaches and performance are compared considering IoT size, weight, and power limitations. Consensus and smart contracts, if applied, are also analyzed for the respective implementations’ practicality and security. Overall, the maturity of distributed ledgers with respect to sensor and IoT applicability will be analyzed for enterprise interoperability.

Sachin Shetty, Val A. Red, Charles Kamhoua, Kevin Kwiat · 5 authors

Ever increasing adoption of cloud technology scales up the activities like creation, exchange, and alteration of cloud data objects, which create challenges to track malicious activities and security violations. Addressing this issue requires implementation of data provenance framework so that each data object in the federated cloud environment can be tracked and recorded but cannot be modified. The blockchain technology gives a promising decentralized platform to build tamper-proof systems. Its incorruptible distributed ledger/blockchain complements the need of maintaining cloud data provenance. In this paper, we present a cloud based data provenance framework using block chain which traces data record operations and generates provenance data. We anchor provenance data records into block chain transactions, which provide validation on provenance data and preserve user privacy at the same time. Once the provenance data is uploaded to the global block chain network, it is extremely challenging to tamper the provenance data. Besides, the provenance data uses hashed user identifiers prior to uploading so the blockchain nodes cannot link the operations to a particular user. The framework ensures that the privacy is preserved. We implemented the architecture on ownCloud, uploaded records to blockchain network, stored records in a provenance database and developed a prototype in form of a web service.

Mayra Samaniego, Ralph Deters

Until now, most systems for Internet of Things (IoT) management, have been designed in a Cloud-centric manner, getting benefits from the unified platform that the Cloud offers. However, a Cloud-centric infrastructure mainly achieves static sensor and data streaming systems, which do not support the direct configuration management of IoT components. To address this issue, a virtualization of IoT components (Virtual Resources) is introduced at the edge of the IoT network. This research also introduces permission-based Blockchain protocols to handle the provisioning of Virtual Resources directly onto edge devices. The architecture presented by this research focuses on the use of Virtual Resources and Blockchain protocols as management tools to distribute configuration tasks towards the edge of the IoT network. Results from lab experiments demonstrate the successful deployment and communication performance (response time in milliseconds) of Virtual Resources on two edge platforms, Raspberry Pi and Edison board. This work also provides performance evaluations of two permission-based blockchain protocol approaches. The first blockchain approach is a Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) in the Cloud, Bluemix. The second blockchain approach is a private cluster hosted in a Fog network, Multichain

Vanesa Daza, Roberto Di Pietro, Ivan Klimek, Matteo Signorini

The Internet of Things is gaining momentum thanks to the provided vision of seamlessly interconnected devices. However, a unified way to discover and to interact with the surrounding smart environment is missing. As an outcome, we have been assisting to the development of heterogeneous ecosystems, where each service provider adopts its own protocol- thus preventing IoT devices from interacting when belonging to different providers. And, the same is happening again for the blockchain technology which provides a robust and trusted way to accomplish tasks -unfortunately not providing interoperability thus creating the same heterogeneous ecosystems above highlighted. In this context, the fundamental research question we address is how do we find things or services in the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose the first IoT discovery approach which provides an answer to the above question by exploiting hierarchical and universal multi-layered blockchains. Our approach does neither define new standards nor force service providers to change their own protocol. On the contrary, it leverages the existing and publicly available information obtained from each single blockchain to have a better knowledge of the surrounding environment. The proposed approach is detailed and discussed with the support of relevant use cases.

Saravanan Raju, Sai Boddepalli, Suraj Gampa, Qiben Yan · 5 authors

Cloud-centric cognitive cellular networks utilize dynamic spectrum access and opportunistic network access technologies as a means to mitigate spectrum crunch and network demand. However, furnishing a carrier with personally identifiable information for user setup increases the risk of profiling in cognitive cellular networks, wherein users seek secondary access at various times with multiple carriers. Moreover, network access provisioning - assertion, authentication, authorization, and accounting - implemented in conventional cellular networks is inadequate in the cognitive space, as it is neither spontaneous nor scalable. In this paper, we propose a privacy-enhancing user identity management system using blockchain technology which places due importance on both anonymity and attribution, and supports end-to-end management from user assertion to usage billing. The setup enables network access using pseudonymous identities, hindering the reconstruction of a subscriber's identity. Our test results indicate that this approach diminishes access provisioning duration by up to 4x, decreases network signaling traffic by almost 40%, and enables near real-time user billing that may lead to approximately 3x reduction in payments settlement time.

Sadhu Ram Basnet, Subarna Shakya

One of the major concerns on today's Software-Defined Network (SDN) is to enhance its security. Files sharing in SDN can be made much more secured against fraudulent activities by the implementation of blockchain technology. When the privacy of network's users is increased, the reliability of system increases correspondingly. Blockchain Security over SDN (BSS) is proposed which protects privacy and availability of resources against non-trusting members. Mininet emulator is used for simulating custom SDN network topology. OpenDaylight controller is integrated with OpenStack controller. For cloud data storage, OpenStack platform is used. For testing purpose of Blockchain, Pyethereum tester tool under Ethereum platform is implemented. Serpent programming is used for creating contract in the blockchain. BSS facilitates files sharing among SDN users in distributed peer-to-peer basis using OpenStack as a cloud storage platform.

Haneffa Muchlis Gazali, Rusni Hassan, Rizal Mohd Nor, M. M. Hafizur Rahman

The issue of default payments from borrowers of the National Higher Education Fund Corporation (PTPTN) is worrisome. Many borrowers fail to pay their loans and claims that the PTPTN has poor management and filing system. This study proposed a prototype for managing study loan repayment utilizing blockchain and smart contracts. Borrowers have full access toward their accounts and ledgers while corporation filing and management system get automatically up-to-date with the assistance of smart contracts.

Alexandru Stanciu

Edge computing proposes a novel model for providing computational resources close to end devices that are connected to the network. It has numerous applications in Internet of Things, as well as smart grids, healthcare, smart home, etc. This paper presents ongoing research regarding the use of blockchain technology as a platform hierarchical and distributed control systems based on IEC 61499 standard. Hyperledger Fabric was selected as the blockchain solution, where function blocks are to be implemented as smart contracts on a supervisor level. The integration with the edge nodes that perform on the executive level responsible for actual process control is based on a micro-services architecture where Docker containers implement function blocks, and Kubernetes platform is used for orchestrating the execution of containers across the edge resources.

Ali Dorri, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak

There has been increasing interest in adopting BlockChain (BC), that underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, in Internet of Things (IoT) for security and privacy. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight BC-based architecture for IoT that virtually eliminates the overheads of classic BC, while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. IoT devices benefit from a private immutable ledger, that acts similar to BC but is managed centrally, to optimize energy consumption. High resource devices create an overlay network to implement a publicly accessible distributed BC that ensures end-to-end security and privacy. The proposed architecture uses distributed trust to reduce the block validation processing time. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications. Simulations demonstrate that our method decreases packet and processing overhead significantly compared to the BC implementation used in Bitcoin.

Sean Rowan, Michael Clear, Mário Gerla, Meriel Huggard · 5 authors

Autonomous and self-driving vehicles are appearing on the public highways.\nThese vehicles commonly use wireless communication techniques for both\nvehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. Manufacturers,\nregulators and the public are understandably concerned about large-scale\nsystems failure or malicious attack via these wireless vehicular networks. This\npaper explores the use of sensing and signalling devices that are commonly\nintegrated into modern vehicles for side-channel communication purposes.\nVisible light (using a CMOS camera) and acoustic (ultrasonic audio)\nside-channel encoding techniques are proposed, developed and evaluated in this\ncontext. The side-channels are examined both theoretically and experimentally\nand an upper bound on the line code modulation rate that is achievable with\nthese side channel schemes in the vehicular networking context is established.\nA novel inter-vehicle session key establishment protocol, leveraging both\nside-channels and a blockchain public key infrastructure, is then presented. In\nlight of the limited channel capacity and the interoperability/security\nrequirements for vehicular communications, techniques for constraining the\nthroughput requirement, providing device independence and validating the\nlocation of the intended recipient vehicle, are presented. These reduce the\nnecessary device handshake throughput to 176 bits for creating symmetric\nencryption and message authentication keys and in verifying a vehicle's\ncertificate with a recognised certification authority.\n

Paul Rimba, An Binh Tran, Ingo Weber, Mark Staples · 6 authors

Blockchain is of rising importance as a technology for engineering applications in cross-organizational settings, avoiding reliance on central trusted third-parties. The use of blockchain, instead of traditional databases or services, is an architectural choice in the development of a software system. The costs of execution and storage are important non-functional qualities, but as yet very little has been done to study them for blockchain-based systems. We investigate the cost of using blockchain using business process execution as a lens. Specifically, we compare the cost for computation and storage of business process execution on blockchain vs. a popular cloud service. First, we capture the cost models for both alternatives. Second, we implemented and measured the cost of business process execution on blockchain and cloud services for an example business process model from the literature. We observe two orders of magnitude difference in this cost.

Aymen Boudguiga, Nabil Bouzerna, Louis Granboulan, Alexis Olivereau · 7 authors

Building the Internet of Things requires deploying a huge number of objects with full or limited connectivity to the Internet. Given that these objects are exposed to attackers and generally not secured-by-design, it is essential to be able to update them, to patch their vulnerabilities and to prevent hackers from enrolling them into botnets. Ideally, the update infrastructure should implement the CIA triad properties, i.e., confidentiality, integrity and availability. In this work, we investigate how the use of a blockchain infrastructure can meet these requirements, with a focus on availability. In addition, we propose a peer-to-peer mechanism, to spread updates between objects that have limited access to the Internet. Finally, we give an overview of our ongoing prototype implementation.

Ali Dorri, Marco Steger, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak

Interconnected smart vehicles offer a range of sophisticated services that benefit the vehicle owners, transport authorities, car manufacturers and other service providers. This potentially exposes smart vehicles to a range of security and privacy threats such as location tracking or remote hijacking of the vehicle. In this article, we argue that BlockChain (BC), a disruptive technology that has found many applications from cryptocurrencies to smart contracts, is a potential solution to these challenges. We propose a BC-based architecture to protect the privacy of the users and to increase the security of the vehicular ecosystem. Wireless remote software updates and other emerging services such as dynamic vehicle insurance fees, are used to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed security architecture. We also qualitatively argue the resilience of the architecture against common security attacks.

Wenting Li, Alessandro Sforzin, Sergey Fedorov, Ghassan Karame

The blockchain emerges as an innovative tool that has the potential to positively impact the way we design a number of online applications today. In many ways, the blockchain technology is, however, still not mature enough to cater for industrial standards. Namely, existing Byzantine tolerant permission-based blockchain deployments can only scale to a limited number of nodes. These systems typically require that all transactions (and their order of execution) are publicly available to all nodes in the system, which comes at odds with common data sharing practices in the industry, and prevents a centralized regulator from overseeing the full blockchain system. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain architecture devised specifically to meet industrial standards. Our proposal leverages the notion of satellite chains that can privately run different consensus protocols in parallel - thereby considerably boosting the scalability premises of the system. Our solution also accounts for a hands-off regulator that oversees the entire network, enforces specific policies by means of smart contracts, etc. We implemented our solution and integrated it with Hyperledger Fabric v0.6.

Weihong Hu, Meng Ao, Lin Shi, Jiagui Xie · 5 authors

DNS Protocol was originally designed with no security protection in place. Subsequent DNSSEC added a layer of trust on top of DNS by providing authentication, but it still did not address issues such as DoS/DDoS attacks and deployment difficulties. Blockchain technology offers an innovative perspective to tackle those challenges. By reviewing and analyzing two prevail blockchain-based DNS alternatives (Namecoin and Blockstack), it is concluded that although blockchain presently have problems that have to be solved, it is a promising approach to build decentralized, secure and human-friendly naming systems.

Navneet Kaur, Nidhi Chahal, Ritu Dewan, Shikha Singh · 7 authors

Distributed ledger technology, a method of storing and maintaining the integrity of multiple copies of critical data using a massively redundant network of participating machines, has found a “killer application” in blockchain, a type of distributed ledger. A blockchain consists of sequential blocks that may never be modified or reordered, leaving a public, auditable record that is consistent and highly resistant to tampering and deletion. These qualities make blockchain eminently suitable for its most common use, cryptocurrency, and its occasional variants in the form of cryptocurrency tokens, used to represent ownership or some other right to virtual or physical goods and capabilities. Blockchain also enables smart contracts, discrete bodies of software written to serve both as the memorial and the means of execution of an agreement between parties. Smart contracts can have all the elements of a traditional contract, and as jurisdictions legislate or jurists rule on the fine points of enforceability and the acceptability of smart contracts as traditional contracts, applications in nearly every area of commerce have emerged. Digital lawyers may not need to become software developers, but deepening their understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology, developing a keen awareness of the issues at the intersection between code and the law, as well as the law’s readiness in this area, will be of great advantage to them and their clients in this rapidly evolving area at the intersection of technology, commerce and law.

S. Matthew English, Ehsan Nezhadian

Heretofore the concept of "blockchain" has not been precisely defined. Accordingly the potential useful applications of this technology have been largely inflated. This work sidesteps the question of what constitutes a blockchain as such and focuses on the architectural components of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, insofar as possible, in isolation. We consider common problems inherent in the design of effective supply chain management systems. With each identified problem we propose a solution that utilizes one or more component aspects of Bitcoin. This culminates in five design principles for increased efficiency in supply chain management systems through the application of incentive mechanisms and data structures native to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency protocol.

Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Ji Wang, Gang Chen, Rui Liu · 6 authors

Blockchain technologies are taking the world by storm. Public blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable secure peer-to-peer applications like crypto-currency or smart contracts. Their security and performance are well studied. This paper concerns recent private blockchain systems designed with stronger security (trust) assumption and performance requirement. These systems target and aim to disrupt applications which have so far been implemented on top of database systems, for example banking, finance applications. Multiple platforms for private blockchains are being actively developed and fine tuned. However, there is a clear lack of a systematic framework with which different systems can be analyzed and compared against each other. Such a framework can be used to assess blockchains' viability as another distributed data processing platform, while helping developers to identify bottlenecks and accordingly improve their platforms. In this paper, we first describe BlockBench, the first evaluation framework for analyzing private blockchains. It serves as a fair means of comparison for different platforms and enables deeper understanding of different system design choices. Any private blockchain can be integrated to BlockBench via simple APIs and benchmarked against workloads that are based on real and synthetic smart contracts. BlockBench measures overall and component-wise performance in terms of throughput, latency, scalability and fault-tolerance. Next, we use BlockBench to conduct comprehensive evaluation of three major private blockchains: Ethereum, Parity and Hyperledger Fabric. The results demonstrate that these systems are still far from displacing current database systems in traditional data processing workloads. Furthermore, there are gaps in performance among the three systems which are attributed to the design choices at different layers of the software stack.

M. Suguna, R. Anusia, S. Mercy Shalinie, S. Renu Deepti

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is a platform that allows mobile users to offload the computationally rigorous and storage demanding tasks on available cloud resources using wireless access. The major concern with MCC is the privacy of data. Mobile users give confidential information through the network, that if not safeguarded may lead to security issues. Identity Management (IDM) is the management of user identities, their authentication, and authorization in the cloud environment. The existing Consolidated Identity Management (CIDM) overcomes the network traffic interception in the traditional IDM but is prone to Identity theft in case of Identity Management Server (IDMS) compromise. This work is focused on the development of a Secure Identity Management (SIDM) that alleviates the attacks in the CIDM by using techniques that strengthens the authentication process and identity privacy. A secure IDM is developed using two-step authentication process which involves Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and token verification. The proposed SIDM model reduces the consequences of Identity server compromise attack. There is a marginal increase in the communication overhead of SIDM compared to that of CIDM but it can be compromised to realize the benefits of identity privacy. The analysis of the experimental results shows that there is an overall increase of thirty percent in communication overhead when compared to CIDM.

Huawei Zhao, Yong Zhang, Yün Peng, Ruzhi Xu

Blockchain is a technology of recording ledgers in a distributed manner. It uses a consensus mechanism, digital signature and hash chains to realize the reliable storage of ledgers, and provide services such as traceability, integrity and no-repudiation for transactions in ledgers in a decentralized way. These services make blockchain have great application potentiality in the fields of healthcare, Fintech, computational law and so on. Before wide spreading its applications, blockchain must solve problems such as efficiency and privacy. Among these problems the privacy is an important one. Because blocks on blockchain are open, when transactions in blocks involve privacy data, these data can be leaked. Thus, certain security mechanisms must be built to protect privacy data. The core of these mechanisms is the appropriate key management schemes. However, blockchain is a developing technology, and few studies have been done on key management schemes for it. Because healthcare is a big application scenario of blockchain, in this paper, according to the features of health blockchain, we use body sensor network to design a lightweight backup and efficient recovery scheme for keys of health blockchain. Analyses show that the scheme has high security and performance, and it can be used to protect privacy messages on health blockchain effectively and to promote the application of health blockchain.

Ali Dorri, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak, Praveen Gauravaram

Internet of Things (IoT) security and privacy remain a major challenge, mainly due to the massive scale and distributed nature of IoT networks. Blockchain-based approaches provide decentralized security and privacy, yet they involve significant energy, delay, and computational overhead that is not suitable for most resource-constrained IoT devices. In our previous work, we presented a lightweight instantiation of a BC particularly geared for use in IoT by eliminating the Proof of Work (POW) and the concept of coins. Our approach was exemplified in a smart home setting and consists of three main tiers namely: cloud storage, overlay, and smart home. In this paper we delve deeper and outline the various core components and functions of the smart home tier. Each smart home is equipped with an always online, high resource device, known as “miner” that is responsible for handling all communication within and external to the home. The miner also preserves a private and secure BC, used for controlling and auditing communications. We show that our proposed BC-based smart home framework is secure by thoroughly analysing its security with respect to the fundamental security goals of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Finally, we present simulation results to highlight that the overheads (in terms of traffic, processing time and energy consumption) introduced by our approach are insignificant relative to its security and privacy gains.

Yuqin Xu, Qingzhong Li, Xingpin Min, Lizhen Cui · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Marc Pilkington

No abstract is available for this record.