With the development of mobile computing technology, there has higher demand for computation resource in mobile applications than before. Fog computing has emerged as a promising infrastructure to provide elastic resources at the proximity of mobile users. Mobile users can offload some computations from the mobile devices to the nearby Fog servers so as to release the workloads of mobile devices, and therefore improve mobile users' quality of experience. However, mobile users may mistakenly offload their computations to the nearby Fog servers which have been injected by some attackers, and therefore induce some privacy and security issues. As most of mobile devices have natural mobility feature, it is very necessary to check the veracity of a Fog server in a very short time before doing computation offloading. In view of this challenge, we bring blockchain technique into Fog environment so as to verify each Fog server's authenticity and propose a blockchain-based offloading approach in this paper. Concretely, the proposed approach constantly maintains a set of candidate authorized Fog servers by leveraging blockchain technology, and the offloading decision could be made in a real-time fashion. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated our method's feasibility and efficiency.
The article identifies gaps in the legal regulation of Kiptocurrency status. The state of legislative regulation of cryptocurrency turnover in Ukraine is considered. The possibility of using cryptocurrency is considered in the economic activities of business entities, namely, making it into the authorized capital. The analysis of modern and foreign experience is given for example. On its basis, the solution of this problem is proposed.
As the Internet of Things and distributed ledger technology (DLT) continue to evolve, so do questions regarding the future of ‘autonomous’ machine-to-machine (M2M) payments. For example, whether machines can carry out autonomous payments, how they could carry out such payments, and indeed whether they should are all points worth consideration. While autonomous machines are often depicted as frightening images of a dystopian future, it is worth noting that M2M payments are already being implemented in closed-loop systems where payments such as road tolls are made ‘on behalf’ of the consumer. DLT-based approaches, however, remain proprietary and without any proven realworld use case, while genuinely autonomous M2M payments still belong to the world of science fiction. This opinion piece discusses M2M payments from three perspectives: the legal point of view, the functional implementation of payment systems, and the social context. Specifically, it considers the declaration of will, DLT-based proprietary M2M payments, and whether people will be willing to let robots make autonomous decisions, including payments.
Aurelie Bayle, Mirko Koscina, David Manset, Octavio Pérez Kempner
In this work we propose a new blockchain model that ensure the GDPR compliance by handling references to the sensitive data and using metadata instead of manipulate private data directly within the blockchain. We accomplish this by defining a modular architecture that relies on strong cryptographic assumptions that provide the means to guarantee that the right to be forgotten is being well enforced.
Muhammad Salek Ali, Massimo Vecchio, Fabio Antonelli
Within many industry verticals, the Internet of Things provides the means to collect and analyze crucial data for optimizing system performance. The technical evolution of IoT is shifting its computational capabilities away from centralized cloud platforms to a decentralized IoT edge. The IoT edge faces challenges in providing fully decentralized security mechanisms, as well as built-in guarantees for user-data privacy. In recent years, blockchain has been viewed as a potential fabric for a secure, decentralized IoT edge due to its inherent features of fault tolerance, transparency, and enforcement of service level agreements through smart contracts. Despite their virtues, blockchains have their fair share of challenges in being integrated into IoT. In this article, we discuss these challenges, as well as candidate solutions for integrating blockchains into the IoT edge.
Blockchain inspires many people across the globe and has started getting many adoptions after realizing its promising benefits through successful trials. Applications of blockchain range from cryptocurrency, smart contract, banking, healthcare and identity management, insurance, land registry to IoT industry. However, scalability and throughput issues are major challenges of blockchain and are less researched. Many lightweight nodes especially IoT devices depend and put much workload on blockchain servers since they cannot store the full blockchain due to its huge size. This paper investigates performance bottlenecks in blockchain and presents efficient high performance system for caching the blockchain data in the FPGA network interface controller (NIC) for improving scalability and throughput of blockchain applications. We design a customized SHA-256 hash core specific for efficient blockchain caching to save hashing executions and improve the performance. We built and use Jansson and Curl libraries to interface our system with real Bitcoin core. We finally evaluate the throughput performance of the Bitcoin core. The overall result revealed that our system improves the throughput performance by 103 times when cache hit. The design also offers small work area utilization, low power consumption and higher performance.
In this paper, we propose a delay independent control scheme that regulates to zero the state and the control input of a linear input delayed system whose open loop poles are at the origin. Two main features of our control scheme are its non-distributed nature in the sense that only the current state is used in the feedback, and its delay independence in the sense that no knowledge of the delay is required. The main ingredients of our control scheme and the regulation proof include a design of the delay independent truncated predictor feedback law with a time-varying feedback parameter, a Lyapunov function based adaptation of the time-varying parameter, a mechanism for switching between two update laws of the time-varying parameter, and the partial differential equation based analysis for delayed systems.
Stability and Control of Uncertain Systems
Stability and Controllability of Differential Equations
Decentralized Justice in the Era of Blockchain ODR that is built on blockchain technology and infrastructure is championed by supporters as being capable of revolutionizing dispute resolution. Kleros is a decentralized dispute resolution platform built on the Ethereum blockchain that uses cryptoeconomic theories and game theory to recruit and incentivize a worldwide pool of ‘jurors’ to decide the cases arbitrated through the platform. This article discusses some early evaluations of whether this kind of decentralized ODR is likely to succeed by viewing the model through a normative framework, including considering whether crowdsourcing of justice on a decentralized platform is a viable way to conduct ODR. The article then discusses the likelihood of the success of the sub-court model, including whether choice-of-law issues might be problematic for a worldwide, decentralized system. Finally, the article considers whether the cryptoeconomic and game theories that provide the foundation for the Kleros platform are likely to result in a jury pool, much less an actual jury, that could be considered ‘fair.’ The article is informed by the author’s experience with the Kleros platform through participation in its interactive initial coin offering and engaging in its beta-testing phase.
Abstract Banks are automating their processes, migrating their infrastructure and applications to the cloud to create a seamless customer journey. Transformative technology has enabled banks and financial institutions to automate their operations based on advanced data-driven. Banks are adopting AI based anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, compliance, credit-underwriting and smart contracts technology in their operations. These applications have been embraced by the investment banks as regulatory framework are failing to combat conventional way in combating against money laundering. Artificial Intelligence will focus on cognitive application in functional areas of business along with investment and compliance sectors of financial services industry. Adopting AI based anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud, compliance, credit-underwriting and smart contracts technology in their operations.
Blockchain is a new decentralized and distributed network applying technologies such as P2P network, cryptography and so on, in which P2P lays the foundation. Various consensus mechanisms, which correspond to trust models in P2P, solve the trust problems caused due to the anonymity of nodes. In addition, different incentive models are established in the P2P and blockchain network to encourage nodes to share resources subjectively, thereby improving the contribution of nodes to the system. Based on the analysis of trust and incentive models in P2P, this paper summarizes the consensus and incentive mechanisms of blockchain network. What's more, we indicate the future prospects in blockchain including the improvement of blockchain derived from P2P, the idea of a coin-free blockchain, the problems faced by blockchain, issues about blockchain storage and blockchain application scenarios, which will provide guidance for the future study of blockchain network.
Áron Lászka, Scott Eisele, Abhishek Dubey, Gábor Karsai · 5 authors
Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy and improvements in battery technology. Prompted by the increasing complexity of power systems, decentralized IoT solutions are emerging, which arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. The core functionality of these solutions is to provide mechanisms for matching producers with consumers while ensuring system safety. However, there are multiple challenges that these solutions still face: privacy, trust, and resilience. The privacy challenge arises because the time series of production and consumption data for each participant is sensitive and may be used to infer personal information. Trust is an issue because a producer or consumer can renege on the promised energy transfer. Providing resilience is challenging due to the possibility of failures in the infrastructure that is required to support these market based solutions. In this paper, we develop a rigorous solution for transactive microgrids that addresses all three challenges by providing an innovative combination of MILP solvers, smart contracts, and publish-subscribe middleware within a framework of a novel distributed application platform, called Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid. Towards this purpose, we describe the key architectural concepts, including fault tolerance, and show the trade-off between market efficiency and resource requirements.
Today’s complex and dispersed supply chains create significant challenges for supply chain managers. ‘Organic’, ‘non-GMO’, ‘fair trade’ and ‘conflict free’ are just some of the claims that require a transparency in the supply chain to maintain and verify. Product origin and authenticity are similarly at risk from a lack of transparency in supply chain data. Traditionally, supply chain managers use cumbersome and unreliable auditing to validate supply chain data to substantiate product information and provenance. But errors and fraud in supply chain information remain and threaten the brand reputation of affected products. Supply chain data is no stranger to technological enhancement. Enterprise resource planning systems have expanded the volume of real-time actionable data available. The reliability of that data is, however, still in question from its susceptibility to errors and falsification. Distributed ledger technology, best known as blockchain, offers the promise of greater transparency and reliability of supply chain data. Ultimately, that reduces the risks associated with product claims and provenance based on supply chain data. This paper examines the operation of blockchains and their resistance to falsification by looking at the mechanics of the bitcoin blockchain. The paper explores private blockchain alternatives to the bitcoin blockchain that can facilitate distributed data in a closed supply chain. The paper then describes several supply chain challenges where blockchain technology is being used to improve the reliability and integrity of the underlying supply chain data. Finally, the paper looks to the blockchain regulations that may have an impact on the adoption of blockchain in the supply chain. At the end of the day, substantiating supply chain product claims, minimising counterfeiting and enabling product recall all rely on the traceability and integrity of supply chain information, for which blockchain solutions are well suited.
Zakaria Abou El Houda, Lyes Khoukhi, Abdelhakim Hafid
Nowadays, blockchain is seen as one of the main technological innovations. Many applications can rely on the blockchain to secure their exchanges. However, applications with private interest cannot rely on public blockchains. First, in a public blockchain, anyone can read the whole data of the blockchain. Second, anyone can participate to the "consensus process"; the process for determining the validity of each transaction. Consortium and fully private blockchains aim to combine forcefulness of blockchains with controlled consensus process and stricter permissions for deploying a node and joining the blockchain network. In both consortium and fully private blockchains, the number of peers on the blockchain network is very small in comparison with public blockchain. Nonetheless, by targeting the nodes of blockchains, an attacker can easily manage the whole blockchain and takes control of the consensus process to validate his illegitimate transactions. In this paper, to defend blockchain nodes from DNS amplification attacks, we propose a scalable and proactive solution in the context of software defined networks (SDN), named ChainSecure. ChainSecure consists of 3 schemes: (1) StateMap, a novel stateful mapping scheme (SMS) to perform a mapping one-to-one between DNS request and response; (2) Entropy calculation scheme (ECS) to measure the disorder / randomness of data using sFlow in order to detect illegitimate flows; (3) DNS DDoS Mitigation (DDM) module to effectively mitigate illegitimate DNS requests. The experimental results show that ChainSecure protects blockchain nodes and can detect/mitigate the attack quickly to achieve high accuracy in detecting illegitimate DNS traffic making it a promising solution to protect blockchain nodes from DNS amplification attacks.
The fifth generation of mobile networks is rapidly evolving, fueled by the ever-growing mobile traffic over recent years. Ultra-reliable and low latency provisioning of services with ranging contextual parameters mapped to highly fluctuating levels of quality of service and quality of user experience, render the optimum operation point of the future networks unsustainable. Network coding is emerging once more as a potential key enabler for optimizing bandwidth requirements and energy consumption in highly dense mobile network environments. Nonetheless, network coding deployments still need to consider security vulnerabilities and their countermeasures, before they can be adapted as part of the emerging mobile network deployments. This paper studies the performance of random linear network coding for wireless mobile networks with an emphasis on pollution attacks while proposing a novel blockchain based message authentication scheme in order to minimize delays and signalling costs.
It is difficult these days to avoid hearing about blockchain. Despite the significant potential of blockchain, it is also difficult to find a consistent description of what it really is. This article looks at the basics of blockchain: the individual components, how those components fit together, and what changes might be made to solve some of the problems with blockchain technology.
There has recently been a wave of enthusiasm for applying Blockchain technology in the food sector. This article aims to clarify many of the questions surrounding Blockchain technologies, in particular: is Blockchain the future for the food industry and therefore does my company need a Blockchain? Traceability has been achieved for many years using systems that connect core business processes with strategic management of product and supply chain data, namely Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms. Companies must determine what Blockchains can offer that is different from existing ERP systems and what is the value of using them. Working within a secure cloud platform is mainstream today but this was not the case five years ago.
While ERP systems have significant benefits that can be realised, they are often very expensive to implement, with the cost of implementation linked to the operational complexity. The full costs can range broadly from £150,000 to £1,000,000+ and therefore are prohibitive for many SMEs, which make up 96% of the UK Food industry.
In a research community, the provenance sharing of scientific workflows can enhance distributed research cooperation, experiment reproducibility verification and experiment repeatedly doing. Considering that scientists in such a community are often in a loose relation and distributed geographically, traditional centralized provenance sharing architectures have shown their disadvantages in poor trustworthiness, reliabilities and efficiency. Additionally, they are also difficult to protect the rights and interests of data providers. All these have been largely hindering the willings of distributed scientists to share their workflow provenance. Considering the big advantages of blockchain in decentralization, trustworthiness and high reliability, an approach to sharing scientific workflow provenance based on blockchain in a research community is proposed. To make the approach more practical, provenance is handled on-chain and original data is delivered off-chain. A kind of block structure to support efficient provenance storing and retrieving is designed, and an algorithm for scientists to search workflow segments from provenance as well as an algorithm for experiments backtracking are provided to enhance the experiment result sharing, save computing resource and time cost by avoiding repeated experiments as far as possible. Analyses show that the approach is efficient and effective.
Chun‐Wei Chen, Jianwei Su, Tung-Wei Kuo, Kung Chen
In this paper, we focus on the design of consensus algorithms for permission-based blockchains, i.e., private blockchains. In most consensus algorithms, blocks are proposed by a specific role called “leader”. In this paper, we introduce a new role called “witness” to supervise the leader. The presence of the witness facilitates the design of the consensus algorithm. We propose a witness-based consensus algorithm that guarantees safety and liveness. We implemented this consensus algorithm on Go Ethereum. The experimental result shows that in a blockchain where four nodes participate in the consensus process, we can achieve a throughput of 1000 transactions per second (TPS). Even if these four nodes are located on different continents, and one of them is faulty, we can still achieve a throughput of 300 TPS. Finally, we find that during the experiment, a significant portion of time is spent on activities other than the consensus task. The result suggests that to further increase the throughput of a private blockchain, the consensus task and non-consensus activities should be considered jointly.
Blockchains are used to perform state agreement in a distributed system. However, there is no way to validate off-chain actions, such as physical actions, in the current architecture. This paper proposes a new blockchain architecture which features locally physically-verified transactions. From this new architecture, this paper presents a protocol for securing vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) without the need to constantly communicate with roadside units (RSUs) or other infrastructure components. However, issues such as privacy in VANETs and Blockchains are left to future work. This paper shows the results from simulations of the current system in order to note its weaknesses. In particular, this paper can be used as a benchmark to show that ideas such as Proof-of-Work and full blockchain validation cannot work in a purely peer-to-peer VANET.