This paper presents a blockchain-based architecture for electronic health record (EHR) systems. The architecture is built on top of existing databases maintained by health providers, implements a blockchain solution to improve interoperability of the current EHR systems, prevent tampering and malicious misuse of EHRs by means of tracking all events that happened to the data in the databases. This proposed architecture also introduces a new incentive mechanism for the creation of new blocks in the blockchain. The architecture is independent of any specific blockchain platforms and open to further extensions, hence potentially fits in with other electronic record systems that require protection against tampering and misuse.
Ubiquitous sensing enabled by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies cuts across many areas of modern day living. This offers the ability to measure, infer and understand environmental indicators, from delicate ecologies and natural resources to urban environments. The proliferation of these devices in a communicating–actuating network creates the Internet of Things (IoT), wherein sensors and actuators blend seamlessly with the environment around us, and the information is shared across platforms in order to develop a common operating picture (COP). Fueled by the recent adaptation of a variety of enabling wireless technologies such as RFID tags and embedded sensor and actuator nodes, the IoT has stepped out of its infancy and is the next revolutionary technology in transforming the Internet into a fully integrated Future Internet. As we move from www (static pages’ web) to web2 (social networking web) to web3 (ubiquitous computing web), the need for data-on-demand using sophisticated intuitive queries increases significantly. This paper presents a Cloud centric vision for worldwide implementation of Internet of Things. The key enabling technologies and application domains that are likely to drive IoT research in the near future are discussed.
Introduction: currently, the whole world is experiencing tremendous changes in connection with the transition to the information society. This work is devoted to the challenges faced by contract law. The aim of this work is to study the theoretical and practical problems of the legal regulation of "smart" contracts. Methods: the methodological framework for the study is the dialectical method of cognition, which assumes the comprehensiveness, objectivity and interconnectedness of the studied phenomena; the general scientific methods of cognition (analysis, synthesis, hypothesis, analogy, etc.); the comparative law and functional methods. As a result of the study, the main problems arising in the legislative regulation of "smart" contracts were grouped. The technical ones include: the problem of describing the conditions in the artificial language, obtaining the data from the real world by the system, the reliability of the input data, the system errors, the speed of transaction processing, the inability to maintain the complete confidentiality of the operations. The legal problems include: the complexity of the contract verification by a lawyer, the lack of control of transactions by the state and tax authorities, the possibility of illegal transactions, the complexity of proving the fact of the contract, the definition of the applicable law, remedies. The legislation of some foreign countries, which is also under development, is analyzed. The analysis of the draft law "On Digital Financial Assets" shows that the document does not satisfy the requests for the legal regulation of the digital economy. In the definition, there is no indication that a "smart" contract is written in the artificial language, the turnover of the crypto currency is significantly limited. It is concluded that a "smart" contract is now rational to use as part of a paper contract for simple transactions with the measurable conditions. The draft law "On Digital Financial Assets" needs the significant improvement to simplify the turnover of digital assets and the development of the institution of "smart" contracts.
This research studies cryptocurrency trading with an emphasis on technical analysis. In particular, the classic Turtle Trading System is modified to suit cryptocurrency trading. Based on backtest results on main cryptocurrencies, the extended Turtle Trading System yielded 114.41 % average net profit margin and 52.75% average profitability, which were higher than those of the original system. The trading strategy was next implemented in a mobile application. The application prototype is also presented in the paper.
Benefit from the capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization, open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity. Yet, the proof-of-work based consensus protocols under threats, e.g., double-spending. In this paper, by adopting the cyber-insurance as an economic tool to neutralize cyber risks, we propose a novel approach of cyber risk management for blockchain-based service. The blockchain service market under our consideration is composed of four entities, i.e., the infrastructure provider, blockchain provider, cyber-insurer, and users. The blockchain provider purchases the computing resources, e.g., a cloud, from the infrastructure provider to maintain the blockchain consensus and then offers blockchain services to the users. The blockchain provider optimize its profit by strategizing its investment in the infrastructure in order to improve the security of the blockchain and the service price charged to the users. In the meantime, to prevent the potential damage incurred by the attacks and then fully secure the cyber-space, the blockchain provider purchases a cyber-insurance from the cyber-insurer. In return, the cyber- insurer adjusts the insurance premium according to the perceived risk level of the blockchain service and will pay the claim to the blockchain provider once attacks happen. Based on the rationality of the market entities, we model the interaction among the blockchain provider, users, and cyber-insurer as a two- stage Stackelberg game. Specifically, the blockchain provider and cyber-insurer lead to set their pricing/investment strategies in the upper level subgame, and then the users follow to determine their demand of the blockchain service in the lower level subgame. Specifically, we consider the scenario of double-spending attacks and provide a series of analytical results about the Stackelberg equilibrium in the market game.
The objective of the study was to examine financing rural industrialization and employment creation practices and possibilities in Ethiopia. In this context, rural industrialization refers to encouraging small to large industries to be established in rural areas. As rural industrialization is a new concept at a policy level let alone to the practice on the ground in Ethiopia, a full-fledged data regarding the rural industrialization and the rural financing practice is inadequate. However, attempts were made to see at least the trends in agricultural commercialization, off farm practices, the government’s policy, the financial institutions practices, and above all how other countries approached rural industrialization and financing such industries. Hence, relevant data were collected from CSA, NBE, DHS, World Bank, and Ethiopian Investment Commission and the collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The major finding of the study indicates rural industrialization process is at conception stage and financing the rural strategy is still poorly developed despite the immense economic and social implications. Hence, a combination of centralized financing rural industrialization through commercial banks and a decentralized financing rural industrialization through microfinance institutions is recommended for the country to get better depth and breadth of rural industrialization.
There is a growing need to both secure patient health data from unauthorized breaches and at the same time make access to such data easier for patients. Blockchain may provide a solution.
Blockchain technology and its applications have played an important role to overcome challenges in numerous areas of the life. However, most current blockchain projects have concentrated on financial model by using existing platforms such as Bitcoin or Ethereum to generate tokens without the development of the technological features. Unfortunately, the decentralization has several challenges which cannot be adopted by our current political, economic and social systems. The fundamental technical problem of current blockchain algorithm is that `performance inefficiency' could not be solved, in comparison with the central server system. In addition, the client software cannot establish conventions for making decisions about the future direction of the cryptocurrency. Furthermore, users' completed anonymity and the absence of a responsible person are also open problems of decentralization. To this end, this paper proposes an alternative method, dubbed RCANE which is semi-centralized network of parallel blockchain and APoS (Authorized Proof of Stake), whose purpose is to solve the above challenges of current blockchain and comply with our preconceived perspectives of the current political, social, and economic systems to build up an ecosystem for economy, society and politics. Several experiments are conducted to show the executability of RCANE Project.
Blockchain ushers in a new era for the global financial system with the advent of digital currency (cryptocurrency), and its impact can be felt in many related industries. Because of its possible applications, cryptocurrency draws significant attention from researchers. Although there are a number of risks (e.g., speculation, 51% attack) related to cryptocurrency, billions of dollars are invested in them, because of transparency, traceability, low transaction cost, and highly profitable potential. In December 2017, the most famous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has reached almost $20,000.00 per coin. Such short-term, high gain potential attracts many new small investors. However, speculative movements raise many questions related to safety and privacy, just to name a few. In order to understand public opinion about cryptocurrency and to protect small investors financial interests, sentiment analysis can be done by using social media activities of individuals who are interested or investing in cryptocurrencies. One of the most important steps in the analysis is to understand the profiles of the users. Therefore, in this paper, we determine education levels of investors or users who are interested in eight cryptocurrencies by using seven readability techniques on Reddit comments as a part of profiling. Results show that the education levels of users are approximately 60% in middle school, 30% in high school, and 10% in other levels according to the average of the seven readability technique results. The results and analysis, which are provided in this paper, help new investors and developers to obtain profile information about the users who are interested or investing in cryptocurrency.
Smart Grids is an emerging technology promising significant changes in the economy and the social sphere. One among many challenges in their development and distribution is security. Considering recent hackers attacks on energy grids and taking into account the distributed structure of these systems the use of traditional means of computer protection and the search for a crime figure becomes more difficult or impossible. In this article, we introduce some application areas of smart grid forensic science, discuss the opportunities, and outline the open issues in the topic. We summarized challenges for forensic in Smart Grids in connection with a Blockchain and proposed a decentralized transaction platform based on Blockchain tailored to the energy sector with all the latest technology such as advanced metering infrastructure, distributed generation, etc.
Intelligent Cyber-physical systems can be modelled as multi-agent systems with planning capability to impart adaptivity for changing contexts. In such multi-agent systems, the protocol for plan execution must result in the proper completion and ordering of actions in spite of their distributed execution. However, in untrusted scenarios, there is a possibility of agents not respecting the protocol either due to faults or due to malicious reasons thereby resulting in plan failure. In order to prevent such situations, we propose to implement the execution of agents through smart contracts. This points to a generic architecture seamlessly integrating intelligent planning-based CPS and smart-contracts.
espanolEste articulo compara algunas expresiones clave y palabras de cuatro constituciones de la region andina en paises que han adoptado el tipo de estado unitario y el modelo de organizacion territorial frances, desde entonces y hasta ahora, desarrollando procesos diferentes de descentralizacion (Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru). Las palabras: plurinacional, multicultural, comunitario, autonomo, autonomia, unitario y indivisible seran contadas (vamos a comparar cuantas veces cada palabra aparece en los textos constitucionales) y su significado sera analizado en relacion con los procesos de descentralizacion de cada pais. Estos procesos seran analizados por medio de un dialogo entre ciencia politica y derecho comparado para entender mejor las tendencias de la descentralizacion en America latina y su impacto sobre la circulacion del modelo frances. EnglishThis article aims to compare some key statements and words from four constitutions in the Latin American region of countries that initially adopted the unitary form of state and the territorial organization of the French model, while subsequently developing different decentralization processes (Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru). The words: plurinational, multicultural, communitary, autonomous, autonomy, unitary and indivisible will be counted (comparing the number of times each word appears in the constitutional texts) and their meaning will be analyzed in relation to decentralization processes of each country. We analyze this process through a dialog between political science and comparative law to better understand the Latin American decentralization trend and its impact on the circulation of the French model.
As the rising popularity of Bitcoin, people tend to use Bitcoin wallets to managing the keys for spending or receiving funds. Instead of generating pairs of keys randomly which are hard to be stored, hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets derive all the keys from a single seed, thus storing that seed is sufficient to recover keys. In an HD wallet, it allows users to generate child public keys from parent public keys without knowledge of any private key. A suitable case for this feature is that an auditor is permitted to derive all the public keys for auditing, However, this impressive feature makes HD wallets suffered from so-called privilege escalation attacks that the leakage of any one of child private key along with its parent public key will cause the exposure of the other child private keys. To confront with this severe problem, we propose a novel HD wallet scheme that gives out a signature with trapdoor hash functions instead of directly giving anyone private keys for signing. Since it conceals private keys from any child nodes, it can prevent from privilege escalation attacks. Nevertheless, the proposed scheme also provides unlinkability between two public keys in order to achieve anonymity of user identity and high scalability to the derivations of keys. Thus, the proposed scheme achieves user anonymity, public key derivation and high scalability.
2 source records
Cryptography and Data Security
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Eranga Bandara, Wee Keong Ng, Kasun De Zoysa, Owen Noel Newton Fernando · 7 authors
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed storage that stores chronological series of transactions in a tamper-resistant manner. Blockchain became popular in various industries due to its decentralized trust ecosystem. When integrating blockchain with big data, one encounters many challenges. Current public blockchain does not support high transaction throughput; it does not scale in terms of big data storage and management; it does not provide keyword-based search and retrieval; and so on. As a result, it is hard to incorporate existing blockchain systems for big data applications. In this research, we propose a new blockchain storage "Mystiko" that is built over the Apache Cassandra distributed database to incorporate big data. Mystiko supports high transaction throughput, high scalability, high availability and full text search features. With Mystiko, we make big data more secure, structured and meaningful, and allows further data analytics on big data to be more easily performed.
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
Abstract: Smart contracts provide a quandary for contract law remedies. The self-enforcing nature of smart contracts implies that there is little possibility for breach and thus, little need or opportunity to apply contract law remedies. This article explores if this is really the case. It concludes that contract law remains applicable to smart contracts relating to the enforceability of its terms based on legality, public policy, and contracts policing doctrines. In such cases, post hoc judicial or arbitral claims remain likely and the dispute resolution bodies would seek to apply contract remedies. In order to diminish instances of litigation or arbitration the smart contract should include self-remedying or internal measures (remedies). The article divides internal measures into proactive and reactive measures. These measures should be considered in the drafting of a smart contract in order to diminish resort to contract remedies. In the end, contract law and contract remedies will remain important as default law. In addition, like smart contracts, some of contract law rules are immutable and cannot be made obsolete by blockchain technology.
Analysis of any digital currency is performed for identifying and quantifying uncertainties, estimating their impact on results with real-time market value. Cryptocurrency, as an encrypted form of currencies which is used for shopping, investment, money transfer and in other purpose now days. Most popular use of Bitcoins are investment because its price was unexpectedly high in past few years (data shown in content of paper). In this paper prediction of Bitcoin close price by using the ARIMA model has been performed. The ARIMA model is found suitable for the prediction of bitcoin prices because this model is used for prediction of time series data. The forecast of future values is provided based on seasonality and trend present in the price data. In terms of visualizations, results are manifest by using R programming language. The obtained results are then compared with actual prices and percent mean error is calculated. The present mean error is found here less than 6% for most of the values.
This paper addresses the problem of uploading large quantities of sensitive industrial data to a public distributed network by proposing a new framework. The framework combines the existing technologies of the distributed web and distributed ledger to provide a mechanism of encrypting data and choosing whom to share the data with. The framework is designed to work with existing platforms; the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and the Ethereum blockchain platforms are used as examples within this paper, though it is stated that similar platforms are capable of providing the requirements for the framework to operate. The framework uses the concept of the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE), and is implemented in three different mechanisms of the DHKE: one-step Elliptical-Curve Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (ECDH); two-step ECDH; and Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange (SIDH). The paper discusses the security of each along with individual advantages and disadvantages, and concludes that the SIDH is the most appropriate implementation for future use due to it being post-quantum secure.
Abstract: The success of smart contracts based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) springs from their potential to secure contract performance when traditional legal enforcement remedies are not practical or too costly. EU policymakers and regulators have struggled for years to facilitate the enforcement of consumer rights while reducing transaction costs for businesses. The article argues that smart contracts can be a viable tool to address such a challenge. By virtue of their self-executing and tamper-proof character, smart contracts are suited to substantially reduce transaction costs in B2C relationships. So far, several legal scholars have raised concerns regarding both smart contracts inability to reflect relational aspects of contract governance and the augmented complexity generated by the translation of an agreement into computer code. Building upon the extant literature on the topic, the article explains why these problems can be overcome when it comes to consumer rights that are standardized and easily verifiable. Thus, smart contracts will likely prove suitable for specific industries, such as the transport sector. The article concludes that policy makers and regulators shall take the lead by testing, with a sector-specific approach, smart contracts ability to improve the consumer protection toolbox.
Digital coin became an interesting subject for research in the last few years. For security reasons, the technical detail of digital coins (for example Bitcoin) are studied to stop security breaches. Bitcoin work dependently on a blockchain. Blockchain holds the record of all user's transactions. The user opens a wallet with public/private key pairs. The user then buy/sell his coin through the wallet. The security of the user's wallet depends on how secure the user's private key. Some people hide bitcoins (which in this case refers to the private key) in their house. Others hide the security key into a plain-text. In this paper we proposed a robust steganography technique to hide bitcoins into steganographic fractals. Steganographic fractal is our novel approach, it is not explored before. The fractal tree is selected for its simple recursive structure. The private-key bit stream is hidden by discretizing the angles and lengths of the tree branches. The tree can then be printed without the fear of being lost or stolen. The proposed approach showed high security and robustness to attacks.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The healthcare industry is constantly reforming and adopting new shapes with respect to the technological evolutions and transitions. One of the crucial requirements in the current smart healthcare systems is the protection of patients sensitive data against the potential adversaries. Therefore, it is vital to have secure data access mechanisms that can ensure only authorized entities can access the patients medical information. Hence, this paper considers blockchain technology as a distributed approach protect the data in healthcare systems. This research proposes a blockchain based secure and efficient data accessibility mechanism for the patient and the doctor in a given healthcare system. Proposed system able to protect the privacy of the patients as well. The security analysis of our scheme shows that it can resist to well-known attacks along with maintaining the integrity of the system. Moreover, an Ethereum based implementation has used to verify the feasibility of our proposed system.
The Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm (PBFT)has been highly applied in consortium blockchain systems, however, this kind of consensus algorithm can hardly identify and remove faulty nodes in time, and also vulnerable to many attacks against the primary node of PBFT. The equality of consortium members' discourse rights is inapplicable to some real scenarios where dominating members are likely to have a larger discourse rights in the voting process. To address these problems, this paper presents Reputation-based Byzantine Fault Tolerance (RBFT)algorithm that incorporates a reputation model to evaluate the operations of each node in the consensus process. The faulty nodes will get lower discourse rights in the voting process if any malicious behavior is detected, with their reputation decreased. Furthermore, this paper presents an innovative reputation-based primary change scheme. The node with higher reputation obtains greater opportunities to be a primary to generate new valid blocks, which reduces the security risk of the primary. The experimental results demonstrate that RBFT gains better performance and ensures system security and reliability. Compared with PBFT, it increases the average throughput by 15% and reduces delay by 10%, and the faulty node rate of the system can continue to decrease over time.
In the age of Big Data, enabling task scheduling while protecting users' privacy is critical for various decentralized applications in blockchain-based smart contract platforms. Such a privacy-preserving task scheduler requires the task input data to be secretly maintained until a prescribed task execution time and be automatically recorded into the blockchain to enabling the execution of the task at the execution time, even if the user goes offline. While straight-forward centralized approaches provide a basic solution to the problem, unfortunately they are limited to a single point of trust and involve a single point of control. This paper presents decentralized techniques for supporting privacy-preserving task scheduling using smart contracts in Ethereum blockchain networks. We design a privacy-preserving task scheduling protocol that is managed by a manager smart contract. The protocol requires a user to schedule a task by deploying a proxy smart contract maintaining the non-sensitive information of the task while creating decentralized secret trust and selecting trustees from the network to maintain the sensitive information of the task. With security techniques including secret sharing and layered encryption as well as security deposit paid by trustees as economic deterrence, the protocol can protect the sensitive information against possible attacks including some trustees destroying the sensitive information (drop attack) or secretly releasing the sensitive information before the execution time (release-ahead attack). We demonstrate the attack-resilience of the proposed protocol through rigorous analysis.Our implementation and experimental evaluation on the Ethereum official test network demonstrate the low monetary cost and the low time overhead associated with the proposed approach.