Blockchain as a new technique has attracted attentions from industry and academics for sharing data across organizations. Many blockchain-based data sharing applications, such as Internet of Things devices management, need privacy-preserving access services over encrypted data with dual capabilities. On one hand, they need to keep the sensitive data private such that others cannot trace and infer sensitive data stored in the block. On the other hand, they need to support fine-grained access control both from time and users’ attributes. However, to the best of our knowledge, no blockchain systems can support time-bound and attributes-based access with high efficiency. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving Internet of Things devices management scheme based on blockchain, which provides efficient time-bound and attribute-based access and supports key automatic revocation. The analysis and experiments show that our scheme is quite efficient and deployable.
In this paper, we address the issue of electricity trading in residential electricity market. In recent years, the residential electricity trading has draw more and more attention, the households that produce excessive electricity sell electricity to households that lack of electricity, however the existence of the manage center brings a huge risk to users, once the center goes crashed, the households will suffer economics losses and there is a great possibility of the leakage of users' personal information. To tackle these issues, we propose a peer-to-peer electricity trading mechanism based on blockchain, under our mechanism each user has a distributed ledger maintained by all households and there is no existence of such a manage center, eliminating the danger of all users suffering huge economic losses when the management center goes crashed. Besides, each user in the market can have multiple virtual addresses that are used to sell and purchase electricity, and other users cansellers submit trading information includes unit pricenot identify their identities via virtual addresses, these virtual addresses protect users' privacy from leaking. The experimental results show the consumption of our proposed mechanism is logical and small, which illustrates the reasonability of our mechanism in time consumption.
Jeff Daniels, Saman Sargolzaei, Arman Sargolzaei, Tareq Ahram · 6 authors
This article describes how technology can be impactful when applied to solve precise and measurable problems. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT), robotic process automation (RPA), and blockchain hold tremendous potential when integrated for specific solutions. In addition to these technologies, the professional designers, engineers, and developers are fundamental to solving problems. People are our most critical element in envisioning the future and solving challenges with the help of technologies. We recognize that in order to truly maximize our efforts with these technologies, the solutions must be used within the ethics of our communities, with a responsibility to safeguard the public’s health, safety, security, and environment with a minimum standard of care ultimately governed by people in a constantly evolving network. With proper oversight on a secure platform and architecture, we will see that the convergence of IoT/RPA, AI, and blockchain make a significant difference in our everyday lives.
Sorin Zoican, Marius Vochin, Roxana Zoican, Dan Galațchi
this paper focuses on the performance evaluation of consensus algorithms used in a blockchain system for Internet of Things (IoT). In such systems the time necessary to achieve consensus should be small. Three most used consensus algorithms (modified proof of work, practical byzantine fault tolerance and binary consensus) are evaluated in different situations – type of motes, number of nodes participating in consensus algorithm and radio propagation model. An integrated solution is proposed to adapt an IoT node to different consensus algorithm. The simulations in Contiki IoT operating system show good performance (time to achieve consensus less than seconds)
This paper proposes a framework for collaborative anomaly detection on Blockchain. Taking condition-based management of industrial asset as a practical example, we extend the notion of Smart Contract, which has been implicitly assumed to be deterministic, to be able to handle noisy sensor data. By formalizing the task of collaborative anomaly detection as that of multi-task probabilistic dictionary learning, we show that major technical issues of validation, consensus building, and data privacy are naturally addressed within a statistical machine learning algorithm. We envision Blockchain as a platform for collaborative learning rather than just a traceable, immutable, and decentralized data management system, suggesting the direction towards "Blockchain 3.0".
Recently education blockchain driven smart education has become focus of attention, and related system frameworks and key technologies are presented. However, problems of difficult to model, difficult to experiment, and difficult to optimize in education blockchain need to be further solved, and driving mechanisms, application scenarios and other issues need further analysis. This paper first introduces education blockchain, challenges and issues, then based on introduction of parallel intelligence theory and parallel blockchain, it proposes parallel education blockchain, and its driven mechanism, function distribution, data transfer, application scenarios and related issues are elaborated; At last, several questions are raised for discussion.
Cloud service providers offer massive storage space for individuals and enterprises. To guarantee the integrity of outsourced data, a range of data auditing schemes have been proposed. The auditing tasks in these schemes are typically performed by a Third Party Auditor (TPA)responsible for periodically checking the integrity of user data. However, such a centralized auditing framework is vulnerable and as a third party, the auditor cannot be fully trusted. In this paper, we propose a decentralized and smart public auditing scheme for cloud storage, which eliminates the involvement of the TPA and improves the reliability of auditing schemes. We build a protocol for automatic data integrity checking in a decentralized environment based on a smart contract, which eliminates the involvement of data owners and data users. Performance analysis and experiments show that our scheme is efficient and favorable.
This paper introduces a small Java application named ChainTutor for learning basic Blockchain concepts. Although the term Blockchain is widely known and Blockchain technologies are finding applications in various areas such as banking, health care and Internet of Things, some concepts of Blockchain are not easy for beginners to understand. Fully text-based tutorials are often difficult to follow. General picture of Blockchain operations gets lost in lengthy textual descriptions. With the Java application introduced in this paper, users can experiment with key Blockchain concepts through a graphical user interface. They can generate keys, hashes, transactions, blocks and wallets. They can see the low level details of a blockchain such as encryption keys and hashes. They can see how mining works and how blocks are added to a blockchain. Parameters of a blockchain can also be varied in order to observe their impact on performance or even to make a blockchain invalid. The Java application is intended to be used in classroom environment by instructors when they teach introductory Blockchain courses.
It has been a long time since Nakamoto Satoshi introduced Bitcoin [1]. However, the underlying technology, blockchain, has been getting more and more attention. It is regarded as one of the most important technology for the fourth industrial revolution, although there exit few the real-world production-level applications due to the hardly tolerant performance of most of the existing blockchain systems. Therefore, how to improve its performance has been identified as one of the most significant research directions in order to use blockchain for practical applications. In this paper, we present a method to build a scalable and extendible blockchain system by multiple chains and sharding techniques.
In ID-based user authentications, a privacy problem can occur, since the service provider (SP) can accumulate the user's use history from the user ID. As a solution to that problem, group signatures are researched. One of important issues in the group signatures is the user revocation. Previously, an efficient revocable scheme with signing/verification of constant complexity was proposed. In this scheme, users are managed by a binary tree, and a list of revoked user information, called a revocation list (RL), is used for revocation. However, the scheme suffers from the large RL. Recently, an extended scheme has been proposed, where the RL size is reduced by compressing RL. On the other hand, there is a problem that some overhead occurs in the authentication as a price for reducing the size of RL. In this research, we propose an extended scheme where the authentication is sped up by reducing the number of zero-knowledge proofs. Furthermore, we implemented it on a PC and shows the effectiveness. The verification time is about 30% shorter than the previous scheme.
Alexander Yakubov, Wazen M. Shbair, Nida Khan, Radu State · 6 authors
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is one of the most prominent cryptographic standards offering end-to-end encryption for email messages and other sensitive information. PGP allows to verify the identity of the correspondent in information exchange as well as the information integrity. PGP implements asymmetric encryption with certificates shared through a network of PGP key servers. Many recent breaches show that certificate infrastructure can be compromised as well as exposed to operational errors. In this paper we propose a new PGP management framework with the key server infrastructure implemented using blockchain technology. Our framework resolves some problems of PGP key servers focusing in particular on fast propagation of certificate revocation among key servers and elimination of man-in-the-middle risk. We also provided user access right control where only the certificate holder can change information related to the certificate. We designed and developed a prototype for key server deployment on permissioned Ethereum blockchain. Permissioned blockchain should allow to control the costs of PGP key server infrastructure maintenance at the present level.
A new initiative from the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) aims to establish a Common Domain Model (ISDA CDM): a new standard for data and process representation across the full range of derivatives instruments. The resulting standardisation of workflow will not only reduce the cost of traditional processing but will also facilitate new platforms using distributed ledger technology and enable processing via smart contracts. The design of the ISDA CDM is at an early stage and the draft definition contains considerable complexity and ambiguity. This paper contributes by offering insight, critical analysis and discussion relating to important topics in the design space such as data lineage, timestamps, consistency, operations, events, state and state transitions.
Blockchain technology which is the fundamental system of Bitcoin running on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, has attracted a lot of attention. This enables a practical P2P electronic money system with Byzantine fault tolerance and stability with all participating nodes having the same transaction ledger and using a distributed consensus algorithm called Proof of Work (PoW) that performs calculation work called mining. Many studies have proposed methods of enhancing scalability in terms of transaction processing of blockchain, however few studies have proposed them in term of network load in a P2P network architecture. To solve these problems, we propose a method in which all nodes are separated into mining nodes in a pure P2P network and blockchain data having nodes in a distributed hash table (DHT) network. Kademlia is incorporated as DHT network for processing responsible blocks' data for each node cluster and broadcasting efficiently. The results of a broadcast simulation show that our method improved the redundancy rate and average number of messages in the networks.
Peace engineering implies taking positive and proactive actions to promote peace and jnstice. Blockchain, on the other hand, is a distributed sequence of blocks which acts like a public ledger. Motivations to develop blockchain based systems are usually related to transparency and trust. Inherently, blockchain ideals relate to peace engineering because of the way users can manage information globally: transparently and confidently. Application of blockchain in higher education may represent a fundamental change in the way professors deliver contents, manage courses, and even assess student work. Moreover, higher education institutions can find blockchain useful as it has the potential to change the way of providing certifications and the way knowledge is managed, produced, and shared. In this work, we review previous works that address blockchain implementation in higher education highlighting implementation advantages and possible disadvantages Additionally, we explore further potential applications of smart contracts as a tool in blockchain based approaches to enhance engineering education programs.
A blockchain provides a securedparadigm to achieve consensus using a distributed and peer-to-peer network in which no trusted central party is required. As a result, it has the potential to resolve many challenges that are faced with current centralized controllers in globally distributed applications. To date, the blockchain technology has been used for recording transactions and tracking objects in which multiple participants reach a consensus on whether a transaction is valid or not. This paper introduces the novel paradigm of probabilistic blockchains, an extension of the current blockchains that allows building efficient and distributed risk assessment and decision-making applications in which multiple untrusting parties collaborate but may not completely agree on the outcome. The paradigm is particularly useful for risk assessment, where a group of decision-makersneeds to decide or analyze an event based on imperfect information. The proposed approach can be used in applications like intrusion detections, stock market predictions, insurance, and recommendation systems. The paper presents and analyzes the application of probabilistic blockchains for intrusion detection systems for computer networks. The results show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed paradigm in making such decisions.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) represents both business and Information Technology (IT) perspectives, which must be constantly updated in response to the transformations of the company; this update is difficult to achieve. The problem has been addressed on different fronts and there are still ways to explore, one of them is the blockchain technology, especially the way to extend the logic of smart contracts to the company. In this study the authors propose to implement a new type of operational processes activity through smart contracts, which could detect that, the process in which they are operating, has an unexpected behavior and, in turn, warn of possible needs to update the AE and the same smart contract.
A decentralized ride-or carsharing application is among the early proposals of what smart contracts on blockchains may enable in the future. To facilitate use cases in the field of location-based services (LBS), smart contracts need to receive trustworthy positioning information, and be able to process them. We propose an approach on how geofences can be defined in smart contracts, and how supplied positions can be evaluated on whether they are contained in the geofence or not. The approach relies on existing location encoding systems like Geohashes and S2 cells that can transform polygons into a grid of cells. These can be stored in a smart contract to represent a geofence. An oracle run by a mobile network provider can submit network-based positioning information to the contract, that compares it with the geofence. We evaluate the location encoding systems on their ability to model city geofences and mobile network cell position estimates and analyze the costs associated with storing and evaluating received oracle-positions in an Ethereum-based smart contract implementation. Our results show that S2 encodings perform better than Geohashes, that the one-time cost of geofence definition corresponds linearly with the number of grid cells used, and that the evaluation of oracle-submitted locations does not incur high costs.
Sandi Rahmadika, Bruno Joachim Kweka, Cho Nwe Zin Latt, Kyung-Hyune Rhee
Blockchain technology combined with IoT to improve the reliability of the supply chain system is one of the topics in great demand lately. Due to the nature of blockchain, it is suitable to be applied in the supply chain to improve the level of service with security guarantees. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of blockchain in the supply chain using Ethereum smart contract to maintain ownership of digital assets and to track the origin of a product. By leveraging the proposed model, the user can be protected by minimizing the fake online trading activity because product assets that have been recorded by blockchain can be guaranteed since the data cannot be changed by anyone (tamper-proof). Further research needs to be developed, especially the connection between IoT devices and the blockchain network to improve the reliability and effectiveness of the decentralized supply chain system.
Pavol Helebrandt, Matej Belluš, Michal Ries, Ivan Kotuliak · 5 authors
Mass application of blockchain technology is becoming reality. Adopting blockchain to enterprise network is innovative approach. It brings novel solution for increasing network security and improved efficiency of network maintenance. Key feature of blockchain is storing data securely in encrypted chains of blocks. It is a distributed database processing continuously growing list of transactions. This feature makes blockchain extremely resistant to unauthorized modifications of stored data. Application of blockchain for network monitoring and management facilitates secure and distributed medium for configuration of network nodes. Furthermore, all modifications in configuration of devices are traceable in blockchain and configuration recovery after incident is rather simple and transparent. In this paper we introduce architecture for monitoring and managing enterprise networks through private blockchain. Using blockchain, any change is attributable to administrator as in traditional network management with AAA implemented, but in addition rollback to previous configuration is simple. Using blockchain instead of traditional network management approaches built on database, distributed nature of blockchain removes single point of failure and simplify management of distributed networks. Our solution utilizes blockchain for secure dissemination of configuration changes to network nodes. Proof of concept of our solution was validated with Hyperledger Composer in our Cisco Lab.
The underlying or core technology of Bitcoin cryptocurrency has become a blessing for human being in this era. Everything is gradually changing to digitization in this today's epoch. Bitcoin creates virtual money using Blockchain that's become popular over the world. Blockchain is a shared public ledger, and it includes all transactions which are confirmed. It is almost impossible to crack the hidden information in the blocks of the Blockchain. However, there are certain security and technical challenges like scalability, privacy leakage, selfish mining, etc. which hampers the wide application of Blockchain. In this paper, we briefly discuss this emerging technology namely Blockchain. In addition, we extrapolate in-depth insight on Blockchain technology.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Public key infrastructure (PKI) is the foundation and core of network security construction. Blockchain (BC) has many technical characteristics, such as decentralization, impossibility of being tampered with and forged, which makes it have incomparable advantages in ensuring information credibility, security, traceability and other aspects of traditional technology. In this paper, a method of constructing PKI certificate system based on permissioned BC is proposed. The problems of multi-CA mutual trust, poor certificate configuration efficiency and single point failure in digital certificate system are solved by using the characteristics of BC distribution and non-tampering. At the same time, in order to solve the problem of identity privacy on BC, this paper proposes a privacy-aware PKI system based on permissioned BCs. This system is an anonymous digital certificate publishing scheme., which achieves the separation of user registration and authorization, and has the characteristics of anonymity and conditional traceability, so as to realize to protect user's identity privacy. The system meets the requirements of certificate security and anonymity, reduces the cost of CA construction, operation and maintenance in traditional PKI technology, and improves the efficiency of certificate application and configuration.
Luigi D’Oriano, Giuseppe Mastandrea, Giuseppe Rana, Giuseppe Raveduto · 7 authors
With the diffusion of smart metering devices and the increasing trend in renewable energy investment [1], the electrical grids are rapidly changing towards the adoption of decentralized energy networks in which consumers can be also producers (i.e. prosumers). The increased use of renewable and distributed generation is leading the development of Smart Grid and microgrid technologies. In this context new business opportunities can be developed provided that new critical issues for the traditional operators, introduced by decentralization, are addressed properly. As example, grid imbalances can generate Reverse Power Flow (RPF) that is harmful for the equipment since many of the protection and control devices are designed with the assumption that power always flows in one direction. In this paper, we present results from the ongoing project eDREAM (enabling new Demand REsponse Advanced, Market oriented and Secure technologies, solutions and business models) with some extent on requirements and use cases related a decentralized flexibility system based on ledger technologies.
Lucie Mercenne, Kei-Léo Brousmiche, Elyes Ben Hamida
The Blockchain technology is currently considered as a major paradigm shift in software architectures and applications. Indeed, it enables the automation of business worflows, using smart contracts, and hence the collaboration between trustless entities, without having to rely on any centralized or third parties. In this context, the automated generation of smart contracts, from high level business process models, has recently received increased interests within the research community. In this paper, we introduce the Blockchain Studio framework, which is a fork of Caterpillar, and whose objective is to enable the generation and automation of role-based business workflows on Ethereum based blockchains. The architecture and implementation of Blockchain Studio are firstly discussed, followed by the analysis of the achieved benefits on a practical use case related to the management of vehicles' life-cycles and data history. Various research challenges and opportunities are then highlighted.