Blockchain is disrupting the banking industry and contributing to the increased big data in banking. However, there exists a gap in research and development into blockchain-ed big data in banking from an academic perspective, and this gap is expected to have a significant negative impact on the adoption and development of blockchain technology for banking. In hope of motivating more active engagement by academics, researchers and bankers alike, we present the most comprehensive review of the impact of blockchain in banking to date by summarizing the opportunities and challenges from a bankers perspective. In addition, we also discuss the impact that big data from blockchain will have on banking data analytics in future and show the increasing importance of filtering and signal extraction for the banking industry. Whilst there is evidence of selected banks adopting blockchain technology in isolation or small groups, we find the need for extensive research and development into several aspects of banking with blockchain to overcome the challenges which are currently hindering its adoption in banking across the globe.
Space situation awareness (SSA) includes tracking of active and inactive resident space objects and assessing the space environment through sensor data collection and processing. To enhance SSA, the dynamic data-driven application systems framework couples online data with offline models to enhance performance by using feedback control, sensor management, and communications reliability. For information management, there is a need for identity authentication and access control (AC) to ensure the integrity of exchanged data as well as to grant authorized entities access right to data and services. Due to decentralization and heterogeneity of SSA systems, it is challenging to build an efficient centralized AC system, which can either be a performance bottleneck or the single point of failure. Inspired by the blockchain and smart contract technology, we introduce blockchain-enabled, decentralized, capability-based access control (BlendCAC), a decentralized authentication, and capability-based AC mechanism to enable effective protection for devices, services, and information in SSA networks. To achieve secure identity authentication, the BlendCAC leverages the blockchain to create virtual trust zones, in which distributed components can identify and update each other in a trustless network environment. A robust identity-based capability token management strategy is proposed, which takes advantage of the smart contract for registration, propagation, and revocation of the access authorization. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented on both resources-constrained devices (i.e., Raspberry Pi nodes emulating satellites with sensor observations) and more powerful computing devices (i.e., laptops emulating a ground network) and is tested on a private Ethereum blockchain network. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the BlendCAC scheme to offer a decentralized, scalable, lightweight, and fine-grained AC solution for space system toward SSA.
The aim of this paper is to propose a theoretical construct, smart network field theory, for the characterization, monitoring, and control of smart network systems. Smart network systems are intelligent autonomously-operating networks, a new form of global computational infrastructure that includes blockchains, deep learning, and autonomous-strike UAVs. These kinds of large-scale networks are a contemporary reality with thousands, millions, and billions of constituent elements, and entail a foundational and theoretically-robust model for their design and operation. Hence this work proposes smart network field theory, drawing from statistical physics, effective field theories, and model systems, for criticality detection and fleet-many item orchestration in smart network systems. Smart network field theory falls within the broader concern of technophysics (the application of physics to the study of technology), in which a key objective is deriving standardized methods for assessing system criticality and phase transition, and defining interim system structure between the levels of microscopic noise and macroscopic labels. The farther implications of this work include the possibility of recasting the P/NP computational complexity schema as one no longer based on traditional time (concurrency) and space constraints, due to the availability of smart network computational resources.
Xueping Liang, Sachin Shetty, Deepak K. Tosh, Juan Zhao · 6 authors
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) including power systems, transportation, industrial control systems, etc. support both advanced control and communications among system components. Frequent data operations could introduce random failures and malicious attacks or even bring down the whole system. The dependency on a central authority increases the risk of single point of failure. To establish an immutable data provenance scheme for CPS, the authors adopt blockchain and propose a decentralized architecture to assure data integrity. In business-driven CPS, end users are required to share their personal information with multiple third parties. To prevent data leakage and preserve user privacy, the authors isolate and feed different information retrieval requests using tokens specifically generated for each type of request. Providing both traceability of data operations, and unlinkability of end user activities, a robust blockchain-based CPS is prototyped. Evaluation indicates the architecture is capable of assured data provenance validation and user privacy preservation at a low overhead.
S. MUTHAMILSELVAN, NIMISHA PRAVEEN, SUVETHA SURESH, Vishnu Sanjana
As technology develops, there arises a need to take control of personal data. One of the most important benefits of block chain is that, it can store data permanently and in an immutable manner. And another one aspect is that block chain is decentralized i,e there is no central hub to store data. Using this technology to store important documents of an individual makes the documents more secured and they cannot be tampered once uploaded and the individual can have the advantage of accessing their documents anytime without the need of middle men. Smart contracts are used to exchange data in a transparent and in a trusted manner. Documents of the users are converted into e-docs along with a unique quick response code. Each individual's code forms a block with a specific hashed value and helps in forming a continuous blocks. These blocks cannot be altered once formed and hence it is not possible to retrieve the documents unless the user's permission. It is secured using the user's fingerprint which is dissolved into text using steganography. Thus the documents are kept secure and can be used whenever needed without any constraints and can also be never tampered or manipulated.
Energy Internet provides important support to power transmission and substation distribution links, security is particularly significant. However, access authentication centralized to the certification center has brought great pressure on computing and communications. In this paper, a distributed authentication scheme for the energy Internet is proposed based on the blockchain technology, which is decentralized and undeniable. A PBFT consensus mechanism is implemented with the Shamir threshold secret sharing mechanism. Experiments show that the scheme can effectively improve the concurrent access efficiency of Energy Internet terminals.
With the continuous development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the surge in data generated by sensors and smart devices has caused data overload in designated centralized data centers. However, centralized data centers, such as cloud storage, cannot afford to manage these gigantic data in the suitable way. Due to the lots of devices and senors continuously creating data, traditional IoT architectures must address many challenges that are not designed to provide trust, security, resiliency, and low latency. To solve theses problems, we propose a decentralized architecture named MicrothingsChain based on blockchain with smart contract, which enables edge computing nodes storing corresponding domain IoT data and interacting with each other safely. It brings computing and storage capabilities to the edge of the IoT network and realizes distributed storage of large amounts of data. Specially, MicrothingsChain adopts publish-subscribe mode, in which users can access the data across domain. Furthermore, we present one cryptographic currency for our ecology named MicroCoin. The security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that MicrothingsChain is suitable in practice.
Internet of Things devices is more common and the growth of LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) technology is unavoidable. However, the regulation for this kind of technology is lack behind even though there will be multiple licensing and certification from national regulator and from industry. It will not easy to maintain and check the device's licensing for user and regulator, moreover if the product already had another type of licensing from abroad. It often happens that the vendor files a fake license claims of his products to fulfill the procurement. Therefore, licensing management is required for everyone goodness in the IoT industry. Blockchain implementation assessment framework can be used for assessing this case.
E-commerce has become an essential part of our life allowing us to buy products, request services, and transfer money easily with a press of a button. In general, people consider various factors of a product like price, quality, etc. before making purchases. When it comes to choosing one of the sellers having a same product with similar price, customers pay attention to each seller's reputation or the degree of trust to the seller. On the existing online payment systems, however, information such as reputation could be manipulated by the malicious (including the advertisers) giving extremely high or low ratings on purpose. Furthermore, as each individual has different criteria on ways to evaluate, the result value of reputation could be non-objective resulting in unreliability of data.In this paper, we propose Reptor, a model for calculation of trust and reputation with the values stored on blockchain-based payment system's ledger. Reptor is applied on blockchain-based online payment system which has a characteristic of immutability. Reptor normalizes the evaluations given by each user based on personal evaluation criteria changing over time. In addition, Reptor derives reputation of users and trust of one to another by applying psychological factors. Simulation results show that our Reptor is able to derive robust and objective values from immutable transactions on blockchain-based online payment system.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Spam and Phishing Detection
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
We present an energy-efficient, security-enhanced consensus algorithm to compensate for the security weaknesses that may arise when a node that generates a block is vulnerable in a closed blockchain environment. Consensus algorithms, which are usually used in blockchain environments, use a large amount of hash to create a new block, producing significant energy waste. The consensus algorithm that is proposed in this paper reduces energy waste by generating new blocks in a single operation according to the defined rules of all miner nodes that can generate blocks and converging them into blocks with many identical block values, forming a blockchain.
As cloud services greatly facilitate file sharing online, there's been a growing awareness of the security challenges brought by outsourcing data to a third party. Traditionally, the centralized management of cloud service provider brings about safety issues because the third party is only semi-trusted by clients. Besides, it causes trouble for sharing online data conveniently. In this paper, the blockchain technology is utilized for decentralized safety administration and provide more user-friendly service. Apart from that, Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption is introduced as an effective tool to realize fine-grained data access control of the stored files. Meanwhile, the security analysis proves the confidentiality and integrity of the data stored in the cloud server. Finally, we evaluate the performance of computation overhead of our system.
Mirko Staderini, Enrico Schiavone, Andrea Bondavalli
In recent years, the interest in blockchain has grown exponentially, and nowadays it is foreseen as a technology with the potential to revolutionize the way data is maintained and transferred around the globe. The reason of this excitement is ascribable to the ability of enabling new forms of transactions and interactions between mistrusting and decentralized entities. Indeed, it has attracted interests and huge investments from enterprises, and it is predictable that in a near future many industries will adopt it. However, it is not a panacea and in some cases may even become useless or not convenient. Moreover, even when it can really constitute an added value, selecting the proper blockchain and configuring it may not be trivial. Trying to go beyond the hype and to address this problem, this paper proposes a methodology addressing: i) whether, given a specific problem requirements, the blockchain is a proper solution for it ii) in such a case which is the blockchain category more suitable, and finally iii) guiding the designer throughout its configuration.
Fake news on major social media platforms has real-world consequences on the sentiments of citizens. For instance, it has the power to influence the election results of a country. The problem statement is fake news detection and prevention on social media presents unique challenges that require novel algorithms. The research methodology is to implement current blockchain technology with advanced Artificial Intelligence in social media platform to prevent fake news. This study aims to provide a substantial review on implementing blockchain on social media in order to build public trust on credible news and prevent spread of fake news via social media. In particular, this paper provides the research problem and discusses state-of-the-art blockchain solutions and technical constraints as well as points out the future research direction in tackling the challenges.
The state parameters of electrical equipment and power system control parameters are the key data to realize the precise control and cooperative autonomy of a cyber physical power system. The trustworthiness of the data is the primary condition to guarantee the electric power system’s safe and reliable operation. In the traditional centralized data acquisition and management architecture, the security and trustworthiness completely depend on the central main server. A small mistake in the main server will result in data loss, which is irreversible and fatal. Blockchain technique combines the dispersed data with mutual backup and retrieval mechanism, which guarantees that the data cannot be tampered with and forged privately. Based on the blockchain technology, this article proposes a novel data trustworthy acquisition model with high credibility, applied to a self-organized cyber physical power system. In order to overcome the long time-consuming process of building traditional blockchains, a new on-demand data transmission routing algorithm with M/M/1/k queuing model is proposed in this article. Different scales of IEEE standard bus systems are employed as experimental examples to evaluate the algorithm’s performance. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively shorten the time consumption of blockchain construction and realize the data trustworthiness of cyber physical power system.
ChangHyung Lee, Lewis Nkenyereye, Nak-Myoung Sung, JaeSeung Song
With the growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT), Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications is a key factor to enable the IoT paradigm. Several Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) including oneM2M are working on specifications that will enable interoperability for the M2M within the IoT ecosystem. However, the transactions within the IoT platform are not trustworthy due to its centralized structure. In the meanwhile, blockchain technologies have emerged as a revolutionary technology with a wide range of applications. In this paper, we present an architectural framework that aims at enabling blockchain in IoT platform. We consider a oneM2M-based IoT platform and an existing blockchain system namely Logchain that uses the blind voting algorithm as a consensus rule to ensure the integrity of the blocks. We discuss the proposed framework by highlighting the key points that are achieved through the architecture. We then present the concluding remarks and our future work.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The robustness of modern power systems depends on the level of cyber security against cyber-attacks. Since energy transactions could significantly affect the power system operation, these transactions should be evaluated through a secure system to enhance the power system reliability. In this paper, a blockchain-based energy transaction framework is introduced and the level of security for different energy transaction frameworks are evaluated by calculating the overall probability of successful attacks (PSA)to each one. PSA is defined as a successful attack to the system which can lead to the system collapse. The numerical results will demonstrate that the blockchain based energy transaction framework is the most reliable system against cyber-attacks comparing with traditional centralized and modified decentralized energy transaction frameworks.
This study proposes a privacy preserving Blockchain-Based Ticketing Service (BB Tickets), which stores information about events and related tickets in the blockchain network. As the blockchain technologies can ensure information integrity, ticket buyers can use the data stored in the blockchain network to ensure the authenticity of the purchased tickets and to resolve related disputes. Furthermore, the Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) scheme is utilized in the proposed system to protect user privacy. Therefore, this study contributes to providing a privacy-preserving means for users to enjoy the reliable ticketing service provided by the blockchain technologies.
As an important part of the smart grid, the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) can provide various auxiliary services for the power grid and promote the use of renewable resources. However, there are various kinds of attacks in the V2G network. Based on consortium blockchain, this paper proposes a cross-domain authentication scheme for the security threat in the V2G network. This paper designs the trust model and the system architecture, and describes the scheme in detail. The signature and authentication of the scheme adopt the SM9 identity-based cryptographic algorithm. This scheme utilizes the fact that block chain technology is not easy to tamper with. It uses a hash algorithm to verify the certificate, reducing the number of public key algorithm signatures and verifications, making the solution efficient and scalable. The introduction of block chain technology provides new ideas and methods for solving the security problems in the Smart Grid.
Security of the Internet of Things represents a field that strongly attracts academia and industry since it represents one of the main obstacles in its adoption. In this area, authentication and authorization methods holds a golden place in priority rank. Indeed, current approaches suffers from numerous limits. Moreover, generally, deployment systems use separately two methods one dedicated to the authentication and the other to the authorization, while the number of methods that combine both requirements is limited. In this work we propose an adaptive blockchain based authentication and authorization approach for IoT use cases. We provided a real implementation of our approach using Java language. The extensive evaluation provided, shows clearly the ability of our scheme in meeting the different requirements, as well as its ability in ensuring a very lightweight cost.
ABSTRACT Blockchain systems, best known in connection with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, are networks of databases stored in different places that use securely encrypted messages to connect with each other over the internet. In simplest terms, it is a decentralized and incorruptible recordkeeping. Since data storage in healthcare industries is of critical importance in terms of patient safety and financial integrity, the possibility of using blockchain for healthcare data management has been raising lots of attention in both industry and academia in recent years. It has been reported that blockchain can be used as a distributed ledger to store healthcare–related data for sharing, exchanging, analyzing, recording, and validating purposes among various stakeholders of the healthcare sector. The paper of this paper is to review the basics of blockchain and illustrate current and future applications of this technology within the healthcare industry. While what we may see next is somewhat unpredictable, we hope to raise some issues that could serve as catalyst for further research of the topic. Keywords Blockchain; Healthcare; Electronic health record (EHR)
Mehmet Demir, Atefeh Mashatan, Ozgur Turetken, Alexander Ferworn
There are various compelling use cases of blockchain technology in the energy and utility sector. We survey the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology on these use cases. Most of these cases focus on the trade of energy. We introduce a novel use case on transparent disaster recovery from service disruptions. We describe the actors on the system, identify trust issues, and show the benefits of using blockchain in this use case.
Open banking brings both the opportunities and challenges to banks all over the world. Due to the different economic development levels of each country and the gaps among financial environment maturity, all countries have different strategies and regulations towards the privacy protection of data in financial scenes, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by European Union (EU). A blockchain as a continuously growing list of records managed by a peer-to-peer network is widely used in various application scenarios, and can protect the privacy of financial data. However, financial blockchain still poses some problems that cannot fully meet the data protection needs. In order to address the existing problems, this paper proposes a new blockchain-based data privacy management framework. The framework consists of three components: a data privacy classification method according to the characteristics of financial data and a new collaborative-filtering-based model and a confirmation data disclosure scheme for customer strategies based on the Nudge Theory. We implement a prototype and propose a set of algorithms for this management framework.