Since it first appears in 2008 as the underlying technology of the Bitcoin payment system, Blockchain has gained further interests, since it offers a distributed peer-to-peer ledger where non-trusting members can interact with each other, in addition, members can now run applications without the need for a central authority with the same level of certainty. however blockchain suffers from certain limitations and challenges, specifically, when combined with Internet of things (iot) infrastructure, namely the high cost needed in the mining process due to restricted computation resources of iot devices, in this paper we will focus on a survey on three of most relevant papers that discuss resources management in mobile blockchain then we we will propose a matching model based on graph theory for optimal resources allocation between services offered by an Edge service provider and demands from miners of a blockchain network.
Lei Xu, Lin Chen, Zhimin Gao, Yanling Chang · 6 authors
Maritime transportation plays a critical role for the U.S. and global economies, and has evolved into a complex system that involves a plethora of supply chain stakeholders spread around the globe. The inherent complexity brings huge security challenges including cargo loss and high burdens in cargo inspection against illicit activities and potential terrorist attacks. The emerging blockchain technology provides a promising tool to build a unified maritime cargo tracking system critical for cargo security. However, most existing efforts focus on transportation data itself, while ignoring how to bind the physical cargo movements and information managed by the system consistently. This can severely undermine the effectiveness of securing cargo transportation. To fulfill this gap, we propose a binding scheme leveraging a novel digital identity management mechanism. The digital identity management mechanism maps the best practice in the physical world to the cyber world and can be seamlessly integrated with a blockchain-based cargo management system.
The existing credit systems are not well recognized because of separate brokerage systems, non-pertinence, centralized and static evaluation models, and insufficient supporting information. An autonomous credit system is proposed to reform and address the issues of the current systems based on self-regulating blockchain data and programmable smart contracts. The autonomous credit system is trading-oriented to satisfy all the involved trading participants. A blockchain creditworthiness ecosystem is developed to implement the credit system as it provides an open, equal and creditworthy infrastructure. And it is through a collection of smart contracts that all the blockchain operations are processes. A creditworthiness model is developed to implement the credit system to be integrated, traceable, dynamic and personalized. Several pilot projects have been developed to test the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed autonomous credit system. Four creditworthiness clouds have been developed as public blockchain clients and creditworthiness lookup services.
Blockchain is currently one of the most widely discussed and hyped technologies. It has the potential to disrupt existing but also to enable new business models — The top 3 key takeaways in the blockchain technology in the media industry are: New pricing option for paid content using Blockchain: Blockchain makes even micro-cent payments cost-efficient. Current cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum permit transactions as small as fractions of cents. It is thus an enabler for penny price content purchases, such as paying for reading a single news article or streaming a single song. Also, traditionally ad-sponsored content such as YouTube videos can be monetized with an “ad-free” alternative for a small fee. — Consumption of paid content without boundaries: National / regional limitations of paid content subscriptions and DRM complexities will be decreased by the Blockchain. Blockchain is not a technical prerequisite for this endeavor since more sophisticated Digital Rights Management systems are also capable of dealing with complexities like multi-country access. Nevertheless, the blockchain has the potential to make DRM systems obsolete or at least to reduce the complexity of these systems, because every transaction/ consumption is tracked in the blockchain and directly linked to a user. The payment will be automatically initiated according to the underlying smart contract terms for the content. — Smart contracts: Ethereum, the second-largest blockchain network by market capitalization, was the first platform to introduce the concept of a smart contract. Smart contracts enable counterparties to automate transaction tasks that are typically performed manually and that require the involvement of third-party intermediaries. Smart contract technology can result in processes that are faster and more accurate and cost-efficient. — Challenges in implementing blockchain technology: — • Trust in blockchain technologies and platforms — • Opaqueness of blockchain platforms and standards due to quickly-changing market participants — • Usability and reach of blockchain technologies in everyday environments — • Interoperability of platforms and various standards needs to be secured
The students' online quiz is a way to realize the informatization and modernization of higher education. To solve the problem that the scoring process is non-transparent, injustice and the final results are easy to be changed, an online quiz scheme based on Double-layer Consortium Blockchain is proposed. The scheme achieves the public verification of students' answers and the answer records cannot be tampered with but can be traced. Besides, group signature is used to solve the problem of anonymous abuse in blockchain applications. In addition, the storage pressure of sub-chains' nodes can be further reduced by adding the prime-chain's index to the sub-chains.
As the complexity of software increases, the importance of software quality is ever increasing, as everyone recognizes. In order to secure software quality, various engineering methods have been proposed. However, because these methods are very specialized, the reality is that it is difficult to apply them to a distributed and small-scale development environment. So, to solve this problem, a tool to analyze the quality of source code is used. Still, it is not easy to rely on code quality in a distributed development environment. In this study, source code quality data measured in a distributed development environment is stored in a blockchain ledger based on a graph database. In this way, the reliability of code quality in a distributed development environment can be enhanced.
Kyungchan Ko, Chaehyeon Lee, Taeyeol Jeong, James Won‐Ki Hong
On 2017, Bitcoin and Ethereum shocked the world with their coins being traded in coin exchange markets at incredibly high prices around the world. The fervor led to more than 1,700 startups launching ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) and many more preparing one. Blockchain the fundamental technology behind these cryptocurrencies - is being used by many companies worldwide to solve mathematically meaningful problems. enhance efficiency, save cost and/or generate new revenue. The growing popularity of blockchain has brought about the need for monitoring and analyzing blockchain transactions, nodes, blocks, and smart contracts in order to make sure that the blockchains operate legally, efficiently, and reliably. Various government authorities (police, taxation office, banking and financial) show great interest in monitoring blockchain transactions. In this paper, we present the design of blockchain monitoring and analysis system for collecting and analyzing important aspects of blockchain operations.
Oct 1, 2018·2018 IEEE SmartWorld, Ubiquitous Intelligence & Computing, Advanced & Trusted Computing, Scalable Computing & Communications, Cloud & Big Data Computing, Internet of People and Smart City Innovation (SmartWorld/SCALCOM/UIC/ATC/CBDCom/IOP/SCI)
The widespread adoption of fax machines in the 1980s revolutionised everyday communications. It was quickly adopted as the standard form of communication across the globe. Since then, the internet has replaced fax as a truly global form of instant communication. However, the fax machine still reigns as the primary form of communication in a number of industries, healthcare being one of them. This paper presents a system that uses a blockchain and an off-chain centralised data storage to give patients and medical professionals instant access to their medical records from anywhere. By assigning each medical record a pseudo anonymous identifier, a second layer "blockchain" for each user can be created allowing for the rapid collection and querying of data. The off-chain pseudo anonymous data storage allows for the data to remain unencrypted enabling the rapid generation of anonymous medical datasets which can be used for machine learning and data mining on the data, potentially bringing many benefits to the healthcare industry.
In 2008 Blockchain became known by Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, author of the article "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." Blockchain technology facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without the intermediary, which is safe and trust. Blockchain is a data structure that makes it possible to create a digital ledger of transactions and share it among a distributed network of computers, continuously updated simultaneously and secure with encryption. Furthermore, blockchain uses cryptography to allow each participant on the network to manipulate the ledger in a secure way without the need for a centralized trusted party. Since the Bitcoin protocol is open source. This concept has led to the idea develop of smart contract. Blockchain technology can apply in non-Financial Uses which have application examples in many industries include energy sector. Energy Sector can apply this technology from grid management to retail & customer experience that will transformation to new business model.
The growing adoption of photovoltaic panels on roof-tops increases the pressure on grid operators for offsetting surplus or deficiency in generation. A multi-carrier energy system allows energy to be converted and stored using different energy carriers, thus relieving the stress from grid operators. However, these systems require efficient operation to unfold their full potential. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-enabled process to coordinate, allocate, and settle intra-day energy transactions in a district multi-carrier energy system with electricity and heating sub-networks. An incentive mechanism is designed for an optimal allocation of local green energy generation. The mechanism is implemented for the Ethereum blockchain and operates fully on-chain. The design leaves energy producers the freedom to choose their preferred pricing strategy for profit maximization while restricting them to behavior favoring the common good. We test three pricing strategies, with different levels of knowledge on users’ pricing behaviors, that energy producers may adopt. The price-availability-based allocation system guarantees consumers the lowest possible cost.
Pietro Danzi, Sarah Hambridge, Čedomir Stefanović, Petar Popovski
In the power grid, the Balance Responsible Parties (BRPs) purchase energy based on a forecast of the user consumption. The forecasts are imperfect, and the corrections of their real-time deviations are managed by a System Operator (SO), which charges the BRPs for the procured imbalances. Flexible consumers, associated with a BRP, can be involved in a demand response (DR) program to reduce the imbalance costs. However, running the DR program requires the BRP to invest resources in the infrastructure and increases its operating costs. To limit the intervention of BRP, we implement the DR via a blockchain smart contract. Moreover, to reduce the delay of publication of the imbalance price, caused by the inefficient accounting process of the current balancing markets, a second blockchain is adopted at the SO layer, procuring a fast and auditable credit settlements. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is evaluated over an Ethereum blockchain platform. The results show that block chains can enable a high automation of the balancing market, by providing (i) the implementation of aggregators with low operating cost and (ii) the timely and transparent access to the balancing information, thus fostering new business models for the BRPs.
Barbara Carminati, Elena Ferrari, Christian Rondanini
Today, most of the services one may think of are based on a collaborative paradigm (e.g., social media services, IoT-based services, etc.). One of the most relevant representative of such class of services are inter-organizational processes, where an organized group of joined activities is carried out by two or more organizations to achieve a common business goal. Inter-organizational processes are therefore vital to achieve business partnerships among different organizations. However, they may also pose serious security and privacy threats to the data each organization exposes. This is mainly due to the weak trust relationships that may hold among the collaborating parties, which result in a potential lack of trust on how data/operations are managed. In this paper, we discuss, how blockchain, one of today hottest technology, can be used in support of secure inter-organizational processes. We further point out which additional security issues the use of blockchain can bring, illustrate the ongoing research projects in the area and discuss future research directions.
<p>The study assesses the effect of energy use on social, economic and environmental sustainability in Africa. The energy sources considered in the study comprises four prominent sources in Africa, including: fossil fuel, solid fuel, electricity and natural gas consumption. The finding suggests that fossil fuel consumption and solid fuel constitute about 75 percent of energy use in the region and contributively worsen social and environmental conditions. The predominant consumption of these dirty energies has severely hampered child and adult survival and efficient delivery of services. Also, the time wasted in fetching biomass has constituted an impediment to learning capacities in children and women’s mobility. In the same manner, frequent exposure to fumes from the dirty energy sources had resulted in severe indoor air pollution and rising incidence of pneumonia, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases in women and children. On the other hand, the empirical and conceptual analysis shows that access to clean and reliable energy sources (such as electricity) reduce time poverty, enhance gender empowerment and reduce environmental degradation. The study recommends structural policy reforms and transformation towards decentralizing energy provisions and adopting off-grid power solution to rural areas. Furthermore, African governments need to develop a sustainable energy financing mechanism through an affordable pricing template; this can be achieved by increasing local contents in energy provision and increasing the share of abundant domestic resource in energy mix.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Energy Access, Structural transformation, Sustainable Development, Africa</p><p><strong>JEL Classifications:</strong> Q43, K32, Q01</p><p>DOI: <a href="https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.7213">https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.7213</a></p>
Among the various challenges faced by the P2P file sharing systems like BitTorrent, the most common attack on the basic foundation of such systems is: Free-riding. Generally, free-riders are the users in the file sharing network who avoid contributing any resources but tend to consume the resources unethically from the P2P network whereas white-washers are more specific category of free-riders that voluntarily leave the system in a frequent fashion and appearing again and again with different identities to escape from the penal actions imposed by the network. BitTorrent being a collaborative distributed platform requires techniques for discouraging and punishing such user behavior. In this paper, we propose that “Instead of punishing, we may focus more on rewarding the honest peers”. This approach could be presented as an alternative to other mechanisms of rewarding the peers like tit-for-tat [10], reciprocity based etc., built for the BitTorrent platform. The prime objective of BitTrusty is: providing incentives to the cooperative peers by rewarding in terms of cryptocoins based on blockchain. We have anticipated three ways of achieving the above defined objective. We are further investigating on how to integrate these two technologies of distributed systems viz. P2P file sharing systems and blockchain, and with this new paradigm, interesting research areas can be further developed, both in the field of P2P cryptocurrency networks and also when these networks are combined with other distributed scenarios.
Ravi Kishore Kodali, Subbachary Yerroju, Borra Yatish Krishna Yogi
In 21stcentury one of the revolutionary technologies is Blockchain. It can bring regularity ideas to public and private sectors which improve the present management failures. To permit peer-to-peer transactions, Blockchiain maintains continuously growing list of records as a distributive database. In future, the existing conventional energy sources cannot meet the electricity demand. The renewable electricity generation is growing to balance supply and demand and accounts to share in the overall power supply. In the concept of smart cities development, The energy distribution without any intermediaries has a major concern. This emerging blockchain technology provides distributive and decentralized solutions for energy transactions. In this paper, a permissioned blockchain that uses hyperledger fabric to provide a peer-to-peer energy transacting network in order to accommodate the growing volume of renewable energy supply.
Centered on the value of listed banks in investment management, this article proposes an automatic pattern recognition value system based on blockchain. It will be of great value for investors to reasonably estimate the stock value of listed banks. In this way, the investors will make a better investment decision, which will realize the rational allocation of social resources. The new value system includes three layers: (a) production of value; (b) record of value; (c) assessment of value. In the framework, we encapsulate the valuable business processes of listed banks through smart contracts. The cryptographic algorithms and token mechanism ensure the normal operation of the transaction. We record the value of listed banks by distributed ledger technology. Consensus mechanism verifies the validity of records. Meanwhile, the token mechanism completes the value transfer and acts as an incentive measure for network node accounting. Finally, we evaluate the value of listed banks from integration, optimization, control, and value-added satisfaction services. Therefore, the new value system can correctly guide investors in making a rational investment, which will increase investment returns and ultimately realize the rational allocation of social resources.
This paper explains how the distributed ledger technology that has successfully decentralized currencies can be used to enable a decentralized marketplace for digital content rights. Today, multiple centralized rights lockers from companies and consortiums offer similar but incompatible systems to register a consumer's video purchases and manage content rights. Each is representing a monopoly that centrally governs the content rights and is motivated to do so only for as long as it remains profitable. — Blockchain technology can be used to establish a permanent, secure, decentralized and distributed registry for content registration, assignment and archival of rights. The benefits of leveraging blockchain for video content distribution and content rights management provide longevity that is independent of a single standard, company or governance body as well as security of transactions with cryptographic guarantee of entitlements and grants of content licenses that cannot be changed and verified permanently. Lastly, the distributed and replicated nature of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network provides resiliency, eliminating a single point of failure as well as the need to rely on just one single standard, company or governance body. This paper will provide a novel system design that explains how a blockchain can be applied to not only manage content rights but to also secure content by including digital rights management (DRM) and playback control as an integral part of the decentralized network. It also details how to improve common ledger technology to overcome concerns of performance and abuse that are relevant to this application.
Internet of Things (IoT) has already been in the period of rapid development and widespread deployment, while it is still vulnerable to various malicious attacks. Security detection before system installation is not enough to ensure that IoT devices are always secure, because newly emerging vulnerabilities can still be exploited to launch attacks. To address this issue, retrospective detection is often required to trace the security status of IoT systems. Unfortunately, existing centralized detection mechanisms cannot easily provide a comprehensive security analysis. In particular, consumers cannot automatically receive security notification whenever a new vulnerability is uncovered. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-powered incentive platform, called SmartRetro, that can incentivize and attract more distributed detectors to participate in retrospective vulnerability detection and contribute their detection results. Leveraging smart contracts, consumers in SmartRetro receive automatic security feedback about their installed IoT systems. We perform the security and theoretical analysis to demonstrate that SmartRetro achieves our desirable security goals.We further implement SmartRetro prototype on Ethereum to evaluate its performance. Our experimental results show SmartRetro is technically feasible and economically beneficial.
Sai Medury, Anthony Skjellum, Richard R. Brooks, Lu Yu
X.509 certificates underpin the security of the Internet economy, notably secure web servers, and they need to be revoked promptly and reliably once they are compromised. The original revocation method specified in the X.509 standard, to distribute certificate revocation lists (CRLs), is both old and untrustworthy. CRLs are susceptible to attacks such as Man-in-the-Middle and Denial of Service. The newer Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) and OCSP-stapling approaches have well-known drawbacks as well. The primary contribution of this paper is Secure Revocation as a Peer Service (SCRaaPS). SCRaaPS is an alternative, reliable way to support X.509 certificate revocation via the Scrybe secure provenance system. The blockchain support of Scrybe enables the creation of a durable, reliable revocation service that can withstand Denial-of-Service attacks and ensures non-repudiation of certificates revoked. We provide cross-CA-revocation information and address the additional problem of intermediate-certificate revocation with the knock-on effects on certificates derived thereof. A Cuckoo filter provides quick, communication-free testing by servers and browsers against our current revocation list (with no false negatives). A further contribution of this work is that the revocation service can fit in as a drop-in replacement for OCSP-stapling with superior performance and coverage both for servers and browsers. Potential revocation indicated by our Cuckoo filter is backed up by rigorous service query to eliminate false positives. Cuckoo filter parameters are also stored in our blockchain to provide open access to this algorithmic option for detection. We describe the advantages of using a blockchain-based system and, in particular, the approach to distributed ledger technology and lightweight mining enabled by Scrybe, which was designed with secure provenance in mind.
By letting students simulate operations and games on a digital education operation system, schools are able to inspect learning achievement and teaching quality. In digital education area, we are able to use blockchain technology to improve competition mode. It's helpful to simplify process, improve efficiency and avoid the problem of opaque and falsification messages. Besides, it can provide unchangeable digital certification of academic achievement. Based on existing research foundation, against features on related users and services, especially the standard and trustful problem in competitions and evaluation mode nowadays, I studied competition mode based on blockchain technology, designed blockchain's application mode and frame, analyzed evaluation criteria and algorithm, designed an operational skill evaluation model, developed an operational skill competition evaluation system based on e-business sandbox and experimented it.
Andreas Martin Seitz, Dominic Henze, Daniel Miehle, Bernd Bruegge · 6 authors
Fog Computing, Augmented Reality (AR) and Blockchain are technologies that have been receiving more attention in recent years. Fog Computing for on-site data analysis and Blockchain as a decentralized framework are used to establish security and trust. AR enables new interactive scenarios with devices in the industrial environment and provides user interfaces for devices that had previously lacked one. The combination of these technologies in an industrial environment opens up new possibilities and opportunities. We present the IIoT Bazaar, a decentralized marketplace for industrial edge applications that relies on Blockchain to create transparency for all stakeholders involved and to enable the traceability of app installations on edge devices. With Fog Computing, resource-limited edge devices can be integrated into the IIoT Bazaar ecosystem. Fog Nodes enable the provisioning of applications on edge devices and their integration into a decentralized Blockchain network. AR serves as an interface between the users and the machines, allowing people to interact intuitively with the edge devices. With a case study, we demonstrate the design and prototypical implementation of the IIoT Bazaar and its applications which bring software developers and users together using a combination of Fog Computing, AR, and Blockchain. We share the challenges we faced and our experiences we made during the case study.
With the rapid development of information and communication technology, a vast amount of personal health data is generated, stored, and utilized in healthcare related services. However, there are many issues remained to be solved, such as data interoperability, security, and privacy concerns. On the other hand, blockchain, a decentralized peer-to-peer digital ledger, has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as a promising technology to protect privacy of personal data. By adopting blockchain, individuals can take advantage of personal health data for better healthcare. In this paper, after briefly summarizing the major features of blockchain, we describe blockchain-empowered solutions for utilization of personal health data in healthcare and discuss issues and challenges. We further propose i-Blockchain, an individual-centric framework for use of personal health data based on an extension of permissioned blockchain, present the basic architecture and protocols, and show several application scenarios.