A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets.Cryptocurrencies are a type of digital currencies, alternative currencies and virtual currencies. Cryptocurrencies use decentralized control as opposed to centralized electronic money and central banking systems. The decentralized control of each cryptocurrency works through a blockchain, which is a public transaction database, functioning as a distributed ledger.Neural Networks field has many techniques to perform predictions. They are widely used to predict the future values of stock exchange indicators variables. In this paper we will try to use Artificial Neural Network to predict cryptocurrencies close prices, and we'll study the difference in price change with the normal stock exchanges.
Purpose This purpose of this paper is to illustrate how terrorists finance their activities through cryptocurrencies. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative content analysis of 30 semi-standardized expert interviews with both illegal financial service providers and prevention experts developed understanding of the concrete techniques of financing terrorism through cryptocurrencies. Findings Terrorists could use Bitcoin to receive donations from their supporters. Research limitations/implications As the findings are based on semi-standardized interviews, they are limited to the perspectives of the 30 interviewees. Practical implications The identification of gaps in current prevention mechanisms is intended to provide legislators and intelligence agencies with insights into the operations of terrorism financers. Originality/value While the existing literature focuses simply on identifying areas that could play a role in financing terrorism, this paper describes concrete methods, taking both prevention and criminal perspectives into account.
Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
Nowadays, the development of the Internet of Things is growing rapidly. This condition raises security problems because of the many violations of security policies. In addition, the development of blockchain is also growing rapidly since it was first popularized in Bitcoin. Security issues on this IoT can be solved using blockchain. One way that can be done is to make secure communication between IoT devices. In this study, an IoT system will be created without and using blockchain which will then be compared between the two. The communication protocol used in IoT systems without blockchain is MQTT. Meanwhile, the blockchain platform used is Ethereum along with a smart contract. Both of these IoT systems will be analyzed for their security level by simulating attacks and observing their security aspects. The test results show that the IoT system based on blockchain technology has a higher level of security than the IoT system without blockchain technology.
Ulfah Nadiya, Kusprasapta Mutijarsa, Cahyo Y Rizqi
Blockchain is a distributed database that has advantage of being irreversible, transparent and decentralized. However, beside of its advantages, blockchain still face several challenges, one of them is scalability. One of the scalability challenges is increasing block size for every new transaction. The size of blockchain reached more than 180 GB. The block size will burden the node in conducting transaction verification. To overcome this problem, this paper has an objective to make summary blocks and compression for the summary blocks so that it can increase the space saving of blockchain and make it easier for nodes to verify transactions. The proposed method used for transactions whose entities can be transferred. This method combines block summarization algorithm and deflate compression algorithm. The proposed method applied to Bitcoin blockchain. Space saving is calculated by comparing the total size of original block with the total size of block that has been summarized and the total size of summary block which has been compressed. From the experiment results, the value of space saving for summary blocks is 22.318% and space saving for summary blocks that have been compressed is 78.104%.
In the age of Big Data, releasing protected sensitive data at a future point in time is critical for various applications. Such self-emerging data release requires the data to be protected until a prescribed data release time and be automatically released to the recipient at the release time, even if the data sender 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 self-emerging data using smart contracts in Ethereum blockchain networks. We design a credible and enforceable smart contract for supporting self-emerging data release. The smart contract employs a set of Ethereum peers to jointly follow the proposed timed-release service protocol allowing the participating peers to earn the remuneration paid by the service users. We model the problem as an extensive-form game with imperfect information to protect against possible adversarial attacks including some peers destroying the private data (drop attack) or secretly releasing the private data before the release time (release-ahead attack). We demonstrate the efficacy and attack-resilience of the proposed techniques through rigorous analysis and experimental evaluation. 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 and validate its guaranteed security properties.
Bruno Andriamanalimanana, Chen-Fu Chiang, Jorge Novillo, Sam Sengupta ยท 5 authors
A central problem with distributed ledger technologies involves the latency that must be incurred in processing and verifying transactions to be accepted as permanent records in the ledger. In many applications, high latency is simply not a tolerable aspect of the governance of the ledger. To help reduce latency, we offer a distributed ledger architecture, Tango, that mimics the Iota-tangle design as articulated by Popov [1] in his seminal paper. A main idea is the introduction of a semi-synchronous transaction entry protocol layer. We model periodic pulsed injections into the evaluation layer from the entry layer.
Randa Almadhoun, Maha Kadadha, Maya Alhemeiri, Maryam R. Al-Shehhi ยท 5 authors
These days, IoT devices are deployed at a massive scale, with Cisco predicting 20 billion devices by the year 2020. As opposed to endpoint devices, IoT devices are resource-constrained devices, incapable of securing and defending themselves, and can be easily hacked and compromised. Fog computing can augment such capacity limitations by providing localized compute, storage, and networking for a group of IoT devices. As fog nodes are deployed in close proximity to IoT devices, fog computing can be more effective than cloud computing. Furthermore, Blockchain has emerged as technology with capabilities to provide secure management, authentication and access to IoT devices and their data, in decentralized manner with high trust, integrity, and resiliency. In this paper, we propose a user authentication scheme using blockhain-enabled fog nodes in which fog nodes interface to Ethereum smart contracts to authenticate users to access IoT devices. The fog nodes are used to provide scalability to the system by relieving the IoT devices from carrying out heavy computation involving tasks related to authentication and communicating with the blockchain. We describe system components, architecture and design, and we discuss key aspects related to security analysis, functionality, testing and implementation of the smart contracts. The full code of the smart contracts for authentication registry, lists, rules and logic is also made publicly available at Github.
Mobile network operators can expand their capacity by aggregating their licensed spectrum with the spectrum discovered opportunistically, i.e., spatiotemporally unused spectrum by other primary users. For an accurate identification of the spectral opportunities, the mobile network has to deploy multiple sensors or it can offload this task to nearby nodes with sensing capabilities, so called helpers. Unfortunately, incentives are limited for helpers to perform energy-wasteful spectrum sensing. Instead, we envision spectrum sensing as a service (Spass) in which a smart contract running on a blockchain (BC) describes the required sensing service parameters and the contracted helpers receive payments only if they perform sensing accurately as agreed in the contract. In this paper, we first introduce Spass and derive a closed formula defining the profitability of a Spass-based business as a function of the spectral efficiency, cost of helpers, and cost of the service. Moreover, we propose two-threshold based voting (TTBV) algorithm to ensure that the fraudulent helpers are excluded from Spass. Via numerical analysis, we show that TTBV causes almost zero false alarms and can exclude malicious users from the contract after only a few iterations. Finally, we develop a running prototype of Spass on Ethereum BC and share the related source code on a publicly-available repository.
Oct 1, 2018ยท2018 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)
Saqib Ali, Guojun Wang, Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Hai Jiang
Mission-critical applications such as industrial control, smart grids, security and surveillance systems are highly dependent on cloud-centric IoT networks. In such networks, the diverse IoT devices harvest the data from the remote environments and relay it to multiple intermediate agents over the wireless links towards the cloud for storage, analysis and decision making. Such systems require highly trustworthy data to guarantee accurate and timely decisions. However, in most of the cases, the IoT data becomes dubious during the transmission towards the cloud. Ensuring data provenance in such a heterogeneous multi-layered system is a critical security issue. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a secure data provenance framework for cloud-centric IoT network by utilizing the immutable, deterministic and public nature of the blockchain smart contracts with the traditional cloud infrastructure. In the framework, the cryptographic hash of the device metadata is stored in the blockchain whereas actual data is stored off-chain i.e., in the cloud, making it highly scalable for a dense deployment of IoT devices in the network. Multiple smart contracts are stationed in the blockchain to guarantee the provenance receipt to the data stored in the cloud. The initial evaluation revealed that the proposed framework is highly acceptable in achieving the data provenance for large-scale cloud-centric IoT networks.
Ethereum is a public (permissionless) blockchain with a Turing complete execution machine for smart contracts. Miners that execute a smart contract receive a fee determined by the gas associated with the operation codes (opcodes) in the smart contract. It is important that the gas award is proportional to the computation resources required, to assure that incentives are aligned and denial of service attacks are avoided. Currently, the amount of gas awarded is set statically for each opcode, but it is unknown if these values are correct for various computer architectures. Therefore, we propose in this paper a benchmark approach to assess the computational resources required per opcode. We apply the benchmark approach to PC and MAC as a first illustration of the approach.
Blockchain technology has gained immense popularity because many researchers believe that it could solve numerous problems and could be applied in various fields of study. Unfortunately, behind its potentials, blockchain also possessed many challenges and limitations. The highlighted problem is the usability aspect of blockchain technology examined from developer and user perspective. This paper tried to address this problem by proposing query functionalities, with the help of query layer system, to facilitate the developer and the user to access blockchain data easily. There are three main query functionalities that will be discussed in this paper: (1) finding blockchain data based on multiple search parameters (retrieval query), (2) providing simple statistical analysis from a collection of blockchain data (aggregate query) and (3) sorting blockchain data according to its blockchain component (ranking query). For the implementation stage, Ethereum is used as platform to provide blockchain network, MongoDB is used as cloud storage service and REST API is used as web services. For the testing stage, throughput and time response are used to evaluate the performance of the developed query functionalities in the query layer system. The results are: (1) the throughput of query layer system is lower than Ethereum service for blockchain data retrieval and (2) the time response of query layer system is affected by the number of thread and the amount of data stored in cloud storage.
Parinya Ekparinya, Vincent Gramoli, Guillaume Jourjon
Recent theoretical attacks conjectured the vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains through simulations or assumption violations. Unfortunately, previous results typically omit both the nature of the network under which the blockchain code runs and whether blockchains are private, consortium or public. In this paper, we study the public Ethereum blockchain as well as a consortium and private blockchains and quantify the feasibility of man-in-the-middle and double spending attacks against them. To this end, we list important properties of the Ethereum public blockchain topology, we deploy VMs with constrained CPU quantum to mimic the top-10 mining pools of Ethereum and we attack them, by first partitionning the network through BGP hijacking or ARP spooling before issuing a Balance Attack to steal coins. Our results demonstrate that attacking Ethereum is remarkably devastating in a consortium or private context as the adversary can multiply her digital assets by 200, 000ร in 10 hours through BGP hijacking whereas it would be almost impossible in a public context.
Modern centralized online marketplaces such as eBay offer an alternative option for consumers to both sell and purchase goods with relative ease. However, drawbacks to these marketplaces include the platform's ability to block merchants at their own whim, the fees paid to the platform when listing a product and when selling a product, and the lack of privacy of users' data. In this paper, we propose an application that remedies all three of these drawbacks through use of the Ethereum blockchain platform. The application was developed using the Truffle development framework. The application's functions were contained within an Ethereum smart contract, which was then migrated to the Ethereum network. The user's input was read through a web interface and sent to the Ethereum network via the web3.js API. Statistics about the application were gathered on the Rinkeby test network. The application was shown to have an average transaction runtime of 3.8 seconds, and an average gas consumption of 4.6 wei. Contract creation times for the application were shown to be less than a second. A cost analysis of the application was then conducted. The gas consumption of the transactions needed to both buy and sell a product was converted into US dollars, and the gas cost of the application was then compared to the cost to use an online auction marketplace such as eBay as well as an in-person auction house such as Sotheby's. The results showed that selling on the application is cheaper than existing online options as well as existing in-person options. These tests showed that our application was successful in addressing the drawbacks of current auction marketplaces.
The sentiment in Twitter about Bitcoin have direct or indirect influence on overall market value of the Bitcoin. This research is concerned with predicting the volatile price of Bitcoin by analyzing the sentiment in Twitter and to find the relation between them. The tweets of Bitcoin collected from different news account sources are classified to positive or negative sentiments. The obtained percentage of positive and negative tweets are feed to RNN model along with historical price to predict the new price for next time frame. The accuracy for sentiment classification of tweets in two class positive and negative is found to be 81.39 % and the overall price prediction accuracy using RNN is found to be 77.62%.
Sananda Mitra, Sumanta Bose, Sourav Sen Gupta, Anupam Chattopadhyay
The phases those turn the wheels of an autonomous vehicle, are perception, decision and actuation. Among these, the major highlight of recent research has been perception through diverse sensors, and decision through an ever-aggressive cloud/fog/mist computing setup. In this paper, we take a closer look into the flow of data, both internal and external to the autonomous vehicle. We argue that confidentiality, integrity and availability of these data are critical to the eventual adoption of higher-level security and privacy mechanisms in autonomous vehicles. To that effect, we propose a secure and tamper-resilient distributed ledger as an underlying enabler for intra-vehicular data aggregation, and study its security and privacy issues under appropriate adversarial models, where the distributed ledger is instantiated as a standard consortium blockchain.
Astrid Nieรe, Norman Ihle, Stephan Balduin, Matthias Postina ยท 6 authors
Congestion management in distribution grids is an important task for distribution grid operators, both from a financial and a technological perspective. Whereas large generation units and large controllable loads might in general be controllable in a manual way, this is no option for small distributed generators and loads. With flexibility control in multiple owner scenarios, documentation, transparency and automation are of crucial importance. In this work, we present a fully automated congestion management approach based on a combination of distributed ledger technology and distributed algorithms in an agent-based architectural approach. We present a case study focused on the visualization of the concept and discuss the advantages and possible challenges for this approach. Whereas distributed ledger technology has been introduced for peer-to-peer energy trading within the last years, no similar approach has been presented yet for stable distribution grid management.
Blockchain, as a decentralized ledger technology with characteristics of transparent, secure, permanent and immutable, has been applied in many fields such as cryptocurrency, equity financing, and corporate governance. However, the blockchain technology is in the experimental stage and has several problems to be solved including limited data processing capacity, information confidentiality, and regulatory difficulties. This study sheds light on the potential application of blockchain technology in financial accounting and its possible impacts. We argue that in the short run the public blockchain could be used as a platform for firms to voluntarily disclose information. In the long run, the application could effectively reduce errors in disclosure and earnings management, increase the quality of accounting information and mitigate information asymmetry. We also discuss potential impacts that the application will have on independent auditors and financial accountants. ยฉ 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The blockchain is the distributed ledger technology, and the unchangeability is the main feature. However, the scalability is hindered to satisfy the characteristic. Nowadays, there are more and more attempts to put many applications on block-chains, but there are problems in actual use, for example, the low number of processing transactions per second (tps). Since solving these problems can increase the performance of the blockchain and reduce the cost, to solve them is one of the most important issues in the blockchain; And it is called the scalability issue. In this paper, we analyze methods that various attempts to solve it into following categories: On-chain, Off-chain, Side-chain, Child-chain and Inter-chain. We will analyze how these methods in each category work, what their pros and cons are, and finally compare which scalability issue has been resolved and their own features.
Blockchains are tamper evident and tamper resistant digital ledgers implemented in a distributed fashion (i.e., without a central repository) and usually without a central authority (i.e., a bank, company, or government). At their basic level, they enable a community of users to record transactions in a shared ledger within that community, such that under normal operation of the blockchain network no transaction can be changed once published. This document provides a high-level technical overview of blockchain technology. The purpose is to help readers understand how blockchain technology works.
The proliferation of web applications has essentially transformed modern browsers into small but powerful operating systems. Upon visiting a website, user devices run implicitly trusted script code, the execution of which is confined within the browser to prevent any interference with the user's system. Recent JavaScript APIs, however, provide advanced capabilities that not only enable feature-rich web applications, but also allow attackers to perform malicious operations despite the confined nature of JavaScript code execution. In this paper, we demonstrate the powerful capabilities that modern browser APIs provide to attackers by presenting MarioNet: a framework that allows a remote malicious entity to control a visitor's browser and abuse its resources for unwanted computation or harmful operations, such as cryptocurrency mining, password-cracking, and DDoS. MarioNet relies solely on already available HTML5 APIs, without requiring the installation of any additional software. In contrast to previous browser-based botnets, the persistence and stealthiness characteristics of MarioNet allow the malicious computations to continue in the background of the browser even after the user closes the window or tab of the initial malicious website. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a prototype system, MarioNet, that is compatible with all major browsers, and discuss potential defense strategies to counter the threat of such persistent in-browser attacks. Our main goal is to raise awareness regarding this new class of attacks, and inform the design of future browser APIs so that they provide a more secure client-side environment for web applications.
Blockchain technology is growing everyday at a fast-passed rhythm and it is possible to integrate it with many systems, namely Robotics with AI services. However, this is still a recent field and there is not yet a clear understanding of what it could potentially become. In this paper, we conduct an overview of many different methods and platforms that try to leverage the power of blockchains into robotic systems, to improve AI services, or to solve problems that are present in the major blockchains, which can lead to the ability of creating robotic systems with increased capabilities and security. We present an overview, discuss the methods, and conclude the paper with our view on the future of the integration of these technologies.
Marcel C. Ugwu, Izunna Okpala, Collins I. Oham, Cosmas Ifeanyi Nwakanma
In this paper, we present a tiered vehicular forensics framework based on permission BlockChain. We integrate all entities involved in the forensics process and record their interactions in the BlockChain to generate comprehensive evidence for settling disputes and appropriating blame. We incorporate a watchdog entity in our tiered framework to prevent collusive tendencies of potentiality liable entities and to prevent exploitation of evidence. Also, we incorporate a state mechanism to prove the state of a smart vehicle when an accident occurs. Furthermore, we conduct a security analysis to demonstrate the resilience of our framework against identified attacks and describe security mechanisms used to achieve key requirements for vehicular forensics. Finally, we comparatively evaluate our framework against existing proposals.