Blockchain Papers

Onishi Hirofumi

VANET (Vehicle Ad-hoc Network, i.e., V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communication) with short communication latency and not needing an infrastructure could play important roles in future road safety, to implement crash warning applications. VANET could be useful for awareness of vehicles in drivers' blind spots in situations that cannot be detected by cameras or radars. However, VANET has additional security difficulties to detect and exclude vehicles that are malicious nodes from the network, besides wireless communication's inherent security vulnerabilities, such as jamming, eavesdropping, and tampering, because nodes are communicating with each other directly and not through a base station or a server. On the other hand, DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) typified by blockchain is planned to take important roles even in the auto industry, for example, to record/control the information of a huge number of components or maintenance/inspection histories. However, these technologies still have technical limitations to cover time sensitive safety-related applications provided by VANET. Hence, this report first introduces VANET and its security risks, then addresses blockchain's opportunities in the automotive industry. Finally, this report concludes by discussing technical challenges on blockchain to be applied for VANET, for example, the consensus process to create a new block and 51% issue.

Jan Verwoert

Previous articleNext article FreeFake FateJan VerwoertJan Verwoert Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreCourtesy of the author.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint1. Plenty of games are played to fake fate. There is little innocence in them. Pick a daisy and pluck its petals, one by one, as you say to yourself “He loves me, he loves me not,” Catch a fly and pluck its wings, one by one. What do you think you’re doing? To the flower, the fly, and yourself? You seal their fate while you play with the idea of what yours may be. Is your love life at the mercy of divine forces, or do you command them yourself? Are you crushed or elated by the petal count, or titillated by the rush of power that comes with making the insect die? Does it even make a difference whether you suffer or act? For the flower and fly, you’re the killer either way, and what does the daisy care about how you interpret the outcome of ripping it apart. It ceases to exist, regardless. What is it with the sadism at work in these games, irrespective of whether you play fate or toy with the sense of being at its mercy? Either way you have a little jab at the violence of existence, you get a purchase on the pull of irreversible events, of endings that will feel inevitable from the moment you start plucking. You tap into (what may strike you as) the original cruelty of life, and feel its force at your fingertips. Shudder.All the while, of course, you know fully well that you’re faking fate. Neither will the daisy decide on whether you get lucky, nor does killing a fly make you God. Better knowledge, however, doesn’t spoil the game. On the contrary, it heightens the pleasure derived from it. Je sais bien, mais quand même… [I know fully well, but nevertheless…] is not just a formula for the weakness of the will that lets you surrender to the fatal attraction of games and addictions your better self would forbid you to dabble in. No, that French phrase also is a veritable battle cry, as triumphant as they come: “Ha! Watch me pull it off!” Petals and wings for starters. Licking frozen metal poles for the more advanced. I’m 50 percent Catholic, so I know the joy of being a cheat and faking a deal with God on having the cake, because it excites me not to know if he watches or not, when I eat it anyway. But I’m 50 percent Protestant, too, and, that said, I would never be caught stealing. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t fake things. A hypocrite at heart, I will then simply invest all the intelligence my mind can muster into mounting resolute defenses: “Cake absolutely had to be had and eaten. Wasn’t me. Couldn’t be. I’m the law. My lawyer has the facts. Get back to him on it!”The kick the cheater in me gets from faking a law only to break it, the hypocrite derives from the strength found in steadfast denials of faking or breaking anything. Try me, I could keep on going till the break of dawn, building ever more elaborate theories on my constitutive inability to ever hurt a fly or fool around with flowers. The knowledge that I’m faking it will just add fire to the flame. It’s how you make a radical: Get me in a place of objective untruth and I will put unlimited pressure on myself to sustain the lie for as long as it takes to cross the river of no return, at which point, the path taken will, as inescapably as irreversibly, have become fateful. I know, I’d also prefer to sneak away and eat the cake with the cheater in me. Unfortunately, the other side beckons me to remain consequential and finish this thought, come what may.2. Are there games that lack the cruelty of faking fate? I don’t know, but maybe there are dances. Most games thrive on the thrill of partaking in the fateful ways a then irreversible ending is brought about. The dice are cast. Les jeux sont faites. Rien ne va plus. Dances are different. They don’t want to end, they want to be saved, even and especially if they should be the last one, for the night, there will be more coming, for the continuation of the dance is not just up to the players; rhythm itself is the dancer, and the beat goes on, like life does, because things go in cycles.Some of the most attractive dances indeed could be said to derive their power to draw you into their roundelay from the way they, too, magnetize the fundamental ambiguities of life. The perpetual flicker of the Love me/Love me not might be seen to render them irresistible too: On a beach in Calabria (technically the Southernmost tip of Italy, effectively its very own thing), I recall being pulled to my feet and amicably coerced into joining a Tarantella dance. The age-old tune, played on a fiddle, lute, and flute swayed back and forth between two harmonies only, like a pendulum in perpetual swing, GGDDGGDDGGDDGGDDGG…. The lyrics, my partner translated to me while dancing, matched the cycle of eternal return: “…met someone and we were very happy until we got married and it got horrible so I ran away and met someone and we were very happy until we got married…(and so on, till you drop)…”. For a moment still, I heard the voice of my better self scream in panic from the back of my head: “Achtung Achtung, alarm, watch out, it’s a pattern, break the habit, get help, see an analyst, at least change chords, take it to the bridge, any bridge, anywhere other than back to the start…” A moment later I lost my sandals, gave into my fate, went with the flow, and had a great night. The crazy thing about the Tarantella was how they played it, as if the tune was laughing out loud every time it looped back onto itself. The flute player briefly drew breath, only to plunge back into the rolling waves of the music with renewed zest: “Shall we do it again? Deep breath, hell yes!”Afterwards I learned that what makes the Tarantella a dance of life, in the most literal (and magical) sense of the word is the homeopathic, socio-medicinal role it originally played. When a woman in a village was bitten by a Tarantula, while working in the fields, she would need to dance the Tarantella all day and night, till the spider’s poison left her body, and the whole village would join the dance. To fathom which Tarantella did the magic, the flutist needed to try different tunes, in search of the one whose key clicked with the bite and emitted deep vibrations on the frequency needed for pulling out the poison. In the Middle Ages, Gary Tomlinson writes,1 the Tarantella was one of the very few cases in which the Vatican admitted defeat, granting exception from its monopoly on governing people’s fate, by officially acknowledging that the dancers of the South could do what licensed exorcists couldn’t: keep the community alive and dancing. Did anyone ever get bitten for real? Or did they fake the bite to start the rave? No way of checking. Who cares!3. It would be very tempting to oppose the dances of life to games of death. This is, if it wasn’t for the fact that dances and games have a lot, too much even, in common. Their attraction lies in the way they allow us to engage the fateful ambiguities of life. What does it mean to win or lose when, a winner today, may be a loser tomorrow, or it may as easily be the other way around? To keep on playing is the only way to know. Do you suffer love when you feel it, do you make love real when you act upon the feeling? What does the daisy tell you when, picking its petals, you pluck at your own heartstrings? What side of the divide between who eats and who gets eaten do you imagine yourself to be on when you slowly kill a fly to watch it die? What, if not both sides, that of the cruel God, and that of the struggling creature! Indeed, the sadism of these games does not so much lie merely in choosing to play killer of flowers and flies. It much rather resides in the player’s prerogative to entertain the possibility of switching sides, between suffering and acting. The player claims the privilege of enjoying an otherwise fatal alternative, as if it was ambivalent, that is, as if it was of no consequence, as if no one died in the game. The actuality of the flower’s and fly’s dismemberment raises the stakes, yet only insofar as it intensifies the virtuality of the sensation—of mild vertigo—which the players create for themselves. Love me/Love me not, Like/Dislike, Crush/Cling to life, Kill/Maim (as Grimes has it): Could be either, could be both—at the expense of whose body the game is played over.The virtual indifference between the fateful extremes of life creates a fast flat oscillation—Love me/Not, Kill/Maim—which the sadist player creates for their own entertainment. Perhaps this is the point where who counts as a player should be clarified. In sports, arts, and the circus, we relate to the athletes, actors, and artists as if they were the players of the game, when all who are not in the arena, on the pitch, on stage, or on view is considered the public. Any performer, athlete, or artist, however, who has felt what it means to be at an audience’s mercy, can tell you that this distinction is as ridiculous as it is to call the mouse the player, and not the cat. Considering the cruelty of the game, existentially speaking, there is only ever one player, namely the audience, treated to the prerogative of playing at being both and either: in the winner’s or the loser’s shoes, lover or unloved, barely alive or still kicking…. Those who perform for the player put their body at stake—they are closer to the ball than the score—for their fate to be decided, in the eyes of those who watch the game (play or show) unravel.Blaming the internet is for prematurely aged cultural pessimists, I know. Nevertheless it’s hard to deny that this medium has played a big part in turning more and more people into players, appealing to, fostering even that certain sense of cursory sadism in audiences. The “fourth wall” that used to protect theater-goers from the admission that what happened on stage did not just do so for their entertainment, this symbolic barrier of thin air has now become a solid screen. Safely separated from the fates whose twists I contemplate, why would I not feel like little Caesar, equipped with exhilarating powers—thumbs up/click/thumbs down/click—as, before me, the spectacle unfolds of on-screen gladiators fighting out between them who shall live to face my fateful judgement: “You’re fired/You shall live (to see the next episode).” A cable TV president for a troll nation of online Caesars needs gladiators to stay behind glass and readily offer their petals and wings up to be picked: winners, losers, losers, winners, lovers, haters, clicks prevail…. So it sends out deep vibrations, shaking the very foundations of cursory Caesar culture when performers signal that, if they are to put their body at stake in the game, their fate is not confined to the virtual realm of the public’s entertainment, but connected to the actualities of death on the streets.4. For cursory Caesars to get their kicks it’s imperative to be shielded from the fates they judge by the screen they gaze at. For dancers there is little joy to be had, unless their body actually enters into the dance. Flat oscillations generated for the judges’ entertainment occur around a skewed vertical axis, that is the dividing line between options: Like/Dislike, Love me/Not, Kill/Maim. Deep vibrations, however, travel across horizontal planes. Here I don’t only mean earth-shaking bass, but layers upon layers of sound, color, motion, memory, and meaning rubbing up against one another, quivering from within.Let’s take a tune that got major parts of the global population dancing: Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” The euphoria that this song irresistibly induces—the way it makes you want to get up and live—I believe, has all to do with how it layers feelings and thereby makes the strata of existence deeply vibrate: Pharrell lays joy and pain on top of each other. How? The song is set in a minor key, yet to an upbeat rhythm with ample swing. Try playing it without that beat (better don’t) and the mournful tone inscribed in the minor will weigh the tune down (as many covers on YouTube show). But there’s still more going on. Pharrell gives a fair warning in the first verse: “It may sound crazy what I’m gonna say” Say what? Here comes the chorus “Clap along, if you feel like a room without a roof.” A WHAT? A ruin? A mind blown? As the lyrics set the brain reeling, the music touches the soul in a most ambivalent way: The harmony that opens the chorus literally layers a minor chord on top of a major chord. You hear the higher notes ring out in the song’s root key, a mellow soulful F minor.2 At the same time, the bass drops to C sharp which makes it feel like you actually also hear a bold C sharp major 7 chord, heading downward and onward, in pursuit of resolution.As, pushing up against each other, the layered chords of minor and major create a vibration between moods, modes, or attitudes, their ambiguity stretches the muscles of the heart like a chest expander. The major seventh note rises up against the higher octave, as if indeed to punch a hole through the roof, while the descent of the bass drops the center of gravity below the root note: Not only does this room do without a roof, its floor, too, suddenly gives way. As kids, I remember, we were once riding our bikes across a field. Lost in talking about music, no one saw the overgrown irrigation ditch ahead. But we certainly felt it, as the bikes went in, and got pulled out away under us, while we went on up, skyward, until we hit the grass beyond the ditch, laughing like crazy. If I was to try and say what happiness feels like to me, I’d probably gesture to this sense of elation, of being hurled out into space, between strata, earth pulling away below, heavens stretching out above. It’s what the opening harmony (and lyrics) of the chorus of “Happy,” I would say, by virtue of being ambiguously layered and alive with the power to make the soul’s strata vibrate.5. Power politics need people to partake in the presence of power, if only phantasmatically, to gain a semblance of credibility, yet on an existential level. It’s what gladiator games were always for: making people think that, with the turn of their thumb, they partake in the cursory choice over Death/Life, Kill/Maim which power graciously concedes to them. For people to feel like they have stakes in the way power works, even and especially when it actually works against them, an even more cruel game is needed: the sovereign himself needs to offer himself up as a performer for the audience to (play at) judging his fate. The axis of flat oscillation is his persona, a skewed vertical axis, around which a whirlwind of contradictory opinions can arise. Anyone who passes judgement, can thereby get the exhilarating sense of getting a direct purchase on the fundamental contradictions of fate, which they would otherwise be at the mercy of: Who’s a winner, who a loser, who’s for real, who a con? These are existential questions when survival is about the money. Now the sovereign performs for the population of cursory Caesars: Is he a winner? Look at his power and riches! A loser? Look at his marriage, where’s proof of the riches? Is it not all debt? King or freak? One of ours or of theirs? Donald or Pepe? Fascist or just a frown? Real as his Twitter account says? Or fake like the hair and tan, of a show and dance man, hopping round the fire shouting his secret name “Fake News, Fake this, Fake that, Fakelstiltskin, Don Pepe, here I am.” The oscillation couldn’t be faster and flatter. The silicon mask of power and money comes on and off, in one pull.In his incredible account of the postcolonial grotesque, Achille Mbembe has analyzed precisely this brand of performance as the cruel game of fake fate, by means of which leaders secure a semblance of legitimacy when their illegitimacy is obvious.3 The carnival dictator, Mbembe argues, foregrounds the fact that, not just his, but power as such, is a cruel joke, a joke, however, that no one can stop themselves from telling, hence spreading—or a luscious parade, you cannot not attend, because it would be stupid to abstain when the clowns comes to town. Cynicism seals its own fate. By the time everyone has laughed about the fact that their leader is a joke, they have thereby consented to the fate of being led by a joker, and that power is but a silly feast one must nevertheless celebrate. Call it the self-sealing fate of the big media grotesque: It is as inescapable to have opinions on the current U.S. president as it is to listen to Mariah Carey over Christmas.But I have no business here bad-mouthing Carey. On the contrary, I think she can help. Around last Christmas, I was on a writing retreat in a Dutch forest. It started snowing, and for one participant, coming from the Tropics, it was the first snow ever. Life vibrated, out came laughter and tears. “Quick, someone put on some Carey!” a second participant, from the Gulf, shouted, and, sure enough “All I want for Christmas…” rang out, giving laughs and tears a touch of the “festive,” as the diva herself would say. Neither did the song fake any feelings, nor did it make the flakes any more real. It just helped camp things up for an instant, in the absence of ceremonial protocols for what to do when experiencing first snow in a lifetime.Think about it, what do most ceremonies that commemorate turning points in life, like weddings and funerals, have in common? When feelings are so strong, that no form of expression could be considered “proper,” those forms that do channel a sense of the deeply fateful, tend to inescapably be, for better or worse, as camp as Christmas. I don’t think it’s a modern thing only. When the Greeks put on masks to enact fate on stage, they knew that it would make the Gods sob and giggle. I forgot to mention that disco divinities like Nile Rodgers do what Pharrell did in the chorus to “Happy” the moment their fingers touch the fretboard4: throw things open, in harmonies that vibrate with fateful ambiguity, not to confirm the cynic’s belief that life is but a joke, no, but to embrace the powerful sense that, as we have no way of knowing what will come, true love of fate, as Nietzsche insinuated, may express itself in the form of a certain exuberance, that is, in the key of a heartfelt dedication to life’s unfathomable openness, as he put it, the great perhaps.Courtesy of the author.View Large ImageDownload PowerPoint Notes 1. Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).2. Here I should say that the root key of the song itself is rather ambiguous. While the tune of the verse is set in F the opening chord of the is a the harmony which the chord of the chorus is a F which the of the tune back into F each time the chorus the precisely when the the word Achille On the University of Press, I for this in my Watch Nile Rodgers his way through a in in how he harmonies into the disco he Love is so existentially yet on point, it makes you want to with up and around with tears of in your Previous articleNext article by for the for and by The University of no articles this

Micael Ferreira, Sven Rodrigues, Catarina I. Reis, Marisa Maximiano

Bitcoin continues to get more and more attention from the media, mainly because of the volatility of its value and insignificantly associated with the technological innovation. This cryptocurrency is supported by an immutable database and is distributed throughout a network of thousands of nodes, known as Blockchain. One way to ensure that all the concepts behind the Blockchain technology and infrastructure are seized is to conduct the development of one of the most popular context applications for it: a wallet for well-known cryptocurrencies. Yet Another Bitcoin Wallet (YABW) is a hybrid application available for both Android and iOS, which was developed with the Ionic and Angular frameworks. This application communicates with Bitcoin Blockchain to send, receive and store bitcoins; provides a set of features focused on security and user experience, and is available on the Play Store and Apple Store. A rather relevant issue that is becoming a major subject of current research is the application of the Blockchain infrastructure to other contexts that are neither directly connected to cryptocurrencies, nor are finance related. The implementation of a proof-of-concept application proposes the use of a blockchain for a specific case study: the exchange of meal vouchers of an institution amongst students. This is achieved using the decentralized platform Ethereum, which allows us to create a Smart Contract using the Solidity programming language to create a token that follows the Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC), the ERC-20 standard and represents the meal vouchers. This second application uses the architecture defined for YABW, reusing major components and custom developing specific modules to enhance the required features. There is still a lot of research to be done on the non-financial applicability of the Blockchain infrastructure and technology, but for the moment, we have left further evidence that it is possible and is a relative straight-forward process to accomplish from the technological perspective.

Marianna Stehnei, Inna Irtysheva, O. Gurina

The aim of the article is to study the current state of financial provision of the social sphere of the Black Sea region and to develop practical recommendations for its optimization in conditions of decentralization processes. Methodology. We have made a generalization of the theoretical provisions of the financial mechanism of the social sphere of the region. We propose to investigate the financial mechanism of the social sphere of the Black Sea region by means of analysis of indicators of income and expenditure parts of the budget of regions of the Black Sea region. At the present stage of the gradual transformation of the socio-economic development of the regions and in the context of the implementation of the budget decentralization reform, a number of acute problems from the financial support of social development, the guarantee of social standards for the population, and the improvement of the quality of social services arose. The solution of these problems needs a substantial research in the direction of developing the best models for financing social development of the regions, which will promote the achievement of decent social standards and stimulate economic growth. The financial mechanism for providing social development of the Black Sea region is analysed, the current state of the regional budget in terms and trends in financing social expenditures of the region is identified. It is determined that despite the increase in tax revenues, local authorities still do not have sufficient financial resources to perform their functions and tasks. It adversely affects the development of social infrastructure, provision of social services, and does not contribute to the effective human development, which serves not only as the main goal but also as a key determinant of the economic development of the region. It is substantiated that in order to improve the situation in the social sphere of the region, it is necessary to improve the financial mechanism of social security. On the basis of the investigated scientific approaches, the concept of “mechanism of the financial provision of socially-oriented regional development” is clarified, directions of budget and extrabudgetary financing of social expenditures are substantiated, and proposals on the improvement of financial management of social sphere in the conditions of decentralization are developed. Results. To improve the system of financial provision of social development of the region, it was proposed to establish clear and transparent financial relations in the areas of income generation and distribution of regional budget expenditures at all levels, to create conditions for additional attraction of financial resources from extrabudgetary sources aimed at the implementation of regional social programs, and to form an effective system control over the functioning of the financial mechanism, primarily on the part of the territorial communities. Value/originality. The concept of the mechanism of the financial provision of socially-oriented regional development is generalized. An estimation of the social sphere of the Black Sea region is carried out on the basis of the analysis of indicators of income and expenditure parts of budgets of regions of the Black Sea region, the use of which allows determining the perspective directions of the social sphere of the Black Sea region.

Michael Cash, Mostafa Bassiouni

The rise of popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum has increased the popularity of blockchain technology, the framework these cryptocurrencies are built upon. The security and access control that blockchain technology has provided for cryptocurrencies has peaked the curiosity of other industries, realizing its potential value and future outlook. In this paper, we analyze two types of blockchains, permission-ed and permission-less, and introduce a two-tier blockchain concept utilizing both types for secure data sharing. We provide background on the consensus algorithms used for each blockchain type, Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Authority. Testing on both Mac OS and Ubuntu Linux-based system environments, preliminary results show that by increasing the number of miners in a Proof-of-Work consensus, there is a correlating increase in the total block count in a permission-less blockchain, where the rate of increase is dependent on the system environment. In the Proof-of-Authority permission-ed blockchain, the block count observed little to no change across both environments.

Ignacio Carlucho, Mariano De Paula, Sen Wang, Yvan Petillot · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Haerul Fatah, Agus Subekti

Uang elektronik menjadi pilihan yang mulai ramai digunakan oleh banyak orang, terutama para pengusaha, pebisnis dan investor, karena menganggap bahwa uang elektronik akan menggantikan uang fisik dimasa depan. Cryptocurrency muncul sebagai jawaban atas kendala uang eletronik yang sangat bergantung kepada pihak ketiga. Salah satu jenis Cryptocurrency yaitu Bitcoin. Analogi keuangan Bitcoin sama dengan analogi pasar saham, yakni fluktuasi harga tidak tentu setiap detik. Tujuan dari penelitian yang dilakukan yaitu melakukan prediksi harga Cryptocurrency dengan menggunakan metode KNN (K-Nearest Neighbours). Hasil dari penelitian ini diketahui bahwa model KNN yang paling baik dalam memprediksi harga Cryptocurrency adalah KNN dengan parameter nilai K=3 dan Nearest Neighbour Search Algorithm : Linear NN Search. Dengan nilai Mean Absolute Error (MAE) sebesar 0.0018 dan Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) sebesar 0.0089.

Fredrik Blom, Hossein Farahmand

Local energy markets could play a very important role in future electric power systems, allowing small electricity producers/consumers to trade within a small geographical area. In this context, an important challenge to allow the proper operation of a local energy market is to devise efficient and economic computational platforms in charge of data storage, data communication, and any other relevant computational requirements. Fortunately, the recent developments in blockchain-based mechanisms open up promising approaches that can support the effective management of local energy markets. In fact, blockchain technology allows, in particular, to carry out decentralised payments without involving a third party in charge of keeping track of the trades performed, which can potentially simplify and enhance the management of a local energy market significantly. Motivated by this, this paper will study the use of the blockchainbased Ethereum platform as the computational support for a local energy market. Specifically, this paper addresses the scalability of this platform in terms of number of participants in the local energy market, and in terms of trading frequency. With this purpose, computer simulations are carried out for a market that consists of day-ahead trading and real-time trading. The day-ahead mechanism trades energy quantities in such a way that flexible demand can be shifted to balance inflexible supply, and the real-time mechanism trades energy in such a way that flexible loads cover deviations from the day-ahead settlement. The results illustrate that the Ethereum platform is sufficiently scalable, allowing to manage a local energy market with a large number of participants and a high trading frequency.

George Markowsky, Олег Савенко, Anatoliy Sachenko

The paper proposes the architecture of distributed multilevel detection system of malicious software in local area networks. Its feature is the synthesis of its requirements of distribution, decentralization, multilevel. This allows you to use it autonomously. In addition, the feature of autonomous program modules of the system is the same organization, which allows the exchange of knowledge in the middle of the system, which, unlike the known systems, allows you to use the knowledge gained by separate parts of the system in other parts. The developed system allows to fill it with subsystems of detection of various types of malicious software in local area networks.

Subhasis Thakur, Barry Hayes, John G. Breslin

In this paper we use the blockchain technology to develop a peer to peer energy trade platform without a trusted third party. Our main contribution is a novel distributed double auction mechanism which allows any peer to act as an auctioneer and the blockchain mechanism ensures that a peer behaves lawfully while acting as an auctioneer. Using experimental evaluation we show that (1) the distributed auction converges quickly, (2) it minimizes energy loss due to long transmission, (3) computational overhead due to employing a blockchain is negligible, (4) it is efficient and (5) it can implement trade restrictions imposed by the energy distribution network.

Raphael Vicente Rosa, Christian Esteve Rothenberg

Evolving networking scenarios include multi-administrative domain network services as drivers of novel business opportunities along with emerging operational challenges. As a potential approach to tackle upcoming requirements providing basic primitives to encompass analytics, automation, and distributed orchestration, we investigate blockchain-based decentralized applications (DApps) in the context of operational phases in support of multi-administrative domain networking. We present and discuss a generalized framework for multi-domain service orchestration using blockchain-based DApps and then showcase proof-of-concept prototype experiments based on best of breed open source components that demonstrate DApp functionalities as candidate enablers of multi-domain network services. We then analyze three use case scenarios pursued by ongoing work at standards development organizations, namely MEF, 3GPP, and ETSI NFV, discussing standardization opportunities around blockchain-based DApps.

Sandro Amofa, Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, Kwame Opuni-Boachie Obour Agyekum, Abla Smahi · 7 authors

Health information exchanges have been popular for some time with their advantages known and widely researched. In spite of their utility in increasing provider efficiency and decreasing administrative costs, one challenge that has persisted is the data owners inability to control data after transmission. The lack of technical mechanisms to effectively control patients' health data in the network significantly affects participation of health and medical institutions while perpetrating the silo-based data management that locks value and potential inherent in the data. This not only affects researchers due to the lack of data for research and analysis but the quality of life of patients.We present a blockchain-supported architectural framework for secure control of personal data in a health information exchange by pairing user-generated acceptable use policies with smart contracts. We highlight the merits of our system, its user-centric focus and also show experimental results along with directions for extending our work. The framework introduces minimal risk to data by architecting a mechanism for controlling data after sharing. In adopting our framework, health service providers can deliver a stronger assurance for data management than is possible with current systems.

Rafael Brundo Uriarte, Rocco De Nicola

Smart contracts and blockchain have the potential to change the current shape of cloud markets by enabling the development of completely decentralized cloud/fog solutions, which lower costs and enforce predictable results without requiring any intermediary. In this article, we survey three of these solutions, namely Golem, iExec, and SONM, compare them, and identify some of the problems they leave unsolved. Moreover, we consider existing standards for the development of interoperable decentralized cloud solutions that would allow such systems to compete with large providers and would prevent vendor lock-in. We believe that our study contributes to the evolution of cloud systems not only by pointing out incompatibilities among projects and possible solutions for research problems in the area, but also by reviewing the existing standards and suggesting new standardization opportunities.

Masoud Rezaei, Alireza Boushehri, Naser Bagheri Moghaddam

Using a variety of solar power plants is one of the solutions governments use to respond to energy and sustainable development needs. While Iran has a strong potential for using solar energy, the application of solar energy, especially through PV technology, has been limited due to the country’s richness of fossil fuels and their low prices. Therefore, it is important to adopt effective strategies and policies to promote the development and application of this technology. The purpose of this study is to identify factors affecting the use of photovoltaic technology in Iran. To this end, 142 factors were first identified through a comprehensive review of the literature. Then, all of these factors were prioritized and categorized by “semi-structured interview” with 15 energy policy experts. The “content analysis” of the experts’ opinions showed that only 59 of these factors were considered important at the sectorial level for Iran. Based on the same content analysis, a conceptual framework for the application of decentralized photovoltaic power plants in Iran was developed. The framework shows that 10 generic categories of factors should be considered by policy-makers at the solar energy sector to promote PV technology application in Iran. They include policy factors, institutional factors, finance and budgeting factors, system economy factors, macroeconomic factors, socio-cultural factors, human resource factors, factors influencing capabilities of industries, technological and related infrastructural factors, geographical, climatic and environmental factors, and foreign political factors. It is also emphasized that all these categories should be considered at three levels: industry (electricity industry) level, national level, and international level. Thus, renewable energy policy-makers in Iran should take into account all means that influence these factors in order to improve the conditions for decentralized photovoltaic technology application.

Marko Hölbl, Aida Kamišalić, Muhamed Turkanović, Marko Kompara · 6 authors

Blockchain technology enables the creation of a decentralized and distributed environment in which transactions and data are not controlled by a central authority. Simultaneously transactions are secure, ubiquitous and trustworthy due to the used cryptographic principles. In this paper, we present a global decentralized blockchain-based platform and ecosystem called EduCTX. The platform enables managing, assigning and presenting credentials for individuals and educational institutions as well as other potential stakeholders such as companies, institutions and organizations. Further it enables the development of own digital services, which offers organizations the opportunity to automate the evaluation of individuals' skills and knowledge. The EduCTX platform is implemented on the blockchain platform Ethereum on a consortium-based network of Ethereum run nodes. The platform enables a globally efficient, simplified and ubiquitous environment to avoid language and administrative barriers.

N. Jones

No abstract is available for this record.

Guozhen Zhang, Tong Li, Yong Li, Pan Hui · 5 authors

The explosive development of mobile communications and networking has led to the creation of an extremely complex system, which is difficult to manage. Hence, we propose an AI-powered network framework that uses AI technologies to operate the network automatically. However, due to the separation between different mobile network operators, data barriers between diverse operators become bottlenecks to exploit the full power of AI. In this paper, we establish a mutual trust data sharing framework to break these data barriers. The framework is based on the distributed and temper-proof attributes of blockchain. We implement a prototype based on Hyperledger Fabric. The proposed system combines supervision and fine-grained data access control based on smart contracts, which provides a secure and trustless environment for data sharing. We further compare our system with existing data sharing schemes, and we find that our system provides a better functionality.

Enis Karaarslan, Eylül Adıgüzel

Domain name systems and certificate authority systems may have security and trust problems in their implementation. This article summarizes how these systems work and what the implementation problems may be. There are blockchain-based decentralized solutions that claim to overcome those problems. We provide a brief explanation on how blockchain systems work, and their strengths are explained. DNS security challenges are given. Blockchain-based DNS solutions are classified and described in detail according to their services. The advantages and feasibility of these implementations are discussed. Last but not least, the possibility of the decentralized Internet is questioned.

Abhishek Srivastava, Pronaya Bhattacharya, Arunendra Singh, Atul Mathur · 6 authors

Blockchain is an immutable and shared database of time–stamped transactions that supports decentralization and strong consistency support over many authoritative domains where trust is a major factor. The above advantage of Blockchain makes it potentially suitable for a diverse set of applications in many sectors like healthcare, education and finance. In this paper, we propose a globally trusted blockchain based educational framework among various stakeholders like universities, companies and other higher educational institutions that agree to collaborate as a part of the framework. This framework aids to verify academic certificates and course credits of a student registered in a university which can be digitally transferred among the stakeholders. This ensures a global view of a student’s performance by achieving consistency among the local copies of educational certificates and credits. The proposed framework will assign tokens on successful completion of courses as credits of registered students in various universities. The transferred credits will act as transactions mined as blocks and added to longest chain. It will work in a homogeneous environment where all stakeholders collaborate irrespective of the hurdles of legal and administrative policies.

Chengjun Cai, Huayi Duan, Cong Wang

Beyond cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies have shown great potential in enabling a wealth of decentralized applications (DApps), including but not limited to trustworthy auction, election, autonomous organization. While public blockchains are well recognized to allow participants mutually unbeknownst to achieve consensus, financial/business organizations also find great interest in consortium blockchains for better organizational collaborations. We will touch both types of blockchain and corresponding applications in this tutorial. In particular, we will summarize existing blockchain technologies and applications, elaborate the principles of designing and implementing secure DApps, and analyze the security concerns therein. Through concrete examples, we will discuss common practices and pitfalls, such as on-chain/off-chain interaction, randomness generation, and various corner cases. If time permits, we will also go through the implementation of the cloud-based blockchain backbone that powers this tutorial, possibly covering a layered architecture, and discuss deployment choices and security issues along the way. The tutorial will be interspersed with revisiting the security and implementation rules, so that participants are expected to readily apply the tutorial content into real-world practice. The design principles elaborated in this tutorial will be transferable to participants' development of secure and trustworthy blockchain applications and systems in their own workplaces.

Prasanna Karthik Vairam, Gargi Mitra, Chester Rebeiro, Byrav Ramamurthy · 5 authors

Blockchains are known to provide verifiable tamper-resistant trails of accepted transactions. This guarantee comes at the considerable cost of storage and computational power, thereby restricting its application. Current research has focused on alternatives such as proof of reputation, proof of stake, and proof of elapsed-time to reduce the computational burden on the blockchain participants. Orthogonal to this effort, we focus on a specific set of applications that cannot commit much storage space and computational resources, but require only reasonable guarantees on the validity of transactions. To this end, we introduce blockchain design alternatives, collectively called ApproxBC, that can provide proof of transactions with provable confidence bounds. Consequently, ApproxBC can considerably reduce the computation and storage resources required, making them suitable for resource-constrained Internet of Things environments. We also showcase two approximation-tolerant applications that can leverage the quicker computation and smaller storage requirements.

J. Gordon Lindsay

“One of the issues that arise when developing a crowdsourcing monitoring application is the fact that we rely on the measurements taken by the users, but, how to engage users to use this application and provide observations?” 1.

Vimal Dwivedi, Alex Norta

Smart contracts play an advent role in automated business participation by rendering collaboration processes more time-efficient, cost-effective and establishing more transparency. Smart contracts facilitate trust-less systems, without the need for intervention from third-party intermediaries. Existing smart-contract languages mainly focus on technical utility and do not take into consideration social and legally relevant issues, e.g., lack of semantics, ontological completeness, and so on. In this research, we address the gap by developing with rigorous means a smart contract's language that aims to be legally relevant, and that comprises socio-technical utility for cross-organizational business collaboration. The proposed language seeks to retain the strengths of the already existing languages of different generations while eluding their limitations. We aim to identify and implement abstract grammar patterns for a smart-contract language that has the expected application utility and verifiability. We evaluate the developed language based on automating industry-collaboration cases with our novel smart-contract language to test the suitability, utility, and expressiveness.

David López, Bilal Farooq

A blockchain framework is presented for addressing the privacy and security challenges associated with the Big Data in smart mobility. It is composed of individuals, companies, government and universities where all the participants collect, own, and control their data. Each participant shares their encrypted data to the blockchain network and can make information transactions with other participants as long as both party agrees to the transaction rules (smart contract) issued by the owner of the data. Data ownership, transparency, auditability and access control are the core principles of the proposed blockchain for smart mobility Big Data.