This paper examines how circular economics addresses and uses smart technology, and demonstrates the lack of consideration given to ownership issues in such contexts. The extent to which circular economic ideals require controlling goods down-stream will be exposed. Following this is an analysis of the ramifications of smart technology, illustrated with recent examples of control through smart technology. This leads to a critique of the US Supreme Court’s recent decision on patent exhaustion Impression Products v Lexmark alongside the CJEU’s decision in UsedSoft on copyright, addressing implications for contracting practices. The article concludes by urging close comparison of claimed benefits arising from circular economic approaches to smart technology with the potential costs of control (or lack thereof) of novel technologies.
The Holy Quran is the fundamental Islamic scripture revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him) for the past 1400 years. In today’s Internet, there exist online sources which provide incomplete or false Quranic text which may either be published deliberately or unintentionally. The research investigates the possibility of developing a digital trust framework that secures the integrity of the Quranic text using blockchain technology. The research uses blockchain technology as the emerging secured distributed ledger to establish digital trust. The Ethereum blockchain platform was used to validate the proposed framework. The proposed digital trust framework was developed in a three-level architecture consisting of participants, digital trust and Quranic text. The key components of the proposed framework were found useful in Ethereum blockchain platform for effective use in distributed ledger, distributed consensus, smart contract, decentralized application development and cryptographic algorithms for database encryption and user authentication in Whisper, Swarm and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The findings show the effectiveness, efficiency and usability of the proposed digital trust framework on the Ethereum blockchain platform and demonstrate how user of Quran and blockchain miner interact with the system to verify and validate Quranic content. The research has recommended the use of blockchain technology to secure the integrity of the Quranic text. The work facilitates the protection of the Quranic text as well as proving a mean to verify the authenticity of the Quranic content.
By transforming the Zeta function into a real function through Laplace inverse transformation, an algebraic research paradigm for prime number distribution was established, and important results were obtained (page 10). This method has received positive feedback from Sir Atiyah (see page 14 for details) and demonstrates significant potential for applications in the field of cryptography and blockchain. Core breakthrough: Revealing the essence of Zeta function, replacing complex analysis with convolutional algebra, making the proof path of Riemann hypothesis clear, concise, and computable.
Objective: to consider the features of centralized and decentralized monetary systems development and to identify the necessary conditions for the transition of the national economy to decentralized network platforms operating within the distributed ledger technology, public and private digital currencies.Methods: a systemic approach to the cognition of economic phenomena, enabling to study them in dynamic development, taking into account the influence of various environmental factors. The systemic approach determined the choice of specific research methods: empirical, historical, logical, comparative and statistical.Results: the article considers different approaches to the organization of money issue. It is shown that the era of the centralized monetary system, based on the issue of Central banks, has come to its end. The Central bank is the main link of the centralized monetary system, while in the context of 2008 financial crisis the functions of the Central Bank as the lender of last resort were significantly expanded by changing the paradigm of the monetary mechanism. It is established that the new monetary mechanism has become the main channel of money supply in the economy, while the main factors of the new monetary supply formation are the reserve money of Central banks, new Basel standards and high requirements for borrowers. This monetary policy and the centralization of the financial market have led to a distortion of the market pricing mechanism in the monetary market and to the disruption of competition in the financial intermediation market. The author analyzes the new trends in the emergence of a decentralized monetary system in the world economy based on public and private digital currencies issued by users of distribution computer networks. The article shows the mechanism and technology of crypto currency emission, which implies the use of public or private blockchain without any participation of the Central bank and other financial intermediation institutions.Scientific novelty: for the first time, the article shows that the era of centralized monetary system based on monopoly issue by Central banks, has come to its logical end; a decentralized monetary system is emerging in the world economy today, based on public and private issue of digital currency; in the course of legalization, growth of scalability, confidentiality, validation and tokenization of real assets, the crypto currencies will become a liquid and less volatile monetary asset.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used to clarify the target mandates, tools, channels and mechanisms of monetary policy of the Bank of Russia, capable of launching a decentralized crypto currency market, acting as a built-in stabilizer of financial sustainability and elastic regulation of trade and financial imbalances within the country and between countries.
Amaç: Kripto parabirimleri teknolojinin gelişmesiyle birlikte son yıllarda önem kazanmış ve dahaçok kullanılır hale gelmiştir. Merkezi bir otoriteye bağlı olmayan vekriptografik sistemler ile güvenliği sağlanan bu para birimlerinden en bilineniBitcoin’dir. Bu çalışmada, başlıca kripto para birimleri ve işleyiş süreçleriincelenmiştir. Buna ek olarak Bitcoin’in döviz, hisse senedi emtia piyasalarıve faiz ile olan ilişkisi ele alınmıştır. Yöntem: Çalışmadakullanılan veri setinin frekansı aylık olup Mart-2012 ile Mayıs-2018 döneminikapsamaktadır. Zaman serisi yöntemlerinden Johansen Eşbütünleşme ve GrangerNedensellik analizleri uygulanmıştır.Bulgular: Çalışmanınsonuçlarına göre, Bitcoin fiyatlarının artan bir trende ve yüksek birvolatiliteye sahip olduğu görülmektedir. Faiz değişkeni ile Bitcoin fiyatları arasında diğer analizler ve Grangernedensellik testi sonuçlarına göre istatistiksel olarak anlamlı bir ilişkivardır.
Este artigo elucida aspectos jurídicos e regulatórios do bitcoin (BTC) com objetivo de reduzir a insegurança jurídica em que se encontram as operações realizadas com a criptomoeda no Brasil. Essa pesquisa descritiva de cunho qualitativo e método dedutivo averigua, por meio do estudo da legislação e doutrinas pertinentes, a quais órgãos reguladores do Sistema Financeiro Nacional (SFN) as operações com o BTC estão submetidas. Para tanto, são introduzidas as funcionalidades, potencialidades e limitações do blockchain, tecnologia subjacente à criptomoeda. Após, são destacados aspectos relevantes do Sistema Financeiro Nacional. Em seguida, busca-se classificação conceitual jurídica adequada ao Bitcoin. Findas essas etapas, o trabalho sugere que, em razão da natureza jurídica do bitcoin como bem intangível, no atual aparato legal, não há previsão regulatória sobre o BTC, motivo pelo qual, no momento, operações com a moeda virtual não estão submetidas a qualquer órgão do SFN.
Purpose This paper aims to provide an overview of recent US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Division of Investment Management staff (“Staff”) guidance related to investment funds registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 that seeks to provide exposure to cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency-related products. Design/methodology/approach This paper provides analysis regarding the Staff’s view on registered investment companies that intend to invest in cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency-related products, including an overview of the questions posed by the Staff with respect to registered investment companies that seek to hold cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency-related products, which are divided into five categories: valuation, liquidity, custody, arbitrage (for exchange-traded funds) and potential manipulation and other risks. Findings The Staff is asking for additional information from industry participants to fully analyze and evaluate registered investment companies that seek to invest in cryptocurrencies. Practical implications The industry should continue to provide information to the Staff with the short-term goal of fostering an open dialogue and with the long-term goal of launching a registered investment company that invests in cryptocurrencies or cryptocurrency-related products. Originality/value This paper provides practical guidance from experienced lawyers of the Investment Company Act and Securities Act.
Currently, blockchain technology, which is decentralized and may provide tamper-resistance to recorded data, is experiencing exponential growth in industry and research. In this paper, we propose the MIStore, a blockchain-based medical insurance storage system. Due to blockchain's the property of tamper-resistance, MIStore may provide a high-credibility to users. In a basic instance of the system, there are a hospital, patient, insurance company and n servers. Specifically, the hospital performs a (t, n)-threshold MIStore protocol among the n servers. For the protocol, any node of the blockchain may join the protocol to be a server if the node and the hospital wish. Patient's spending data is stored by the hospital in the blockchain and is protected by the n servers. Any t servers may help the insurance company to obtain a sum of a part of the patient's spending data, which servers can perform homomorphic computations on. However, the n servers cannot learn anything from the patient's spending data, which recorded in the blockchain, forever as long as more than n - t servers are honest. Besides, because most of verifications are performed by record-nodes and all related data is stored at the blockchain, thus the insurance company, servers and the hospital only need small memory and CPU. Finally, we deploy the MIStore on the Ethererum blockchain and give the corresponding performance evaluation.
Most of the existing RFID based ownership transfer protocols are in need of TTP or require reader to reader communication in a centralized system. In the post supply chain, the products are to be tracked to prove their originality in a distributed environment. This paper aims to provide a verifiable ownership transfer of products attached with an RFID tag using blockchain technology to address various security requirements. The proposed protocol consists of two phases; in the first phase the buyer commits to buy the product and in the second phase actual ownership is transferred from the seller to the buyer. Analysis of the proposed protocol is carried out and it shows that our protocol is relatively better than the existing related schemes with respect to security requirements.
Personal data are often collected and processed in a decentralized fashion, within different contexts. For instance, with the emergence of distributed applications, several providers are used to correlate their records, to provide personalized services to their clients. As such, to protect users' privacy, different pseudonyms are generally used for different contexts. These pseudonyms have to be unlinkable to prevent identifying records to be associated to the same user. Although unlinkable, these pseudonyms have to be processed and exchanged according to their owners' consent and in a privacy-preserving fashion. In this paper, we propose BDUA, a new Blockchain-based Data Usage Auditing system, that ensures a controlled yet privacy preserving exchange of distributed data, such that a set of authorized auditing entities are able to conduct an accurate auditing relying on registered blockchains' transactions.
Blockchain as a new technology has created a great amount of hype and hope for different applications. There is a promise of a better, decentralised trust based on strict guarantees from cryptography. However, there is a great similarity in the structure of blockchains and classical iterated hash functions of the Merkle-Damgård (M-D) type. As the structure of M-D type hash functions has been extensively studied and many different structural weaknesses have been exposed, it is plausible to think that blockchains also share these structural problems. In this paper, we present the most relevant problems of M-D type hash functions and their relation to blockchains. We also examine how these might affect currently established blockchains. Our results can help in avoiding some problems in the design of new blockchain systems and also provide some (theoretical) limits on the trustworthiness of current blockchains.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The user can organize a social network together with other peoples, in the manner of the consortium blockchain, so that expected contents can be accessed via collecting pieces of data (sub-flows) from members. This promising mechanism heavily relies on the multipath data transmission to transfer sub-flows to the user over the social network. However, the performance differentiation and link overlapping of transmission paths between the user and members could result in severe traffic congestion and packet scrambling. To solve these problems, we design a novel SDN (Software-Defined Networking)-based framework because the global traffic engineering can perform more flexible flow transferring. Our SDN controller has three modules of topology discovery, sub-flow association and path selection. We quickly capture the social network from the most appropriate consortium blockchain where a set of paths with minimal link overlapping and performance differentiation can be found to transfer correlated sub-flows the user wants. The simulation results show that our solution achieves a higher network throughput compared with traditional methods while guaranteeing a low data retransmission rate.
Existing service ecosystems typically rely on some centralized service registries (e.g., ProgrammableWeb.com) as "middle people" to record service behaviors thus to provide service ranking and recommendation. Excessive centralization increasingly becomes the bottleneck and hinders the further growth of the service ecosystems. As the first attempt to apply the fundamental technique underneath the emerging Bitcoin network into the field of service oriented computing, this paper proposes to build a service ecosystem as a decentralized blockchain-oriented service network, called Decentralized Service Eco-System (DSES). Whenever any activity occurs in the system (e.g., APIs are used together in a published mashup), all involved parties will individually store and maintain a copy of the detailed record (provenance) at their local databases. Such a distributed database-oriented solution will enable services who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states. In this way, service discovery and recommendation can be realized in a distributed manner that promises higher scalability and maintainability. As a proof of concept, a prototyping system of DSES is constructed using the real-world data from ProgrammableWeb.com, based on the INKchain, a newly open-source consortium blockchain mechanism extending the Hyperledger Fabric.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The number of deployed Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been increasing rapidly, and security has become significantly important in IoT environments. However, security issues remain challenging due to constraints of IoT devices. One critical security issue is that attacks tamper the firmware of IoT devices. Once the firmware is tampered, it is difficult to notice and recover the tampered firmware. For the integrity of firmware, this paper proposes a new blockchain-based firmware verification system, called Chain Veri. We overcome vulnerabilities of previous studies such as fudging firmware verification. Furthermore, unlike previous studies that presented only the concepts and ideas, we implement Chain Veri from scratch and carry out performance evaluation on storage consumption and CPU cycles to run Chain Veri on IoT device. Our results show that only 1.2MB of storage is used to verify 2,845 devices. Also, 1,692 CPU cycles are to generate a palette in ChainVeri.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
With the development of information and communication technology, the amount of data in the world is increasing dramatically every day. Now data has been recognized as a valuable asset, and monetization from valuable data becomes an urgent need. In light of this, many data trading platforms have emerged in recent years. Existing data trading schemes, however, generally rely on a third party to trade data. These schemes suffer from complex transaction process, high transaction cost, and possibly unfair exchange. In this paper, we propose two secure, fair and efficient data trading schemes that do not rely on any third party using blockchain. The first scheme achieves direct raw data exchange for large amount of data, while the second scheme achieves data statistics trading. We implement both our schemes with smart contracts, and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate their performance. The experiment results show that they are highly efficient in trading data: the first scheme can trade 100,000 data records within 1.51s, while the second scheme can process a statistic over a data set of 1,024 records within 1.99s.
Pasu Poonpakdee, Jarotwan Koiwanit, Chumpol Yuangyai, Watchara Chatwiriya
Our global market is emerging transformation strategy that can make the difference between success and failure. Smart contract systems through developments of technological innovations are increasingly seen as alternative technologies to impact transactional processes significantly. Blockchain is a smart contract protocol with trust offering the potential for creating new transaction platforms and thus shows a radical change of the current core value creation in third parties. These results in enormous cost and time savings and the reduced risk for the parties. This study proposed a method to improve the efficiency of distributed consensus in blockchains using epidemic algorithm. The results showed that epidemic protocols can distribute the information similar to blockchain.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Blockchain and smart contract technology provide a means of decentralised computational agreements that are trusted and automated. By integrating Internet of Things (IoT) devices with blockchain systems and smart contracts, agreements can not only be confined to in-blockchain manipulation of state, however can enable agreements to interact on the physical world. This integration is non-trivial due to the limited resources on IoT devices and the heterogeneity of such an architecture. Such blockchain connected IoT devices typically require programming of smart contracts, edge blockchain nodes and the IoT devices. IoT embedded systems require expertise in low level development. Similarly, smart contract programming requires expertise with an extensive attention to detail, as even minor bugs can have catastrophic consequences. In this paper, we propose a macroprogramming approach for developing the different system components required for blockchain connected IoT devices including smart contracts, edge nodes and IoT devices from a monolithic description. In this manner, one can use a higher level of abstraction to develop an application, while still being able to generate code automatically which can be deployed on different nodes.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
The rapid development of Internet of Things technology has led to the sharp increase of the number of interconnected devices. A large amount of data is generated by large-scale loT devices. In this paper, we propose PDash with parallel distributed architecture, a scalable blockchain-based platform for loT data storage and sharing. PDash aims to solve the bottleneck problem of blockchain system: scalability, and makes it possible for users to keep ownership of their own data as well as share data securely with economic feedback. PDash integrates decentralized blockchain network and distributed storage network to achieve secure data storage, validation and sharing, and utilizes multiple encryption technologies to enable efficient interaction between two parallel distributed networks.
Blockchain technology has been recently applied in many applications including cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Internet of Things, healthcare, and supply chain management. The essential properties are the capabilities in doing verification and maintaining data integrity which would be hardly guaranteed in other systems. As millions of packages are daily sent, information related to those packages must be protected since they are prone to attacks such as phishing. In addition, current package delivery systems are mostly implemented on a centralized platform which would be vulnerable to different kind of attacks. In this paper, we propose a package delivery system based on the blockchain technology which would help enhance the security with data integrity and the verification of both users and data. We evaluate the performance of our system using two operations: insertions and reads/writes under high workload. We found that our system performance for both insertions and reads/writes is highly sensitive to the number of chains rather than the number of transactions per chain. But, the time spent for reads/writes is much higher than the time spent for insertions.
Jul 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData)
Secure naming systems, or more narrowly public key infrastructures (PKIs), form the basis of secure communications over insecure networks. All security guarantees against active attackers come from a trustworthy binding between user-facing names, such as domain names, to cryptographic identities, such as public keys. By offering a secure, distributed ledger with highly decentralized trust, blockchains such as Bitcoin show promise as the root of trust for naming systems with no central trusted parties. PKIs based upon blockchains, such as Namecoin and Blockstack, have greatly improved security and resilience compared to traditional centralized PKIs. Yet blockchain PKIs tend to significantly sacrifice scalability and flexibility in pursuit of decentralization, hindering large-scale deployability on the Internet. We propose Conifer, a novel PKI with an architecture based upon CONIKS, a centralized transparency-based PKI, and Catena, a blockchain-agnostic way of embedding a permissioned log, but with a different lookup strategy. In doing so, Conifer achieves decentralized trust with security at least as strong as existing blockchain-based naming systems, yet without sacrificing the flexibility and performance typically found in centralized PKIs. We also present our reference implementation of Conifer, demonstrating how it can easily be integrated into applications. Finally, we use experiments to evaluate the performance of Conifer compared with other naming systems, both centralized and blockchain-based, demonstrating that it incurs only a modest overhead compared to traditional centralized-trust systems while being far more scalable and performant than purely blockchain-based solutions.
Mandrita Banerjee, Junghee Lee, Qian Chen, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
Internet-of-Things (IoT) is increasingly becoming the norm in both civilian and military settings. In this paper, we present a comprehensive security abstraction layer for IoT systems based on blockchain, which provides us a logical view of a system that comprises trusted devices. The goal of the proposed layer is to detect and isolate untrusted devices. The proposed abstraction layer provides three services, namely: authorization, authentication, and auditing by using blockchain and smart contract-based approaches. We adopt a hardware based approach, where dedicated hardware modules are used to monitor the behavior of the firmware without incurring excessive performance overhead.