(eng) The main conceptual element this thesis orbits around is the idea of using social networks as a data source. First, classical trading theory and current usage of data obtained from social networks is reviewed. Taking all this information into account, a forecasting of the Bitcoin price is performed using both classical methods and machine learning Neural Networks. In order to obtain data from social networks, another complexity layer needs to be added by accessing the sources through APIs and directly web-scrapping the net. The results of all of this complex implementation are given with a strong focus on visualisation using several different techniques. Finally, after a critical discussion a Future Work chapter is introduced, where many possible follow-ups are drawn up.
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)
Marcello Cinque, Christian Esposito, Stefano Russo
Trust management is extremely important for sensor networks, and the emerging vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) does not represent an exception. In fact, it allows to realize a dynamic access control needed to cope with internal attacks conducted by compromised nodes, which are likely to occur in real world. However, trust management implies a considerable consumption of energy, due to the amount of messages exchanged to collect reputation scores. Consumption is further exacerbated by the means needed to protect from attacks the trust management entities themselves. This work proposes a suitable trust management for the IoT by exploiting the eventual consistency and security guarantees of blockchain. The design of a solution based on such a technology is described, and a qualitative assessment of its protection degree is provided.
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 popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its various applications are growing rapidly. Trust in most IoT networks is presumed implicitly. This implicit assumption of trust can be abused by adversaries to disrupt the network and manipulate reputations of trusted devices. Spoofing devices' identities or forging new identities allows adversaries to masquerade and act as legitimate devices. Devices with forged identities are known as Sybils. In this paper, we propose an IoT trust model that uses permissioned blockchains that utilize Smart Contracts (executable policies) to evaluate trustworthiness of IoT devices by recording and validating IoT devices' identities to prevent Sybil attacks. Additionally, to show effectiveness of our model, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype of our model's key features.
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)
Gladstone M. Arantes, Jose Nogueira D'Almeida, Marcio Teruo Onodera, Suzana Mesquita De Borba Maranhao Moreno · 5 authors
This paper describes a proposal for a process of lending, monitoring and evaluating development projects in the Brazilian Development Bank using blockchain technology. After highlighting the difficulties to implement this proposal, this paper also discusses what can be done as a transition process and outlines what have already been done. The proposals increase transparency of public money allocation, simplify manual activities, reduce operational costs and produce data to support aggregate analysis of the benefits arising from the bank's loans.
This paper explores Bitcoin intraday technical trading based on artificial neural networks for the return prediction. In particular, our deep learning method successfully discovers trading signals through a seven layered neural network structure for given input data of technical indicators, which are calculated by the past time-series data over every 15 minutes. Under feasible settings of execution costs, the numerical experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of a buy-and-hold strategy. Especially, our model performs well for a challenging period from December 2017 to January 2018, during which Bitcoin suffers from substantial minus returns. Furthermore, various sensitivity analysis is implemented for the change of the number of layers, activation functions, input data and output classification to confirm the robustness of our approach.
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)
Kei Leo Brousmiche, Antoine Durand, Thomas Heno, Christian Poulain · 6 authors
The blockchain technology has recently attracted increasing interests in a wide range of use-cases. Among those, the management of vehicles' data and life cycle over a blockchain has sparked various research initiatives on a global scale, with the promise to prevent automobile frauds and to enable more collaborations between the involved stakeholders. In this paper, we investigate the problem of securing and sharing vehicles' data over a consortium blockchain, and we describe the architecture of the implemented proof-of-concept. Then, we introduce a novel hybrid cryptographic protocol to secure the access to vehicles' data between the involved stakeholders. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned acquired from the preliminary trials and we highlight the future research challenges and opportunities.
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)
In this paper, we first propose an adaptive strategy for double-spending attack on blockchains. The attacker in our strategy observes the length of the honest branch when a submitted transaction becomes available in the blockchain, and then updates the attack strategy accordingly. This provides a stronger strategy than conventional double-spending attack. We then derive closed-form expressions for the probability of a successful attack and the expected reward of attacker miners. Our analysis shows that the probability of a successful attack by convincing the network nodes to follow the counterfeit branch under the proposed attack strategy is 60% higher than what is expected from the conventional attack strategy when the attackers acquire 40% of the total network processing power. To counter this increase in the probability of attack, the network nodes are required to use a bigger number of confirmation blocks for validating any transaction in the blockchain. We computed the. expected reward of an attacker for mining a counterfeit branch on a blockchain and observed that the expected reward drops to zero after a few number of block confirmations.
Seunghyun Yoo, Seungbae Kim, Joshua Joy, Mário Gerla
A proof-of-work blockchain adopts an incentive-driven design to encourage people to participate in the network. Miners provide computing resources and services in exchange for incentives such as static block rewards and transaction fees collected from blockchain users. However, our findings suggest that the current reward scheme may not encourage miners to process user transactions. A non-cooperative strategy that submits a block with no transaction can be more rewarded than a cooperative strategy. As a consequence, the non-cooperative strategy can prevail over the cooperative strategy, decrease the system throughput, and distort credit distribution. We particularly choose Ethereum project as a subject since it is a general-purpose smart contract platform. By investigating the past two years of its ledger history, we find network propagation and block processing delays are the most significant factors that cause miners to choose the non-cooperative strategy. From this finding, we develop a more accurate statistical model for a block discovery time, as well as a reward matrix. We then derive the condition that either strategy has no additional gain, which also helps to estimate whether the transaction fee is underpriced or not. Simulation results show that the non-cooperative strategy is no longer dominant under the revised reward scheme.
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)
As an alternative to the energy greedy proof-of-work, new blockchains constrain the set of participants whose selection is debatable. These blockchains typically allow a fixed consortium of machines to decide upon new transaction blocks. In this paper, we introduce the community blockchain that bridges the gap between these public blockchains and constrained blockchains. The idea is to allow potentially all participants to decide upon “some” block while restricting the set of participants deciding upon “one” block. We also propose an implementation called ComChain that builds upon the Red Belly Blockchain, the fastest blockchain we are aware of. It runs a consensus among the existing community to elect a new community. This reconfiguration speeds up as the number of removed nodes increases.
K Navaneeth Krishnan, Roopesh Jenu, Tintu Joseph, M L Silpa
The buss words blockchain and internet of things has been floating around the tech world for quite a while. IoT has already proved that it can have a significant impact on our daily life. A significant amount of data is collected and transmitted through the internet from various devices across the globe. IoT consists of heterogeneous devices communicating over a wide range of networks transmitting lots of critical and non-critical data, which raises concern about the security of such collected data from the users and the ownership of the data. This paper introduces a security framework for the internet of things implementation in a confined environment, such as smart city, power grid or metro rail systems, etc. The framework ensures the secure communication and authentication of the data across such diversified networks and devices. The framework is built upon the underlying mechanism of blockchain technology combined with the use of secure hashing algorithm.
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)
Aleksey Charapko, Ailidani Ailijiang, Murat Demirbaş
The distributed consensus problem has been extensively studied in the last four decades as an important problem in distributed systems. Recent advances in decentralized consensus and blockchain technology, however, arose from a disparate model and gave rise to disjoint knowledge-base and techniques than those in the classical consensus research. In this paper we make a case for bridging these two seemingly disparate approaches in order to help transfer the lessons learned from the classical distributed consensus world to the blockchain world and vice versa. To this end, we draw parallels between blockchain consensus and a classical consensus protocol, Paxos. We also survey prominent approaches to improving the throughput and providing instant irreversibility to blockchain consensus and show analogies to the techniques from classical consensus protocols. Finally, inspired by the central role formal methods played in the success of classical consensus research, we suggest more extensive use of formal methods in modeling the blockchains and smartcontracts.
Manish Kumar, Ashish Kumar Singh, T. V. Suresh Kumar
We are living in the era of information technology. Our day to day life is heavily dependent on it and hence it's safe and secure functioning become very crucial and important. Every minute, there are thousands of cyber-attacks taking place around the world. Attackers are continuously evolving sophisticated and stealthy techniques to target the victim. They takes all the precautionary measures to remove attack traces such as system logs and related information on the victim systems so that they cannot be traced back. Attackers intentionally spread their activities over longer period of time to evade detection. To understand and identify such complex attack, it is required to maintain a secure log records over extended time period. However, preserving the log records for longer time is challenging issue. The system should also ensure the integrity of log files and logging process. In order to overcome these issues, in this paper we are proposing a secure log storage using Blockchain on Cloud platform. Blockchain technology will help to create tamper-proof audit logs. It provides proof of log manipulation and nonrepudiation. Cloud platform makes the overall system scalable and support for deep analysis.
Juan Carlos Farah, Andrii Vozniuk, María Jesús Rodríguez‐Triana, Denis Gillet
The need to ensure privacy and data protection in educational contexts is driving a shift towards new ways of securing and managing learning records. Although there are platforms available to store educational activity traces outside of a central repository, no solution currently guarantees that these traces are authentic when they are retrieved for review. This paper presents a blueprint for an architecture that employs blockchain technology to sign and validate learning traces, allowing them to be stored in a distributed network of repositories without diminishing their authenticity. Our proposal puts participants in online learning activities at the center of the design process, granting them the option to store learning traces in a location of their choice. Using smart contracts, stakeholders can retrieve the data, securely share it with third parties and ensure it has not been tampered with, providing a more transparent and reliable source for learning analytics. Nonetheless, a preliminary evaluation found that only 56% of teachers surveyed considered tamper-evident storage a useful feature of a learning trace repository. These results motivate further examination with other end users, such as learning analytics researchers, who may have stricter expectations of authenticity for data used in their practice.
Objectives Smart e-Forms are a new form of technology that converts complex paperwork to digital forms in an enterprise setting. In the context of the rapidly changing communication channels brought by the move toward a digital innovation environment in the financial industry, this paper examines a smart e-Form solution that can aid effective business communication. Methods Financial services using smart e-Forms are developing multilaterally with the use of electronic documents in both face-to-face and non-face-to-face channels. The electronic document system for enhancing competitiveness in face-to-face environments includes PPR (paperless and process reconstruction) and tablet banking systems, while the distance contract system through mobile banking can be utilized in non-face-to-face environments. Results As a functional document format that includes business logic, smart e-Forms allow various types of data input such as photos, voice recordings, barcode scanning, and e-Signatures through the use of smart devices. This technology has been utilized in implementing paperless services, tablet banking, and distance contract systems for a number of financial institutions, and e-Form technology is being optimized for the latest mobile devices in response to the demands of the financial market. Conclusions The rapid development of smart e-Form technology has played a major role in innovation in the financial sector. This technology improves customer convenience and work efficiency for a diversified financial environment, and the e-Form-based financial service system is becoming more competitive in various ways to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
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-based systems such as cryptocurrencies are achieving widespread usage, with a market capitalization of $150B (USD)as of September 2017. However, the most prominent platforms that account for over 70% of this market - Bitcoin & Ethereum - are exhibiting increasingly lower levels of decentralization. This poses the problem of concentrating levers of consensus to a select group of agents in the system. At the same time, attempts at higher levels of decentralization poses the problem of limiting scalability of such systems. In this paper, using mechanism design we propose a way of designing payoffs in order to disincentivize certain exhibited behaviors and incentivize desired behaviors of miners in such systems. Our approach indicates potential for research in this area for solving the much larger problem of centralization in decentralized systems such as blockchain.
Since Bitcoin appeared in 2009, various other cryptocurrencies have also begun to attract attention and supporters. At the same time, because many cryptocurrency investors want to make a profit using cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency exchanges list them without any special or technical verification. Cryptocurrency developers often write white papers to describe their cryptocurrency's special techniques and expected future worth. However, based solely on the contents of the white paper and/or a surface inspection of the source code, we cannot know if the developer has simply leveraged existing code bases without incorporating novel functionality. In order to address this problem, we present a framework to measure the similarity between the source codes of cryptocurrencies for detecting plagiarism.
This paper presents a new trade-clearing framework with a Super-Large Ledger (SLL) that can be shared with exchanges, banks, and regulators. Furthermore, this SLL runs on top of a permissioned BC with significant redundancy, and can be efficiently processed at high speed with scalability. In other words, when the workload increases, the SLL will be split and allocated to different processors to speed up the operation. The framework has been implemented and evaluated at a clearinghouse and processed 3.3B historical and real-time transactions.
Using Blockchain seems a promising approach for Business Process Reengineering (BPR) to alleviate trust issues among stakeholders, by providing decentralization, transparency, traceability, and immutability of information along with its business logic. However, little work seems to be available on utilizing Blockchain for supporting BPR in a systematic and rational way, potentially leading to disappointments and even doubts on the utility of Blockchain. In this paper, as ongoing research, we outline Fides - a framework for exploiting Blockchain towards enhancing the trustworthiness for BPR. Fides supports diagnosing trust issues with AS-IS business processes, exploring TO-BE business process alternatives using Blockchain, and selecting among the alternatives. A business process of a retail chain for a food supply chain is used throughout the paper to illustrate Fides concepts.
BITCONCH chain proposed an innovative POR (Proof Of Reputation) reputation consensus algorithm, which solved the pain point that the blockchain is difficult to maintain both high throughput and decentralization. Based on social graphs, BITCONCH Chain mathematically models social, time, and contribution activities to build a decentralized reputation system. Each user has the opportunity to establish a high reputation value. The higher the user's reputation, the lower the transaction cost (or even free). The more opportunities that are selected as trust nodes to participate in the consensus, the greater the benefits. High-reputation users are defined as “mutual trust nodes”, and small micro-transactions will start “payment channels” for high-speed offline transactions. The reputation system and system incentive system will effectively promote the continued enthusiasm of business developers and ordinary users, and contribute to the construction of the business ecosystem. Business developers with traffic are more likely to get high reputation values, and the chances of being elected to a trusted full node are higher. Ordinary users can increase reputation by actively engaging in social interactions and actively using business applications in the ecosystem, increasing the chances of being selected as trusted light nodes. The Bitconch chain uses a DAG directed acyclic graph data structure to maintain the system's positive scalability. Support smartphone light node client to resist the decentralization of the system and maintain dispersion. Zero-knowledge verification, latticed data storage, quantum-level encryption algorithms, and improved BVM virtual machines make Bitconch chain more reliable and provide a friendly DApp and sidechain development environment to meet certain applications. Technical requirements for large file storage, low transaction costs, user information protection, sidechain and smart contract iterations, and bug fixes. BITCONCH chain is a decentralized distributed network with no block and no chain, which solves two difficulties in the application of blockchain: scalability and decentralization. Bitconch chain, which can be applied to the commercial application needs of users above 10 million, is the most feasible blockchain ecosystem for high-frequency small micro-transactions and social applications.
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)
George D. Webster, Ryan Harris, Zachary D. Hanif, Bruce A. Hembree · 6 authors
For decades it has been acknowledged that sharing security information and collaboration between security practitioners are a necessity. Yet, effective sharing and collaboration are rare. A gamut of legislative acts, executive orders, academic works, and private sector initiatives have discussed aspects of the problem and aimed to be the catalyst needed to fix the situation. But almost 30 years since these efforts started, the state of sharing and collaboration is still technically complicated, slow, untrusted, and impeded by bureaucratic woes. This work identifies the challenges of sharing security artifacts and uses real-world examples to illustrate our findings. Based on this knowledge, we propose a new model for sharing and collaboration, CARE. The CARE architecture eases many of the privacy, secrecy, lineage, and structure issues that plague current sharing communities and platforms. We then build upon this foundation to introduce a marketplace based on smart contracts with transactional privacy over a distributed blockchain. Therefore, CARE incentivizes sharing, combats free riding, and provides an immutable ledger for the attribution of events. This paradigm shift, overcomes the challenges of sharing while providing new opportunities for business models, insurance risk assessments, and government backed incentivisation.
Apostolos C. Tsolakis, Ioannis Moschos, Konstantinos Votis, Dimosthenis Ioannidis · 9 authors
The aim of the proposed work is to introduce a secure and interoperable Demand Response (DR) management platform that will assist Aggregators (or other relevant Stakeholders involved in DR business scenarios) in their decision making mechanisms over their portfolios of prosumers. This novel architecture incorporates multiple strategies and policies provided from energy market stakeholders, establishing a more modular and future-proof DR solution. By employing an innovative multi-agent decision making system and self-learning algorithms to enable aggregation, segmentation and coordination of several diverse clusters, consisting of supply and demand assets, a fully autonomous design will be delivered. This DR framework is further fortified in terms of data security by not only implementing cutting-edge blockchain infrastructure, but also by making use of Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (dApps) which will further secure and facilitate Aggregators-to-Prosumers transactions. The blockchain technologies will be combined with well-known open protocols (i.e. OpenADR) towards also supporting interoperability in terms of information exchange.
Today, Cloud services are mainly traded on provider platforms such as on Amazon's EC2 On-Demand marketspace. Thereby, consumers and providers neither negotiate the price nor the characteristics of the services. The recent years underpin a trend to more dynamic Cloud markets. So e.g. the Cloud provider Virtustream released a revenue model where consumers are charged based on consumed μVMs while Amazon extended it's spot market with spot blocks and spot fleet management. Hence, multi-round bilateral negotiations are a promising approach for trading Cloud services on future Cloud markets. Such negotiations are based on an alternating exchange of offers and hence, they are termed Bazaar-negotiations. Specifications such as the WS-Agreement Negotiation - which is maintained by the Open Grid Forum - foster the development of Bazaar-based markets. To ensure integrity and transparency of negotiations with untrusted negotiation partners - which is a precondition for the adaption of Bazaar-based Cloud markets - blockchains are a promising approach. In this paper we introduce a concept of a blockchain for Bazaar-negotiations whereby we assume that the offers exchanged during negotiations follow the structure defined in the WS-Agreement Negotiation specification. We implemented it within a CloudSim based simulation environment which is able to simulate such Bazaar-based markets to show its technical feasibility.