Jun 1, 2018·2018 IEEE International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering and 2018 IEEE Industrial and Commercial Power Systems Europe (EEEIC / I&CPS Europe)
Caroline Plaza, J. A. C. Gil, Francois de Chezelles, Karl Axel Sträng
Self-consumption and local energy communities have a significant role to play for the energy transition and the development of renewable energies. This paper introduces a blockchain-based solution designed to serve energy communities sharing solar energy. This solution has been defined and developed to manage the energy exchanges according to the rules set by the energy community. It harnesses the available smart metering infrastructure installed by the DSO, as the trusted party for energy data to the energy stakeholders, to stay focused on the governance of the energy community. This paper summarizes the characteristics and field-proven benefits of the implementation.
The evidence has three properties including relevance, authenticity and legitimacy. For evidence, once implemented, it must not be tampered with and can always be traced back. For trust, the content can be forensics, so the relationship between each other is trustworthy and exchangeable value. Blockchain is a tamper-proof and unforgeable decentralized shared ledger that chunks data blocks chronologically into specific data structures and is cryptographically guaranteed. In this paper, we use the key technologies of blockchain to investigate and achieve collaborative security for IoT devices. This approach uses distributed crowd-sourcing to make tampering of critical data evidence (security). Combination of theoretical research and empirical validation, the paper tries to provide a technical operational and cost-effective solution for collaborative security with blockchain services and promoting the key data stability and self-healing ability.
Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger technology which helps to store information in a decentralized way. It can be put to use for various purposes ranging from the handling and transaction of virtual currency to maintenance of land registries. The adoption of the technology in India will surely enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the various sectors. However, certain legal ramifications may arise. The three prominent usages of Blockchain technology are: Bitcoins, Smart Contracts and the Land Registry System. The legal ramifications of all the three usages under various Indian laws have been examined. Further, adoption of Blockchain technology in the Land Registry System will require certain structural changes. Therefore, the said structural changes have been examined and certain suggestions have been made for successful adoption of Blockchain technology in the Land Registry System in India.
Identity-based encryption is a key distribution system in which the public key of a user is derived directly from his identity information. Compared with PKI, Identity-based encryption simplifies key management issue, but it still suffers from drawbacks inkey escrow and private key delivering. Motivated by this, we propose an improved key distribution solution called BIBE by integrating the technique of blockchain into the identity-based encryption. Specifically, we split the nodes in the chain to complete user authentication and private key protection, respectively. Furthermore, the two sides complete the mutual identity authentication with the identity information key pairs obtained from BIBE. Additionally, to prevent network attack, we employ timestamps, random numbers and hash algorithm in the process of identification. Through the rigorous and mathematical analysis, the proposed scheme demonstratesa far better performance on correctness, safety and efficiency.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cryptography and Data Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
This thesis analyzes whether the fiscal relations between the central and local governments of Turkey can be solely explained by socio-economic and demographic factors or the regional and political positions of cities also affect it.We use a balanced panel dataset consisting of all of the 81 cities of Turkey over the years 2008-2012.Our main dependent variables are transfers and government compensation.We define government compensation as the total government spending made in a city excluding local own revenues.Other fiscal aggregates such as local own revenues and expenditures, or fiscal indicators such as fiscal decentralization and financial independence, defined as the share of local governments spending financed by its own revenues, are also analyzed.Regression analysis and robustness tests showed the following: (i) Socio-economic structure of cities are significantly associated with the amount of transfers and government compensation; which means that the transfer rule of Turkey, as an institutional mechanism, is quite successful addressing regional socio-economic differences.Besides, there is no robust effect of political parties on the amount of transfers and government compensation.(ii) Our analysis also shows that there is a significant association between political parties and local expenditures, revenues, and expenditure decentralization.
Zoltán Balogh, Emil Gatial, José Barbosa, Paulo Leitão · 5 authors
Maintenance is a key factor to ensure the production efficiency, since the occurrence of unexpected failures leads to a degradation of the system performance, causing the loss of productivity and business opportunities, which are crucial roles to achieve competitiveness. The article aims to propose a reference architecture which will improve the way maintenance is considered in the current manufacturing world, by enabling an overall increase of production rates, while increasing the operational equipment effectiveness and decreasing the impact of maintenance needs. This objective would be accomplished by establishing an IoT infrastructure for the collection of the huge amount of available shop floor data, which can be analyzed, considering data analytics algorithms, predictive maintenance models and forecasting techniques, to perform the machine/system health assessment and prediction of maintenance needs, e.g. by detecting earlier the occurrence of possible failures and consequently the need to implement maintenance interventions. The scheduling of predictive maintenance needs will be integrated with the existing maintenance planning tools, and especially synchronized with the production planning tools to achieve a nondisruptive maintenance impact in the production system. A cloud-based collaborative maintenance services platform allows the secure collection, aggregation and analysis of a large amount of shared data from numerous manufacturers that use the same or similar machinery, and acts as an open market where companies can contract specialized maintenance services. This reference architecture aims to provide replicable architecture to be broadly applicable in a variety of industries, capable to improve the production efficiency through a real-time health monitoring and early detection of failures and outages, to speed up the maintenance delivery, and consequently mitigate their impact.
Since radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been used in various scenarios such as supply chain, access control system and credit card, tremendous efforts have been made to improve the authentication between tags and readers to prevent potential attacks. Though effective in certain circumstances, these existing methods usually require a server to maintain a database of identity related information for every tag, which makes the system vulnerable to the SQL injection attack and not suitable for distributed environment. To address these problems, we now propose a novel blockchain-based mutual authentication security protocol. In this new scheme, there is no need for the trusted third parties to provide security and privacy for the system. Authentication is executed as an unmodifiable transaction based on blockchain rather than database, which applies to distributed RFID systems with high security demand and relatively low real-time requirement. Analysis shows that our protocol is logically correct and can prevent multiple attacks.
Bitcoin has introduced a new concept that could feasibly revolutionise the entire Internet as it exists, and positively impact on many types of industries including, but not limited to, banking, public sector and supply chain. This innovation is grounded on pseudo-anonymity and strives on its innovative decentralised architecture based on the blockchain technology. Blockchain is pushing forward a race of transaction-based applications with trust establishment without the need for a centralised authority, promoting accountability and transparency within the business process. However, a blockchain ledger (e.g., Bitcoin) tend to become very complex and specialised tools, collectively called “Blockchain Analytics”, are required to allow individuals, law enforcement agencies and service providers to search, explore and visualise it. Over the last years, several analytical tools have been developed with capabilities that allow, e.g., to map relationships, examine flow of transactions and filter crime instances as a way to enhance forensic investigations. This paper discusses the current state of blockchain analytical tools and presents a thematic taxonomy model based on their applications. It also examines open challenges for future development and research.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Devices to support pervasive computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming present in almost every aspect of our lives. Due to their limited power and computation, these devices often need to rely on some more powerful outsourced cloud services, which raises a security and privacy concern as IoT data is often sensitive. On the other hand, blockchain technology has recently gained much attention due to its decentralized, trustless and immutable design. We propose CapChain - an access control framework based on blockchain that allows users to share and delegate their access rights easily to IoT devices in public but still maintain privacy. To protect privacy, we adapt multiple techniques from anonymous crypto-currency blockchain systems to hide sensitive information, including users' identities and related information about the capabilities. We also build a testbed as a proof of concept.
Marcin Płóciennik, Mario Drobics, Ivana Podnar Žarko, Konstantinos V. Katsaros · 6 authors
In the current Internet of Things (IoT), centralized IoT structures greatly limit the direct, efficient and privacy preserving interaction with the locally available resources. A sustainable path for the future development of Smart Urban Environments, from Smart Homes and Offices, to Smart Neighborhoods and Cities, requires next-generation IoT solutions which are interoperable and decentralized. Building on direct device-to-device interactions and the existing infrastructure operated by open and interoperable platforms, a novel decentralized IoT architecture is required to offer both privacy-preserving and smart real-time interactions in Smart Spaces, leading thus to truly trustful ambient intelligence serving ordinary citizens in everyday situations. We present the key interoperability and security-related aspects which are designed and implemented within the H2020 project symbIoTe to pave the way for such decentralized IoT solutions. Furthermore, we analyze the requirements and technologies, namely Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), intelligent agents and edge technologies, as the building blocks for the next-generation IoT solutions.
Zahra Zahedi, Mohammad Mehdi Arefi, Alireza Khayatian, Hamidreza Modares
In this paper, a solution for Nash equilibrium seeking problem for N-players static non-cooperative games with non-quadratic payoff functions is proposed. The proposed solution is a non-model based approach, in the sense that the players do not need any knowledge about the agent's model or other players' actions, and can attain the Nash equilibrium using only measurements of payoff values. To overcome the shortcoming of existing non-model based algorithms, for which the Nash equilibrium stays within a small neighborhood and oscillates, the proposed approach adjusts the classical extremum seeking algorithms so that the amplitude of excitation sinusoidal signal converges to zero locally and exponentially. Therefore, with removing steady-state oscillation, not only the deleterious effects of steady-state oscillation is eliminated but also Nash equilibrium is achieved faster. The details of proof and the analysis for stability and convergence are provided. Finally, the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithm are illustrated with a numerical example and simulation.
Jun 1, 2018·2018 IEEE 20th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 16th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 4th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS)
The construction of smart city involves multiple corporate organizations and government agencies, while smart city operations often require data across organizations. This paper describes a blockchain-based approach to exchange information in smart cities that assists sharing data across multiple, non-trusted organizations. The proposed method enables an organization safely use data from another organization to participate in business operations without accessing the data. The data that participates in operations is in an encrypted form stored only in the executor sandbox. Consensus calculations are performed on multiple nodes by smart contract. After the confirmation through multiple nodes, the result of the calculation will be returned to the applicant. Thus, the risk of data leakage could be avoided. Our proposed method can effectively prevent the access to the information from being illegally obtained, used, and tampered. Also it ensures the reliable use of the data which enables the effective information sharing and protection of information among multiple organizations in the smart city applications.
Carlos Kamienski, João Henrique Kleinschmidt, Juha-Pekka Soininen, Kari Kolehmainen · 8 authors
The intensive use of technology in precision irrigation for agriculture is getting momentum in order to optimize the use of water, reduce the energy consumption and improve the quality of crops. Internet of Things (IoT) and other technologies are the natural choices for smart water management applications, and the SWAMP project is expected to prove the appropriateness of IoT in real settings with the deployment of on-site pilots. At the same time, the more intense the use of technology is, agriculture turns new security risks, which may affect both crop development and the commodities market. A security breach may irreversibly compromise a crop and data eavesdropping may compromise price and contracts exposing sensitive data such crop quality, development or management. This paper discusses security challenges and technologies for the application of IoT in agriculture and indicates that one of the most relevant challenges to be handled in SWAMP project is dealing with the multitude of behaviors from IoT application and what would be considered as normal and what would be considered as a threat.
This paper presents an innovative solution to manage security and trustiness in Osmotic Computing. Osmotic Computing dynamically manages Cloud, Edge and IoT resources across federated environments set up by different and cooperating stakeholders. In this context, the Software Defined Membrane (SDMem) is the main component responsible to orchestrate the osmotic transfer of microelements (MELs) across different environments straightening the security needs of such a complex ecosystem. The basic idea presented in this paper is to leverage Private Blockchain technologies in SDMem implementation over federated systems. Data access activities will be logged in a private distributed Blockchain-based ledger. This will allow to have a certified, non-repudiable record of all the data accessed performed by distributed computing, thus assuring the overall ownership and integrity of data and processes running in MELs. The resulting SDMem solution allow us to isolate data and workflows in distributed environments where heterogeneous resources and devices are exploited.
Grégory Claeys, Maria Demertzis, Konstantinos Efstathiou
This Policy Contribution tries to answer two main questions: can cryptocurrencies acquire the role of money? And what are the implications for central banks and monetary policy?
The study is a bird's eye view on various elements of virtual cryptocurrency that has been in existence from 2009 onwards. The information required for the study was collected from the media reports. In the first section of the paper, origin and features of bitcoin were discussed. In the next section, general risks and transactional risks with suitable examples and a few caselets were explained. Majority of the news content described that cryptocurrency does not carry the features of investment, and it is merely a form of speculation. The media reports indicated many fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions running into several lakhs because of hidden identity of people that opens the door for hacking money without much efforts. Unless the technology used to create cryptocurrency is transparent and regulated, it will not safeguard the money of investors getting trapped into it. The last part of the study indicated the international acceptance of cryptocurrency (both in developed and developing countries). It was found that majority of the countries did not encourage the use of bitcoins. Hence, this study would be of great use to the people who want to invest in cryptocurrencies.
Andrei Cirstea, Florentina Magda Enescu, Nicu Bizon, Cosmin Ştirbu · 5 authors
This paper will introduce a minimal introduction to blockchain technology, followed by a medical application (MedBlocks). The application is based on this technology, with the purpose to make medical field more efficient. Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize both medicine and any other field for system decentralization. This can change the whole world through efficiency and secure way to act. The objective of this paper is to show the extraordinary potential of this technology and how it will fundamentally change all aspects of receiving, transmitting and securing of information.
The commodity industry, the transaction lifecycle of commodities, its value chain and supply chain are complex systems with many parties involved. Ownership of cargoes are determined by who is holding the physical paper, the Bill of Lading. The participants in the industry require constant verification between parties, and this resultsin cumbersome paper-heavy back-office operations which are exposed to human errors. \nThe entire commodity transaction life-cycle involves the value chain and supply chain, and it creates a complicated and long chain involving several intermediaries, each taking a piece of the pie and adds to transaction costs for producers. The roles of intermediaries in the commodity industry can be financing trades, facilitating trade, managing risk, on-site inspection and verification of cargoes, shipping, and logistics.\nBlockchain technology is the technology underlying bitcoins and most of the cryptocurrencies in existence. Bitcoin enabled people to transfer money, peer-to-peer without an intermediary to establish trust and facilitate transactions. Bitcoin has paved the way for further use-cases of the technology, which has a much broader use-case spectrum than just being the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies.\nBlockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger, where transactions are stored in blocks and secured with cryptography. It allows anyone to execute trade without an intermediary to establish trust between parties. It allows for one single source of the truth between counterparties through enhancing transparency, visibility and availability of transactions data and information.\nBlockchains can be fully transparent, but a blockchain can also allow for privacy. There are different types of blockchain, public/private/hybrid, and each of these types serves its purpose a little bit differently. In a private or hybrid blockchain, information that is sensitive to a certain trade remains private by only allowing the counterparties of that trade transparency into the transactions of that certain trade.\nThe blockchain technology enhances cyber security through decentralization and cryptography. Digital tokens can replace the Bill of Lading to track ownership of cargoes. Smart contracts that self-execute triggered upon a set of predetermined conditions are among the features of blockchain technology. The convenience of blockchain technology, is that anyone at any time can build its own decentralized application on top of already existing blockchain platforms like Ethereum, Hyperledger and others. These factors create for a unique opportunity to digitalize the commodity industry, gaining security, efficiency and opening up possibilities for new trade models in trade finance.
This paper considers the design, the development and the experimental evaluation, of a blockchain based smart contract specifying the operating rules of a real time, uniform-price double auction energy market. Producers and consumers interact with this contract sending their offers and bids accordingly and the contract clears the market based on a double auction model. We propose four different approaches for implementing, through the Ethereum platform, both the P2P network as well as the smart contract. We systematically compare the above approaches on the basis of their decentralization nature, operating costs, computational costs, effectiveness, security, privacy and beyond. This comparison is achieved through large scale, real time simulations based on the GridLAB-D platform.
The current study aim at providing blockchain technology for government auditing that conduct by government auditors in the public sector. The main idea of this research is to draw the issue and technique to blockchain technology for government auditing. This approach allows to consider auditing process like chess since controlled processes are studied from all interrelated and affiliated sides, taking into account the time factor. As a result we reached to conclusion that using day-to-day blockchain and digital technologies is a perfect way to prevent any kind of fraud with budget money.
The paper is aimed at a very accurate topic which is problematic of cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The main aim of this paper is to evaluate the potential of this most important cryptocurrency to serve as full-value money. The matter of the first chapter is introducing the Bitcoin concept including its characters and history. In this phase, we are thinking about Bitcoin as a commodity. The analysis of cryptocurrency Bitcoin within currency relations framework is subject for next chapter. Each commodity, which has a role of money, must fulfil three criteria. This commodity must be convertible, relative stable and liquid. This paper discusses the evaluation of these aspects. Based on the analysis, we can contribute to the question whether bitcoin can be used as full-value money in the future. The paper is not concerned on technical aspects like the algorithm of mining, blockchain technology or account safety.
This study examines the presence of herding in the cryptocurrency market. The latter is the outcome of mass collaboration and imitation. Results from the static model suggest no significant herding. However, the presence of structural breaks and nonlinearities in the data series suggests applying a static model is not appropriate. Accordingly, we conduct a rolling-window analysis, and those results point to significant herding behavior, which varies over time. Using a logistic regression, we find that herding tends to occur as uncertainty increases. Our findings induce useful insights related to portfolio and risk management, trading strategies, and market efficiency.