Blockchain Papers

Марат Рашитович Сафиуллин, Leonid Alekseevich Elshin, A.A. Abdukaeva

Аннотация Предмет

Alexander Schönhals, Thomas Hepp, Béla Gipp

In this vision paper, we present an approach that makes it possible to protect developed ideas and early concepts even during their systematical development. We take the Design Thinking process as an example, in which interfaces are used for individual stages (understand, observe, define, ideate, prototype, test) to digitally record verbal, written or sketched, and even modeled or constructed outcome. This outcome is recorded and linked to the originating person. To guarantee both proof-of-existence and proof-of-origin, a unique hash is generated from each digital artifact stored and embedded into the Bitcoin Blockchain by the OriginStamp decentralized trusted timestamping service. Once this unique fingerprint is embedded in a transaction in the underlying Blockchain network, it can be proven where particular contributions originated due to the characteristics of Blockchain architecture. By setting up a decentralized tamper-proof means of record keeping, the entire innovation chain from the first ideation to the beginning of production is verifiably stored. By providing a clear proof-of-origin, all innovators (even competitors) could continue to work on existing problem-solving process and add their contribution proportionately, depending on the state of innovation development. This concept enables an Open Innovation ecosystem, which has the potential to increase the innovation potential of companies immensely. Additionally, inventions that are not patentable because they do not comply with the strict regulations of patent law can still be published and protected because the information about the origin of the respective contribution is guaranteed.

Lyudmila Kovalchuk, Dmytro Kaidalov, Andrii Nastenko, Oleksiy Shevtsov · 6 authors

A specific number of transaction confirmation blocks determines average time of receiving and accepting payments at cryptocurrencies, and the shortest confirmation time for the same level of blockchain security provides the best user properties. Existing papers on transaction confirmation blocks for Bitcoin use implicit assumption of prompt spreading of Bitcoin blocks over the network (that is not always the case for the real world conditions). The newer publications with rigorous analysis and proofs of Bitcoin blockchain properties that take into account network delays provide asymptotic estimates, with no specific numbers for transaction confirmation blocks.

Thomas Hepp, Patrick Wortner, Alexander Schönhals, Béla Gipp

The use of blockchain technology to track physical assets is not new. However, the state of the art concepts are not applicable due to several limitations. One limitation is the scalability of blockchains with regard to the number of transactions that can be processed by the network. The well-established technology in tracking products is based on RFID chips that can be cloned. This paper provides insights into how objects can be protected and monitored by a varnish with a unique crack pattern, as an example of a Physical Unclonable Function. The perceptual hash of the unique pattern is used to encrypt the associated data to ensure privacy. Instead of logging each event on the blockchain individually, which is not possible due to the limited transaction throughput, OriginStamp is used to preserve data integrity on the blockchain. OriginStamp aggregates events, combines them through hashing and embeds this hash into a Bitcoin transaction. Once the Bitcoin network mines the transaction into a block and confirms it, the timestamp is considered as immutable proof of existence. With this approach, the integrity of tracking data cannot be contested.

Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa, Giovanni Pau

This paper makes the case for the use of blockchains in emerging intelligent transportation systems applications. Specifically, we argue for the use of blockchains to settle contracts and transactions in a variety of intelligent transportation scenarios. We argue that mainstream blockchains such as Ethereum have the foundations to sustain transactions with fine tunable granularity at large scale and in a near-realtime manner. The paper analyzes the refueling scenario for autonomous electric vehicles and proposes an algorithm to guarantee the execution of energy recharges.

Zhimin Gao, Lei Xu, Glenn Turner, B. Patel · 7 authors

Blockchain is a powerful and distributed platform for transactions which require a unified, resilient, transparent and consensus-based record keeping system. It has been applied to scenarios like smart city, supply chain, medical data storing and sharing, and etc. Many works have been done on improving the performance and security of such systems. However, there is a lack of the mechanism of identity binding when a human being is involved in corresponding physical world, i.e., if one is involved in an activity, his/her identity in the real world should be correctly reflected in the blockchain system. To mitigate this gap, we propose BlockID, a novel framework for people identity management that leverages biometric authentication and trusted computing technology. We also develop a prototype to demonstrate its feasibility in practice.

Uzair Javaid, Ang Kiang Siang, Muhammad Naveed Aman, Biplab Sikdar

Many IoT devices lack memory and computational complexities of modern computing devices, making them vulnerable to a wide range of cyber attacks. Among these, DDoS attacks are a growing concern in IoT. Such attacks are executed through the introduction of rogue devices and then using them and/or other compromised devices to facilitate DDoS attacks by generating relentless traffic. This paper aims to address DDoS security issues in IoT by proposing an integration of IoT devices with blockchain. This paper uses Ethereum, a blockchain variant, with smart contracts to replace the traditional centralized IoT infrastructure with a decentralized one. IoT devices are then required to access the network using smart contracts. The integration of IoT with Ethereum not only prevents rogue devices from gaining access to the server but also addresses DDoS attacks by using static resource allocation for devices.

Ahmed Faeq Hussein, N. Arunkumar, Gustavo Ramírez-González, Enas Abdulhay · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Gabriele D'Angelo, Stefano Ferretti, Moreno Marzolla

Many companies rely on Cloud infrastructures for their computation, communication and data storage requirements. While Cloud services provide some benefits, e.g., replacing high upfront costs for an IT infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go model, they also introduce serious concerns that are notoriously difficult to address. In essence, Cloud customers are storing data and running computations on infrastructures that they can not control directly. Therefore, when problems arise -- violations of Service Level Agreements, data corruption, data leakage, security breaches -- both customers and Cloud providers face the challenge of agreeing on which party is to be held responsible. In this paper, we review the challenges and requirements for enforcing accountability in Cloud infrastructures, and argue that smart contracts and blockchain technologies might provide a key contribution towards accountable Clouds.

Liam Bell, William J. Buchanan, Jonathan Cameron, Owen Lo

There are several areas of healthcare and well-being that could be enhanced using blockchain technologies. These include device tracking, clinical trials, pharmaceutical tracing, and health insurance. Within device tracking, hospitals can trace their asset within a blockchain infrastructure, including through the complete lifecycle of a device. The information gathered can then be used to improve patient safety and provide after-market analysis to improve efficiency savings. This paper outlines recent work within the areas of pharmaceutical traceability, data sharing, clinical trials, and device tracking. Keywords: Asset Tracking, Blockchain, Drug tracking, Ethereum, Healthcare, Internet of Things, IoT

Yao‐Chieh Hu, Ting‐Ting Lee, Dimitris Chatzopoulos, Pan Hui

Although the primary role of decentralized ledgers, such as blockchains in cryptocurrencies, is to store data related to interactions between users to establish trust within incognizant parties, their capabilities allow them to offer more sophisticated functionalities. Smart contracts are decentralized rules that are stored on the blockchain and are executed on demand. Furthermore, smart contracts can interact with each other via message exchange to access data that are stored on them and to call each others' methods. In this paper, we propose a two-level hierarchical architecture that is composed of two types of smart contracts: custodian and client. A custodian contract can deploy on-demand client contract, access their data and call their methods to perform specific updates. Moreover, we develop a framework to allow client contracts to share common variables among all or partial group of the contracts, which may only be mutated by its creator, custodian contracts. We measure the performance of our proposal by developing the proposed contracts and deploying them on three popular testnets.

Giulia Fanti, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Surya Bakshi, Bradley Denby · 7 authors

Recent work has demonstrated significant anonymity vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's networking stack. In particular, the current mechanism for broadcasting Bitcoin transactions allows third-party observers to link transactions to the IP addresses that originated them. This lays the groundwork for low-cost, large-scale deanonymization attacks. In this work, we present Dandelion++, a first-principles defense against large-scale deanonymization attacks with near-optimal information-theoretic guarantees. Dandelion++ builds upon a recent proposal called Dandelion that exhibited similar goals. However, in this paper, we highlight simplifying assumptions made in Dandelion, and show how they can lead to serious deanonymization attacks when violated. In contrast, Dandelion++ defends against stronger adversaries that are allowed to disobey protocol. Dandelion++ is lightweight, scalable, and completely interoperable with the existing Bitcoin network. We evaluate it through experiments on Bitcoin's mainnet (i.e., the live Bitcoin network) to demonstrate its interoperability and low broadcast latency overhead.

Mohammad A. Salahuddin, Ala Al-Fuqaha, Mohsen Guizani, Khaled Shuaib · 5 authors

We propose an agile softwarized infrastructure for flexible, cost effective, secure and privacy preserving deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart healthcare applications and services. It integrates state-of-the-art networking and virtualization techniques across IoT, fog and cloud domains, employing Blockchain, Tor and message brokers to provide security and privacy for patients and healthcare providers. We propose a novel platform using Machine-to-Machine (M2M) messaging and rule-based beacons for seamless data management and discuss the role of data and decision fusion in the cloud and the fog, respectively, for smart healthcare applications and services.

Peter E. Sedgewick, Rogério de Lemos

This position paper describes how blockchains facilitate the implementation of distributed self-adaptive systems. We demonstrate how the master/slave decentralised control pattern for self-adaptive systems, integrated with a permissioned blockchain, can protect nodes of a network against attacks by continuously adapting the membership of an access control list. Whenever malicious behaviour is detected, consensus on an updated access control list is reached, and that node is removed from the network. Using a smart home, as an example, we demonstrate that a permissioned blockchain is able to maintain a consistent view of a network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the presence of malicious nodes.

Susanne Boshuis, Tim B. Braam, Alejandra Pedroza Marchena, Slinger Jansen

Thus far, no research has been done into the effect of business strategies on software ecosystem health. This research aims to fill that gap by combining the Open Source Ecosystem Health Operationalization (OSEHO) and generic strategies. These models are combined and tested on five cases of cryptocurrency ecosystems: Ripple, Ethereum, Litecoin, IOTA and zCash. Findings suggest that the generic strategy Focused Differentiation has the biggest positive impact on ecosystem health. Further research is necessary to see if this is also true for more mature and more stable ecosystems.

F. Rubinstein, Gustavo Gonçalves Vettori

No abstract is available for this record.

Giulia Fanti, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Surya Bakshi, Bradley Denby · 7 authors

Recent work has demonstrated significant anonymity vulnerabilities in\nBitcoin's networking stack. In particular, the current mechanism for\nbroadcasting Bitcoin transactions allows third-party observers to link\ntransactions to the IP addresses that originated them. This lays the groundwork\nfor low-cost, large-scale deanonymization attacks. In this work, we present\nDandelion++, a first-principles defense against large-scale deanonymization\nattacks with near-optimal information-theoretic guarantees. Dandelion++ builds\nupon a recent proposal called Dandelion that exhibited similar goals. However,\nin this paper, we highlight simplifying assumptions made in Dandelion, and show\nhow they can lead to serious deanonymization attacks when violated. In\ncontrast, Dandelion++ defends against stronger adversaries that are allowed to\ndisobey protocol. Dandelion++ is lightweight, scalable, and completely\ninteroperable with the existing Bitcoin network. We evaluate it through\nexperiments on Bitcoin's mainnet (i.e., the live Bitcoin network) to\ndemonstrate its interoperability and low broadcast latency overhead.\n

Eyyüp Ensari Şahin

In the world finance and technological development in finance, along with innovative financial instruments, have attracted investors. The most popular of these developments is undoubtedly Bitcoin, which is an output of the blockchain infrastructure .Bitcoin that is not connected to a central authority and contains cryptographic features, is one of the crypto moneys. The fact that Bitcoin does not depend on Central Authority and disclose the factors affecting its price by supply and demand have resulted in high volatility. In this study, firstly blockchain technology will be explained briefly and time-dependent price estimates for Bitcoin which is one of the important outputs of this technology, will be made. Artificial Neural Networks (YSA), which has become increasingly popular among estimation methods in recent years, has been used in the study and compared with ARIMA in traditional estimation methods. The sample of the study was created using daily closing prices between 02.02.2012 - 09.01.2018 dates. As a result of this study, both directions and values of estimated prices by artificial neural networks MPL (6-3-1) model between 10.01.2018 - 18.01.2018 have been more successful than ARIMA (1.1.6) model.

Adam J. Kolber

The first high-profile decentralized autonomous organization formed in 2016. Called “TheDAO,” it used smart contracts on a bitcoin-style blockchain to allow strangers to come together online to vote on and invest in venture capital proposals. Newspapers raved about the $160 million it quickly raised, even though it purported to have no central human authority, including no managers, executives, or board of directors. Technologists have grand plans for smart contracts and autonomous organizations. Rather than staying at traditional hotels with elaborate human staff, we may pay for hotel rooms using bitcoin (or another cryptocurrency) which will automatically unlock the room door. If the toilet breaks, the room itself will contract with a plumber to fix it. Similarly, a smart contract may allow us to hire a self-driving car. The car will not only drive passengers around but arrange for its own routine maintenance. TheDAO itself, however, is now a cautionary tale. A bug in its smart contract code was exploited to drain more than $50 million in value. Some purists denounced efforts to mitigate the problem, arguing that the alleged hacker simply withdrew money in accordance with the organization’s agreed-upon contractual terms in the form of computer code. Since the “code is the contract” in their minds, the alleged hacker did nothing wrong. I defend two related claims. First, contra the purists, I argue that the code does not reflect the entirety of the parties’ agreement, and so the “code is the contract” slogan does not resolve whether TheDAO exploitation should have been mitigated. I take no position on whether mitigation was appropriate except to say that the matter depends on many considerations aside from smart contract code itself. Second, I point to a broader danger lurking in the code-is-the-contract view. TheDAO had tremendous “artificial responsibility” in that we gave it considerable control that couldn’t be easily revoked or reined in. Not-so-smart contracts in the future may prove even more dangerous: hotel guests might be locked out of their rooms, and self-driving cars might drive off bridges. I argue that unadulterated commitment to the code-is-the-contract slogan increases artificial responsibility and its associated risks.

Pengcheng Wang, Jeffrey Svajlenko, Yanzhao Wu, Yun Xu · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Daniel Martens, Walid Maalej

Online portals include an increasing amount of user feedback in form of ratings and reviews. Recent research highlighted the importance of this feedback and confirmed that positive feedback improves product sales figures and thus its success. Online portals' operators act as central authorities throughout the overall review process. In the worst case, operators can exclude users from submitting reviews, modify existing reviews, and introduce fake reviews by fictional users. This paper presents ReviewChain, a decentralized review approach. Our approach avoids central authorities by using blockchain technologies, decentralized apps and storage. It enables users to submit and retrieve untampered reviews. We highlight the implementation challenges encountered when realizing our approach on the public Ethereum blockchain. Then, we discuss possible design alternatives and their trade-offs regarding costs, security, and trustworthiness. Finally, we analyze which design decision should be chosen to support specific trade-offs and present resulting combinations of decentralized blockchain technologies, also with conventional centralized technologies.

D S Pradeepkumar, Kapil Singi, Vikrant Kaulgud, Sanjay Podder

Blockchain technology becomes the key solution to provide trust and security without any need for a central supervisory authority to validate the transactions. By now, it plays a key role in the digital transformation of several processes and industries with varying application use cases. To promote the wide adoption of blockchain technology we need mechanisms to identify the digitizability level of the given regulations to smart contracts and mechanisms to specify which blockchain technology is best suitable for the given regulations. In this work, we propose a modeling approach that supports the automated analysis of human-readable regulation representations by suggesting how much percentage of regulation is digitizable and the suitable blockchain environment to design the application. We identify smart contract components that correspond to real-world entities and its pertaining clauses and its digitizability property. With selected examples, we explore this capability and discuss our future research directions on smart contract generation according to the recommended environment.

Jungho Kim, Sungwon Kang, Hwi Ahn, Changsup Keum · 5 authors

Recently, public interest in the blockchain technology has surged and various applications based on the technology have emerged. However, there has been little study on architectural evaluations of popular block chain platforms that can help the developers choose an appropriate architecture matching their needs. In this paper, we reconstruct and evaluate the architecture of Hyperledger and Ethereum, which are representative open source platforms for blockchain. The evaluation results indicate that Hyperledger is strong in modifiability and performance whereas Ethereum is better in security.

Florian Wessling, Christopher Ehmke, Marc Hesenius, Volker Gruhn

Adding blockchain technology to existing systems instead of building them from the ground up poses several challenges. It is difficult to find out which attributes of blockchains are important for a given use case (e.g. immutable, trustless, anonymous) and to decide which elements of an architecture should employ blockchain technologies. Current approaches generally only give a hint on whether blockchain technology makes sense for a given use case or not. This paper proposes a more fine-grained approach to decide which elements of an application architecture could benefit from the use of blockchain technology. We illustrate the first outline of our approach which identifies participants, their trust relations and interactions to derive a hybrid architecture (i.e., an architecture embedding blockchain technology in existing software systems or creating new systems using blockchain only in certain parts).