Sharing provenance across workflow management systems automatically is not currently possible, but the value of such a capability is high since it could greatly reduce the amount of duplicated workflows, accelerate the discovery of new knowledge, and verify the integrity of past and present analyses. Although numerous technological challenges exist to efficiently share provenance information across workflow management systems, permissioned distributed ledgers could surmount many of them. The primary benefit of permissioned distributed ledgers over other technologies is that their distribution is over a peer-to-peer network that encodes transactions across the network into an immutable hash list and achieves consensus on the validity of the new data through a common consensus mechanism. This work discusses provenance and distributed ledgers on their own and then presents an argument that distributed ledgers naturally satisfy many of the requirements of workflow provenance, that provenance information can exist in the ledger in multiple ways, and that a number of novel research areas exist based on this strategy.
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Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Scientific Computing and Data Management
Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
Raymond Cheng, Fan Zhang, Jernej Kos, Warren He · 9 authors
Smart contracts are applications that execute on blockchains. Today they manage billions of dollars in value and motivate visionary plans for pervasive blockchain deployment. While smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of blockchains, however, they are impeded by blockchains' lack of confidentiality and poor performance. We present Ekiden, a system that addresses these critical gaps by combining blockchains with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Ekiden leverages a novel architecture that separates consensus from execution, enabling efficient TEE-backed confidentiality-preserving smart-contracts and high scalability. Our prototype (with Tendermint as the consensus layer) achieves example performance of 600× more throughput and 400× less latency at 1000× less cost than the Ethereum mainnet. Another contribution of this paper is that we systematically identify and treat the pitfalls arising from harmonizing TEEs and blockchains. Treated separately, both TEEs and blockchains provide powerful guarantees, but hybridized, though, they engender new attacks. For example, in naïve designs, privacy in TEE-backed contracts can be jeopardized by forgery of blocks, a seemingly unrelated attack vector. We believe the insights learned from Ekiden will prove to be of broad importance in hybridized TEE-blockchain systems.
Holger Kinkelin, Valentin Hauner, Heiko Niedermayer, Georg Carle
Numerous IoT applications, like building automation or process control of\nindustrial sites, exist today. These applications inherently have a strong\nconnection to the physical world. Hence, IT security threats cannot only cause\nproblems like data leaks but also safety issues which might harm people.\nAttacks on IT systems are not only performed by outside attackers but also\ninsiders like administrators. For this reason, we present ongoing work on a\nconfiguration management system (CMS) that provides control over\nadministrators, restrains their rights, and enforces separation of concerns. We\nreach this goal by conducting a configuration management process that requires\nmulti-party authorization for critical configurations to achieve Byzantine\nfault tolerance against attacks and faults by administrators. Only after a\nconfiguration has been authorized by multiple experts, it is applied to the\ntargeted devices. For the whole configuration management process, our CMS\nguarantees accountability and traceability. Lastly, our system is\ntamper-resistant as we leverage Hyperledger Fabric, which provides a\ndistributed execution environment for our CMS and a blockchain-based\ndistributed ledger that we use to store the configurations. A beneficial side\neffect of this approach is that our CMS is also suitable to manage\nconfigurations for infrastructure shared across different organizations that do\nnot need to trust each other.\n
Achieving government’s goals for cannabis regulation requires legal cannabis to be a cheaper, more attractive consumer alternative compared to the illegal market. This goal may be undermined by the costs and disadvantages of traditional regulatory management. A Canada wide, real-time blockchain tracking system appears to be a viable technical solution architecture. A permissioned blockchain network could be tested alongside traditional tracking. This investment, if proven effective, could reduce regulatory costs for government and red tape for business, helping to achieve Governments’ objectives to:Enhance public safety by ensuring quality and monitoring product salesUndermine illegal markets to reduce crime and prevent product diversion
Masarah Paquet-Clouston, Bernhard Haslhofer, Benoît Dupont
Ransomware can prevent a user from accessing a device and its files until a ransom is paid to the attacker, most frequently in Bitcoin. With over 500 known ransomware families, it has become one of the dominant cybercrime threats for law enforcement, security professionals and the public. However, a more comprehensive, evidence-based picture on the global direct financial impact of ransomware attacks is still missing. In this paper, we present a data-driven method for identifying and gathering information on Bitcoin transactions related to illicit activity based on footprints left on the public Bitcoin blockchain. We implement this method on-top-of the GraphSense open-source platform and apply it to empirically analyze transactions related to 35 ransomware families. We estimate the lower bound direct financial impact of each ransomware family and find that, from 2013 to mid-2017, the market for ransomware payments has a minimum worth of USD 12,768,536 (22,967.54 BTC). We also find that the market is highly skewed with only a few number of players responsible for the majority of the payments. Based on these research findings, policy-makers and law enforcement agencies can use the statistics provided to understand the size of the illicit market and make informed decisions on how best to address the threat.
The emergence of block-chain technology in the form known as “cryptocurrency” is an evolution of the global monetary system that is here to stay. The rise of this new variant of distributed ledger technology has been dismissed by some who believe it offers no real value and denigrated by others who believe its prevalence raises national security concerns. Many of these concerns stem from the common misperception that all cryptocurrencies have cryptographic properties which render them anonymous and can be used by terrorists and other undesirables to fund their criminal enterprises. After discussing the basic technical components of blockchain technology, this article distinguishes that, contrary to popular belief, most cryptocurrencies are not what could be classified as “anonymous,” but are instead “pseudonymous.” These pseudonymous cryptocurrencies can actually enhance law enforcement’s ability to track criminal users’ financial activities. It further refines the notion that all cryptocurrencies are the same by noting that some are more anonymous than others, and some are in fact more identifiable than fiat currencies. Instead of resisting cryptocurrencies altogether, this article argues that the United States government should embrace those cryptocurrencies that are pseudonymous and should further study those which are considered anonymous.
The connection between financial innovation and information technology industry has provided and kept the crypto currencies for some ten years on the market, a kind of offset of monetary evolution after the introduction of virtual, electronic and digital money. Although their essence is still wrapped up under the veil of secrets, the facts show that the value of Bitcoin as the first crypto currency has a rising trend, and that an increasing number of firms and individuals are deciding to use it. This will result in the emergence of over 1000 new crypto currencies. This paper explains the emergence and functioning of the Bitcoin, its characteristics and functions, the benefits and risks that it carries, as well as possible scenarios of further development of the international monetary system with crypto currencies.
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Since Bitcoin appeared in 2009, the digital currency has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for all manner of criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: Just how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros?\nThe answer lies in a technology called blockchain, which can be used for much more than Bitcoin. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet itself in both form and impact. Some have said this tool may change society as we know it. Blockchains are being used to create autonomous computer programs known as “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to create financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. The technology could affect governance itself, by supporting new organizational structures that promote more democratic and participatory decision making.\nPrimavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright acknowledge this potential and urge the law to catch up. That is because disintermediation—a blockchain’s greatest asset—subverts critical regulation. By cutting out middlemen, such as large online operators and multinational corporations, blockchains run the risk of undermining the capacity of governmental authorities to supervise activities in banking, commerce, law, and other vital areas. De Filippi and Wright welcome the new possibilities inherent in blockchains. But as Blockchain and the Law makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking.
Franklin Schrans, Susan Eisenbach, Sophia Drossopoulou
Blockchain-based platforms such as Ethereum support the execution of versatile decentralized applications, known as smart contracts. These typically hold and transfer digital currency (e.g., Ether) to other parties on the platform. Contracts have been subject to numerous attacks, losing hundreds of millions of dollars (in Ether). We propose Flint, a new type-safe, capabilities-secure, contract-oriented programming language specifically designed for writing robust smart contracts. To help programmers reason about access control of functions, Flint programmers use caller capabilities. To prevent vulnerabilities relating to the unintentional loss of currency, transfers of assets in Flint are performed through safe atomic operations, inspired by linear type theory.
Emanuel Ferreira Jesus, Vanessa R. L. Chicarino, Célio Albuquerque, Antônio A. de A. Rocha
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly a reality today. Nevertheless, some key challenges still need to be given particular attention so that IoT solutions further support the growing demand for connected devices and the services offered. Due to the potential relevance and sensitivity of services, IoT solutions should address the security and privacy concerns surrounding these devices and the data they collect, generate, and process. Recently, the Blockchain technology has gained much attention in IoT solutions. Its primary usage scenarios are in the financial domain, where Blockchain creates a promising applications world and can be leveraged to solve security and privacy issues. However, this emerging technology has a great potential in the most diverse technological areas and can significantly help achieve the Internet of Things view in different aspects, increasing the capacity of decentralization, facilitating interactions, enabling new transaction models, and allowing autonomous coordination of the devices. The paper goal is to provide the concepts about the structure and operation of Blockchain and, mainly, analyze how the use of this technology can be used to provide security and privacy in IoT. Finally, we present the stalker, which is a selfish miner variant that has the objective of preventing a node to publish its blocks on the main chain.
Motivated by the recent blockchain technology originally built for bitcoin transactions, various industries are exploring the opportunities to redefine their existing operational systems. In this study, an innovative environmentally sustainable solution is proposed for the fashion apparel manufacturing industry (FAMI), which is energized by blockchain. Incorporating the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), and a novel “emission link” system, the proposed framework exposes carbon emission to the public and establishes a feature to reduce the emissions for all key steps of clothing making. Fully compatible with Industry 4.0, blockchain provides decentralization, transparency, automation, and immutability characteristics to the proposed framework. Specifically, the blockchain supported ETS framework, the carbon emissions of clothing manufacturing life cycle, and the emission link powered procedures are introduced in detail. A case study is provided to demonstrate the carbon emission evaluation procedure. Finally, a multi-criteria evaluation is performed to demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed system.
Bitcoins and Blockchain technologies are attracting the attention of different scientific communities. In addition, their widespread industrial applications and the continuous introduction of cryptocurrencies are also stimulating the attention of the public opinion. The underlying structure of these technologies constitutes one of their core concepts. In particular, they are based on peer-to-peer networks. Accordingly, all nodes lie at the same level, so that there is no place for privileged actors as, for instance, banking institutions in classical financial networks. In this work, we perform a preliminary investigation on two kinds of network, i.e. the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin Cash network. Notably, we analyze their global structure and we try to evaluate if they are provided with a small-world behavior. Results suggest that the principle known as 'fittest-gets-richer', combined with a continuous increasing of connections, might constitute the mechanism leading these networks to reach their current structure. Moreover, further observations open the way to new investigations into this direction.
Bitcoins and Blockchain technologies are attracting the attention of different scientific communities. In addition, their widespread industrial applications and the continuous introduction of cryptocurrencies are also stimulating the attention of the public opinion. The underlying structure of these technologies constitutes one of their core concepts. In particular, they are based on peer-to-peer networks. Accordingly, all nodes lie at the same level, so that there is no place for privileged actors as, for instance, banking institutions in classical financial networks. In this work, we perform a preliminary investigation on two kinds of network, i.e. the Bitcoin network and the Bitcoin Cash network. Notably, we analyze their global structure and we try to evaluate if they are provided with a small-world behavior. Results suggest that the principle known as 'fittest-gets-richer', combined with a continuous increasing of connections, might constitute the mechanism leading these networks to reach their current structure. Moreover, further observations open the way to new investigations into this direction.