Blockchain technology is a kind of distributed database network, which provides the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) digital currency transaction mode through the encryption algorithm and the decentralized mechanism. This paper is to study the application of blockchain technology related to industry 4.0, and put forward blockchain technology in the cooperative development of power electronic devices. The above application scenario includes a producer and a number of engineers, and they are trading on the blockchain. The producer publishes the special requirement of power electronic device which has a preference considering the conflicts between different parameters to apply to his certain industrial scenario. The participants are to design the power supply topology in accordance with the parameters required by the producer. When all parameters are satisfied the order of the producer, it is about to complete the transaction. All participants are required to provide true data of their topology design models.
In 2008, following the outbreak of the global financial crisis, a new trading system emerged that was made possible by cryptographically-produced currencies. Among them, the most popular digital cryp-tocurrency is undoubtedly the Bitcoin. This alternative way of trading quickly captured the interest of both businesses and consumers. Combined with a general lack of confidence towards financial institu-tions, central governments, and the effect of capital controls imposed across several countries, Bitcoins begun being used extensively for funds transfer across borders and general payments. How-ever, it is unclear whether the use of Bitcoins is extensive enough so as to lead to complete or partial disintermediation of monetary transactions, and whether users understand how the technology works and what are the inherit risks of this alternative payment mechanism. This paper addresses these ques-tions through a survey-based study, conducted within the Greek context, where capital controls are still active and awareness regarding cryptocurrencies seems to be on the rise. Our findings show that despite that end-users of Bitcoin are somewhat concerned with regards to security issues, they are nevertheless interested in its use for identifying new business opportunities and bypassing residency-based measures, such as capital controls.
Distributed energy resources (DERs) include distributed generations (DGs), distributed energy storages (DESs), and the demand response resources (DRRs). With the increasing penetration of DERs in distribution network, more and more users change from power consumers to prosumers which have great influences on distribution network as well as generate new business models on the demand side. Based on the emerging change of the power system, this paper proposes a transactive energy scheme (TES) based on multi-factor evaluation and contract net protocol to determine energy trading strategies among prosumers to realize economic and stable operation of distribution network. In the proposed TES, a TE market is built in the deregulatory retail power market. Power consumers, smart homes, industrial parks, or virtual power plants with DERs take the initiative as transactive nodes (TNs), and the peer to peer transactions among TNs in TE market can be carried out based on the multi-factor evaluation and contract protocol. When a TN cannot meet its own electricity demand, it launches the contract net to other TNs, requests to carry on the electric energy transaction, and determines the selected TNs according to the multi-factor evaluation. The simulation results show compared with the traditional electricity business model, the market participants who use the proposed TES can gain more economic benefits as well as protecting their own privacy.
Blockchain is an integrated technology to ensure keeping record and process transactions with decentralized manner. It is thought as the foundation of future decentralized ecosystem, and collects much attention. However, the maturity of this technology including security of the fundamental protocol and its applications is not enough, thus we need more research on the security evaluation and verification of Blockchain technology This tutorial explains the current status of the security of this technology, its security layers and possibility of application of formal analysis and verification.
Blockchain's ever increasing size has become a major problem. Bitcoin [7], for example, has grown to 115120 MB as of May 2017, which is roughly 115 GB. This uncontrollable growth of the Blockchain is bound to become an issue in the future, as hard disks may become too small to store the entire Blockchain history and traversing the transactions databases may become increasingly slow. Already, there are lightweight clients in various Blockchain platforms (Bitcoin included), who do not store the entire chain locally but rely on a third party to send them the blocks they need. There are many issues with these clients, mainly security problems, since they go back to trusting a central authority rather than gaining trust from several distributed peers. These clients' knowledge of the Blockchain is solely based on some third party that should be trusted, while the conceptual base for Blockchain is trust distributing. In this paper we present two Blockchain abbreviation schemes. The first one is based on the Ethereum [8] project and proposes replacing the full Blockchain with a new Genesis block, which summarizes everyone's account balances at a certain point in time. One possible benefit is to use less communication while still storing the prefix of the old Blockchain (or signature of the Blockchain that can validate a version archived by other participants) in a local archive. Here we trade loss of transaction history for efficiency. Our second contribution is a UNIX based architecture using the file system, for implementing Blockchain. We demonstrate a Blockchain abbreviation technique for this architecture too.
Cooperation of vehicular systems is the stepping stone towards both road and indoor smart transportation systems. It aims at increasing transportation efficiency and safety compared to the stand-alone vehicular systems. The usage of wireless communication as the foundation of such safety-critical cooperation needs to be embraced with all its benefits and flaws compared to the wired communication. The cooperative functions need to be designed to adapt to the varying reliability of the wireless communication channels such that both the stand-alone vehicles as well as the smart transportation system formed by their cooperation are deemed sufficiently safe. In this paper we build upon a contract-based runtime monitoring architecture and propose a methodology for assuring adaptive behaviour of transportation with respect to the wireless communication channel failures. More specifically, we elaborate how safety analysis of the interaction of the wirelessly connected vehicles can be used as the basis for derivation of the adaptive modes and the corresponding contracts. Furthermore, we discuss how such contracts can be used as the basis for assurance of the adaptive wireless cooperation. We illustrate the proposed methodology on a smart transportation system of a factory.
To achieve privacy requirements, IoT application providers may need to spend a lot of money to replace existing IoT devices. To address this problem, this study proposes the Blockchain Connected Gateways (BC Gateways) to protect users from providing personal data to IoT devices without user consent. In addition, the gateways store user privacy preferences on IoT devices in the blockchain network. Therefore, this study can utilize the blockchain technology to resolve the disputes of privacy issues. In conclusion, this paper can contribute to improving user privacy and trust in IoT applications with legacy IoT devices.
Multi-modal travelling is a common phenomenon. However, planning multi-modal journeys is still an unstructured and time-consuming experience for customers: they lose time assembling a comprehensive plan out of disparate data, spread over a multitude of information systems - each corresponding to a different company responsible for one of the legs in the journey. Also transport operators are affected by the sparsity of the transportation market, as they might lose potential customers who could not find or know about their services. In this paper, we propose Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as a solution to such problems. Key element of MaaS is that MaaS operators can aggregate solutions of multiple providers to deliver dynamic, transparent multi-modal travels to their users, who experience transportation as managed directly by a single operator. However, given the volume and sparsity of the transportation market, we argue that MaaS operators cannot rely on one-to-one, custom contracts of usage with single mobility operators. Instead, we envision the creation of platforms that automatise the marketing of services for mobility among many mobility providers. In this work, we detail the required features of a general software platform for such a MaaS market. In particular, we provide a precise definition of MaaS through the MaaS Stack - a tiered view of the components needed by entities to join the MaaS market. Then, through the lens of the MaaS Stack, we elicit the features of an enabling software platform. Finally, to validate our approach, we present a compliant prototype, called SMAll, and discuss its main design choices, among which: i) how SMAll supports the creation of a federation-based MaaS market and ii) how microservices - an emerging architectural style that fosters cohesiveness and minimality of components - enhance flexibility and let the platform and the services of its members efficiently scale according to dynamic demands.
The article addresses some aspects of finance, a sufficiently complicated economic category that is insufficiently developed in modern scientific literature. According to the author, the holistic view of the finance is closely related to the study of genetic and functional aspects of finance, their interdependence and interaction. The author made an attempt to look on the finance from the genetic point of view. The finance as an economic category is considered from different perspectives: as the object and subject of utilization (consumption), in terms of its nature, its role as a subject in social reproduction, as well as its functionality. As a synthetic economic category, the finance is connected with definite steps of the reproduction process at all levels of the economy, represents a complex of economic relations in terms of formation, distribution, re-distribution and use of centralized and decentralized funds as well as non-fund forms of accumulation in the process of establishment, distribution, re-distribution and use of the gross domestic product and the national income of the state.
Blockchain has been applied to study data privacy and network security recently. In this paper, we propose a punishment scheme based on the action record on the blockchain to suppress the attack motivation of the edge servers and the mobile devices in the edge network. The interactions between a mobile device and an edge server are formulated as a blockchain security game, in which the mobile device sends a request to the server to obtain real-time service or launches attacks against the server for illegal security gains, and the server chooses to perform the request from the device or attack it. The Nash equilibria (NEs) of the game are derived and the conditions that each NE exists are provided to disclose how the punishment scheme impacts the adversary behaviors of the mobile device and the edge server.
Ethereum contracts can be designed to function as fully decentralized applications called DAPPs that hold financial assets, and many have already been fielded. Unfortunately, DAPPs can be hacked, and the assets they control can be stolen. A recent attack on an Ethereum decentralized application called The DAO demonstrated that smart contract bugs are more than an academic concern. Ether worth hundreds of millions of US dollars was extracted by an attacker from The DAO, sending the value of its tokens and the overall exchange price of ether itself tumbling.
A mix-net is an important cryptographic tool in schemes requiring anonymity of messages, such as in secure e-voting and e-auction schemes. In this paper, we present a novel mix-net protocol which achieves stronger security and satisfies both public verifiability and sender verifiability. Our mix-net is constructed based on Wikström's scheme and strengthens its se-curity by introducing an improved key generation procedure and proposing a new method for constructing zero knowledge proof of secret shuffle. It is proved to be CCA-secure under the assumption of random oracle. Compared with previous mix-net schemes which are CCA-secure, the proposed protocol does not require any trusted center, and incurs fewer inter-actions between servers which resulting in a lower computation and communication complexity.
Among the smart cities applications, optimizing lottery games is one of the urgent needs to ensure their fairness and transparency. The emerging blockchain technology shows a glimpse of solutions to fairness and transparency issues faced by lottery industries. This paper presents the design of a blockchain-based lottery system for smart cities applications. We adopt the smart contracts of blockchain technology and the cryptograph blockchain model, Hawk [8], to design the blockchain-based lottery system, FairLotto, for future smart cities applications. Fairness, transparency, and privacy of the proposed blockchain-based lottery system are discussed and ensured.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, which works peer-to-peer without a centralized repository, and is accepted as a form of payment all around the world. The “public ledger”, which registers transactions, is known as the block chain. A conventional ledger records bills and notes which are used by an organization, but in the case of Bitcoin these are simply data “entries” in the Blockchain sequence. Business Intelligence (BI), according to Investpedia, refers to the procedural and technical infrastructure that collect, store and analyses the data produced by a field of activities or by an individual company. BI is meant to take in all the data being generated by a business and present easy to digest performance measures and trends that will inform management decisions. The paper shows the BI steps and procedures that will help a Bitcoin user, owner or broker make the best decision possible in order to maximize their profits and financial security.
The article discusses issues related to the use of cryptocurrency in the world and in Russia. In particular, the author conducted a statistical study of the market volume, basic trends in the use of cryptocurrencies. Examines the main approaches to attract citizens to use crypto currencies for payment services, and also analyzes the problems faced by Russian business in this area.
Open access
Economic and Technological Developments in Russia
Security, Politics, and Digital Transformation
Digitalization and Economic Development in Agriculture
Zhongqi Cheng, Tim Schmidt, Guantao Liu, Rainer Doomer
The rapidly growing design complexity has become a big obstacle and dramatically increased the time required for SystemC simulation. In this case study, we exploit different levels of parallelism, including thread- and data-level parallelism, to accelerate the simulation of a Bitcoin miner model in SystemC. Our experiments are performed on two multi-core processors and one many-core Intel(g) Xeon PhiTMCoprocessor. Our results show that with the combination of data- and thread-level parallelism, the peak simulation speed improves by over 11x on a 4-core host, 50x on a 16-core host, and 510x on a 60-core host, respectively. The results confirm the efficiency of combining thread- and datalevel parallelism for higher SystemC simulation speed, and can serve as a benchmark for future optimization of system level design, modeling, and simulation.
Marcelo Battesini, Carla Lourenço Tavares de Andrade, Marismary Horsth De Seta
Health Surveillance carries out a set of actions to prevent health risks related to the consumption of products and the provision of services under the Unified Health System (SUS). The implementation of Health Surveillance actions relies heavily on the federal funding policy, which induces its decentralization. This text aims to analyze the federal funding of Health Surveillance to States and Municipalities from the scheduled onlendings in the period 2005-2012. Among the main results are the increase of per capita values, steady at around the mean value of R$ 1.25/inhabitant/year; the increased number of municipalities that agreed to carry out strategic actions; and a stable trend in the proportions of each federated entity at around 50% to Municipalities, 25% to state federated entities and 20% to the Central Public Health Laboratories (LACENs). Results show that the adoption of unified nationwide per capita values caused distortions that indicate inequity among state territories, pointing to the need to clarify the concept of equity in financing under the National Health Surveillance System and to broaden the discussion on the currently used allocation criteria.
Halal supply chains are vulnerable due to their credence quality attributes, importance of maintaining halal integrity throughout the supply chain, need to avoid doubt, lack of control of food norms, and sensitivity of the Muslim consumer towards halal. These vulnerabilities make halal supply chains complex to design, manage, and optimise. Transparency of halal supply chains is needed in order to ensure trust and authenticity of a halal brand. The principle of a shared database that is safe, open and verifiable without a central operator is an attractive proposition to embed trust and authenticity for halal food, cosmetics, home care, and pharmaceuticals.
Abstract This paper argues that many so‐called digital technologies can be construed as notational technologies, explored through the example of Monegraph, an art and digital asset management platform built on top of the blockchain system originally developed for the cryptocurrency bitcoin. As the paper characterizes it, a notational technology is the performance of syntactic notation within a field of reference, a technologized version of what Nelson Goodman called a “notational system.” Notational technologies produce abstracted entities through positive and reliable, or constitutive, tests of socially acceptable meaning. Accordingly, this account deviates from typical narratives of blockchains (usually characterized as Turing or state machines), instead demonstrating that blockchain technologies are effective at managing digital assets because they produce abstracted identities through the performance of notation. Since notational technologies rely on configurations of socially acceptable meaning, this paper also provides a philosophical account of how blockchain technologies are socially embedded.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations