Abstract The central theme of this paper is that the development of a technology that is predicted to have a major impact on the way we transact with each other should be a matter where the needs of society at large are taken into account. Where the technology is one that emerges from the domain of the Internet, inclusivity becomes even more acute in order to avoid widening the already existing gap in reaping the “digital dividend.” With blockchain, the obligation could even be seen as a moral one, as blockchain is said to have the potential to negate the scope for the abuse of trust by states and institutions. This could be a game changer in areas such as public procurement and the conduct of elections where abuse can lead to the denial of essential resources and a concomitant loss of life, or to conflict and mass killings. Blockchain presents an opportunity for the Internet development community to claim a degree of recognition in the human rights realm by aiding civil intervention in areas where military intervention has been deemed inappropriate.
The blockchain technology is gaining momentum because of its possible application to other systems than the cryptocurrency one. Indeed, blockchain, as a de-centralized system based on a distributed digital ledger, can be utilized to securely manage any kind of assets, constructing a system that is independent of any authorization entity. In this paper, we briefly present blockchain and our work in progress, the VMOA blockchain, to secure virtual machine orchestration operations for cloud computing and network functions virtualization systems. Using tutorial examples, we describe our design choices and draw implementation plans.
Recent years have witnessed the trend of increasingly relying on distributed infrastructures. This increased the number of reported incidents of security breaches compromising users' privacy, where third parties massively collect, process and manage users' personal data. Towards these security and privacy challenges, we combine hierarchical identity based cryptographic mechanisms with emerging blockchain infrastructures and propose a blockchain-based data usage auditing architecture ensuring availability and accountability in a privacy-preserving fashion. Our approach relies on the use of auditable contracts deployed in blockchain infrastructures. Thus, it offers transparent and controlled data access, sharing and processing, so that unauthorized users or untrusted servers cannot process data without client's authorization. Moreover, based on cryptographic mechanisms, our solution preserves privacy of data owners and ensures secrecy for shared data with multiple service providers. It also provides auditing authorities with tamper-proof evidences for data usage compliance.
Abstract A blockchain can be considered a technological phenomenon that is made up of different interconnected and autonomous systems. Such systems are referred to here as cyber‐physical systems: complex interconnections of cyber and physical components. When cyber‐physical systems are interconnected, a new whole consisting of a system of systems is created by the autonomous systems and their intercommunication and interaction. In a blockchain, individual systems can independently make decisions on joint information transactions. The decision‐making procedures needed for this are executed based on fault‐tolerant communication and voting and consensus procedures, while the results of these decision‐making procedures are stored in distributed ledgers. Due to the intercommunication, interaction, and independent decision making by autonomous systems, the new whole of a blockchain is a complex entity. Complexity science rather than the usual reductionist scientific approach can help us better understand the behaviour of the new and continuously developing whole of a blockchain as a technological phenomenon.
With the promotion of electric power reform in China, distributed energy participating in power market transaction becomes possible. However, due to the characteristics of transaction decentralization, multiple energy synergies, information symmetry and the large quantity, the transaction cost and the risk of information leak increase significantly, which inhibits the enthusiasm of distributed energy to participate in electric power transaction. The block chain has been widely used in finance, logistics and other industries because of its decentralized data processing. In this paper, the characteristics and infrastructure of the block chain is analyzed and the distributed energy trading frame work based on the block chain is built. The result shows that block chain has significant effect on the information security of the energy transaction.
David Froelicher, Patricia Egger, João Sá Sousa, Jean Louis Raisaro · 8 authors
Abstract Current solutions for privacy-preserving data sharing among multiple parties either depend on a centralized authority that must be trusted and provides only weakest-link security (e.g., the entity that manages private/secret cryptographic keys), or leverage on decentralized but impractical approaches (e.g., secure multi-party computation). When the data to be shared are of a sensitive nature and the number of data providers is high, these solutions are not appropriate. Therefore, we present U n L ynx , a new decentralized system for efficient privacy-preserving data sharing. We consider m servers that constitute a collective authority whose goal is to verifiably compute on data sent from n data providers. U n L ynx guarantees the confidentiality, unlinkability between data providers and their data, privacy of the end result and the correctness of computations by the servers. Furthermore, to support differentially private queries, U n L ynx can collectively add noise under encryption. All of this is achieved through a combination of a set of new distributed and secure protocols that are based on homomorphic cryptography, verifiable shuffling and zero-knowledge proofs. U n L ynx is highly parallelizable and modular by design as it enables multiple security/privacy vs. runtime tradeoffs. Our evaluation shows that U n L ynx can execute a secure survey on 400,000 personal data records containing 5 encrypted attributes, distributed over 20 independent databases, for a total of 2,000,000 ciphertexts, in 24 minutes.
The article presents the results of a study of a business-engineering project for a commercial bank. The technique of the international standard of business analysis practice BABOK GUIDE v3 (SWOT-Analysis) is used to identify internal and external factors that affect the organization. The commercial bank «Home Credit» was chosen as the object of the study. The aim of the research is to achieve the leading position of a commercial bank among the world's credit institutions by developing a program for the transformation of the enterprise architecture segment. Business process «Lending« was subject to reengineering and reoriented to increase the share of solvent customers through the implementation of the Masterchain platform in the organization's activities. The potential results from the introduction of the «Blockchain» into the business process «Lending» are defined.
The ever-increasing number of IoT devices necessitates a secure and scalable infrastructure to store and process generated data. Blockchain is an ideal choice with its decentralized, trustless architecture. However, low-power IoT end-devices do not possess enough horsepower to run a software client for intensive blockchain calculations. The purpose of this paper is to create a proof of concept to enable low-power, resource-constrained IoT end-devices accessing a blockchain-based infrastructure. To achieve this aim, an IoT gateway is configured as a blockchain node and an event-based messaging mechanism for low-power IoT end-devices is proposed. A demonstration of such a system is realized using LoRa nodes and gateway in a private Ethereum network.
Jacob Wood, Haejin Jang, Artem Lenskiy, Gohar F. Khan
As an emerging form of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has become increasingly prevalent in today’s financial marketplace. As a new technological instrument, this study examines Bitcoin by utilizing the technology adoption model and innovation diffusion theory. By utilizing such a framework, this study examines the factors that are associated with a decision to adopt Bitcoin as a means of financial exchange. By employing structural equation modeling and the partial least squares method, a research model was developed and tested using an international study that surveyed 121 global cryptocurrency community members. From our analysis we found that relative advantage and ease of use had a significant positive effect on bitcoin use intention while visibility and compatibility were also found to have a statistically positive impact. The results from this study have important implications to the finance and business sectors.
Blockchain technology is being considered as one of the ultimate revolutions that will be able to disrupt several pillars of our society. It is a public and distributed ledger built for security and interoperability. Blockchain provides all parties a secure and synchronized record of immutable transactions assembled together and permanently stored with a fingerprint, creating therefore an irreversible chain. In order to operate, this technology does not rely on any central authority. All transactions are sent over the network and the consensus is achieved by the mutual calculation and agreement. In this paper, we evaluate the blockchain technology and its evolution. Then, we characterize some essential features of the distributed ledger technologies (DLT) focusing on the three main blockchains actors: Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger. Besides, we present their security challenges and explore their drawbacks that can lead to use the blockchain network in order to conduct several attack scenarios. Finally, we describe their relationship with the onion router network (Tor) that beyond the malicious uses of the blockchain via Tor, these two networks share many common points.
Aleksandr Kapitonov, Sergey Lonshakov, Aleksandr Krupenkin, Ivan Berman
This article describes a method of organizing the communication protocol, which allows agents of the multiagent system (MAS) to make decisions about their actions. Plan activities and interact with each other to perform tasks of modern industrial and business processes based on cyber-physical systems. The main attention is paid to those multi-agent systems, where autonomous agents - robots or smart things - participate in business processes among people, and their activities are organized in an unreliable and unknown environment. The article shows, how to organize a communication system between agents in a peer-to-peer network using the decentralized Ethereum Blochchain technology and smart contracts. The architecture of protocol of autonomous business activity, based on this communication method is given. As a result, the experience of implementation an autonomous economic system with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is described.
IoT (Internet of Things) has a large portion of our life. This is manifested by the large number of connected devices. With the exponential growth of IoT devices, IoT security is becoming important. In particular, Smart Door Lock system is extremely important because it is closely related to the safety of the user. However, the data sent and received of existing Smart Door Lock system is vulnerable to forgery and hacking. To improve these security issues, we propose a Smart Door Lock system based on blockchain. Also, this provides data integrity and non-repudiation. Lastly, we propose an algorithm that the Smart Door Lock system judge some situations around itself and operates based on data sent from sensors.
Bitcoin is a decentralized currency system that does not need any central authorities. All transactions issued by users have been recorded in the common ledger, called blockchain, which is shared by all users. In Bitcoin, an SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) client, which is a lightweight client that does not possess the entire blockchain, are developed for storage constrained devices such as a mobile phone. For an SPV client to check if there are transactions related to it, a Bloom filter where their Bitcoin addresses are involved is sent to a full client that possesses the entire blockchain. The full client only transfers transactions of which Bitcoin addresses are positive on the received Bloom filter. However, it is necessary to preserve the privacy of SPV clients when designing a Bloom filter because SPV clients' Bitcoin addresses will be identified by a full client with high probability. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving Bloom filter design for SPV clients based on γ-Deniability. γ-Deniability is a privacy metric that shows how much true positive Bitcoin addresses are hidden by the false positives in a Bloom filter. Furthermore, in order to design a Bloom Filter that satisfies a certain γ-Deniability, it is necessary to know the number of unique Bitcoin addresses that appear for the first time since the queried time. Based on our manual inspection, we propose to estimate it based on the linear regression. We show that our scheme achieves good estimation accuracy and γ through the simulation with a real Bitcoin blockchain.
Importance of Internet of Things technologies increased in recent years. However, these technologies carry some security vulnerabilities because of their network communication layer. The root cause of these vulnerabilities is usually the Authentication problem. Zero knowledge proof method is a strong cryptographic solution for Authentication problem that is proving of having a knowledge to another party without revealing anything other than the veracity of the statement. Zero knowledge proof method is consist of two-way complex mathematical algorithms for both parties. In this work, a new method that uses zero knowledge proofs has been proposed to provide efficient solution for Internet of Things technologies. New method was implemented and tested, then compared with existing proposed zero knowledge proof based authentication methods.
Yukun Niu, Lingbo Wei, Chi Zhang, Jianqing Liu · 5 authors
Anonymous authentication can protect users' privacy and security when they access public Wi-Fi hotspots. However, most of the existing privacy-enhanced authentication schemes either do not consider users' accountability or they are inherently dependent on trusted third parties, and therefore are undeployable in practical settings. In this paper, we design and implement an access authentication scheme to simultaneously and efficiently provide anonymity and accountability without relying on any trusted third party. Our scheme is inspired by the recent progress of Bitcoin techniques such as Colored Coins and CoinShuffle protocol. We utilize the unmodified Bitcoin blockchain as the powerful platform to manage and determine ownership of access credentials in a peer-to-peer fashion and introduce a completely decentralized Bitcoin mixing protocol that allows users to anonymously exchange their access credentials offline. The verification path of access credentials is designed to support blacklisting and punishing misbehaving anonymous users. Our proposed scheme is compatible with the current Bitcoin system, and its effectiveness and feasibility in Wi-Fi hotspot access scenario are also demonstrated by security analysis and performance evaluation.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies are recently gaining wide adoption since the introduction of Bitcoin, being distributed, authority-free, and secure. Proof of Work (PoW) is at the heart of blockchain's security, asset generation, and maintenance. Although simple and secure, a hash-based PoW like Bitcoin's puzzle is often referred to as “useless”, and the used intensive computations are considered “waste” of energy. A myriad of Proof of “something” alternatives have been proposed to mitigate energy consumption; however, they either introduced new security threats and limitations, or the “work” remained far from being really “useful”. In this work, we introduce Proof of eXercise (PoX): a sustainable alternative to PoW where an eXercise is a real world matrix-based scientific computation problem. We provide a novel study of the properties of Bitcoin's PoW, the challenges of a more “rational” solution as PoX, and we suggest a comprehensive approach for PoX.
Oct 1, 2017·2017 4th International Scientific-Practical Conference Problems of Infocommunications. Science and Technology (PIC S&T), Kharkov, Ukraine, 2017, pp. 456-459
In the work, a comparative correlation and fractal analysis of time series of Bitcoin crypto currency rate and community activities in social networks associated with Bitcoin was conducted. A significant correlation between the Bitcoin rate and the community activities was detected. Time series fractal analysis indicated the presence of self-similar and multifractal properties. The results of researches showed that the series having a strong correlation dependence have a similar multifractal structure.
Petra Isenberg, Christoph Kinkeldey, Jean‐Daniel Fekete
We contribute a visual exploration system for analyzing the behavior of individual entities exchanging Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, popular for allowing pseudonymous financial transactions. The Bitcoin blockchain is the public ledger of the Bitcoin system holding data on millions of individual transactions between pseudonymous addresses. These addresses belong to individual entities such as people, services, or enterprises. Understanding how the Bitcoin system is used, however, is difficult because it is unclear which addresses belong to the same entities. Our tool addresses this
problem by clustering addresses and displaying transaction detail for individual entities
Abstract This paper argues that the practical implementation of blockchain technology can be considered an institution of property similar to legal institutions. Invoking Penner's theory of property and Hegel's system of property rights, and using the example of bitcoin, it is possible to demonstrate that blockchain effectively implements all necessary and sufficient criteria for property without reliance on legal means. Blockchains eliminate the need for a third‐party authority to enforce exclusion rights, and provide a system of universal access to knowledge and discoverability about the property rights of all participants and how the system functions. The implications of these findings are that traditional property relations in society could be replaced by or supplemented with blockchain models, and implemented in new domains.
In the last decade, we have seen the emergence of the Bitcoin crypto-currency, where the Blockchain technology builds trust transaction after transaction through a validation process. Academics focused their research on security flaws or improvement, but we identify a lack of literature on how the validation of transaction and block proceeds. In fact, understanding the validation will help the conception of new blockchain features and allow users to recognize all security risks. This paper aims at a deep comprehension and detailed analysis of the validation in the Bitcoin protocol.
The 2008 financial crisis had scattered incredulity around the globe regarding traditional financial systems, which made investors and non-financial customers turn to other alternative such as digital banking systems. The existence and development of blockchain technology make cryptocurrency in recent years believably become a complete alternative to traditional ones. Bitcoin is the world's first peer-to-peer and decentralized digital cash system initiated by Nakamoto [1]. Though being the most prominent cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has not been a legal trading currency in various countries. Its exchange rate has appeared to be an exceptionally high-risk portfolio with extreme volatility, which requires a more detailed evaluation before making any decision. This paper utilizes knowledge of statistics for financial time series and machine learning to (i) fit the parametric distribution and (ii) model and forecast the volatility of Bitcoin returns, and (iii) analyze its correlation to other financial market indicators. The fitted parametric time series model significantly outperforms other standard models in explaining the stylized facts and statistical variances in the behavior of Bitcoin returns. The model forecast also outperforms some machine learning methodologies, which would benefit policy makers, banks and financial investors in trading activities for both long-term and short-term strategies.
Abstract This article introduces the symposium “Toward a Philosophy of Blockchain,” which provides a philosophical contemplation of blockchain technology, the digital ledger software underlying cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, for the secure transfer of money, assets, and information via the Internet without needing a third‐party intermediary. The symposium offers philosophical scholarship on a new topic, blockchain technology , from a variety of perspectives. The philosophical themes discussed include mathematical models of reality, signification, and the sociopolitical institutions that structure human life and interaction. The symposium also investigates the metaphilosophical theme of how to create a philosophy of anything , specifically a new topic such as blockchain technology. Repeated themes are identified, in all areas of philosophical inquiry (ontology, epistemology, and axiology), and conceptual resources are elaborated to contribute to a philosophical understanding of blockchain technology. Thus, philosophy as a metaphilosophical approach is shown to be able to provide an understanding of the conceptual, theoretical, and foundational dimensions of novelty and emergence in the world, with a particular focus on blockchain technology.