The path towards Industry 4.0 have pushed the workforce to continuously develop their skills to stay at the forefront of their careers and remain attractive to their employers. In this case, the electronic portfolio is designed as a promising tool for professionals and employers, in assessing and presenting guidance for further learning in the workplace environment. However, the implementation of electronic portfolios faces huge challenges, especially due to the lack of interoperability to collect and share competition evidence among multiple organizations and institutions. The growing trend of professional (learning) interoperability has brought other challenges that must be addressed in order to fully utilize the potential of the electronic product portfolio in the context of the fourth industry. This article proposes a framework taking the benefits of blockchain, decentralized storage systems, smart contracts and session management in achieving professional-centric interoperability while creating electronic portfolio and share evidences among multiple organizations without giving up the confidentiality, integrity and availability of shared evidence. The simulation of the proposed model for proof of concept on Ethereum proved its viability in real world practice. In expansion, the assessment of the proposed model proved its effectiveness in terms of cost, storage space and security as a possible solution in electronic portfolios implementation and assisting professionals to stay competitive in global labor market.
Bu çalışmada ekonomik politika belirsizliğinin (EPU) kripto paralar üzerindeki etkisi panel veri yöntemleriyle araştırılmaktadır. Bu amaç doğrultusunda öncelikle küresel ekonomik politika belirsizliği endeksi ve en büyük dört kripto paranın aylık verileri elde edilmiştir. Çalışmada kullanılan kripto paralar; Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), BinanceCoin (BNB) ve Ripple (XRP)’dir. 2018:01-2020:12 dönemine ait verilerin kullanıldığı çalışmada, yatay kesit bağımlılığı ve homojenlik testleri gerçekleştirilmiştir. Daha sonra Kónya (2006) tarafından önerilen bootstrap panel nedensellik testi uygulanmıştır. Dört kripto paradan ilk sırada yer alan Bitcoin ile EPU arasında çift yönlü nedensellik ilişkisi bulunurken, son sırada bulunan XRP için herhangi bir nedensellik ilişkisine rastlanamamıştır. İkinci ve üçüncü sıradaki kripto paralarda ise EPU’dan bu paralara doğru tek yönlü nedensellik ilişkisi olduğu görülmüştür. Çalışmadan elde edilen bulgular, ekonomik politika belirsizliğinin kripto paraların değerleri üzerinde etkisi olabileceğini göstermektedir.
Andrea De Salve, Andrea Lisi, Paolo Mori, Laura Ricci
Decentralized Applications have become of paramount importance, especially thanks to the widespread adoption of blockchains, such as Ethereum and EOS.IO, which are two of the most known platforms where such applications can be executed. Even if the goal of Ethereum and EOS.IO is very similar, the two projects have distinct capabilities and properties. For example, they use different consensus algorithms, different languages to program smart contracts, and allocate and manage on-chain resources in different ways. In this paper, we perform in-depth analysis of the models used by EOS.IO blockchain to manage its resources (i.e., ram, cpu and network bandwidth). For this purpose, we instantiate an EOS.IO-based Decentralized Application (DApp) implementing a Decentralized Rating Framework and we measure its resource requirements. Finally, we evaluate and compare the cost in fees required for running the DApp under three different resource management models provided by EOS.IO, which are the staking, rex, and power up models.
This paper discusses the blockchain frameworks for evaluating trustworthiness in managing waqf management system. The frameworks are Ethereum, Hyperledger, Finterra Waqfchain and Waqf Blockchain (WB). The invention of the blockchain has offered many benefits to the waqf institution since this institution faced many challenges such as lack of data transparency, accountability issues, weak of historical records, improper audit and improper compliance practices that may breaks donors' trust to use waqf system as a platform to make donation. However, the framework has their own pros and cons in order to make waqf management system more transparent, trusted and efficient. As a result, Ethereum framework shows the most suitable blockchain platform that can be used for the waqf management system.
A certificate is a document that is received once the person completed a particular course. This certificate can be used to get a job or to get admitted to an institute/university of higher studies. Most of the institutes/universities do not have a mechanism in the admission system that can catch forged certificates. Hence, a system that can store certificates on the blockchain and stop the admission forgery through fake certificates is required. The proposed framework is based on blockchain technology that improves security, transparency, etc., and reduces the cost. To overcome the problem of fake certification, a chain of blocks is created for certificates that are immutable as well as transparent amongst all the nodes in the system. This paper presents a step-by-step development process for a certificate verification system using blockchain technology. The key component of this system is a smart contract. A Smart contract Certi has been developed for storing certificates by using a text editor Sublime Text3 and an IDE Remix Ethereum. The validity of the stored certificates can be checked by the employer or admission team at the time of recruitment or admission using Certi smart contract. Blockchain technology possesses its transparency feature hence at the same time the same data on the certificate can be seen by the employer, admission team as well as student itself.
Md. Nasim Uddin, Abu Hayat Mohammed Abul Hasnat, Shamima Nasrin, Md. Shahinur Alam · 5 authors
People are dependent on Trusted Third Party (TTP) administration based Centralized systems for content sharing having a deficit of security, faith, immutability, and clearness. This work has proposed a file-sharing environment based on Blockchain by clouting the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) systems, advantages for overcoming these troubles. The smart contract is implemented to control the access privilege and the modified version of IPFS software is utilized to enforce the predefined access-control list. An application framework on a secure decentralized file sharing system is presented in combination with IPFS and PKI to secure file sharing. PKI having public and private keys is used to enable encryption and decryption of every file transaction and authentication of identities through Metamask to cryptographically recognize account ownership in the Blockchain system. A gas consumption-based result analysis is done in the private Ethereum network and it attains transparency, security managed access, and quality of data indicating better efficacy of this work.
Supply chain finance (SCF), a proposal to address financing problems of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), aims to make working capital optimized by utilizing credit and transaction information through cooperation between upstream and downstream in the supply chain. But some demerits such as information asymmetry and the lack of trust in financing scenarios could still be witnessed in supply chain finance. Blockchain technology, with the characteristics of asymmetric encryption, decentralization, nonrepudiation, and conducting transactions without the supervision of a trusted third party, has revolved multiple stages of development. Smart contracts are regarded as an important derivative technology of blockchain, which are automatically executed by the code between multiple parties through the blockchain without relying on a trusted institution. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based supply chain financial system combining smart contracts and main methods of supply chain financing to solve the disadvantages of SCF. We select three represented financing modes to design financing platforms with the introduction of smart contracts, and present our schemes in the form of specific pseudo code. All financing processes of supply chain are conducted on the basis of ethereum blockchain. This allows SMEs which have difficulty in capital turnover in the short term, or have insufficient credit to get financial loans more easily compared with traditional financing approaches due to merits of blockchain, and also this could facilitate supply chain to improve financing efficiency for SMEs.
Smart approaches such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are proven to be superior answers to the expansion of agriculture in terms of efficiency and safety of trade and supply. Agri-trade involves the buying and selling of products that have been produced through farming industries. Online auction is defined as a process where the buyers and sellers can come on an integrated platform and are allowed to bid in a fixed time frame. Decentralized Blockchain-based e-auction system increases auction security and efficiency and transforms the auction process by eliminating intermediaries. With centralized auction, where websites or platforms gather bids and calculate auction outcomes, it is difficult to build confidence among sellers, buyers, and auctioneers. This system lacks transparency, anonymity, and hence prove to be untrustworthy. So, a broad architecture for decentralized auctions that are used to track and trace bids to execute the transactions safely and securely between the seller and the buyers without the involvement of untrusted third parties, is needed. In this work, we give a complete overview of auction systems using blockchain technology. Then the work uses solidity-based smart contracts deployed on Ethereum test network for executing decentralized, privacy preserving auction system. This system enhances the efficiency and safety of trade and supply of agricultural products and is referred to as an Agro auction system using Blockchain. This work opens opportunities for future research to build a complete end-to-end solution for agricultural auction.
Chandan Kumar, Urbi Chatterjee, Debdeep Mukhopadhayay
Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) primitives and blockchain technologies, also known as PUFchain, are recently taking huge attention to integrate the security parameters in Supply Chain Management (SCM) system. In this work, we devise a technique to interface an electronic chip and a blockchain platform by providing access to a unique hardware fingerprint and the stored information of chips on blockchain at one single point. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only scalable and automated technique that has been successfully implemented to authenticate the hardware device at any stage of the supply chain management system. The technique realises the concept of embedded PUF instance and the smart contract deployment on the ethereum blockchain. In the proposed technique, we have highly reduced the cost of implementing the interaction by storing the CRP on a distributed file system called as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Further, we implement and analyse the interfacing for ‘IC traceability’ to ensure the current ownership of a product, its point of origin, and ownership history in the SCM system. We employ Nexys 4 DDR Artix-7 FPGA board and go-ethereum blockchain library for implementing “IC traceability” to demonstrate the workflow and overhead involved in our interfacing technique.
Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis
Muhammad Zilal Hamzah, Diyanatul Husna, F. Astha Ekadiyanto, I Ketut Eddy Purnama · 10 authors
To fulfill health as basic human needs, health care services technology is always improved but also must maintain security and privacy of the data due to huge amount of data is created and distributed. Telemedicine with telecommunication technology offers convenience and cheaper cost, but still is vulnerable to cyber attacks, making it a threat for patients’ data's privacy. One approach that can be used to secure the data is applying access control to the data. Immutable blockchain can helps to enforce access control so it cannot be violated. We propose a system which implements Ethereum for the blockchain and React web application for the interface of the system. Data management and the access control are provided through Ethereum smart contracts, and the access control requires different role-based permission to upload and access the patients’ data. The system works successfully with average time taken to verify the role is 1.8033 seconds per session. The privacy of the patients’ data is ensured because only the patients that are allowed to keep the ID of their own data.
Ananda Rizky Duto Pamungkas, Diyanatul Husna, F. Astha Ekadiyanto, I Ketut Eddy Purnama · 10 authors
In this study, a higher level of security was implemented by using InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) based peer-to-peer data storage on an Ethereum blockchain. IPFS is used as an image data storage medium that generates an IPFS hash, or known as content identifier (CID). The CID is used to access image data on the IPFS, which can be done with the help of an IPFS gateway. The CID is sent into the blockchain using a smart contract. The results of the study demonstrates that the use of IPFS as additional security on a blockchain system can be done. The size of file sent using IPFS proportionally affects the time it takes for IPFS to store the file. The larger the file size, the more time it will take. For each additional 1 MB file, there is an approximately 5% increase in access time. The distance from the IPFS gateway will also affect file access times in which, the farther the IPFS gateway, the more time it takes. If the IPFS gateway is at a distance of 1,000 km, there will be a decrease in access time of about 5%. The distance between the IPFS gateway and the accessor also affects success with accessing data. For the most distant gateway, i.e. the United States, there was even an access failure of 24%.
Abstract Since the introduction of Ethereum in 2015, blockchain technology (BT) has been evolving, and BT has been associated with the concept of the sharing economy by business academics. Despite the marketing research on the sharing economy that has been extensively conducted in the last decade, the linkage between BT and ethical marketing in the sharing economy remains unclear. Through a systematic literature review of 163 articles and a co-citation analysis, this study identifies the key elements of blockchain capabilities, blockchain attributes, and the underlying economic theories of blockchain. It also synthesizes and proposes a shift of ethical marketing logic in the blockchain-based sharing economy that delineates the principles of stakeholder capitalism. The article concludes with a list of future research directions that underline three approaches of stakeholder theory (i.e., the descriptive, instrument, and normative approaches). These directions aim to guide marketing scholars concerning how BT enables an institutionally embedded view of ethical marketing activities and practices that enhance collaborative marketing and subsequently innovate value chains and create sustainable business models in the sharing economy, as well as to the metaverse.
M.Santhosh Kumar, G C Akshatha, Manthan D Bangre, M Dhanush · 5 authors
Blockchain technology is used to decentralize ledger to keep transaction records. The record of transactions is persistent in a peer-to-peer network. This eliminates central authority needed to confirm the transactions. The participants verify the transactions in peer-to-peer networks. The need for any central authority for any kind of trade settlement, voting, or money transactions is nullified. Blockchain technology has been revolutionizing Information Technology (IT) for the past few years. It is being used in supply chain, health sector, Internet of Things, asset management, banking sector, payments and many more. Blockchain allows decentralization, transparency, security and increased efficiency in the applications. With the increasing awareness of cryptocurrency, the significance of blockchain is obtaining its popularity across the globe.Cars being the most popular mode of transport used by the majority of the population across the globe. Because of the increasing prices of new cars, the popularity of used cars (second hand cars) has increased exponentially over all these years. Identifying this opportunity in the used cars segment, we propose an application that uses blockchain to connect buyers and sellers. By implementing decentralization, we aim to solve security related issues in existing centralized applications. We have implemented an e-auction methodology on top of Ethereum Blockchain. The proposed application allows bidders to directly bid the products over the Internet. The blockchain technology with low transaction cost is used to develop the smart contract of public bid and sealed bid.
Matija Šipek, Martin Žagar, Nikola Drašković, Branko Mihaljević
Blockchain technology provides a private, secure, transparent decentralized exchange of data. Also, blockchain is not limited to a particular area, but it has a wide range of applications and can be integrated into a variety of Internet interactive systems. For example, the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chain tracking, Electronic Health Records (EHR), digital forensics, identity management, trustless payments, and other key business elements will all benefit from its implementation. Next layer solutions such as Ethereum 2.0, Polkadot, Cardano, and other Web 3.0 technologies provide developers versatility. Moreover, these platforms utilize smart contracts which are similar to standard, traditionalized software during development but offer key utilities to end-users such as online wallets, secure data with transparent rules. Blockchain is receiving a lot of attention in educational technology (EduTech) as it aims to achieve a more transparent and multipurpose educational system. In addition to smart contract technology which defines how data should be registered, gathered and processed, blockchain can be used as an IoT intermediary for mobile usage. Therefore, we implemented an educational learning platform powered by blockchain technology to examine feasibility in industry and academic environment. In essence, this is a web application which is adapted to mobile platform and connected to blockchain for crucial data exchanges. In this paper we want to emphasize the potential of blockchain technology in multiple sectors as well as the need to really understand the underlying principles which are allowing disruptability of traditional centralized software solutions.
This study applies the high data integrity that comes with blockchain technology towards authentication and access control for visitors of a physical facility. The use of smart contracts on an Ethereum based implementation of the blockchain allows for smart contract code to handle both access control and visitor authentication at scale. Javascript code executed off the blockchain enables the system to interact with and parse through the blockchain data. The proposed system is scalable, applies to multiple use cases, and mitigates issues a centralized approach faces.
Mirza Jabbar Aziz Baig, M. Tariq Iqbal, Mohsin Jamil, Jahangir Khan · 5 authors
With advancements in renewable energy technologies, consumers are becoming prosumers, and renewable energy resources are being used in distributed networks. In an isolated distributed system, peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is one of the most promising energy management solutions. In this paper, we propose a P2P energy trading method for micro-grids using open resources and technology. The proposed setup comprises an Internet of Things (IoT) server to transfer energy amongst the peers without human intervention, and an Ethereum based private blockchain is suggested for money transfer in the form of cryptocurrency. The IoT server enables the peers to control and monitor self-produced energy. Arduino UNO, ACS 712 hall-effect current sensor, and a relay are the main components used in the hardware setup. The current sensor data is sent in real- time to Arduino for onward communication to the IoT server. A user-friendly interface has been developed on the server to perform various energy trading tasks. Peers have the choice to access the server remotely to perform energy trading tasks. The energy trading events can be shared amongst peers through e-mail notifications. For financial transactions, we utilized Ganache graphical user interface (GUI) a private Ethereum blockchain eliminating the need for financial institutions. The proposed peer-to-peer energy trading model has been successfully tested for energy trading between two peers. This paper provides details of the proposed hardware and software setup and explains how low-cost P2P energy trading can be achieved.
With increased awareness comes unprecedented expectations. We live in a digital, cloud era wherein the underlying information architectures are expected to be elastic, secure, resilient, and handle petabyte scaling. The expectation of epic proportions from the next generation of the data frameworks is to not only do all of the above but also build it on a foundation of trust and explainability across multi-organization business networks. From cloud providers to automobile industries or even vaccine manufacturers, components are often sourced by a complex, not full digitized thread of disjoint suppliers. Building Machine Learning and AI-based order fulfillment and predictive models, remediating issues, is a challenge for multi-organization supply chain automation. We posit that Federated Learning in conjunction with blockchain and smart contracts are technologies primed to tackle data privacy and centralization challenges. In this paper, motivated by challenges in the industry, we propose a decentralized distributed system in conjunction with a recommendation system model (Matrix Factorization) that is trained using Federated Learning on an Ethereum blockchain network. We leverage smart contracts that allow decentralized serverless aggregation to update local-ized items vectors. Furthermore, we utilize Homomorphic Encryption (HE) to allow sharing the encrypted gradients over the network while maintaining their privacy. Based on our results, we argue that training a model over a serverless Blockchain network using smart contracts will provide the same accuracy as in a centralized model while maintaining our serverless model privacy and reducing the overhead communication to a central server. Finally, we assert such a system that provides transparency, audit-ready and deep insights into supply chain operations for enterprise cloud customers resulting in cost savings and higher Quality of Service (QoS).
Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) institutions have begun to sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of works from their collections following the $69.3 M USD record sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie’s auction house on March 11, 2021. But many open questions exist about whether NFTs are beneficial or harmful for such institutions from financial, regulatory, and environmental perspectives. In this paper, we aim to unpack what NFTs are within the context of tokenomics and Ethereum standards development by providing an overview of notable NFTs and selling platforms before discussing the pros and cons of their use in GLAM institutions and exploring open research challenges through the lens of Computational Archival Science. Methodologies for the creation (minting) and purchase of NFTs are provided, emphasizing NFTs’ record keeping abilities, while also highlighting their inherent vulnerabilities, particularly with regards to the now-infamous broken link problem and its implications for provenance tracking and authenticity.
A blockchain is a growing list of cryptographically secured blocks to maintain shared data on decentralized systems, in order to archive transactions between untrusted participants. Smart contracts are computer programs that automatically execute legal events according to the terms of contracts. Although the Ethereum blockchain has been successfully applied to a number of interesting applications, there have been several events that subtle flaws in smart contracts induce a huge amount of financial loss such as the DAO attack. Accordingly, to analyze smart contracts, we propose a novel formal verification technique to employ ATL (Alternating-time Temporal Logic) model checking. Our methodology represents the interaction between users and smart contracts with a two-player game and verify game properties by using MCMAS that is an efficient ATL model checker.
AI applications find widespread use in a variety of domains. For further acceptance, mostly when multiple agents interact with the system, we must aim to preserve the privacy of participants information in such applications. Towards this, the Yao’s Millionaires’ problem (YMP), i.e., to determine the richer among two millionaires’ privately, finds relevance. This work presents a novel, practical, and verifiable solution to YMP, namely, Secure Comparison Protocol (SCP). We show that SCP achieves this comparison in a constant number of rounds, without using encryption and not requiring the participants’ continuous involvement. SCP uses semi-trusted third parties - which we refer to as privacy accountants - for the comparison, who do not learn any information about the values. That is, the probability of information leak is negligible in the problem size. In SCP, we also leverage the Ethereum network for pseudo-anonymous communication, unlike computationally expensive secure channels such as Tor. We present a Secure Truthful cOmbinatorial aUction Protocol (STOUP) for single-minded bidders to demonstrate SCP’s significance. We show that STOUP, unlike previous works, preserves the privacies relevant to an auction even from the auctioneer. We demonstrate the practicality of STOUP through simulations.
Afaq Ahmed, Areeb Aamir, Tabish Raza, Muhammad H.D. Khan
Healthcare supply chain refers to the process of procurement and distribution of medicines and other healthcare products as they move from the manufacturing plant to the patient. This is a very complex and distributed process that comes with a set of challenges like scalability, synchronization and trust between the involved parties. The increase in adoption of Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) based systems in the healthcare supply chain shows that RFID technology is a very promising technique for traceability, identification and communication. However, these RFID systems still face issues of privacy and security which need to be addressed to get their full benefit. In this research work, we have integrated RFID systems belonging to the Healthcare supply chain with secure decentralized storage such as Blockchain. Blockchains provides a secure and transparent decentralized mechanism that is used to keep track of all transactions. It offers a new kind of implementation focused on trust, transparency, and accountability. Information about the RFID enabled medicines and other Healthcare products can be added to our proposed framework via a blockchain-based decentralized application (Dapp). The proposed system is based on an Ethereum node, and this information can be stored in a Blockchain using multi-stage interfaces provided by the Smart Contract. Our proposed system has been deployed both on an offline and online environment, and it offers many advantages like monitoring and tracing of medicine through the Blockchain network, determining if the medicine is genuine or counterfeit, and reducing the number of counterfeit and unapproved medicine entering the Healthcare system. Based on simulation results, the proposed framework successfully provides the needed security and privacy required for the healthcare supply chain.
Payment channel, which allows two parties to perform micropayments without involving the blockchain, has become a promising proposal to improve the scalability of decentralized ledgers. Payment channels have been extended to payment networks to utilize existing channels as intermediary links to route coins to others. However, payments through multiple channels bear nontrivial overheads, including time cost, charges at intermediate nodes, etc. In this paper, we propose channel hub, a novel off-chain system to shorten the routing path for the payment network. Channel hub allows transferring coins directly from one payment channel to another within the same hub, so that it can be viewed as a shortcut device for the underlying payment network. Compared with payment hub in literature, which connects participant nodes, our channel hub is more efficient and lightweight, because it connects channels already constructed by the payment network. Based on channel hub, we design a new protocol named Boros to perform secure off-chain cross-channel transfers. We present the security definition of Boros and formally prove its security using the UC-framework. To demonstrate the feasibility of Boros, we develop a proof-of-concept prototype running on Ethereum. Performance evaluation shows that Boros can effectively shorten the off-chain payment path.
In this article, we present a Social Network Analysis–based approach to investigate user behaviour during a cryptocurrency speculative bubble in order to extract knowledge patterns about it. Our approach is general and can be applied to any past, present and future cryptocurrency speculative bubble. To verify its potential, we apply it to investigate the Ethereum speculative bubble happened in the years 2017 and 2018. We also describe several interesting knowledge patterns about the behaviour of specific categories of users that we obtained from this investigation. Furthermore, we describe how our approach can support the construction of an identikit of the speculators who maneuvered behind the Ethereum bubble analysed. Finally, we show that this capability of supporting the hunting for speculators is intrinsic of our approach and can cover past, present and future bubbles.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time (I) between blocks for validating smart contracts present in transactions. In such systems, block validation and PoW mining are typically performed sequentially, the former by CPUs and the latter by ASICs. A trivial increase in validation time (τ) introduces the popularly known Verifier's Dilemma, and as we demonstrate, causes more forking and hurts fairness. Large τ also reduces the tolerance for safety against a Byzantine adversary. Solutions that offload validation to a set of non-chain nodes (a.k.a. off-chain approaches) suffer from trust and performance issues that are non-trivial to resolve. In this paper, we present Tuxedo, the first on-chain protocol to theoretically scale τ/I ≈1 in PoW blockchains. The key innovation in Tuxedo is to perform CPU-based block processing in parallel to ASIC mining. We achieve this by allowing miners to delay validation of transactions in a block by up to ζ blocks, where ζ is a system parameter. We perform security analysis of Tuxedo considering all possible adversarial strategies in a synchronous network with maximum end-to-end delay Δ and demonstrate that Tuxedo achieves security equivalent to known results for longest chain PoW Nakamoto consensus. Our prototype implementation of Tuxedo atop Ethereum demonstrates that it can scale τ without suffering the harmful effects of naive scaling up of τ/I in existing blockchains