Blockchain Papers

Sanjida Sharmin, Iqbal H. Sarker, M. Shamim Kaiser, Mohammad Shamsul Arefin

No abstract is available for this record.

Mahendra Swain, Dilip Lilaramani, G. Mahesh

This paper conducts a performance analysis of popular blockchain platforms, RISC-V, to assess the performance and limitations of these state-of-the-art platforms. This paper performs a performance analysis of popular blockchain platforms, RISC-V, to evaluate the performance and limitations of these state-of-the-art platforms. Blockchain, a decentralized transaction and data management technology, is the technology that will have similar impacts as the Internet had on people's lives. Many industries have become interested in adopting blockchain in their IT systems, but scalability is an often-cited concern of current blockchain technology. Therefore, the goal of this article, to analyze and compare the performances of var-ious hardware platforms available for blockchain. The plat-forms preferred for conducting this research works are X86, ARM, and RISC-V. The computational capabilities have been showcased and elaborated in detail. First, the compatibility of the blockchain has been checked with Ethereum. Second, critical parameters like time and space complexity are considered to find the best suitable platform.

Chaofan Wang, Xiaohai Dai, Jiang Xiao, Chenchen Li · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Alexandre Obadia, Alejo Salles, Lakshman Sankar, Tarun Chitra · 6 authors

The multi-chain future is upon us. Modular architectures are coming to maturity across the ecosystem to scale bandwidth and throughput of cryptocurrency. One example of such is the Ethereum modular architecture, with its beacon chain, its execution chain, its Layer 2s, and soon its shards. These can all be thought as separate blockchains, heavily inter-connected with one another, and together forming an ecosystem. In this work, we call each of these interconnected blockchains "domains", and study the manifestation of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV, a generalization of "Miner Extractable Value") across them. In other words, we investigate whether there exists extractable value that depends on the ordering of transactions in two or more domains jointly. We first recall the definitions of Extractable and Maximal Extractable Value, before introducing a definition of Cross-Domain Maximal Extractable Value. We find that Cross-Domain MEV can be used to measure the incentive for transaction sequencers in different domains to collude with one another, and study the scenarios in which there exists such an incentive. We end the work with a list of negative externalities that might arise from cross-domain MEV extraction and lay out several open questions. We note that the formalism in this work is a work in progress, and we hope that it can serve as the basis for formal analysis tools in the style of those presented in Clockwork Finance, as well as for discussion on how to mitigate the upcoming negative externalities of substantial cross-domain MEV.

Chitturi Prasad, Gummuluri Udaya Chandrika, Vani Venkata Sai Sindhu Garapati, Ganga Rama Koteswara Rao · 6 authors

Immutability is a term used a lot in blockchain and cryptocurrency development when attemptingto analyze the economic interpretation of a network. Designs like the 21 million Bitcoin supply in BTC or incidents like the DAO fork bailout that split the Ethereum community into ETH and ETC are major examples of immutability values determining the ethos of a chain. This research sets out tocategorize different features of blockchain immutability and analyze them in three different networks: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Further in the paper, the Finney Ratio is introduced to help understand how blockchain immutability can be measured over time. The paper then visualizes overall blockchain immutability over time using radar charts as an immutability map. The Szabo Score is then introduced as a tool to score overall mutability over time for each blockchain.

Alexandre Obadia, Alejo Salles, Lakshman Sankar, Tarun Chitra · 6 authors

The multi-chain future is upon us. Modular architectures are coming to\nmaturity across the ecosystem to scale bandwidth and throughput of\ncryptocurrency. One example of such is the Ethereum modular architecture, with\nits beacon chain, its execution chain, its Layer 2s, and soon its shards. These\ncan all be thought as separate blockchains, heavily inter-connected with one\nanother, and together forming an ecosystem. In this work, we call each of these\ninterconnected blockchains "domains", and study the manifestation of Maximal\nExtractable Value (MEV, a generalization of "Miner Extractable Value") across\nthem. In other words, we investigate whether there exists extractable value\nthat depends on the ordering of transactions in two or more domains jointly. We\nfirst recall the definitions of Extractable and Maximal Extractable Value,\nbefore introducing a definition of Cross-Domain Maximal Extractable Value. We\nfind that Cross-Domain MEV can be used to measure the incentive for transaction\nsequencers in different domains to collude with one another, and study the\nscenarios in which there exists such an incentive. We end the work with a list\nof negative externalities that might arise from cross-domain MEV extraction and\nlay out several open questions. We note that the formalism in this work is a\nwork in progress, and we hope that it can serve as the basis for formal\nanalysis tools in the style of those presented in Clockwork Finance, as well as\nfor discussion on how to mitigate the upcoming negative externalities of\nsubstantial cross-domain MEV.\n

ALhumeira Faroug, Mehmet Demirci

Traditional medical systems are vulnerable to attacks, leaks, and loss of data. The centralized structure of medical systems makes them more susceptible to attacks. Blockchain can be used as a solution to this issue. In particular, using blockchain to track patient medical history and vaccination records can guarantee privacy and security, which are critical requirements for healthcare systems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based application to maintain and share medical data and vaccination records using Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum platforms to ensure data integrity and immutability. Our vaccination tracking system based on the Ethereum platform allows easy verification for people who want to travel abroad. For this system, we employ Ganache to test these vaccination records in a safe and deterministic environment. We have evaluated the performance of our implementation using Hyperledger Caliper and Explorer. The results show that our blockchain-based systems can increase the efficiency and transparency of tracking medical and vaccination records. We believe our proposal is especially valuable in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic because it providesa secure way to update, share and verify vaccination records.

Xianyun Ge

In recent years, blockchain technology has become a hot topic in various industries. With the development and maturity of blockchain technology, it has been applied to finance, law, etc., with its advantages of decentralization, openness, information security, and concealment. The application scenarios of industry are becoming more and more abundant. Compared with the traditional TPA payment contract form, the smart contract mechanism based on blockchain technology is obviously more efficient, convenient, and safe. Against this background, we design a smart payment contract suitable for cloud storage by studying Ethereum. The relationship clause in the smart payment contract should be regulated around the contract law. The smart contract payment linkage clause can be classified into three forms, including conditional effective type, contract joint type, and contract link type, which correspond to the contract law. Therefore, the contract legal system for smart contract payment linkage clauses should follow typified thinking. Based on blockchain technology, smart contracts not only reduce the number of interactions in contract execution but also allow users to stop paying for cloud services when data is lost or damaged. The precise method is to generate each node with a private chain and place the smart contract on the private chain. With the decentralization of the blockchain private chain, the advantages of read-only data, and traceability of information, the storage of smart payment contract data is more secure. Both parties to the transaction are more trustworthy. Therefore, the proposed system has a safe and efficient smart contract payment mechanism, which brings a good user experience to users, which proves the significance and value of this research.

Arun Tanksali

Offline digital payment systems are currently limited in their scope. Extending them using new technologies like blockchain can expand the offline payment landscape and create new directions for payment systems. This paper proposes XipCOIN as a construction of such a system, based on the Ethereum blockchain. It exploits the recently defined Layer 2 Rollups model of significantly increasing performance and creating desirable transaction characteristics by moving the transactions off the primary Layer 1 blockchain. XipCOIN builds on the approach, established in previous studies by Dmitrienko et al. and Takahashi et al., of using a Trusted Execution Environment to validate the transaction offline by the payee with the payer trusting the payee signature on the confirmation.

Turgay Arda Usman, Ali Aydın Selçuk, Süleyman Özarslan

New vulnerabilities are constantly being discovered in Ethereum and the found vulnerabilities are fixed. This situation causes many vulnerabilities to be effective periodically. This article analyzes the smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain in 2020 and examines the ten most common vulnerabilities. By doing so, we aimed to determine a threat landscape for 2020. During this analysis, we studied how the vulnerabilities emerged, critical attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities, and what can be done to avoid them.

G. Naga Nithin, Bhaskara S. Egala, Ashok Kumar Pradhan

The COVID-19 outbreak highlighted the smart healthcare infrastructure requirement to speed up vaccination and treatment. Present vaccination supply chain models are fragmented in nature, and they are suitable for a pandemic like COVID-19. Most of these vaccination supply chain models are cloud-centric and depend on humans. Due to this, the transparency in the supply chain and vaccination process is questionable. Moreover, we con’t trace where the vaccination programs are facing issues in real-time. Furthermore, traditional supply chain models are vulnerable to a single point of failure and lack people-centric service capabilities. This paper has proposed a novel supply chain model for COVID-19 using robust technologies such as Blockchain and the Internet of Things. Besides, it automates the entire vaccination supplication chain, and it records management without compromising data integrity. We have evaluated our proposed model using Ethereum based decentralized application (DApp) to showcase its real-time capabilities. The DApp contains two divisions to deal with internal (intra) and worldwide (inter) use cases. From the system analysis, it is clear that it provides digital records integrity, availability, and system scalability by eliminating a single point of failure. Finally, the proposed system eliminates human interference in digital record management, which is prone to errors and alternation.

Mikola YAKOVCHUK, Vitalii MIKHALEVSKYI, Neliya MEDVEDCHUK, Tetiana SKRYPNYK · 5 authors

The article considers and investigates the system of decision making in the production processes of an agricultural enterprise. In dynamic conditions of decision-making and operational adjustments, a methodology of operational analysis of the current situation is needed to obtain the necessary results. Decentralized blockchain-based systems are the most promising for doing business. Usage areas of decentralized systems are production and logistics. Globalized production and distribution of agricultural tasks have brought a new milestone in the development and optimization of existing systems. The growing number of issues related to the optimization of internal processes in enterprises, has caused an urgent need for an effective solution to process tracking, which serves as an important tool for quality management and provides adequate protection of the process in the agricultural production chain. Blockchain is one of the main technologies that can provide innovative solutions for tracking agricultural products and food supply chains. Modern agricultural supply chains are a complex ecosystem that includes a number of stakeholders and therefore complicates the verification of important criteria: country of origin, stages of crop development, compliance with quality standards, yield monitoring. Ethereum Smart Contracts can effectively monitor and seamlessly integrate business operations and workflows for a stable supply of agricultural products. The agricultural sector has great potential for modernization and optimization of production, which in general can be a breakthrough for the economy as a whole. It is thanks to him that the country receives a significant flow of currency. After the abolition of tariffs restricting the supply of products to Europe, new markets were opened for production. Demand for agricultural products is high and by modernizing the management system, we will be able to get even better results. Also, the involvement of information technology provides good conditions for productive and confident development of small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises and farms. For example, blockchain technology will provide access to new markets and reduce the bureaucratic burden on the company, simplify communication with suppliers and customers.

هيثم السيد أحمد عيسي

Smart contracts offer a unique method of contracting that differs from the methods used for a long time in this regard; Because the agreement between the contracting parties appears in the form of a code that is run and executed by members of the Blockchain network or the nodes, without one of the parties being able to stop it; so that when a certain condition is met and the members of the network verify that, the related or the corresponding condition is executed automatically; therefore it's a contracting method that guarantees the process of contracts performance in the manner agreed upon, without the need to have a confidence in the other party or resort to a trusted body to verify the truth of that party or the object of contract; so we thought about studying the topic of the conclusion of those contracts in order to highlight their features and clarify the extent to which general rules accommodate the specificities of their formation; and we divided our research into an introductory section entitled "the fundamentals of block chain technology", and two main sections; the first entitled "the idea of smart contracts as a blockchain application", and the second entitled" specificity of smart contracts formation. Keywords: smart contracts, blockchain, DApps, Ethereum.

J. S. Shyam Mohan, S. Ramamoorthy, Harsha Surya Abhishek Kota, Vedantham Hanumath Sreeman · 5 authors

Chapter Contents: 14.1 Introduction 14.1.1 Evolution of Healthcare 1.0 to 4.0 14.1.2 Blockchain in health-care applications used for preventing diseases 14.2 Related works on blockchain technology in health-care sectors 14.3 Blockchain-based health-care and management applications 14.4 Benefits of blockchain technology in the health-care industry 14.5 Ethereum – system design 14.6 5G networks and Ethereum for the health-care sector 14.6.1 Challenges in the health-care sector 14.7 Real-time examples of Ethereum in the health-care sector 14.8 5G networks and smart contracts 14.9 Advantages of smart contracts 14.10 Choosing the smart contract platform 14.11 Applications of smart contracts in healthcare 14.12 Case study – design and architecture 14.12.1 Client layer 14.12.2 Blockchain layer 14.13 System implementation 14.13.1 Smart contracts 14.13.2 Algorithm 14.14 Experimental setup 14.14.1 Performance evaluation 14.15 Results 14.16 Conclusion References

Jinlei Sun, Song Huang, Changyou Zheng, Meijuan Wang · 6 authors

ERC20 is the first token standard on Ethereum and is widely used in ICOs, voting, and various asset representations. However, some methods defined in ERC20 imply potential vulnerabilities and Multiple Withdrawal Attack is one of them. Attackers can transfer more tokens than the actual allowance through this vulnerability. The current prevention methods for Multiple Withdrawal Attack include changing the transaction process, modifying the API of ERC20, and modifying the implementation of functions, etc. However, these methods have disadvantages such as poor compatibility, incomplete resolution, and high gas consumption. In this paper, we describe the process of Multiple Withdrawal Attack and analyze the shortcomings of the existing methods, and then propose a solution with lower gas consumption. In our method, a variable is added to record the allowance in the approval function to prevent tokens from being transferred repeatedly. Finally, the effectiveness and the performance of the proposed method is analyzed. The result shows that the method proposed in this paper is safe and has lower gas consumption than the existing methods.

Sukrutha L. T. Vangipuram, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos

This is a demo abstract based on our previously published article [1]. Some of the significant challenges of central cloud systems and the blockchain include lack of scalability, security risks and higher energy consumption. As a solution, an application with an off-chain Interplanetary File System (IPFS) distributed storage system is presented as CoviChain. The IPFS is used for storing and hashing different data formats of various sizes into immutable links. The links are passed through smart contracts of the Ethereum blockchain to provide a double hash guarantee, along with user access permissions.

Parth Khandelwal

Securing and issuing academic transcripts is one of the most mind-numbing tasks in the modern world as there are multiple disciplines and manually maintaining the accuracy of the data is tough. Moreover, the data is stored in an untrusted centralized cloud storage system, this type of model possesses a number of issues like high operational cost, data availability, and data security. The current research paper tries to exploit the decentralization and the smart contract feature of the ethereum blockchain. A model where basic student data is stored in a smart contract and large files are stored in IPFS protocol.

Thomas Osterland, Thomas Rose

The distributed ledger technology (DL T) secures data and the execution of program code in a decentral network. This enables new forms of business cooperation without the need of central intermediaries. However, the design process of DLT applications is not a simple task. The engineering process is burdened with the responsibility of choosing a suitable distributed ledger implementation, that will cope with the environmental limitations and transaction loads. The nature of the distributed ledger technology makes an exchange of the technology base at a later point expensive and complicated, since every network participant needs to agree to the change. That makes prototyping and applied field tests difficult. Stochastic simulation is a means that allows to simulate complex systems that are affected by randomly occurring events. In this paper, we contribute to the advance of using stochastic simulation to support DLT application engineering processes by 1) presenting a structured approach in applying stochastic simulation, that is also configurable depending on individual evaluation goals, 2) use hypothesis tests to assess the model quality of the Ethereum block generation process, when using homogeneous Poisson processes and 3) discuss concrete measures that help assessing the feasibility of implementing an application on the Ethereum blockchain, which is demonstrated for German waterway transportation processes.

Kun Xu, Weiwei Chen, Yanan Zhang

Abstract In the process of multi-cloud storage data migration, data integrity is vulnerable to corruption, but the existing data integrity verification schemes for data migration across clouds are not highly reliable. To address this problem, a blockchain-based data integrity verification scheme for migration across clouds is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, a blockchain network is used instead of a third-party auditor. For each migration, a multi-cloud broker will send an integrity verification request to blockchain at three different times, and a smart contract will verify the data integrity according to the RSA-based homomorphic verification tags. Then, the security of the scheme is analyzed. Finally, simulation experiments and tests are conducted on Ethereum, and the results show the feasibility of the scheme.

Le Lai, Tongqing Zhou, Zhiping Cai, Jiaping Yu · 6 authors

The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has promoted the wide adoption of mobile medical devices, which monitor patients’ body conditions in real-time. The collected health-related data are highly sensitive, requiring careful protection during the accessing and transmission for specialized analysis. Yet, existing efforts either rely on centralized authentication for the numerous end devices or are designed to be partially distributed for a closed institution, both lacking scalability for mobile healthcare scenarios. In this paper, we propose HealthTrust that provides a generalized and flexible authentication scheme for distributed medical devices in the cross-institution context. With blockchain as the building block, HealthTrust jointly exploits smart contracts and secure authentication to attain controlled transmission and secure exchanging of healthcare data between institutions. We have implemented the system functions with a prototype based on Ethereum. Experimental results and safety analysis demonstrate that HealthTrust can well satisfy both the safety and feasibility requirements.

Arun Zachariah, Maha Al‐Rasheed

The various data and privacy regulations introduced around the globe, require data to be stored in a secure and privacy-preserving fashion. Non-compliance with these regulations come with major consequences. This has led to the formation of huge data silos within organizations leading to difficult data analysis along with an increased risk of a data breach. Isolating data also prevents collaborative research. To address this, we present Private-Share, a framework that would enable secure sharing of large scale data. In order to achieve this goal, Private-Share leverages the recent advances in blockchain technology specifically the InterPlanetary File System and Ethereum.

Jisoo Kim, Eun-Sun Cho

Security problems in smart contracts are considered critical, because they are usually implemented in the field of financial services, such as cryptocurrency management. Although numerous solutions have been proposed recently, most of these are dedicated to the vulnerabilities of the source code of smart contracts before they are deployed and cannot cover runtime security issues. For instance, the deployment of vulnerable smart contracts on Ethereum block chains could cause serious damage at runtime, because contracts deployed on block chains are indestructible and are freely used later in the public domain. In addition, smart contracts are deployed in bytecode, a form that is naturally not human-readable, and thus, users fail to perceive their vulnerabilities. In this paper, ReByte, a runtime monitoring method for security enhancement of smart contracts deployed on Ethereum, is proposed. This method is based on a function-call interceptor for smart contracts that operates at runtime, and it checks the security-related properties of smart contracts and takes the corresponding measures described in a JSON policy file. At the beginning of its runtime, a smart contract bytecode is dynamically rewritten to embed within it the policy enforcement logic. The results of experiments on real-world Ethereum smart contracts on EtherScan [18] show that the ReByte prototype efficiently enhances the safety of smart contracts.

Qian Zhang, Sheng Cao, Xiaosong Zhang

Nowadays, online medical services have been greatly developing. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum are very suitable for online medical electronic payment scenarios that require identity privacy protection because of their good anonymity and financial payment attributes. However, cryptocurrencies varies widely, the need of cryptocurrencies exchange is urgent for patients to pay different doctors and platforms with diverse cryptocurrencies. Exchanging cryptocurrencies through centralized exchanges has problems such as high fees and cumbersome operations. The decentralized exchanges mainly focus on cross-blockchain connectivity but high intermediate fees charged by connectors are ignored. In order to minimize the exchange fees, we propose a cross-blockchain connector selection scheme utilizing the reverse Vickrey auction along with Interledger. Our scheme abstracts the connector nodes selection into a service provider bidding process, throught which we can find the very node with the lowest bid, namely, the least exchange fees, as the ideal cross-blockchain service provider. Our scheme implements cross-blockchain payment of different cryptocurrencies conveniently, quickly and cheaply, which can provide patients with better identity protection of personal privacy information. Security analysis and performance evaluations show that our scheme can effectively promote the applications of cryptocurrencies in the field of medical care.

Yifan Cao, Xiaoxu Ren, Chao Qiu, Xiaofei Wang · 6 authors

In microgrid, peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading has quickly ascended to the spotlight and gained enormous popularity. However, there are inevitable credit problems and system security problems. Besides, the current model in the electricity trading system cannot balance the utilities of multiple trading entities. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based distributed P2P electricity trading system. We define elecoins as currency in circulation within our trading system. In order to jointly optimize the utilities of both parties in the elecoins trading, we formulate the elecoins purchasing problem as a hierarchical Stackelberg game. Then, we design a distributed multi-agent utility-balanced reinforcement learning (DMA-UBRL) algorithm to search the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we factually build a blockchain system with a blockchain explorer and deploy an electricity trading smart contract (ETSC) on Ethereum, with a website interface for operating. The numerical results and the implemented realistic system show the advantages of our work.