Marta Bellés-Muñoz, Barry Whitehat, Jordi Baylina, Vanesa Daza · 5 authors
Circuit-based zero-knowledge proofs have arose as a solution to the implementation of privacy in blockchain applications, and to current scalability problems that blockchains suffer from. The most efficient circuit-based zero-knowledge proofs use a pairing-friendly elliptic curve to generate and validate proofs. In particular, the circuits are built connecting wires that carry elements from a large prime field, whose order is determined by the number of elements of the pairing-friendly elliptic curve. In this context, it is important to generate an inner curve using this field, because it allows to create circuits that can verify public-key cryptography primitives, such as digital signatures and encryption schemes. To this purpose, in this article, we present a deterministic algorithm for generating twisted Edwards elliptic curves defined over a given prime field. We also provide an algorithm for checking the resilience of this type of curve against most common security attacks. Additionally, we use our algorithms to generate Baby Jubjub, a curve that can be used to implement elliptic-curve cryptography in circuits that can be validated in the Ethereum blockchain.
Purpose This article examines the susceptibility of cryptocurrencies to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) induced panic in comparison with major stock indices. Design/methodology/approach The author employs the Bayesian structural vector autoregression to examine the phenomenon in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin from 2nd January 2020 to 30th June 2021. A similar analysis is conducted for major stock indices, namely S&P 500, FTSE 100 and SSE Composite for comparison purposes. Findings The results suggest that cryptocurrencies returns suffered immensely in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak following declarations of the disease as a global health emergency and eventually a pandemic in March 2020. However, the returns for all three cryptocurrencies recovered by April 2020 and remained resistant to further COVID-19 panic shocks. The results are dissimilar to those of S&P 500, FTSE 100 and SSE Composite values which were vulnerable to COVID-19 panic throughout the timeframe to June 2021. The results further reveal strong predictive power of Bitcoin on prices of other cryptocurrencies. Research limitations/implications The article provides evidence to support the cryptocurrency as a safe haven during COVID-19 school of thought given their resistance to subsequent shocks during COVID-19. Thus, the author stresses the need for diversification of investment portfolios by including cryptocurrencies given their uniqueness and resistance to shocks during crises. Originality/value The author makes use of the novel corona virus panic index to examine the magnitude of shocks in prices of cryptocurrencies during COVID-19.
The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between supply, demand and price fundamentals of Ethereum. In the paper, daily data covering the period 20.05.2017-31.01.2019 was used. Hypotheses were explained using the Classical Unit Root and ARDL Test. Respectively, the supply of Ethereum is explained by the "Ethereum Energy Consumption Index" and the demand of Ethereum is explained by "Transaction Fee". As a control variable, "Hashrate" is included in the model. Hashrate also expresses a technology used. Ethereum price is considered in Ether/USD. First, stationarity of the variables was determined using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test. The long-term dynamics are characterized using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Test. As a result of the analysis, it was found that there is a long-term relationship between Ethereum's supply, demand, price, and Hashrate. Additionally, Ethereum price and Hashrate affect the supply of Ethereum positively in the long-term.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) leverage blockchain technology to certify and transfer ownership of digital assets to individuals. NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain have garnered significant attention recently, with a trading volume of over $2 billion in Q1 2021 only. At the same time, established NFT solutions have low flexibility, limited scalability, and high transaction fees. These deficiencies make them impractical to use at a larger scale to manage digital assets.
Traditional insurance policy settlement is a manual process that is never hassle-free. There are many issues, such as hidden conditions from the insurer or fraud claims by the insured, making the settlement process rough. This process also consumes a significant amount of time that makes the process very inefficient. This whole scenario can be disrupted by the implementation of blockchain and smart contracts in insurance. Blockchain and innovative contract technology can provide immutable data storage, security, transparency, authenticity, and security while any transaction process is triggered. With the implementation of blockchain, the whole insurance process, from authentication to claim settlement, can be done with more transparency and security. A blockchain is a virtual chain of data blocks that is a decentralized technology. Any transaction or change in the blocks is done after the decentralized validator entity, not a single person. The smart contract is a unique facility stored on the blockchain that gets executed when the predetermined conditions are met. This paper presents a framework where smart contracts are used for insurance contracts and stored on blockchain. In the case of a claim, if all the predetermined conditions are met, the transaction happens; otherwise, it is discarded. The conditions are immutable. That means there is scope for alteration from either side. This blockchain and intelligent contract-based framework are hosted on a private Ethereum network. The Solidity programming language is used to create smart contracts. The framework uses the Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm to validate the transactions. In the case of any faulty transaction request, the consensus algorithm acts according to and cancels the claim. With blockchain and smart contract implementation, this framework can solve all the trust and security issues that rely on a standard insurance policy.
Many countries have been using online voting systems instead of ballot papers. In such voting systems, voters can cast votes online using their cell phones, laptops, and other internet-connected devices. Online voting systems have centralized databases where a malicious attacker can hack, change or manipulate the database. Therefore, current online voting systems present a security concern for any government. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer technology in which data is stored in a tamper-proof ledger and maintained by participating peers. In this paper, we propose a secure online voting system using Ethereum Blockchain and Ethereum Smart Contracts. A voter can cast her vote securely after scanning her fingerprint and iris recognition. Our proposed methodology uses Paillier homomor-phic encryption and the private key shifting technique to ensure voter privacy and identity security.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Imen Riabi, Hella Kaffel Ben Ayed, Bilel Zaghdoudi, Laurent George
We propose the integration of blockchain with the OAuth standard. Two blockchains are considered for the implementation: Ethereum where ACL and token processing is performed on-chain and MultiChain where the processing is performed off-chain. The experiments show that the on-chain token generation provides an additional overhead compared to the off-chain one. However, it provides a secure token management and access traceability. The main advantage of our contribution is to propose a decentralized authorization system while relying on a standard specification.
<p><em>The cryptocurrency industry has exploded, with an increasing number of individuals investing in digital assets — even Malaysians who adhere to Shariah financial norms. The surge in Islamic faith members' involvement in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has given birth to Zakat payments. Zakat is the third pillar of Islam, and it compels Muslims to make charitable contributions if they have sufficient means. The major considerations to explore are whether zakat is required on cryptocurrency investments and how the community sees zakat on cryptocurrencies. As a result, this paper will investigate the prospect of </em><em>cryptocurrencies as a digital assets</em><em> being a new source of revenue for zakat from an Islamic perspective by acquiring appropriate rulings (fatwas) and then investigating community attitudes on zakat on cryptocurrency.</em><em></em></p>
Liang Wang, Jing Zhang, Zheng Yuan Jia, An Hu · 6 authors
As a distributed system with decentralization, trust maintenance, and security assurance, blockchain has successfully served a variety of scenarios involving information exchange and ledger recording. In the blockchain system, the characteristics of peer and autonomy of each node, coupled with the traceability of the blockchain system, the nature of information disclosure and the nature of distributed information storage, make it ubiquitous in the modern Internet of Power Energy It has unique advantages such as safety and efficiency in application scenarios such as the Internet of Power and Energy. First introduced the core application principles of blockchain technology and analyzed the application feasibility of blockchain technology based on the Ethereum network in the virtual power plant (Virtual Power Plant VPP) energy transaction; then on the basis of the Ethereum blockchain platform In the above, a power energy transaction scheme under the virtual power plant architecture is proposed; then the test is carried out in the standard Ethereum test network and virtual environment to verify the feasibility, safety and scalability of the method; finally, the block Analyze and prospect the opportunities and challenges of chain technology in the field of combining virtual power plants and “Internet +”.
The three largest cryptocurrencies by market value are examined for overreaction to positive and negative outlier return events. Bitcoin and Ethereum show significant reversals in value following outlier negative events suggesting overreaction. For positive events, significant cumulative gains (not reversals) followed outlier positive events for Ethereum and Tether showed a significant reversal in value after the positive events. Evidence is, therefore, mixed among the three main cryptocurrencies when it comes to how revaluations occur after outlier positive events.
Xinlai Liu, Yishuo Jiang, Zicheng Wang, Ray Y. Zhong · 6 authors
The manufacturing industry is experiencing a service-oriented transformation in the digitalisation era. However, many small and middle enterprises (SMEs) still rely on traditional manufacturing patterns in which they can hardly servitise manufacturing resources due to the limited budget and poor digitalisation capability. To servitise manufacturing resources, this paper proposes unified five-layer blockchain-enabled secure digital twin platform architecture, followed by its core enabling components and technologies. Firstly, a service-oriented digital twinning model is developed to transform physical resources into digital services. Secondly, a rule-based off-chain matching mechanism is designed to bridge customers’ orders with manufacturing services. Thirdly, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is adopted as the major methodology to design and develop the whole blockchain platform. Four blockchain frontend services are developed using React.js, whilst the blockchain backend is developed using private Ethereum blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Finally, an experimental case is conducted based on the 3D printing scenario to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed platform, named imseStudio. The results show that it not only provides an effective solution to digitalise manufacturing resources but also promotes the transformation towards service manufacturing.Highlights Blockchain-enabled secure digital twin platform is developed to servitise manufacturing resourcesService-oriented digital twinning model is developed to transform physical resources into digital servicesRule-based off-chain matching mechanism is built to bridge customers’ orders with 3D printerFour blockchain explorers are developed to facilitate 3D printing services
Digital Transformation in Industry
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies
Célio Márcio Soares Ferreira, Charles Tim Batista Garrocho, Carlos Frederico Marcelo da Cunha Cavalcanti, Jorge Sá Silva · 5 authors
Blockchain is already advancing in journeys beyond cryptocurrency applications, and Ethereum, already called the world's computer, is going on a path that intends to reinvent the internet or Web 3.0, currently the leading platform for deploying so-called distributed applications (DApp). The growth of these Dapps in different spheres of society, as Smart Cities and Industry 4.0 IoT applications demand new proposals and models that integrate Ethereum and its ecosystem data with existing datasets on the traditional Web. This work presents our efforts to apply ontologies representing an Ethereum network and ecosystem using the Semantic Web model to extract and link its data. We show EthExtras a new ontology that extends and simplifies the EthOn, and as proof of concept and sample of use, we design a middleware web that exposed as RDF graphs the Ethereum data in soft real-time.
Recent years, cloud computing has introduced a number of emerging techniques for efficient ways of storing and sharing the land registry data on cloud. In this paper we have done a survey on how we can provide security to land registry data on cloud, we found one of the emerging techniques that is blockchain. The invention of decentralized network increases computational demands and it's proven to be more secure using lightweight cryptographic based on this we have design the architecture and Records storing and access protocol (RSAP) This advanced model helps to improve the service with high security, high flexibility, availability of data and improve the performance of the network. However, this new idea also raises concerns about land registry data security and privacy on ethereum private blockchain networks.
H Spoorti, R Sneha, V Soujanya, K Heena · 6 authors
With the steady increase in complexity of cloud computing and other technologies, there has been a significant concern for providing privacy and data security. For secure access of cloud resources, protection of sensitive data is essential. The critical data that relates to resource provisioning in cloud environment includes key pairs and IP addresses. The user needs this critical data to access the resources which has been provisioned. In conventional systems, this data is directly provided to the user. This technique results in local storage and opens up a vulnerability of snooping by a malicious intruder. Furthermore, the user needs to repeatedly remember the key pairs and other information of all the created resources. Recently, Blockchain, with its decentralized and immutable features is being explored in the design access control mechanism. In this work, we design blockchain based access control mechanism to access cloud resources. We use OpenStack cloud to provision the resources, store the critical data of resources in Ethereum blockchain and use secure access control to cloud resources. We also carry out the scalability and performance analysis of the blockchain based system using Ethereum platform.
In recent years, securely sharing personal information between two parties involves high risk. Most of the medical health records and financial transactions includes huge uncertainty while storing and retrieving from cloud for query processing. Blockchain is an open platform where each transaction is tampered proof. Various methods like zero knowledge proof or hashing methods used to hide the sensitive information from the real world. When associating blockchain with cloud this uncertainty is reduced. The user information is segregated into two categories sensitive and non-sensitive using linear regression method before processing in cloud. To improve security and increase privacy from various attacks, the sensitive part of data is encrypted using ECC and non- sensitive part of data is encrypted using RSA algorithm. Using Ethereum blockchain the policy of the user is verified and query processing is done. The performance of the model is compared with the existing techniques and results are evaluated using the classification error rate and performance of security against manual attacks.
The Ethereum ecosystem was maintained by a distributed global network of computers that required massive amounts of computational power. Previous work on estimating the energy use and emissions of the Ethereum network has relied on top-down economic analysis and rough estimates of hardware efficiency and emissions factors. In this work we provide a bottom-up analysis that works from hashrate to an energy usage estimate, and from mining locations to an emissions factor estimate, and combines these for an overall emissions estimate. We analyze the entire history of PoW Ethereum, from creation to the merge.
Cloud computing has become an important technology for the processing of large computationally expensive programs and data from real-world. IT organizations are en-trusting the cloud vendors for the security of their computational infrastructures including the data. Thus, there is a need for better provenance assurance for the data present in the cloud for better security and to establish trust between the cloud vendors and customers. Blockchain technology operates in a decentralized way for building trust between the entities in the system using immutable ledger. In this work, we propose the decentralized and trusted cloud data provenance mechanism using Ethereum blockchain platform, IPFS and scalable consensus mechanism. PoW is the consensus algorithm currently used in Ethereum Blockchain. PoW consensus mechanism needs lot of computational power for the processing of data in the Blockchain. Thus, we implement Proof of Stake (POS) consensus algorithm in Ethereum to improve the efficiency of the proposed data provenance mechanism. We demonstrate the performance of PoS-enabled provenance framework in a multi-node testbed. The results reveal that POS performs better than PoW for cloud data provenance.
Alexandru A. Maftei, Partemie-Marian Mutescu, Valentin Popa, Adrian I. Petrariu · 5 authors
Blockchain technology has been seen as a holy grail, being able to solve many of the security and privacy problems related to the growing numbers of interconnected IoT sensors that needs data protection. Gradually, this innovative technology began to be addressed in other industries having an ever-increasing penetration. In this paper, the blockchain technology is integrated into an Internet of Things healthcare application, where a medical wearable device is used for human body health parameters acquisition. Collected data are secured and transmitted using LoRa (long range) technology. The proposed blockchain architecture uses Ethereum technology due to the use of smart contracts technology. From the obtained result, the proposed architecture ensures a high level of performance and security, allowing patients to have control over shared data securely, but also having the assurance that shared data will not be tampered with.
Blockchain, the underlying technology behind Bit-coin, is an emerging technology in industry. Blockchain has the power to reform the existing business processes more democratic, transparent, secure, and efficient. Banking industries are the first movers that capitalize the disruptive potential of this technology. The indian banking system is one of the complex bank payment system in this world. The current infrastructure that is used by indian bank system is real time gross settlement system based and it follows a centralized architecture. Due to this centralized architecture the processing of transactions are slow and cum-bersome. It also causes large amount for security and recovery purposes. The real time gross settlement based system demands high need for security, resilience, and performance. Moving from traditional system to blockchain platform is not the prior concern but making a system that provide security, confidentiality, and decentralized money lending mechanism is the core idea. Here proposed a novel system that enable a decentralized Banking system and services based on Ethereum blockchain platform. The system support different services including money deposit, money transfer and loan checking etc. using the distributed ledger technology.
The ongoing public interest in blockchains and smart contracts has brought a rise to a magnitude of different blockchain implementations. The rate at which new concepts are envisioned and implemented makes it hard to vet their impact on security. Especially smart contract platforms, executing untrusted code, are very complex by design. Still, people put their trust and money into chains that may lack proper testing. A behavior deviation for edge cases of single op-codes is a critical bug class in this brave new world. It can be abused for Denial of Service against the blockchain, chain splits, double-spending, or direct attacks on applications operating on the blockchain. In this paper, we propose an automated methodology to uncover such differences. Through coverage-guided and state-guided fuzzing, we explore smart contract virtual machine behavior against multiple VMs in parallel. We develop NeoDiff, the first framework for feedback-guided differential fuzzing of smart contract VMs. We discuss real, monetary consequences our tool prevents. NeoDiff can be ported to new smart contract platforms with ease. Apart from fuzzing Ethereum VMs, NeoDiff found a range of critical differentials in VMs for the Neo blockchain. Moreover, through a higher-layer semantics mutator, we uncovered semantic discrepancies between Neo smart contracts written in Python when executed on the blockchain vs. classic CPython. Along the way, NeoDiff uncovered memory corruptions in the C# Neo VM.
Dipanjan Bose, Chandan Kumar Chanda, A. Chakrabarti
Abstract The resilience of the power grid is taking a vital role in the energy supply and distribution process. But due to the rapid growth of integration of renewable distributed energy sources to the traditional power grid, the nature of the trading system is shifted from the centralized to decentralized or distributed manner. Blockchain is one of the most emerging security technologies that change the dimension of the financial and energy sector with openness and complete freedom. Blockchain implemented distributed energy trading promotes decentralized electricity markets. The physical system consists of the planning of the routing of energy from one place to another. A user can not send power to another customer in any severe outage or natural disaster in a traditional system. The user cannot participate in the trade globally. So in this proposed methodology, the connections of each customer to the central grid through several microgrids have been shown. In this work, an innovative approach in trading and finding a solution to a payment method is proposed. Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts completed the entire trading system in automation mode in our proposed system. Any power outage at one place can be compensated by routing a new path of energy inflow from another active source, which enhances the system’s resiliency to a certain degree. While trading, no third parties will be engaged so that the transaction is efficient and fast.