Vivek Kumar Prasad, Chandan Trivedi, Dhaval S Jha, Madhuri Bhavsar
The speedy growth of cryptocurrencies in recent years and Blockchain technology has revived smart contracts (SC). Decentralization, verifiability, and enforceability are SC characteristics that allow contract terms to be enforced between untrustworthy parties without the interference of a central server or centralized authority. Traditional sectors, such as finance, the Internet of Things (IoT), and management, are expected to be transformed by smart contracts. Smart contracts could be used in a wide range of scenarios in the digital economy and smart industries such as banking, marketing, sanitation, and the IoT. Not only that, but the SC may also provide improvements in the mainstream development process. For the security of information in distributed networks, Blockchain systems such as Ethereum and Hyperledger are trending. The problems related to privacy and security of information need enhancement through analysis, and we discuss the same in this chapter. Blockchain creates secure smart contracts and has some unique features, including: (a) The Smart Contract software code is recorded and tested on the Blockchain, thereby rendering the Contract resistant to interference. (b) The smart contract execution is imposed anonymously, trustless single nodes with no centralized power and cooperation of third-party administrations. (c) The Smart Contract acts as an intelligent agent with its cryptocurrency (or possibly other digital assets) to transfer when certain conditions are met. Smart contracts are computer protocols that use Blockchain technology to digitally verify, facilitate, and enforce agreements between two or more parties. This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic overview of Blockchain-based Smart Contracts and their emerging research fields.
Machine learning (ML) algorithms have been widely used to predict future financial trends. It has become a tool for predicting future trends based on what is known beforehand. Like other financial stock markets, cryptocurrency has become a new sensation and challenge for investors to predict its behaviour. However, unlike other financial instruments, cryptocurrency has been renowned because of the difficulty to predict the price due to its volatility behaviour that changes so rapidly and since there is no fundamental economy for its value. This paper presents a performance comparison of two ML algorithms in predicting Ethereum price with non-time series analysis, which are k- Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and multiple polynomial regression (MPR). The experiment used independent variables from related real-world economic fundamentals such as Dow Jones Index, gold price, oil price, and Ethereum volume. The experiment data was collected from the records from April 2017 until April 2021. For each algorithm, several methods of preprocessing data were used to match all independent data with the dependent data. Three different preprocessing scenarios were also used to find the maximum accuracy model. scenario 1 (feature selection based on correlation matrix), scenario 2 (feature selection based on correlation with the dependent variables and among independent variables), and scenario 3 (scenario 1 extracted with PCA). The performance of the compared methods was evaluated by using MSE and MAE. From the experiment, a comparison of results using two different models with k-NN and multiple polynomial regression is obtained. It is found that k-NN with a hyperparameter K = 2 have the best prediction with MSE = 449.032 and MAE = 14.282 compared with multiple polynomial regression with the best MSE = 13953.96 and MAE = 84.923.
Wei Yan Ng, Tien-En Tan, Prasanth V H Movva, Andrew Hao Sen Fang · 12 authors
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial and global impact on health care, and has greatly accelerated the adoption of digital technology. One of these emerging digital technologies, blockchain, has unique characteristics (eg, immutability, decentralisation, and transparency) that can be useful in multiple domains (eg, management of electronic medical records and access rights, and mobile health). We conducted a systematic review of COVID-19-related and non-COVID-19-related applications of blockchain in health care. We identified relevant reports published in MEDLINE, SpringerLink, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Xplore, ScienceDirect, arXiv, and Google Scholar up to July 29, 2021. Articles that included both clinical and technical designs, with or without prototype development, were included. A total of 85 375 articles were evaluated, with 415 full length reports (37 related to COVID-19 and 378 not related to COVID-19) eventually included in the final analysis. The main COVID-19-related applications reported were pandemic control and surveillance, immunity or vaccine passport monitoring, and contact tracing. The top three non-COVID-19-related applications were management of electronic medical records, internet of things (eg, remote monitoring or mobile health), and supply chain monitoring. Most reports detailed technical performance of the blockchain prototype platforms (277 [66·7%] of 415), whereas nine (2·2%) studies showed real-world clinical application and adoption. The remaining studies (129 [31·1%] of 415) were themselves of a technical design only. The most common platforms used were Ethereum and Hyperledger. Blockchain technology has numerous potential COVID-19-related and non-COVID-19-related applications in health care. However, much of the current research remains at the technical stage, with few providing actual clinical applications, highlighting the need to translate foundational blockchain technology into clinical use.
Cryptocurrency is a new sort of asset that has emerged as a result of the advancement of financial technology and it has created a big opportunity for researches. Cryptocurrency price forecasting is difficult due to price volatility and dynamism. Around the world, there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies that are used. This paper proposes three types of recurrent neural network (RNN) algorithms used to predict the prices of three types of cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), and Ethereum (ETH). The models show excellent predictions depending on the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Results obtained from these models show that the gated recurrent unit (GRU) performed better in prediction for all types of cryptocurrency than the long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional LSTM (bi-LSTM) models. Therefore, it can be considered the best algorithm. GRU presents the most accurate prediction for LTC with MAPE percentages of 0.2454%, 0.8267%, and 0.2116% for BTC, ETH, and LTC, respectively. The bi-LSTM algorithm presents the lowest prediction result compared with the other two algorithms as the MAPE percentages are: 5.990%, 6.85%, and 2.332% for BTC, ETH, and LTC, respectively. Overall, the prediction models in this paper represent accurate results close to the actual prices of cryptocurrencies. The importance of having these models is that they can have significant economic ramifications by helping investors and traders to pinpoint cryptocurrency sales and purchasing. As a plan for future work, a recommendation is made to investigate other factors that might affect the prices of cryptocurrency market such as social media, tweets, and trading volume.
Mwrwan Abubakar, Zakwan Jaroucheh, Ahmed Al Dubai, Bill Buchanan
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the principal signalling protocol in Voice over IP (VoIP) systems, responsible for initialising, terminating, and maintaining sessions amongst call parties. However, the problem with the SIP protocol is that it was not designed to be secure by nature as the HTTP digest authentication used in SIP is insecure, making it vulnerable to a variety of attacks. The current solutions rely on several standardised encryption protocols, such as TLS and IPsec, to protect SIP registration messages. However, the current centralised solutions do not scale well and cause algorithm overload when encoding and decoding SIP messages. In trying to rectify this issue, we propose in this paper a blockchain-based lightweight authentication mechanism, which involves a decentralised identity model to authenticate the SIP client to the SIP server. Our mechanism uses a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain to ensure trust, accountability and preserves user privacy. We provided a proof-of-concept implementation to demonstrate our work. Further analysis of this approach's usability, mainly CPU and memory usage, was conducted comparing to IPsec and TLS. Then we discussed our system's security and presented a security analysis. Our analysis proves that our approach satisfies the SIP protocol security requirements.
Quiz sites are typically made up of a front end, a back end, and a database of questions. Our objective is to further commonize this structure. Problem verification and solution keeping are aspects that have already been thoroughly studied and modified. However, the fairness of answer validation is often unclear to the end user. We propose a system that reduces the cost of creating a quiz site and a quiz scoring system for e-learning by putting part of the structure on a blockchain. Our system verifies answers using zero-knowledge proofs, stores the answers with Ethereum, an open-source platform for decentralized applications, and tracks them. Blockchain can be used to prevent the falsification of answer records. Ethereum is a new technique that has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and we use its program executions, i.e., smart contracts, to validate answers. After receiving an answer, the system stores it as an Ethereum transaction event.
Technological advancements of Blockchain and other Distributed Ledger Techniques (DLTs) promise to provide significant advantages to applications seeking transparency, redundancy, and accountability. Actual adoption of these emerging technologies requires incorporating cost-effective, fast, QoS-enabled, secure, and scalable design. With the recent advent of quantum computing, the security of current blockchain cryptosystems can be compromised to a greater extent. Quantum algorithms like Shor's large integer factorization algorithm and Grover's unstructured database search algorithm can provide exponential and quadratic speedup, respectively, in contrast to their classical counterpart. This can put threats on both public-key cryptosystems and hash functions, which necessarily demands to migrate from classical cryptography to quantum-secure cryptography. Moreover, the computational latency of blockchain platforms causes slow transaction speed, so quantum computing principles might provide significant speedup and scalability in transaction processing and accelerating the mining process. For such purpose, this article first studies current and future classical state-of-the-art blockchain scalability and security primitives. The relevant quantum-safe blockchain cryptosystem initiatives which have been taken by Bitcoin, Ethereum, Corda, etc. are stated and compared with respect to key sizes, hash length, execution time, computational overhead, and energy efficiency. Post Quantum Cryptographic algorithms like Code-based, Lattice-based, Multivariate-based, and other schemes are not well suited for classical blockchain technology due to several disadvantages in practical implementation. Decryption latency, massive consumption of computational resources, and increased key size are few challenges that can hinder blockchain performance.
Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 was recently implemented to transform Ethereum's transaction fee market. EIP-1559 utilizes an algorithmic update rule with a constant learning rate to estimate a base fee. The base fee reflects prevailing network conditions and hence provides a more reliable oracle for current gas prices. Using on-chain data from the period after its launch, we evaluate the impact of EIP-1559 on the user experience and market performance. Our empirical findings suggest that although EIP-1559 achieves its goals on average, short-term behavior is marked by intense, chaotic oscillations in block sizes (as predicted by our recent theoretical dynamical system analysis [1]) and slow adjustments during periods of demand bursts (e.g., NFT drops). Both phenomena lead to unwanted inter-block variability in mining rewards. To address this issue, we propose an alternative base fee adjustment rule in which the learning rate varies according to an additive increase, multiplicative decrease (AIMD) update scheme. Our simulations show that the latter robustly outperforms the EIP-1559 protocol under various demand scenarios. These results provide evidence that variable learning rate mechanisms may constitute a promising alternative to the default EIP-1559-based format and contribute to the ongoing discussion on the design of more efficient transaction fee markets.
Isaac Adjei-Mensah, Isaac Osei Agyemang, Collins Sey, Linda Delali Fiasam · 5 authors
From online education and trading, all aspects of our lives are affected by digital technology. Among them, the storage of music has also entered the digital era. Music productions created by artists have brought great joy to people. However, when artists upload their works, they are most downloaded and reprinted by others, and copyright information and the issue associated with the sharing of music arise. This will have a significant negative impact on the enthusiasm and motivation of artists. This paper provides an internet database platform for artists, which uses the distributed and tamper-proof technology of the Ethereum blockchain to store music works, and protect the copyright information of each album or music produced by artists in the music industry. Design and implementation of the system model and data storage are proposed and data storage processes based on the Ethereum smart contract are demonstrated in detail. The system stores music information on the blockchain network, using the smart contract to provide artists with a fast and efficient royalty payment. Node.js is applied to carry out the experiments of our system, and we test Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) with available account and private keys for contract development and use block explorer to track music information on the blockchain. Our system enables copyright revenue to be attributed to music creators that will help to eliminate the illegal uploading of music on other websites.
Bitcoin is an innovative and path-breaking technology that has influenced numerous industries across the globe. It is a form of digital currency (cryptocurrency) that can be used for trading and has the potential to replace fiat money, where the underlying infrastructure is called Blockchain. The Blockchain is an open ledger that provides decentralization, transparency, immutability, and confidentiality. Blockchain can be used in enormous applications, such as healthcare, logistics, supply chain management, the IoT, and so forth. Most of the industrial applications rely on the permissioned blockchain. However, the permissioned blockchain fails in some aspects, such as interoperability among different platforms. This paper suggests a sustainable system to solve the interoperability issue of the permissioned blockchain by designing a new infrastructure. This work has been tested in ethereum and hyperledger frameworks, which obtained a success rate of 100 percent.
Blockchain technology is fast becoming the most transformative technology of recent times and has created hype and optimism, gaining much attention from the public and private sectors. It has been widely deployed in decentralized crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin is the success story of a public blockchain application that propelled intense research and development into blockchain technology. However, scalability remains a crucial challenge. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum are encountering low-efficiency issues with low throughput, high transaction latency, and huge energy consumption. The scalability issue in public Blockchains is hindering the provision of optimal solutions to businesses and industries. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on the public blockchain scalability issue and challenges. The scope of this SLR includes an in-depth investigation into the scalability problem of public blockchain, associated fundamental factors, and state-of-art solutions. This project managed to extract 121 primary papers from major scientific databases such as Scopus, IEEE explores, Science Direct, and Web of Science. The synthesis of these 121 articles revealed that scalability in public blockchain is not a singular term. A variety of factors are allied to it, with transaction throughput being the most discussed factor. In addition, other interdependent vita factors include storages, block size, number of nodes, energy consumption, latency, and cost. Generally, each term is somehow directly or indirectly reliant on the consensus model embraced by the blockchain nodes. It is also noticed that the contemporary available consensus models are not efficient in scalability and thus often fail to provide good QoS (throughput and latency) for practical industrial applications. Our findings exemplify that the Internet of Things (IoT) would be the leading application of blockchain in industries such as energy, finance, resource management, healthcare, education, and agriculture. These applications are, however, yet to achieve much-desired outcomes due to scalability issues. Moreover, Onchain and offchain are the two major categories of scalability solutions. Sagwit, block size expansion, sharding, and consensus mechanisms are examples of onchain solutions. Offchain, on the other hand, is a lighting network.
Since its inception in the late 2000s, blockchain has emerged as a powerful tool for creating trust without intermediaries to incentivize global communities for working for a common goal, such as the improvement of its very ecosystem, its applications and community adoption. While first blockchains were mainly devised for confirming transactions of their innate cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, smart-contract blockchains like Ethereum can interface with the real-world through so-called “oracles”, which feed trustful off-chain information. This paper introduces digital twins of physical objects and processes as computational oracles to effectively unleash the tremendous opportunity offered by blockchain to the realm of fundamental science, research and technology development (RTD). The crowdsourcing concept is illustrated with the example of centrifugal flow control in microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) systems.
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Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation
James P Kerr, Max Rioux, Tomas Surna, Fabio Marcellus · 5 authors
NoteTogether [1] seeks to bring interactivity to a very crucial aspect of online learning: consuming video media. We developed a hybrid distributed platform that provides a shared space for watching and annotating video media. Analytics are provided to all users to highlight how users are interacting with a video. NoteTogether utilizes Ethereum Blockchain to ensure data security and scalability by offloading data storage and processing requirements to the distributed Ethereum network.
Attacks on smart contracts have caused considerable losses to digital assets. Many techniques based on symbolic execution, fuzzing, and static analysis are used to detect contract vulnerabilities. Most of the current analyzers only consider vulnerability detection intra-contract scenarios. However, Ethereum contracts usually interact with others by calling their functions. A bug hidden in a path that depends on information from external contract calls is defined as an inter-contract vulnerability. Failure to deal with this kind of bug can result in potential false negatives and false positives. In this work, we propose Pluto, which supports vulnerability detection in inter-contract scenarios. It first builds an Inter-contract Control Flow Graph (ICFG) to extract semantic information among contract calls. Afterward, it symbolically explores the ICFG and deduces Inter-Contract Path Constraints (ICPC) to check the reachability of execution paths more accurately. Finally, Pluto detects whether there is a vulnerability based on some predefined rules. For evaluation, we compare Pluto with five state-of-the-art tools, including Oyente, Mythril, Securify, ILF, and Clairvoyance on a labeled benchmark and 39,443 real-world Ethereum smart contracts. The result shows that other tools can only detect 10% of the inter-contract vulnerabilities, while Pluto can detect 80% of them on the labeled dataset. Beyond that, Pluto has detected 451 confirmed vulnerabilities on real-world contracts, including 36 vulnerabilities in inter-contract scenarios. Two bugs have been assigned with unique CVE identifiers by the US National Vulnerability Database (NVD). On average, Pluto costs 16.9 seconds to analyze a contract, which is as fast as the state-of-the-art tools.
Online vehicle booking service became a growing need now-a-days as it offers an efficient and cheaper alternative. One can directly call a taxi to any location at any time they want without the need for a lengthy delay. There are various platforms implementing online vehicle booking service but the major issue with them is having a centralized authority which are pocketing huge profits. A fixed percentage of money paid by the user is taken by the centralized authority. These centralized systems also tend to misuse their user’s data and are also prone to several attacks. One of the best solutions to this problem is to use BlockChain. Our objective is to avoid this centralized authority by creating a decentralized application. Not just removing the central authority, BlockChain also provides several features like immutability, better transparency, enhanced security and traceability. Platforms like Ethereum and Hyperledger allow one to develop decentralized applications and deploy them in the blockchain. Smart Contracts can be developed using Solidity to achieve decentralization. This maintains transparency, immutability and removes a central authority which may misuse its user's information.
The innovative development in the internet of things is not only giving rapid growth in the development of efficiency of new technologies but also giving a threat relative to the integrity and confidentiality of data. So, it requires security, privacy, data integrity, confidentiality, authentication and authorization which is provided by the Blockchain Technology. This paper mainly represents access control mechanism for different nodes in the smart healthcare environment. For this it uses multiple access control smart contracts. Here the smart contract is implemented using Ethereum Smart Contract increasing the confidentiality and integrity of data by providing Authentication, Access control, Authorization for the management of data sharing and storage of data. Here the smart contracts will provide Node Authentication and authorization of each device, based on the registration to provide the data security which is missing in other Internet of Thing’s applications.
Yang Xu, Ziming Liu, Cheng Zhang, Ju Ren · 6 authors
Renewable energy sources (RES) and low-carbon technology users play a vital role in modern power systems. However, RES generation is easily affected by the environment. Meanwhile, the load, such as electric vehicles (EVs) and prosumers, accounts for most low-carbon technology users. Their power is usually superimposed on peak loads without dispatching, which also exacerbates the instability of the power system. Current optimal dispatching mechanisms mainly rely on centralized organizations, while their dispatching process is not open and transparent. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based trustworthy dispatching approach for the distribution network in high renewable energy penetrated power systems. We first develop an optimal dispatching model considering EVs’ charging behavior and the prosumers’ economic benefits. With the model, prosumers can be dispatched to balance power and consume renewable energy, reducing the impact of disorderly charging on the grid and the abandonment of RES generation. An orderly charging iteration optimization (OCIO) algorithm is proposed to implement orderly EV charging while considering the charging cost and the period. We also propose a modified particle swarm optimization (mPSO) algorithm to publish dispatching tasks based on real-time power balance. Furthermore, blockchain is applied as an open and transparent ledger to record each entity’s power generation and consumption information, ensuring that the dispatching process is trustworthy. Finally, the effectiveness of the dispatching approach is verified in the modified IEEE 33-bus test system and Ethereum-based smart contracts.
Smart Contracts have noninheritable huge prominence within the recent years. After the Ethereum came into existence in 2015, the execution of smart contract had a great development in blockchain technology. The smart contracts execution faces number of issues to name few reliability, scalability, security. Development of Smart Contracts are not followed by standard software development life cycle. This causes the applications with smart contract(s) cannot perform exhaustive testing as well as it is expensive. The most prominent fields like smart contract testing and analysis of the code for vulnerability attracts many researchers. Targeted on reviewing the techniques and approaches discussed in various selected related papers from IEEE, science direct etc. For each of the selected research work identified open challenges that require further research. Hence this literature review on smart contract testing and analysis of smart contract code intends to emphasize the merits and demerits in smart contracts development process.
Divya Stephen, Blesmi Rose Joseph, Neeraja James, S Aswathy
The potential of blockchain technology is increasing rapidly as the technology is more secure and immutable. IoT, the Internet of Things, is an evolving technique that adds quality to lives. IoT raises security issues because of the violations of security policies and rules. Blockchain authorizes IoT devices to make IoT strong in security-related areas. Blockchain provides a decentralized environment to IoT platforms and applications. Blockchain is an expanding technology to various fields due to its greater transparency and enhanced security. Blockchain technology works in a secured atmosphere. Without a third person, people can send money directly, where transactions are inexpensive and fast, and technology also prevents corruption and manipulation. Each cryptocurrency user can monitor their transactions and authenticate them at the same time. The blockchain framework developed by Ethereum and Hyperledger helps to store data for this application. We use many functionalities for digital health records. The computer protocol which verifies or enforces the negotiation or performance is known as the smart contracts. These have a broad spectrum of applications, like financial services, prediction markets, and the IoT. When the use of blockchain increased, issues like the scalability of major public-chain platforms came up, which directly affect the development of blockchain.
Climate change has negative effects on life on earth as well as the environment and economy. Harmful greenhouse gases, especially CO2, emitted from industrial processes executed by developed countries were identified as the primary reason behind climate change. The world recognized the risk of excessive CO2 emissions, therefore, the United Nations established the Kyoto protocol which aims at reducing the release of CO2 by monetizing its emissions. To achieve its goal, the Kyoto protocol established a carbon emission trading scheme to distribute and trade CO2 allowances among and between emitting participants. However, the carbon emission trading scheme fell short of its goal due to lack of integrity, governance, high intermediary cost and other security and technical issues revealing the need for a solution to elevate the scheme's operations. Meanwhile, blockchian emerged as a revolutionary way to operate business models due to its decentralization, security, traceability, immutability, and privacy. This study proposes an efficient and smart carbon emission trading system utilizing blockchain and smart contract. Our paper proposes a carbon emission trading system using Ethereum blockchain smart contract to automate trading Kyoto units between entities and reduce operations cost. The proposed system performs buyers registration and Kyoto units trading using Ether cryptocurrency for payment without intermediary but rather through smart contract and blockchain. The result is a robust and smart system that inherits blockchain features of trust, immutability, distribution, governance, and transparency.
Sheikh Munir Skh Saad, Raja Zahilah Raja Mohd Radzi, Siti Hajar Othman
Blockchain is a technology used as a public ledger that is accessible to everyone without central authority control. This technology has the ability to run smart contracts as well as register users. There are several consensus algorithms used in blockchains. Many researchers are looking into the consensus algorithm in order to ensure the security and authenticity of transaction information in blockchains. In determining which consensus algorithm research areas should be examined, several existing papers from other researchers have been analyzed. This study is motivated by the need to determine the best consensus key. Thus, this study will examine the comparison of the two consensus algorithms which are Proof of Stake (PoS) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) algorithms. A further focus of this research study is on the parameters that are being used by these two algorithms. Analyses are done based on the number of miners and the number of created blocks to determine how long is necessary to produce a new block. The measurements were conducted through the simulation tool, which is Ethereum in a private network. The impact of parameters was assessed and analyzed based on the results. In addition, we conclude by determining their scalability as well as their efficiency. As the results show, DPoS is much better than PoS when it comes to producing a new block, with a percentage difference of 68%-73% between them. For future work, the algorithm studied can be extended to the Dual Delegated Proof of Stake (DDPoS) and the relationship and comparison between Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Dual Delegated Proof of Stake (DDPoS) can be discussed. Furthermore, the key parameters of the analysis can be extended as well such as the power of the consumptions.