Blockchain Papers

Arshdeep Singh, Gulshan Kumar, Rahul Saha, Mauro Conti · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ziaur Rahman, Xun Yi, Sk. Tanzir Mehedi, Rafiqul Islam · 5 authors

Blockchain has recently been able to draw wider attention throughout the research community. Since its emergence, the world has seen the mind-blowing expansion of this new technology, which was initially developed as a pawn of digital currency more than a decade back. A self-administering ledger that ensures extensive data immutability over the peer-to-peer network has made it attractive for cybersecurity applications such as a sensor-enabled system called the Internet of things (IoT). Brand new challenges and questions now demand solutions as huge IoT devices are now online in a distributed fashion to ease our everyday lives. After being motivated by those challenges, the work here has figured out the issues and perspectives an IoT infrastructure can suffer because of the wrong choice of blockchain technology. Though it may look like a typical review, however, unlike that, this paper targets sorting out the specific security challenges of the blockchain-IoT eco-system through critical findings and applicable use-cases. Therefore, the contribution includes directing Blockchain architects, designers, and researchers in the broad domain to select the unblemished combinations of Blockchain-powered IoT applications. In addition, the paper promises to bring a deep insight into the state-of-the-art Blockchain platforms, namely Ethereum, Hyperledger, and IOTA, to exhibit the respective challenges, constraints, and prospects in terms of performance and scalability.

Jie Wu, Suhan Jiang

The lightning network (LN) is a layer-two solution in Bitcoin for support scalability. LN uses offchain micropayment channels to scale the blockchain's capability to perform instant transactions without a global block confirmation process. However, micropayment scalability in a large LN is still limited by its relatively large searching space for a suitable route. Liquidation for small nodes still remains major challenges for the LN as the amount of transactions along a channel is predetermined by the channel capacity defined by two end nodes of the channel. In this paper, we introduce the notion of supernodes and the corresponding supernodes-based pooling to address these challenges. In order to meet the high adaptivity and low maintenance cost in the dynamic LN where users join and leave, supernodes are constructed locally to avoid global information or label propagation. Each supernode, together with a subset of (non-supernodes) neighbors, forms a supernode-based pool. These pools constitute a partition of the LN. Additionally, supernodes are self-connected. Micropayment scalability is supported through node set reduction as only supernodes are involved in searching and in payment with other supernodes. Liquidation is enhanced through pooling to redistribute funds within a pool to external channels of its supernode. Extensive simulations using LN simulator CLoTH have been conducted to validate the improvement in routing scalability and liquidation of the proposed architecture under different settings.

Xiangyu Wang, Wenyong Wang, Youlu Zeng, Ting Yang · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Emmanuelle Anceaume, Aimen Djari, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni

International audience

Cheng Qu, Hang Xiong, Shuo Wang, Yue Niu · 5 authors

Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized ledger for recording transactions. Although blockchain has the advantages of transparency, decentralization, and immutability, it also faces low scalability. Recently, sharding has been emerged as an elegant solution to overcome the scalability problem in blockchain, where Asynchronous Consensus Zones itself has been shown to be a state-of-the-art sharding protocol. However, this protocol will generate a relatively high orphan rate when the throughput is high, which leads to block waste. In this paper, to avoid orphan blocks and further improve throughput, we design a sharding consensus protocol with a fixed block interval named Dioxide. We implement the protocol prototype in a simulated environment and evaluate the performance of the sharding protocol. Compared with Asynchronous Consensus Zones, our experiments show that average throughput is increased by approximately 9%.

Annegret Henninger, Atefeh Mashatan

The heterogeneous and decentralized nature of renewable energy sources is too much to handle for traditional and centralized IT grid infrastructure. Blockchain technology can address many of the associated challenges. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art technology layers of grid system infrastructure, a proposed future state using blockchain technology, and gap analysis. The paper also contributes a set of architectural requirements for a blockchain-enabled future state and a proposed hybrid architecture using blockchain technology, verifiable credentials, and smart contracts. This architecture can uniquely support the technology layers critical to renewable energies, including system architecture, registries, grid management, billing, privacy, and interoperability.

Keerthi Nelaturu, Han Du, Duc-Phong Le

The primary purpose of this paper is to bridge the technology gap between Blockchain and Fintech applications. Blockchain technology is already being explored in a wide number of Fintech sectors. After creating a unique taxonomy for Fintech ecosystems, this paper outlines a number of implementation scenarios. For each of the industries in which blockchain is already in use and has established itself as a complementary technology to traditional systems, we give a taxonomy of use cases. In this procedure, we cover both public and private blockchains. Because it is still believed to be in its infancy, especially when it comes to financial use cases, blockchain has both positive and negative aspects. As a result, it is critical to be aware of all of the open research issues in this field. Our goal is to compile a list of open research challenges related to various aspects of the blockchain’s protocol and application layers. Finally, we will provide a clear understanding of the applications for which blockchain can be valuable, as well as the risks associated with its use in parallel.

Mostefa Kara, Abdelkader Laouid, Mohammad Hammoudeh, Muath AlShaikh · 5 authors

This article is to propose a consensus algorithm, called Proof of Chance (PoCh), which is designed for the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The PoCh protocol is designed to be scalable and extensible, with a controllable conformance delay and low hardware and computation requirements. To reach a consensus, PoCh uses chance rather than computing power: “if condition$_{1}$, I am a candidate; if condition$_{2}$, I am the miner.” During every consensus iteration, the condition$_{1}$is updated, and a single miner is chosen using condition$_{2}$. Those conditions are randomized without the node generating any value and without assigning any weight to such value. The fault tolerance of PoCh is$5f/3 + 1$, meaning that PoCh can successfully achieve consensus as long as more than 40% of nodes are functioning properly, compared to 50% in the Proof of Stake (PoS) protocol.

Bin Li, Yang Fan, Bing Qi, Xuefeng Bai · 6 authors

Abstract It is a critical part of increasing renewable energy accommodation by using virtual power plant (VPP) to attain carbon neutrality. However, VPP applications primarily consider VPP's participation in power market transactions as a whole and rarely consider the transaction interaction between internal resources. VPP's internal resources complement each other organically, and blockchain technology for distributed transactions has incorporated points. In this article, the authors undertake a study and examine the P2P scenario of VPP internal transactions in light of the issues experienced by DERs transactions. Next, the authors analyse the consensus mechanism, smart contract, inter‐blockchain technology, and game theory, and how to apply them in the P2P scenarios of VPP internal transactions. Further, the authors design the function of the DER transaction system, which lays the foundation for the realisation of the system in the future. Finally, the authors conclude that the potential of blockchain technology in P2P transactions between internal entities of the VPP is significant and warrants further investigation.

Kyle P. Michelson, Anjali Sridharan, Umut Can Çabuk, Ethan Reesor · 9 authors

The Accumulate Protocol ("Accumulate") is an identity-based, Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) blockchain designed to power the digital economy through interoperability with Layer-1 blockchains, integration with enterprise tech stacks, and interfacing with the World Wide Web. Accumulate bypasses the trilemma of security, scalability, and decentralization by implementing a chain-of-chains architecture in which digital identities with the ability to manage keys, tokens, data, and other identities are treated as their own independent blockchains. This architecture allows these identities, known as Accumulate Digital Identifiers (ADIs), to be processed and validated in parallel over the Accumulate network. Each ADI also possesses a hierarchical set of keys with different priority levels that allow users to manage their security over time and create complex signature authorization schemes that expand the utility of multi-signature transactions. A two token system provides predictable costs for enterprise users, while anchoring all transactions to Layer-1 blockchains provides enterprise-grade security to everyone.

Yiqing Zhu, Cunqing Hua, Dingjie Zhong, Wenchao Xu

A major concern of blockchain systems is to scale up their throughput. Many improvements and novel consensus protocols have been proposed to address this issue, but they are intrinsically limited by the message synchronization latency of the underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Most existing implementations of blockchain systems are based on the unstructured random overlay disseminating networks, which often results in a heavy-tailed delivery latency distribution, impairing the decentralization property of the blockchain system. To overcome these constraints, this research proposes Urocissa, a structured overlay protocol to reduce the delivery latency and to improve steadiness for blockchain systems. By exploiting the unique characteristics of blockchain traffic and network heterogeneity, the protocol maintains multiple minimum latency broadcasting trees in a distributed way, whereby each node communicates with its neighbors and makes decisions sovereignly to balance relaying tasks among participants. Experiments show that the proposed protocol significantly reduces block delivery and confirmation latency compared to the conventional blockchain delivery network protocols.

Ansh Riyal, Geetansh Kumar, Deepak Kumar Sharma, Koyel Datta Gupta · 5 authors

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) is a system of inter-connectivity and communication between smart automated vehicles. Blockchain has emerged as a technology focusing on data security with a decentralized architecture and has been successful to a very high degree. Unfortunately, this technology was not originally meant for low-power IoT devices and is very computationally expensive with high power requirements and a tendency to introduce delays. With the explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) enabled autonomous vehicles, boosted further by the advent of smart cities, energy requirements have become an issue that can no longer be ignored. As a consequence, research into green technologies has been gaining popularity. With this area of focus, blockchain with its exponential power consumption levels is heavily flawed and thus presents itself as a prime candidate for improvement. In this paper, a framework is proposed to further evolve blockchain technology to integrate it with a semi-centralized data storage mechanism, while keeping network control decentralized. The proposed Blockchain Tree (BCT) approach entails a combination of a tree structure network composed of blockchains, based on a time-based upward data propagation mechanism that optimizes the architecture to reduce communication delay, cut down its high power consumption levels and ensure sustainability in the long run. As is evident in the comparative study, such a blockchain-based network structure offers drastic improvements in terms of speed, energy savings, storage and computation. The proposed model reduces the storage requirement of the blockchain by a factor of 0.17. The energy requirements and time complexity have been optimized by approximately 195% in the early stages of optimization. All the parameters get further optimized by orders of magnitude with more transactions and users.

Maruti M Arer, Praveen M. Dhulavvagol, Shashikumar G. Totad

In current distributed file system, Big data storage suffers from security issues, single point of failure and scalability problems. With the popularity of bitcoin and crypto world, Blockchain has emerged as new decentralized framework. Now, Blockchain is also used as distributed storage framework for storing large data. When the volume of data increases, blockchain suffers from storage overhead and scalability issues. To solve this problem, we propose blockchain based distributed big data storage using IPFS(Inter-Planetary File System). IPFS reduces the storage overhead by storing small pieces of large file in multiple nodes and collectively generating hash of the file. Further elasticsearch is also used for efficient query retrieval. Overall,the above architecture of blockchain, IPFS and Elasticsearch enhances the big data storage, search latency and precision. It also provides access control mechanism which allows only authorized user to access the files. Thus this framework provides efficient data storage, security and its retrieval.

Xuan Chen, Kien Nguyen, Hiroo Sekiya

Blockchain technologies have been emerging with the potential to disrupt many fields (e.g., cryptocurrencies replacing the traditional ones, enabling trustworthy voting, etc.). The Internet of Things (IoT) has been predictably strengthened when integrating to the private blockchain, such as Ethereum. In an IoT deployment with private Ethereum, a thorough understanding of the latency is a critical issue that has not been adequately understood in the literature. Motivated by that, this work aims to comprehend the latency performance in the IoT Ethereum with two popular consensus algorithms: Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Authority (PoA). Initially, we clarify different latency segments from transaction submission to execution, namely, the transaction lifecycle in a private blockchain. We then consider the three related latency metrics: 1) transaction-oriented latency; 2) mining time; and 3) block-oriented latency in the PoW case. With PoA, the mining time’s consideration is omitted since the mining process is not necessary. After that, we construct a realistic private Ethereum IoT network (i.e., using a laptop and seven Raspberry Pi 3b+ nodes) and a large-scale emulated one with 30 nodes. We write and deploy a smart contract to read and write data to the blockchain and measure the latencies in various scenarios. The measurement results reveal the values of transaction-oriented and block-oriented latency with PoW and PoA in both the actual and emulated networks. Moreover, we derive the expected value for the PoW’s mining time by fitting the probabilities to an exponential curve.

Abdelrahman Sheham Abdellah, Sherif M. Saif, Hesham Eldeeb, Emad Abd-Elrahman · 5 authors

In this study, we propose an Information-Centric Network (ICN) approach for the Internet as an alternative to the present host-centric architecture. The proposed approach solves present Internet challenges, where most Internet users nowadays are involved in seeking knowledge by searching through large amounts of data, independent of the data's physical locations and these users usually have requests that need prompt responses. Hence, Internet requirements have got a new shape and the whole Internet paradigm should be shifting where different network considerations are needed. In this context, ICNs can play a vital role where the host-centered architecture is replaced by a content-centered one since the content itself is the aim and not the location. However, the ICN paradigm as a substitute for traditional Internet faces some challenges in terms of security and performance. ICN needs to be protected against some threats such as Denial-of-Service attacks (DoS), hacker attacks, loss of data, data replication, and cache pollution. To accomplish this, we propose this Secured Blockchain-Based ICN (SBBICN) implementation that exploits the secure aspects of Blockchain technology such as data integrity and non-tampering to secure the ICN against the aforementioned threats. In this proposed system, we describe and develop a voting system based on a blockchain consensus algorithm to avoid a single point of failure during the verification process and we apply the system using an Ethereum smart contract to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system. The experimental results and the security analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of the SBBICN proposal when compared to other schemes in the literature.

Wenbing Zhao, Shunkun Yang, Xiong Luo, Jiong Zhou

The goal of this paper is to clarify common misconceptions regarding the blockchain technology, and pointing out some worrisome practices in the field of blockchain technology. We first provide a brief introduction of the blockchain technology, highlighting its design principle, nuts and bolts, and the most fundamental innovation of the technology. Next, we elaborate on a key concept regarding data immutability. In particular, it is a mistake to equate blockchain to data immutability. Data immutability can only be achieved in large-scale public blockchains where the cost becomes an insurmountable barrier for any attempt to change the data recorded in the blockchain. The third topic we discuss is the differences between public, private, and consortium blockchains. We caution the use of private and consortium blockchains. The last topic we argue is regarding blockchain consensus. Because the proof of work (PoW) consensus algorithm has obvious drawbacks on energy consumption, many alternative algorithms have been proposed. We single out two most egregious wrong practices: (1) selecting a small set of validators for reaching consensus, and (2) adopting traditional distributed consensus.

Jie Wang, Lina Ge

Blockchain has attracted widespread attention from scholars due to its decentralization characteristics. Consensus algorithm is one of the core technologies of blockchain. The proposal of the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm solves the problem of wasted hashrate in Proof-of-Work. Aiming at the problem of interest centralization in Proof-of-Stake we propose an improved PoS scheme based on credit model. Design the credit evaluation model, using the credit evaluation mechanism to quantify the credit status of each node in the network, and adjust the hash difficulty according to the credit ranking. Introduce the concept of Gini coefficient to analyze the centralization of stake of the algorithm. Simulation experiments show that the PoS improvement scheme based on the credit model effectively relieves the power centralization, guarantees the block chain decentralization.

Zhuofan Liao, Siwei Cheng, Jingyu Zhang, Wenbing Wu · 5 authors

The industrial Internet-of-things (IIoT) has attracted extensive attention due to its real-time and automation characteristics. Edge computing and blockchain technologies facilitate the IIoT in terms of low latency services and data security respectively. However, with the continuous expansion of industrial data and the growth of industrial nodes, traditional blockchain technology has some critical limitations on low transaction throughput and high data storage costs. Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-blockchain adopts a graph structure of a single transaction as the basic unit, and it has the characteristics of asynchronous consensus. Some existing studies use DAGblockchain to replace the traditional blockchain to alleviate its low throughput problems like IOTA. However, with the rapid data generation in the IIoT environment, the topology scale of DAG-blockchain will increase sharply, which will aggravate the data storage cost of blockchain nodes. In this article, to reduce the data storage cost of edge servers, we design a Graphpartition based storage strategy for DAG-Blockchain (GpDB), equipped with a graph partition algorithm based on transaction freshness, which can partition DAG-blockchain topology in edge servers into two parts, which will be retained and removed respectively. Simulation shows that, in terms of storage cost, GpDB outperforms LDV and Layerchain by 62% and 74% respectively, and with the increasing number of transactions, GpDB has good scalability in reducing the storage cost, and better transaction throughput than IOTA.

Yi Yang, Zijian Liu, Zhixin Liu, Yuan-ai Xie · 6 authors

In wireless communication networks, traffics of base stations (BS) can be effectively offloaded by sharing the cached content between mobile devices through wireless device-to-device (D2D) communication. To encourage the content caching of D2D users, a blockchain incentive scheme is proposed; the game theory is introduced to optimize the benefits for both the edge computing server (ECS) and D2D users in the blockchain network. In Stackelberg game, D2D users act as followers. After the successful implementation of the cache strategy, D2D users are rewarded by the system, which is a new block mining process. In this process, the required computing power is provided by the ECS. Therefore, D2D cache users need to pay the cost to purchase computing power from the ECS. As the game leader, the ECS prices the computing resources, and D2D users adjust their caching strategies based on the price. In this paper, we propose four algorithms based on different pricing methods and different cache reward methods. Simulations are performed to compare the cache quality and cache content dispersion of the four algorithms. The results show that the uniform pricing scheme with a linear reward relationship is more suitable for the scenarios that require higher cache quality, and the discriminatory pricing scheme with a nonlinear reward relationship is more suitable for the scenarios that require more evenly cache content distribution.

Sultan Algarni, Fathy Eassa, Khalid Ali Almarhabi, Abdullah Algarni · 5 authors

Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a flexible and programmable network architecture that takes advantage of the benefits of global visibility and centralized control over a network. One of the main properties of the SDN architecture is the ability to offer a northbound interface (NBI), which enables network applications to access the SDN controller resources. However, the NBI can be compromised by a malicious application due to the lack of standardization and security aspects in the most current NBI designs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel comprehensive security solution for securing the application–controller interface, named BCNBI. We propose a controller-independent lightweight blockchain architecture and exploit the security features of blockchain while limiting the blockchain’s computational overhead. BCNBI automatically verifies application and SDN controller credentials through token-based authentication. The proposed solution enforces fine-grained access control for each application’s API request and classifies the permission set into strict and normal policies, in order to add an extra level of security. In addition, the trustworthiness of applications is evaluated in order to prevent malicious activities. We implemented our blockchain-based solution to analyze its security, based on the confidentiality–integrity–availability model criteria, and evaluated the introduced overhead in terms of processing time and packet overhead. The experimental results demonstrate that the BCNBI can effectively secure the NBI, based on the fundamental security goals, while introducing insignificant overhead.

Phani Prasad Pothavarjula, B. Lakshmi Sirisha

The word blockchain is one of the most popular hotlists of today's emerging technologies. Because of decentralized secured applications, it offers many advantages and thus professionals from various domains are incorporating it in their fields. Though there are some minor security issues, given its advantages towards privacy in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks still it can be integrated into many other fields such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud computing, Artificial intelligence, Banking, and Financial Sectors, Edge computing, etc. This research article focuses on studying and reviewing existing works in blockchain technology towards various applications by describing its architecture, and tools categories. Our contribution to this paper is to examine decentralized ledger applications using Ethereum in a blockchain network through Ganache-Command Line Interface (CLI), and determine its transaction behavior, to investigate the solidity program required for establishing smart contracts on Ethereum blockchain networks, and finally to give a comparative analysis of various blockchain tools suitable for running on multiple platforms.

Anjaneyulu Endurthi, Akhil Khare

The key features that distinguish blockchain as one of the most secure technologies are - decentralization, privacy, and immutability. It has converted a low-trust centralized ledger held by a single third party into a high-trust decentralized ledger held by multiple entities. The main contribution of blockchain is the consensus protocol, which ensures the stable operation of the blockchain system. Consensus occurs when all nodes in a blockchain network agree on a common state of the ledger. Thus, a consensus must prohibit malicious actors from controlling the network while also granting equal rights to all nodes and mandating their participation in the consensus process. Existing algorithms such as proof of work and proof of stake are vulnerable to future attacks such as 51% attack. The proposed algorithm solves issues such as unfair miner selection, 51%-attack, forking, double spending problem with minimal computational resources. It provides adequate protection regardless of the attacker's hashing ability or currency holdings and also resolves the enormous waiting time issue for transaction confirmation.

Andrew Cullen, Lianna Zhao, Luigi Vigneri, Robert Shorten

An outstanding problem in the design of distributed ledgers concerns policies that govern the manner in which users interact with the network. Network usability is crucial to the mainstream adoption of distributed ledgers, particularly for enterprise applications in which most users do not wish to operate full node. For DAG-based ledgers such as IOTA, we propose a user-node interaction mechanism that is designed to ensure the risk of a user experiencing a poor quality of service is low. Our mechanism involves users selecting nodes to issue their transactions to the ledger based on quality of service indicators advertised by the nodes. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed policies.