Blockchain is starting to be deployed in the Internet of Things (IoT) to enable autonomous device-to-device transactions. However, traditional block-based blockchain techniques, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are not suitable for IoT environments due to their low throughput, high computation overhead, and costly transaction fee. To satisfy the requirements of IoT environments, directed-acyclic-graph (DAG)-based approaches, aiming to provide cheap blockchain services with low latency and high throughput, are emerging. This article presents a set of comprehensive experimental studies on IOTA, a representative DAG-based blockchain. We aim to exhibit its unique characteristics mainly from three aspects: 1) performance; 2) security; and 3) system robustness. We have developed a series of benchmark tools and judiciously selected typical configurations to perform experimental examinations with a real private IOTA network. Our studies reveal several interesting findings: 1) the throughput of IOTA is higher than the traditional block-based blockchain but far less than the reported thousands of transactions per second (TPS) in its whitepaper, even with scaling-up configurations; 2) the database query heavily impacts the performance of IOTA, even more than its mining [i.e., Proof of Work (PoW)] process; and 3) the system robustness of IOTA is closely related to the frequency of the incoming transactions while the milestone sent by the centralized coordinator has little effect on the system robustness. We make our benchmark tools public and expect our works can inspire system architects, application designers, and practitioners with new optimization directions and potential application cases for further exploration.
The emerging smart city is driving massive transformations of modern cities, facing the huge influx of sensor data from IoT devices. Edge computing distributes computing tasks to the near-edge end, which greatly enhances the service quality of IoT applications, that is, ultralow latency, large capacity, and high throughput. However, due to the constrained resource of IoT devices, currently, systems with a centralized model are vulnerable to attacks, such as DDoS from IoT botnet and central database failure, which can hardly provide high-confidence services. Recently, blockchain with a high security promise is considered to provide new approaches to enhancing the security of IoT systems. However, blockchain and IoT have obvious incompatibility, and low-capacity IoT devices can hardly be incorporated into blockchain with high computing requirements. In this paper, a blockchain-edge computing hybrid system (BEHS) is presented to make the adaptation of blockchain to edge computing and provide trustworthy IoT management services for a smart city. A novel extensible consensus protocol designed for proof-of-work, named proof-of-contribution (PoC), is proposed to regulate the data upload behaviors of nodes, especially the data upload frequency of IoT device nodes, so as to protect the system from attack about frequency. In order to secure the data privacy and authenticity, a data access control scheme is designed by integrating symmetric encryption with asymmetric encryption algorithm. We implemented a concrete BEHS on Ethereum, realized the function of PoC mechanism via smart contracts, and conducted a case study for smart city. The extensive evaluations and analyses show that the proposed PoC mechanism can effectively detect and automatically manage the behavior of nodes, and the time cost of data access control scheme is within an acceptable range.
Nakamoto's seminal work gave rise to permissionless blockchains -- as well as a wide range of proposals to mitigate their performance shortcomings. Despite substantial throughput and energy efficiency achievements, most proposals only bring modest (or marginal) gains in transaction commit latency. Consequently, commit latencies in today's permissionless blockchain landscape remain prohibitively high. This paper proposes NimbleChain, a novel algorithm that extends permissionless blockchains based on Nakamoto consensus with a fast path that delivers causal promises of commitment, or simply promises. Since promises only partially order transactions, their latency is only a small fraction of the totally-ordered commitment latency of Nakamoto consensus. Still, the weak consistency guarantees of promises are strong enough to correctly implement cryptocurrencies. To the best of our knowledge, NimbleChain is the first system to bring together fast, partially-ordered transactions with consensus-based, totally-ordered transactions in a permissionless setting. This hybrid consistency model is able to speed up cryptocurrency transactions while still supporting smart contracts, which typically have (strong) sequential consistency needs. We implement NimbleChain as an extension of Ethereum and evaluate it in a 500-node geo-distributed deployment. The results show NimbleChain can promise a cryptocurrency transactions up to an order of magnitude faster than a vanilla Ethereum implementation, with marginal overheads.
S Thejaswini, Karthik Siram, H B Roopashree, K N Trupti · 5 authors
Traceability plays a vibrant role in the medicine counterfeit supply chain management system. The drugs may contain some genuine ingredients and toxic ingredients at the production level. These drugs when consumed can cause serious health problems such as result in treatment failure or even death. To introduce fake drugs into the market and create public awareness, pharmaceutical companies have struggled for years to track their products throughout their supply chains. Therefore, to counteract this problem, a system is required to track and trace drugs. Advanced features in blockchain technology have proved that it can be able to handle the complex supply chain management and detect the products at every stage to prevent fake drug being distributed among different stake holders. Hence, in this paper, a decentralized system is proposed to track and trace the counterfeited medicines in the supply chain management. The system is also implemented on ethereum platform which is an advanced blockchain technology and a encrypted QR code mechanism used to efficiently track and trace the counterfeit drugs in the system.
Healthcare insurance is a vital part of today's world. With the increase in the number of health issues, not everyone can afford all kinds of treatment required and the time wasted in claims. The introduction of blockchain technology is proving to be of great benefit to lower and middle-class people. Different types of blockchain are being used to provide maximum benefits to society. Permissioned and advanced blockchain provides security and transparency to sensitive information. The attribute-based signature (MA-ABS) scheme with multiple authorities is used to provide privacy to patient's data. Smart Contracts for Ethereum Blockchain are being used to automate the process of insurance claims and payments to patients. Hyperledger Fabric is used for the implementation so that RESTful APIs can be used for easy access of data on the blockchain. The healthcare insurance system implementation on blockchain will eliminate the intermediaries, causing delay, fraud, high cost, etc., and bring about a faster process of claims and treatment while maintaining the security and privacy of all medical records such as EHRs and EMRs.
Jay Mehta, Darsh Mehta, Jainam Jain, Surekha Dholay
Abstract— The technique of following a product or a batch of things throughout the supply chain to ensure that the products that reach clients are authentic and tamper-proof is known as asset tracking. The ultimate goal of an asset monitoring system is to track products along the supply chain, verifying that they haven't been tampered with and, if they have, pinpointing where the tampering took place. Traditional tracking technologies, such as BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon), which works within a limited range, RFID, and above-mentioned systems, are expensive and centralised. So, for this project, we'll use Blockchain Technology, which is an immutable, tamper-proof, decentralised distributed ledger with security features that allows us to establish an asset tracker that can follow our product along the supply chain. Ethereum is used to implement the system. Unlike other methods, there are no hardware components or large gadgets that may be removed from the original object and attached to the copy. Keywords— Blockchain, Supply Chain, Smart Contract, Keccak-256, Ethereum,GUI
Crowdfunding is a popular method for raising funds for various projects, where a large number of individuals contribute a small amount of money to finance a particular project. It provides an opportunity for entrepreneurs, startups, and artists to seek financial support from the general public, rather than relying on traditional funding sources such as venture capitalists, banks, and angel investors. This project aims to create a decentralized crowdfunding platform using Ethereum blockchain technology. The platform allows creators to post projects with funding goals and deadlines, and investors can contribute funds to these projects. Smart contracts are used to manage the crowdfunding process, ensuring that funds are released only when milestones are met, and that investors have a say in the progress of the project. The platform is designed to be transparent, secure, and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. By using blockchain technology, the platform eliminates the need for intermediaries, reduces transaction fees, and enables global participation. This project demonstrates the potential of blockchain technology in transforming traditional funding models and enabling decentralized innovation. The platform utilizes various features of Solidity, including structs, mappings, and events, to enable the creation, management, and tracking of projects, milestones, and investments. The web interface is developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with a Node.js backend that interacts with the smart contracts using the web3.js library.
Unihedge is a decentralized platform for prediction markets with a novel approach. Using Harberger Tax (HTAX) economic policies a new type of prediction market, named HTAX prediction market, was build. HTAX prediction market derivates from Dynamic PariMutuel (DPM) type of prediction markets thus offering its users an unlimited liquidity for any preferred time horizon. It tries to solve some problems of DPM by introducing a new incentive mechanism to support early information incorporation and a protection against share readjustment for hedgers. In the paper also implementation of platform on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is presented with the usage of Decentralized Exchange (DEX) as an price discovery mechanism for prediction market resolutions.
The decentralization, redundancy, and pseudo-anonymity features have made permission-less public blockchain platforms attractive for adoption as technology platforms for cryptocurrencies. However, such adoption has enabled cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities in blockchain platforms and target the users through social engineering to carry out malicious activities. Most of the state-of-the-art techniques for detecting malicious actors depend on the transactional behavior of individual wallet addresses but do not analyze the money trails. We propose a heuristics-based approach that adds new features associated with money trails to analyze and find suspicious activities in cryptocurrency blockchains. Here, we focus only on the cyclic behavior and identify hidden patterns present in the temporal transactions graphs in a blockchain. We demonstrate our methods on the transaction data of the Ethereum blockchain. We find that malicious activities (such as Gambling, Phishing, and Money Laundering) have different cyclic patterns in Ethereum. We also identify two suspicious temporal cyclic path-based transfers in Ethereum. Our techniques may apply to other cryptocurrency blockchains with appropriate modifications adapted to the nature of the crypto-currency under investigation.
The world first decentralized currency - cryptocurrency brings us the new era of a mode of exchange. It has been included many technologies like bitcoin, ethereum, and hyper ledger. Due to its rising popularity and demand, people are often curious to know the future price of these coins to make a good deal with them. The future price of bitcoin would help investors as well as corporate to get an overview of the demand and role in the economy. Many researchers have investigated various solutions that will predict the future price of bitcoin. But, the solutions achieved low accuracy. This paper main aim is to propose a prediction model that will predict the future price of bitcoin. The model is based on the deep learning approaches. The proposed model included four different deep learning models. These models are Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bidirectional GRU. The performance of the prediction models is computed and it found Bi-GRU gave the best-predicted results.
Gerald B. Imbugwa, Manuel Mazzara, Salvatore Distefano
This research proposes a smart parking system that is geared towards business entities. The system focuses on privacy, scalability, and performance for an enterprise system on a decentralized network(Blockchain). In a business setup, performance, scalability, and privacy should be at the centre stage. This research aims to improve on already existing work on smart parking using blockchain. Most of the research done focuses on single entity privacy, single point of failure for systems deployed on cloud databases, and geographical censorship. This research proposes a smart parking system with a decentralized network where six entities will interact and trade value with ease. The research focuses on privacy, performance, scalability, and multiple entity interaction in the system in a decentralized network.
With the proliferation of smart grid and deregulation of the energy market, a wide variety of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading systems have emerged. Common challenges for designing such systems include prosumers’ privacy and security threats. To this end, Blockchain-based solutions have gained a lot of attention, though most existing solutions have either employed permissionless blockchain, which is far from pragmatic for a P2P energy trading system with peers permitted to join or leave the network at their whim; or relatively secure yet inefficient permissioned blockchains. Hence, this article presents a flexible permissioned ascription (FPA) scheme that uses on-chain and off-chain permissioning scheme viaOrionandMetamaskwallet. It also employs contract permissioning through a JavaScript based chain code deployed over Hyperledger Besu (an Ethereum based permissioned Blockchain network) with istanbul byzantine fault tolerant (IBFT) 2.0 consensus algorithm. Additionally, the proposed framework is emulated for development of a working prototype for a P2P energy trading system. Its performance evaluation has been conducted and monitored with Grafana, Prometheus, Hyperledger Caliper, and Kibana for parameters such as latency, throughput, success rate, CPU time, block time, block behind time, memory usage, garbage collection (GC) time, and performance of the validator nodes. The latency of IBFT 2.0 was found five times lesser than that of Ethereum and two times lesser than HF RAFT and KAFKA under varying conditions. Also, the measured throughput was 1.5 times higher than RAFT and Kafka and three times higher than that of Ethereum. The average block confirmation time measured is 5–6 s. The GC usage measured very less, i.e., 0.5–0.8%, with the proposed framework. It has been observed that the proposed energy-trading framework provides an efficient performance for deploying, transferring, and querying the energy transaction to a P2P energy-trading Blockchain network when compared with other consensus mechanisms.
Lu Liu, Lili Wei, Wuqi Zhang, Ming Wen · 6 authors
Smart contracts are programs stored on blockchains to execute transactions. When input constraints or security properties are violated at runtime, the transaction being executed by a smart contract needs to be reverted to avoid undesirable consequences. On Ethereum, the most popular blockchain that supports smart contracts, developers can choose among three transaction-reverting statements (i.e., require, if…revert, and if…throw) to handle anomalous transactions. While these transaction-reverting statements are vital for preventing smart contracts from exhibiting abnormal behaviors or suffering malicious attacks, there is limited understanding of how they are used in practice. In this work, we perform the first empirical study to characterize transaction-reverting statements in Ethereum smart contracts. We measured the prevalence of these statements in 3,866 verified smart contracts from popular dapps and built a taxonomy of their purposes via manually analyzing 557 transaction-reverting statements. We also compared template contracts and their corresponding custom contracts to understand how developers customize the use of transaction-reverting statements. Finally, we analyzed the security impact of transaction-reverting statements by removing them from smart contracts and comparing the mutated contracts against the original ones. Our study led to important findings. For example, we found that transaction-reverting statements are commonly used to perform seven types of authority verifications or validity checks, and missing such statements may compromise the security of smart contracts. We also found that current smart contract security analyzers cannot effectively handle transaction-reverting statements when detecting security vulnerabilities. Our findings can shed light on further research in the broad area of smart contract quality assurance and provide practical guidance to smart contract developers on the appropriate use of transaction-reverting statements.
Mwrwan Abubakar, Zakwan Jaroucheh, Ahmed Al Dubai, Bill Buchanan
Recent years have seen an increase in medical big data, which can be attributed to a paradigm shift experienced in medical data sharing induced by the growth of medical technology and the Internet of Things. The evidence of this potential has been proved during the recent covid-19 pandemic, which was characterised by the use of medical wearable devices to help with the medical data exchange between the healthcare providers and patients in a bid to contain the pandemic. However, the use of these technologies has also raised questions and concerns about security and privacy risks. To assist in resolving this issue, this paper proposes a blockchain-based access control framework for managing access to users’ medical data. This is facilitated by using a smart contract on the blockchain, which allows for delegated access control and secure user authentication. This solution leverages blockchain technology’s inherent autonomy and immutability to solve the existing access control challenges. We have presented the solution in the form of a medical wearable sensor prototype and a mobile app that uses the Ethereum blockchain in a real data sharing control scenario. Based on the empirical results, the proposed solution has proven effective. It has the potential to facilitate reliable data exchange while also protecting sensitive health information against potential threats. When subjected to security analysis and evaluation, the system exhibits performance improvements in data privacy levels, high security and lightweight access control design compared to the current centralised access control models.
Aboul Ella Hassanien, Mohamed Torky, Essam Goda, Václav Snåšel · 5 authors
<title>Abstract</title> Blockchain technology can play a vital role in the space industry and satellite communication. This disruptive technology can build decentralized and secure protocols for processing and manipulating space transactions in the form of space digital tokens (SDTs). Tokenizing space transactions in the form of SDTs will enable various blockchain-based applications in the space industry. Moreover, blockchain protocols based on smart contracts can be utilized to authenticate many space transactions and P2P communications in a transparent, verifiable, and secure manner. This paper proposes a new blockchain-based solution for managing and securing satellite transactions using a novel concept called SDT. SDT is then used to develop a new blockchain protocol called proof of space transactions (PoST), which is then used in proposing a new blockchain-based protocol for authenticating satellite transactions. The proposed PoST protocol is implemented and simulated using the Ethereum blockchain. Five metrics are used to evaluate the protocol's performance: Ethereum GAZ, read latency, transaction latency, read throughput, and transaction throughput. The performance evaluation results proved the efficiency and reliability of PoST in managing and securing satellite transactions.
The use of Ethereum based tokens in blockchain applications have been on the rise in recent times and accordingly, the need for proper analysis of token source codes for security vulnerabilities has become paramount. Existing symbolic analysis tools have demonstrated to be efficient in detecting many of the security vulnerabilities, but by virtue of the complex nature of the analysis they perform to detect vulnerable paths, there is a considerable increase in search time with an increase in depth. Cryptocurrencies have recently achieved the milestone of a USD 2 trillion market cap and with such a high volume of assets involved, the need for an efficient and scalable security vulnerability detection tool in an ever-increasing list of tokens becomes of utmost priority. This paper proposes a deep learning based approach for the prediction of security vulnerabilities in ERC-20 token smart contracts. The proposal proposed by this paper is based on the use of Long Short-Term Memory neural network architecture on smart contract opcodes which are in form of sequential data. The proposed solution achieves an accuracy of 93.26% when tested on ERC-20 smart contracts collected from Ethereum mainnet and thus proves to be an efficient alternative for existing symbolic tools.
Ponlawat Weerapanpisit, Sergio Trilles, Joaquı́n Huerta, Marco Paìnho
Social Internet of Things (SIoT) is a concept that integrates the Internet of Things and human social networks. An SIoT system has to store and manage device reputation values, which are used by end devices to determine the trustworthiness of another one. This device trustworthiness can also be affected by its geographical location. In this work, we introduced an architecture that includes the geospatial context in the part concerned with reputation management. The proposed architecture is based on the cloud-fog-edge architecture and uses the fog layer as the management system. The devices in the fog layer form an Ethereum Blockchain network and store the Smart Contracts. These in turn allow the management functionalities to be carried out in a decentralised, transparent and secure way, which are the advantages of Blockchain. To enable the characteristics with a geospatial component, it is necessary to apply a geocoding technique. This work shows how geocoding techniques can be adapted to cover the main geospatial functionalities and compares two geocoding options (Geohash or S2). The results showed that it is possible to include the geospatial context in a decentralised reputation management system by using hierarchical geocoding techniques, and the experiments showed that both Geohash and S2 can offer a similar performance in the proposed architecture.