Abstract The General Data Protection Regulation highlights the principle of data minimization, which means that only data required to successfully accomplish a given task should be processed. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based scheme that allows users to have control over the personal data revealed when accessing a service. The proposed solution does not rely on sophisticated cryptographic primitives, provides mechanisms for revoking the authorization to access a service and for guessing the identity of a user only in cases of need, and is compliant with the recent eIDAS Regulation. We prove that the proposed scheme is secure and reaches the expected goal, and we present an Ethereum-based implementation to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Muhammad Abubakr Naeem, Saba Qureshi, Mobeen Ur Rehman, Faruk Balli
This study quantifies the spillover effects among seven cryptocurrencies to explore the spillover characteristics of seven cryptocurrencies, namely, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Monero, Stellar, and NEM. The connectedness networks of returns are based on standard VAR and quantile VAR spillovers. In addition, the framework focuses on intact, pre-, and post-COVID-19 crisis sub-sample periods. Our results highlight that Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ripple are the dominant transmitters to return spillover. The strongest interconnection is found for Bitcoin/Litecoin and Ripple/Sellar pair. Interestingly, Ethereum is the unvarying recipient in the system and is influenced by most of the cryptocurrencies. Further, NEM exhibits no connection with any of the cryptocurrency in the network acting as a potential diversifier. The quantile spillovers suggest increased intensity of connectedness at right and left tails. The sub-sample analysis confirms the low network integration across the cryptocurrencies during pre-COVID period. Finally, the post-COVID period indicates tangled clusters across the cryptocurrencies. The analysis provides contrasting results as obtained in the pre-analysis phase. Implications for investors and policymakers are highlighted in the study.
Lasse Berntzen, Qian Meng, Boban Vesin, Marius Rohde Johannessen · 6 authors
This paper shows how the Ethereum blockchain can register settlements between an aggregator and prosumers in a smart grid. By providing flexible use of electricity to the aggregator, customers get rewarded. The flexibility is valuable for the aggregator since the power infrastructure may be used more efficiently. Blockchain is an exciting technology for handling settlements which, however, also has some clear limitations. For example, the cost per transaction on the public Ethereum blockchain is too high compared to the value of the actual transactions. A private blockchain is an alternative but removes some of the original benefits of using the public blockchain. The paper concludes that blockchain is a promising technology, and a private blockchain is more suitable for transactions containing minimal amounts.
The development of information technology has penetrated various areas. This is driven by improved service, rapid increase in information needs and decision making. General elections that are held every time always leave problems about securities and speed of recapitulation. This is because the process is done in the traditional way. This research tries to apply blockchain technology to the e-Voting system security engineering process so that it creates a votes recapitulation process that is fast, accurate and accompanied by transparency values to maintain the reliability of the existing vote and maintain the confidentiality of the vote data being transacted. Transparency and confidentiality of voter data is a fundamental value in general elections or voting that must exist. Seeing this, blockchain technology deserves to be applied because the principles that needed can be met by applying this technology to the e-Voting system.
Blockchain public ledger is a trusted medium that provides incorruptible data storage and traceable transactions. However, due to its public verifiability, it is hard to compromise two functionalities at once, a covert channel and a verifiable communication medium. The existing methods are either vulnerable to statistical analysis or lack trustable delivery notifications due to off-chain message delivery. This paper fills the gap by proposing a Multi-addresses Random Set Encoding (MaRSE) to increase message covertness by retaining the natural transactions pattern and resisting statistical attacks. The method uses on-chain message delivery to preserve blockchain-based verification that provides a trustable communication medium for the communicating parties. As a result, our proposed method is robust to a brute force attack due to its unpredictable transaction sequence and high number possibility of addresses combinations. The proposed system has been implemented on Ethereum rinkeby networks with the stegano-transactions being recorded within block numbers 4932833 to 4932893.
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Muhammad Nur Aqmal bin Khatiman, Muhammad Salikin bin Ismail, Norzariyah Yahya
Zakat is one of the five pillars in Islamic principles, subject to all qualified Muslims which requires them to contribute a proportion of one of their income or the wealth possession for the welfare of the Muslim community. In Malaysia, Lembaga Zakat is the organization appointed by each state government to manage the zakat transactions. The zakat transactions can be done either through online transactions or over the counter. However, there are issues related to zakat management such as the zakat payers are not satisfied with the zakat distribution, and there are claims for lack of transparency in the zakat management which lead to trust issues among zakat payers to contribute their zakat through Lembaga Zakat. One way to respond to the issues is by having transparency in the zakat transaction by applying a trust model such as blockchain in zakat management. Thus, this project aims to use blockchain technology and its main component, smart contract, as the base of the zakat collection and utilize Ethereum as the platform.
This letter revisits the time-series relation between cryptocurrency prices and forward inflation expectations. Using wavelet time-scale techniques, a positive link between cryptocurrencies and forward inflation rates is identified, focused on a brief period surrounding the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This coincides with a rapid and synchronized decrease in cryptocurrency prices and forward inflation expectations, followed by a swift recovery to pre-crisis levels. Outside of the crisis period, we find no clear evidence of any inflation hedging capacity of Bitcoin or Ethereum during times of increasing forward inflation expectations.
Asif Bhat, Rizal Mohd Nor, Md Amiruzzaman, Md. Rajibul Islam
Blokchain is used in a variety of applications where trustworthy computing is\nre-quired. Trade finance is one of these areas that would benefit immensely\nfrom a decentralized way of doing transactions. This paper presents the\npreliminary as-sessment of Accepire-BT, a software platform developed for the\npractice of col-laborative Trade Finance. The proposed solution is enforced by\nsmart contracts using Solidity, the underlying programming language for the\nEthereum block-chain. We evaluated the performance in the Rinkeby test network\nby using Remix and MetaMask. The results of the preliminary trial show that\nsmart contracts take less than one minute per cycle. Also, we present a\ndiscussion about costs for us-ing the public Ethereum Rinkeby network.\n
Blockchain is currently one of the fastest-growing technologies in the field of Computer Science. It has found a prevalent use in financial applications like cryptocurrency, for example, Bitcoin and Ethereum. They have been able to bring an unforeseen disruption in the field of finance. However, permissionless Blockchains like these have some downsides, namely the computation cost of the Proof of Work algorithm, maximum allowed size for a block, decrease in intelligibility with the increase of the number of blocks in the chain, domination of nodes with higher computing power as miners and validators. These factors have restricted the adoption of permissionless blockchain technology outside the field of finance, such as in medical or legal fields. This paper proposes a solution to these problems using a permissioned blockchain. It does not require a computationally expensive consensus mechanism as permissioned chains call for trust between participating organizations which is achieved via exclusive invitations. We have utilized a third-party orderer to maintain the trust between organizations.
Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized the digital world by connecting billions of electronic devices over the internet. IoT devices play an essential role in the modern era when conventional devices become more autonomous and smart. On the one hand, high‐speed data transfer is a major issue where the 5G‐enabled environment plays an important role. On the other hand, these IoT devices transfer the data by using protocols based on centralized architecture and may cause several security issues for the data. Merging artificial intelligence to 5G wireless systems solves several issues such as autonomous robots, self‐driving vehicles, virtual reality, and engender security problems. Building trust among the network users without trusting third party authorities is the system's primary concern. Blockchain emerged as a key technology based on a distributed ledger to maintain the network's event logs. Blockchain provides a secure, decentralized, and trustless environment for IoT devices. However, integrating IoT and blockchain also has several challenges; for example, major challenge is low throughput. Currently, the ethereum blockchain network can process approximately 12 to 15 transactions per second, while IoT devices require relatively higher throughput. Therefore, blockchains are incapable of providing functionality for a 5G‐enabled IoT based network. The limiting factor of throughput in the blockchain is their network. The slow propagation of transactions and blocks in the P2P network does not allow miners and verifiers to fastly mine and verify new blocks, respectively. Therefore, network scalability is the major issue of IoT based blockchains. In this work, we solved the network scalability issue using blockchain distributed network while to increase the throughput of blockchain, this article uses the Raft consensus algorithm. Another most important issue with IoT networks is privacy. Unfortunately, the blockchain distributed ledgers are public and sensitive information is available on the network for everyone are private, but in such cases, third party editing is not possible without revealing the original contents. To solve privacy issues, we used zkLedger as a solution that is based on zero knowledge‐based cryptography.
Zaghum Umar, Francisco Jareño, María de la O González
This research explores the impact of COVID-19-related media coverage on the dynamic return and volatility connectedness of the three dominant cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP)) and the fiat currencies of the euro, GBP and Chinese yuan. The sample period covers the first and second devasting waves of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and ranges from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020. The dynamic return and volatility connectedness measures are estimated using the time varying parameter-VAR approach. Our return connectedness analysis shows that the media coverage index (only before the first wave) and the cryptocurrencies are the net transmitters of shocks while the fiat currencies are the net receivers of shocks. Similar results are obtained in terms of volatility, except for the euro, which shows a clear net receiver profile in January and February. This fiat currency (the euro) became a net transmitter in March and during the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis, which possibly shows the virulence of the pandemic on the European continent. Moreover, the most relevant differences between the net dynamic (return and volatility) connectedness of these two groups of currencies are focused on the beginning of the sample period, just before the first wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic crisis, although some differences are observed during the first and second waves of the coronavirus outbreak.
Rahmeh Ibrahim, Aseel Mohammad Elian, Mohammed M. Ababneh
Blockchain is a platform technology for the cryptocurrency's applications like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The purpose of the blockchain is to eliminate the need for third trusted parties such as banks. In recent years and because of the properties of this technology like immutability and transparency, the technology was extended beyond cryptocurrencies and was exploited by various sectors like education, healthcare, finance, energy, government, and IoT providing more privacy, faster transactions and more security. In this research, we investigated Illicit accounts on Ethereum blockchain and proposed a Fraud detection model using three different machine learning algorithms: decision tree (j48), Random Forest and K-nearest neighbors (KNN). These algorithms were applied on a data set obtained from Kaggle.com containing 42 features. We have used the correlation coefficient to select the most effective features and built a new data set using 6 features only. Our research results show a significant improvement in time measurements using the three algorithms and an improvement in the F measure using the Random Forest algorithm.
Yong Han Keith, Faizal Ahmad Fadzil, Ahmad Izzuddin Zainal-Abidin
Blockchain technology has emerge over the years since the introduction of Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrency, to the point the value of these cryptocurrencies are as high as a bar of gold. Since Ethereum has been an open source development platform, the industry has taken advantage of decentralized application or DApp where by the application is based on Smart Contract, a set of programming written code becomes the law of in agreement. Hence, the same can implement in House Rental industry where all contract agreement between tenant and landlord were conducted using pen and paper method. Even though, there are applications for this segment in the industry but most of the applications were not able keep data tracking and secure information. In this paper, a comparison is made to propose which algorithm is best to be used in the blockchain application and a better understanding how blockchain works.
Anti-piracy is fundamentally a procedure that relies on collecting data from the open anonymous population, so how to incentivize credible reporting is a question at the center of the problem. Industrial alliances and companies are running anti-piracy incentive campaigns, but their effectiveness is publicly questioned due to the lack of transparency. We believe that full transparency of a campaign is necessary to truly incentivize people. It means that every role, e.g., content owner, licensee of the content, or every person in the open population, can understand the mechanism and be assured about its execution without trusting any single role. We see this as a distributed system problem. In this paper, we present Argus, a fully transparent incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns. The groundwork of Argus is to formulate the objectives for fully transparent incentive mechanisms, which securely and comprehensively consolidate the different interests of all roles. These objectives form the core of the Argus design, highlighted by our innovations about a Sybil-proof incentive function, a commit-and-reveal scheme, and an oblivious transfer scheme. In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency. Moreover, we effectively optimize several cryptographic operations so that the cost for a piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions. With the security and practicality of Argus, we hope real-world anti-piracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism.
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cs.CR
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Nik Nazli Nik Ahmad, Syed Abdul Halim Syed Abdul Rahman
research-article Applying Ethereum Smart Contracts to Blockchain-Based Crowdfunding System to Increase Trust and Information Symmetry Share on Authors: Nik Azlina Nik Ahmad Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Universiti Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaView Profile , Syed Abdul Halim Syed Abdul Rahman PETRONAS, Malaysia PETRONAS, MalaysiaView Profile Authors Info & Claims ICCTA 2021: 2021 7th International Conference on Computer Technology ApplicationsJuly 2021 Pages 53–59https://doi.org/10.1145/3477911.3477920Online:15 October 2021Publication History 0citation72DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads72Last 12 Months72Last 6 weeks12 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access
Caleb Johnson, Tao Lű, Pedro Rivera, Devon R. McDonald · 6 authors
iChain is an application which was created to help meet the growing demand of machine learning. It allows users to pay those with powerful machines to run machine learning tasks for them, bypassing the need for a significant investment in a powerful computer to run it themselves. This is similar to services like a render farm. Our application functions using the Ethereum blockchain which ensures security and decentralization, as well as providing a platform for payment transactions. This article will discuss the background on machine learning and blockchain, the application, how it works, how the data moves through it, and how to use it. We hope our application will enable many without the funds to build or buy a powerful computer to experiment with and utilize complex machine learning tasks.
On March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve Board started the ‘unlimited quantitative easing' to boost economy. After the announcement, an obvious boom in the cryptocurrency markets is observed. This research adopted an event analysis method, by analyzing the cumulative abnormal returns before and after the statement, the study confirmed that the QE announcement has a significant impact on the two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. There could be several possible explanations: cryptocurrencies can be used as an inflation hedge, a ‘safe haven' for other financial asset classes, and a substitute way of transaction. While gold is also known as an inflation hedge and a safe haven, the abnormal returns of the two biggest cryptocurrencies over gold indicate that the third reason, cryptocurrencies are being favored as an alternative option for transactions, played an important role in the boom of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the boom of them might lead to the frenzied market of other cryptocurrencies.Keywords: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Quantitative easing, event analysisJEL Classifications: G15, C10, E52DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijefi.11532
Because of the availability of more than an actor and a wireless component among e-health applications, providing more security and safety is expected. Moreover, ensuring data confidentiality within different services becomes a key requirement. In this paper, we propose to collect data from health and fitness smart devices deployed in connection with the proposed IoT blockchain platform. The use of these devices helps us in extracting an amount of highly valuable heath data that are filtered, analyzed, and stored in electronic health records (EHRs). Different actors of the platform, coaches, patients, and doctors, collaborate to provide an on-time diagnosis and treatment for various diseases in an easy and cost-effective way. Our main purpose is to provide a distributed, secure, and authorized access to these sensitive data using the Ethereum blockchain technology. We have designed an integrated low-powered IoT blockchain platform for a healthcare application to store and review EHRs. This architecture, based on the blockchain Ethereum, includes a web and mobile application allowing the patient as well as the medical and paramedical staff to have a secure access to health information. The Ethereum node is implemented on an embedded platform, which should provide an efficient, flexible, and secure system despite the limited resources and low power consumption of the multiprocessor platform.
Much of the current research in Ethereum transaction records focuses on the statistical analysis and measurements of existing data; however, the evolution mechanism of Ethereum transactions is an important, yet seldom discussed issue. In this work, we first collect the transaction data of Ethereum and build network models from a microlevel view and then use a link-prediction-based framework to quantify the impact of network characteristics on Ethereum evolution. Next, we explore the graph structure properties and the driving factors of newly generated transaction relationships. Experimental results show that the local and microscopic structure of Ethereum networks is star-shaped, and the transaction frequency of addresses has a great impact on the evolution of Ethereum transaction relationships. First-layer nodes of microstructures dominate the network evolution. Moreover, the degree of addresses is an effective basis for predicting the direction of new transactions. Potential further studies on Ethereum transaction link prediction are discussed, for example, the label effect of center addresses.